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A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

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Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#201

Post by argiopetech »

CydeWeys wrote: post #184
argiopetech wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, as a born and raised Floridian, hurricanes are always fun before (laughing as people panic buy, watching the track, wondering if it will turn at the last moment or unexpectedly linger on top of you), during (admiring the wind/rain, wondering if we'll have to run the generator this year), and after (marvelling at the damage, having a good excuse to run the chainsaw, wondering when we can stop runn…

They're fun right up until you lose your house, or someone you know dies.

Death is sad, but it comes to us all one way or the other. Death by hurricane can be mostly avoided by leaving for significant storms and direct hits, but I know several folks who have had very close calls (e.g., tree fell through the roof and clobbered the bed while they were eating dinner) even in light, non-hurricane storms.

Losing the house sucks, but that's why we carry insurance. Any Florida house worth its salt (a unfortunately dwindling percentage due to significant development in recent years) is CBC and isn't likely to take significant damage unless you lose the roof or take a direct hit from a tree or tornado.

Not to refute your (accurate) statement, just to offer my perspective.

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#203

Post by goosedragons »

phone8675309 wrote: post #173
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty helped hide the fact that you were paying $50 in 1980s money for a game that took approximately an hour to beat. If you could beat it . But I suspect the more common gameplay loop was the one I and my friends encountered: you put the game in, played for 20-35 minutes, got a Game Over. If you were really motivated maybe you tried again and got to Stage 4 instead of Stage 3, but at some point said, screw…

Much of this design also feels like a hangover from the arcade days where you wanted players to die cheap deaths so they plugged more quarters into the machine.

Sometimes they were also made harder so it couldn't be beaten on a rental encouraging you to buy the game.

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#204

Post by inconceivable »

lukeck wrote: post #138
AnthonBerg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! In my experience, a big enough 16:9 display also works as a 4:3 in practice – a 55” 4K OLED TV is great for this. It’s like a 2880 × 2160 4:3 display… with three little 960x720 4:3 displays next to it, heh. Window managers can enforce the split. It’s nice!

I used a single large TV for my monitor for a couple of years. At first I used a 50” 4K LCD TV. Some aspects of this were very nice. As you describe, being able to split the screen up into multiple areas or use a portion of the screen as a monitor with different aspect ratios was very nice. The downside with the LCD was the backlight on the areas of the display that weren’t in active use was very distracting. It was…

i use a sony 48" oled and yeah, the only annoying thing is the auto dimming. otherwise it's fine. i may buy an oled actual-monitor (they're starting to be released now...) once this one dies, but my previous sony (non-oled) led tv monitor lasted 6 years so it could be a while.

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#205

Post by goosedragons »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #192
NovaDudely wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always stuck with me when announcing the Virtual Console on Wii U that Satoru Iwata said it perfectly "It can be fun to relive your childhood but just for a little while". It is fun to look back but we tend to forgive a lot of things that kind of sucked. It is like how some people who live through Hurricanes and then a decade later speak about how fun it was coming together even though it was just horrible. Memori…

That Iwata quote kind of rubs me the wrong way, especially with Nintendo and Sony releasing extremely flawed emulators in the past. On top of games designed for CRT TVs often not looking as good on modern screens, we have emulators introducing low FPS and jerkiness (Sony PSone Classic) or making games look worse by rendering certain scenes without fog (Switch Online N64). With commercial emulation of early 3D console…

What's funny is they both had much better emulators in the past. The PS3/PSP/Vita PS1 emulator is pretty good, ditto the Wii's N64 emulator. The Wii U's was a step back, so was the Switch's although they've worked on it.

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#206

Post by treeman79 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #156
userbinator wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's even a name for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard

The difficulty helped hide the fact that you were paying $50 in 1980s money for a game that took approximately an hour to beat. If you could beat it . But I suspect the more common gameplay loop was the one I and my friends encountered: you put the game in, played for 20-35 minutes, got a Game Over. If you were really motivated maybe you tried again and got to Stage 4 instead of Stage 3, but at some point said, screw…

I remember saving for months to buy each game. Would get 1 for birthday and Christmas. So a new game maybe every 3 months on average.

3 months on the same game and you get good at it. Do this several times and you need a hard game to not just finish it an hour.

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#208

Post by bharathyes »

inconceivable wrote: post #32
wang_li wrote: post #7

As a nerd of a certain age I’ve been deeply attracted to retro computing. Even going so far as to place bids on 30 year old Atari STs on eBay since that was a computer I had in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. But in recent days, through the use of modern emulators I’ve dabbled in these retro systems and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re just bad. They are fine for the enjoyment of certain games and reliving or just…

nearly all of the old stuff just sucked. there's a reason we threw it all away (for the most part) and have turned to emulation. the new low power SoC systems with actual connectivity are much more interesting... probably why they can barely keep the stuff in stock. as a bonus, they can run emulation just fine. old, and new, in one package.

not always because they sucked.

Some were replaced by cheaper, easy to mass produce but somewhat inferior products.

Others by some insane reasons by manufacturers to increase their profits or differentiate amongst themselves, pushing for thinner, lighter devices. i would gladly use bulkier devices for better specs and reparability.

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#209

Post by Andys »

pdimitar wrote: post #145

That would be interesting but MS-DOS? Absolutely not. I'm having much more fun tinkering in Linux on a 150 EUR Chinese laptop with a fairly anemic CPU. If there's an itch for retro computing I'll just use an emulator. The only thing I'd probably enjoy using old tech for would be stochastic super-optimization of programs i.e. to find the very best combination of machine code that executes a certain algorithm maximally…

It might run ELKS https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#210

Post by pdimitar »

Andys wrote: post #209
pdimitar wrote: post #145

That would be interesting but MS-DOS? Absolutely not. I'm having much more fun tinkering in Linux on a 150 EUR Chinese laptop with a fairly anemic CPU. If there's an itch for retro computing I'll just use an emulator. The only thing I'd probably enjoy using old tech for would be stochastic super-optimization of programs i.e. to find the very best combination of machine code that executes a certain algorithm maximally…

It might run ELKS https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

Oh, nice. Bookmarking it.
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