With regards to emulation and a return to the classics, I got an Open Pandora (http://openpandora.org/) recently and have been having a blast returning to all my old cartridges, type-ins, tape archives, and so on.
My first computer was an Oric-1, the ZX Spectrum, and I have (had) masses of tapes of things I'd done with those machines .. to think those old tapenames are sitting there in a little emu dir, in my pocket right now, for the train-ride .. pure joy of computer.
You're the first person 'in the wild' I've come across with an Open Pandora. Nice to see they've finally got to a point where they're selling them, it was spun out of the old Gamepark (GP32/GPxx consoles) and had a serious amount of emu devs involved.
Yeah I've been there since the GP32 days, and have Pandora #008 (the eighth one to ship) so I'm kinda lucky that way .. and yeah, the emu guys are really key to the Pandora scene, a bunch of them are still kicking out titles and optimizing things extremely tightly.
The Pandora really is a fabulous machine - maybe its too expensive - but to the HN crowd that shouldn't matter much. Its an amazing amount of power in my pocket, and with MOAI now onboard, I have the ability to use it to develop apps for Android and iOS and Windows, and so on, simply by ssh'ing to it and firing up vim. ;)
I've recently been picking up old consoles/computers both to revisit some old games I loved, but also because I'm getting into demo development for retro hardware. I'm currently hunting for a Vectrex -- can't beat developing for a system with 1KB RAM and with a unique vector display.
I just wish I had kept all my old hardware from my childhood; I sold my NES and all my games for something like $20 in ~1998. Quite a shame.
I've sold everything up to my PS2. I've found better to just have a gamepad adapter to USB and use an emulator in the rare occasions I want to play Super Mario Bros.
I have an arcade cabinet in my living room so I usually just stick to joypad tho :)
I have kept every single 'special' computer along the way, since my first coding days, and I have to say that there is definitely a kind of zen state that occurs when you return to the old systems after decades, and re-code things. It has actually improved me as a modern developer, to return, see what it was I did in my youth, fix it, and move on. :)
So .. in this sense, I will represent to you dear reader the value of such activities by enthusiasts/archivists/mad-scientists who still collect and keep these old systems in order.
Does anyone remember the Oric-1/Atmos line?
Well .. It Lives!!!!
The revival of software development as a social, fun activity, on these machines is producing a virile scene, indeed .. from the demo tree, of course, mostly, but some recent releases have been very special.
The Oric-1 sort of missed a lot of big effort in the 80's, if it'd had just a small percentile more attention, the titles would have been amazing. Nevertheless, the machine has some merits in the 8-bit fashion, and new-school developers are pushing its limits with extraordinary results never thought possible in the mindset of the 80's market.
(Edit, fixed links and added Elite&Stormlord, fabulous games..)
None of the above games were made in the 80's, when the Oric-1 was born. These are all new, revived products, from talented individuals pushing their Oric-1 machines to the limits ..
By way of 'virtues of collectors', here are the Top 150 Games in the Oric scene:
For Oric-1/Atmos/Telestrat users who still turn the machines on today, a lot of it happens with the Oric Defence Force. But there are more groups, and http://oric.org/ provides a unique experience for Oric users, what few of us are out there. Many of us need to learn French. ;)
Emulation of the Oric/Atmos works quite well (http://oric.free.fr/emulator.html), but I am fortunate to be able to turn my old hardware on, and the effort to get the machine on the 'net, and thus connected to this amazing archive and new activity, is a surety.
In short, the collectors value is in the future of the machine. If it still turns on, and works, then use it. And make it available to others to use, even if you don't use it.
> when you return to the old systems after decades, and re-code things.
One of the things that fascinate me is the architectural trade-offs made to deal with the differences in memore and storage.
I grew up with a C64 and Amiga, and have in particularly been delving into old Amiga software. And while a "big" computer compared to the C64 or Oric (which I only remember from the regular "doorstop" insults from C64 users...), you see the difference all over the place.
E.g. a symbolic disassembler that, instead of assuming what we'd likely do now, that it could read everything into memory and build all kinds of structures to help disassemble things, would do two passes, one to identify code sections and one to attach labels and outputthe result.
Or how cut and paste from the shell on the Amiga was structured so that writing the data to the clipboard would happen in a separate task (thread/process) to the one you cut and pasted from, because your clipboard could be located on a floppy or other slow device (most would have it assigned to a directory in a ram disk, but for people with only 256KB or 512KB RAM who wanted to be able to cut and paste "a lot" of data, it might very well be assigned somewhere weird, and even a harddisk might be extremely slow), and so there was otherwise a risk of locking up the UI.
I come away from processes like that thinking about how wasteful a lot of modern development is. Of course most of the time it doesn't matter. But when it does, a lot of modern developers just have never been exposed to styles of development that would help them easiest conserve resources.
(And for a lot of development it does matter greatly. E.g. it annoys me greatly that my Android phone with a CPU several hundred times faster than my Amiga (the comparison being particularly interesting because the Amiga at the time was in competition with the Acorn Archimedes range, running one of the earliest ARM CPU's at around the 8MHz mark, and it was a pretty even match), and a screen resolution and bits per pixel that's not more than about 10-15 times higher, and read/write speeds even to the slow flash of current phones that's still ten times higher than the 20MB harddisk I had back then, is still substantially more sluggish even for basic user interface updates when nothing much is running...)
Fully with you, except I LOL'ed about one thing: an assembler that only makes TWO passes? Ha hah! ;)
Yeah, I'm learning new tricks and have a newfound appreciation for those wireheads who always seemed hell bent on optimizing the crap out of code that I had already deployed .. definitely, returning to the 8bit mindset has made me a much, much better programmer. Whereas 'good enough' works most of the time, 95%, I've developed another sense, maybe borne from operating at the Mhz level, for when things could be 'just a little bit tighter', and I think that all came from a return to the Oric-1 and 6502 assembly ..
And yeah, totally with you on the Android phone being slow point of view. It infuririates me to no end to return to an Android project after 2 or 3 years and realize "oh shit, I have to be responsible for ALL of this crappy pile of code, just to get something up on the screen". Its one of the reasons I moved on from pure 100% Native development, to developing with things like MOAI (which I love) .. one set of code that runs on iOS/Android/Mac/Win/Linux/Chrome/&etc. is far better than having to have a full repository for each platform, different languages, different text files, all for doing the same purpose: putting a button up on the screen, or whatever.
A return to the 8bit scene can give even the most proud, arrogant developer, a reality adjustment to just how devolved we have become .. I yearn for a mobile platform that ships with its own compiler, or multi-pass assembler, at the very least .. ;)
I have to agree with you - maybe it's because I grew up during the time of those consoles and with absolutely-not-realistic graphics but I actually miss that good-old-days video games look since nowadays most games are trying to look realistic like Unreal or Doom or FarCry wow-ing user when they were released.
Maybe my taste is strange but if the game is trying to be very realistic then it's already small things that can annoy me and throw me off, while a totally unrealistic 80s/90s videogame look is perfectly acceptable. I actually prefer it probably for exactly that reason. I don't want all my video games to look super-realistic; while that might be a selling-point for the FPS crowd I think other games should NOT buy into that race and instead focus on the gameplay and on showing me pretty colors.
Multiplayer bomberman on SNES (or maybe Genesis / Megadrive) is an amazing experience.
The rise of smartphone gaming has meant that many more games are being made where "shiny graphics" are not important. I'm really pleased about that. There are many more people experimenting with interesting and fun gameplay ideas.
Now all I want is for people to experiment with ideas that have been forgotten about in current titles. An example would be, in real time strategy, to have "supply routes" - maybe drones build roads to supplies which they mine, and roads make quicker and easier production, but are attackable.
I think the limited graphics helped in the same way a book makes your imagination do all the work.
Recent games with super-graphics have to work harder - either they hit your sweet-spot or disappoint (true that limited graphics was sometimes too limited...)
There's a large gap between games that appeals to me and games that are approaching uncanny valley territory.
For my part, I'd date the "end of interesting games" to approximately the rise of Doom. These games are nowhere near realistic enough to enter the uncanny valley, but to me that's when enough games lost their appeal to me that I stopped playing much.
There's nothing objective about that timing, of course.
Just to me, Doom never appealed, and indeed most FPS's don't appeal, and Doom heralded an age where most games changed in a way that made them less interesting to me. It is conveniently also a way of indicate roughly the timing of the fall of the Amiga and other not-so-3D-capable computers and game consoles, and the styles of games popular on them.
There's definitively exceptions - I bought Sim City 3000 and Alpha Centauri and Terminus long after Doom (those specific games because I've never owned a console nor a Windows PC, and they were amongst a small set of commercial Linux ports available after my last Amiga gave up the ghost).
I'm actually contemplating making my own "retro style" game (only thing stopping me is lack of time to devote to it at the moment) exactly because I keep seeking something that evoke the type of fun for me that the games I grew up with did (what I'd like to do is some sort of mix between International Karate + and Chambers of Shao Lin - never martial arts games don't interest me much).
Of course a lot of this is down to pure nostalgia, and a lot of people would get disappointed if they actually went back and played these games again (with exceptions - I have a Minimig, an Amiga FPGA reimplementation, - and there are certainly games that survive even being blown up on a crystal clear 42" LED TV despite the fact I last saw them on a grainy 26" CRT 20+ years ago).
But there's also a stylistic difference, whether in graphics (cartoon-ish pixel art with lots of metallic gradients vs. "realistic" art that often try to look real), music (80's chip-tune electronica with lots of inspiration from a strange mix of Jarre, heavy metal and others), as well as big changes in gameplay (e.g. 80's games were usually far less forgiving in terms of losing lives and ending the game), and 2D vs. 3D (even for games which today are nominally 2D the graphics is still often in a 3D style).
Well, I never was much of a gamer. But Doom was the first game realistic enough to trigger motion sickness for me. I have been unable to play any FPS since. (I can't even watch many of them.)
I think a big part for me is I want it to be a video game and NOT reality. That's also what ruined playing EVE for me; it is such an amazing game and CCP cannot be praised enough for working hard to stay innovative but for me EVE got way too real and one has to be quite masochistic I think to enjoy playing it. Playing alone is like you are constantly missing out and playing in a corp becomes more like a job with responsibilities than anything, there is not much you can do if you just want to log in and spend some time playing and NOT having to worry or check corp and alliance news or follow fitting rules or having to justify yourself after getting ridiculed on killboards, attend corp meetings or report to your "officer" and what-have-you. Despite being awesome, it stopped being FUN. It's dead-serious to the point people try to interfere with your gameplay in real life.
Same with the ultra-realistic games, they try hard to be very realistic so I judge them on that level whereas trashy video games make it clear they are trashy and from there on I can accept it as just that and can appreciate it when they excel at being trashy. The same goes for movies for me.
I've done so half a year ago and also purchased ~35 games - Best 150€ spent in quite a while...