[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)
 
web link (100r.co)
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
| 
| , 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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