[HN Gopher] Weathering Software Winter
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       Weathering Software Winter
        
       Author : joaomsa
       Score  : 66 points
       Date   : 2023-01-02 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (100r.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (100r.co)
        
       | aworks wrote:
       | Interesting and naive journey to find a suitable and minimal
       | "permacomputing" environment for doing software development on a
       | sailboat.
        
         | hosh wrote:
         | Some pretty good stuff leading to work on computing that can
         | survive societal collapse.
        
         | lowbloodsugar wrote:
         | If only more of us were so "naive". A brilliant journey.
        
       | adql wrote:
       | > We grew up in Montreal, and many of our friends worked in AAA
       | studios like Ubisoft, making free-to-play games, building
       | projects that had a lifespan of three years. The projects that we
       | made in the past on the Apple stack, Electron, or on Unity3D,
       | also had a lifespan of three to four years, but games like Super
       | Mario, as well as others produced in that era, are still playable
       | today.
       | 
       | The games that don't work in some way or form 20 years after
       | creation are in minority due to effort of community. I dunno what
       | author is smoking.
       | 
       | > chains of emulators eventually break down
       | 
       | <citation needed>, arguably some emulation experience is better
       | than original
       | 
       | > The download is at 7 gigs with three more hours left to
       | download the update, it won't finish, and we will have spent all
       | that data for nothing.
       | 
       | Resume download existed for better part of internet. Also
       | torrents are great for that use case...
       | 
       | > There was a time when computers were super playful, but now
       | they feel cold, and have been weaponized against people.
       | 
       | They still are, just gonna join the crowd of weird penguin people
       | instead of buying another windows/macbook box, all the power and
       | weird stuff you can do with computers is still there, using
       | current software.
       | 
       | Maybe not in "I built everything from scratch way" but still
       | 
       | > The Commodore 64 emulator was extremely complex, more complex
       | than I could grasp. It was the limit of what I think a single
       | person could understand. It seemed like a simple system, it was
       | just a box, but writing an emulator for it was more than a
       | weekend project. I was looking for something that I could nail in
       | a single weekend.
       | 
       | Huh, I kinda hit the same thing. Started writing Z80 emu (in Go,
       | then Rust for funzies), got a good framework and some way in into
       | implementing instruction set then realised "damn, now getting it
       | cycle accurate _and_ synchronized with peripherals is a lot of
       | work. And peripherals are more work than CPU itself ".
        
         | ido wrote:
         | The games that don't work in some way or form 20 years after
         | creation          are in minority due to effort of community. I
         | dunno what author is smoking.
         | 
         | I would say what you're seeing is biased towards popular games
         | - there is an immense amount of games out there and most have
         | no community to try to preserve or emulate. It also really
         | changes after a certain point in time & with specific platforms
         | - old, popular (but still simple compared to modern PCs)
         | systems like the PlayStation 2 or Game Boy Advance? Not a
         | problem. DOS games? For the most part ok, especially popular
         | ones like Doom/Quake/etc. But choose a random not-very-popular
         | computer game from 1996 and there's a fair chance it won't be
         | easy to make it work properly.
         | 
         | An iPhone games from 2009 or a Facebook Flash game from 2010?
         | Now there's a real chance you have no way of making it work
         | unless the game is so popular that the developer/publisher have
         | kept it alive and on the market all this time.
        
           | wlesieutre wrote:
           | Biased toward older games too. Even on PC things are shifting
           | toward more online based experiences, often without any sort
           | of local server included.
        
             | Roark66 wrote:
             | Same here. Recently I saw a dvd for sale of a game I was
             | once interested in for really cheap (it was Need for Speed
             | released in 2015). I was interested until I saw the text on
             | the dvd "the game requires a permanent Internet connection
             | to play". Well, what if I want to play it in 20 years after
             | it has been long forgotten by everyone else? Nope. It's not
             | going to work. That's why I'd rather stick to games I can
             | actually own rather than rent briefly.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-02 23:01 UTC)