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The Emularity

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Re: The Emularity

#81
it’s running inside the EM-DOSBOX system, since Windows 3.x was essentially a very complicated program running inside DOS. (When Windows 95 came out, a big deal was made by Gates and Co. that it was the “end” of the DOS prompt, although they were seriously off by a number of years.)

Nitpicking just a little bit: Windows 3 didn't run inside DOS. Maybe "on top of it" if you want to put it that way, but not "inside".

It changed the processor and graphic modes and when shut down it reverted to the prompt. But by no means was it "just a big DOS program".

Guess what: Windows 95 also was a program running "on top" of DOS. That was somewhat hidden, but I remember clearly that I booted to DOS and then executed either Windows 3 or Windows 95 (I was programming a compatible 16/32 bits application). There was some tweaking needed but it worked nicely.

Re: The Emularity

#82
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, a 20-year-old probably didn't grow up with a record player but suddenly vinyl is in a huge renaissance.

On the other other hand, Vinyl at least has some upsides. Listening to a Vinyl is an experience, plus it's lossless, and physically owning a record is cool/makes good art/conversation pieces. Windows3.11 would be interesting to check out, but it'd be more like something you'd check out for 20 minutes to see how it used to be done, then you'd go back to your modern OS. Vinyl is an experience, most older software is a…

Vinyl is absolutely not lossless, there's the crackle and hiss, not to mention the fact that the needle digs into the surface as it's played.

Re: The Emularity

#83
Now I'm imagining pointing this thing not at a proxy that accesses the live web but one which picks a date in the wayback machine and relays the state of the web at the time the browser came out...

Re: The Emularity

#84
post #75
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Listening to a Vinyl is an experience, plus it's lossless Nope, your record loses information every time you play it, because you're literally rubbing a needle over those tiny little grooves.

Not lossless then. High quality? IDK. I thought there was something.

In terms of accuracy of reproduction, vinyl is just simply not going to do better than a CD.

The audiophile community may disagree, but read some of their reviews and articles and you'll see how reliable their analyses are.

Re: The Emularity

#85
post #75
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Listening to a Vinyl is an experience, plus it's lossless Nope, your record loses information every time you play it, because you're literally rubbing a needle over those tiny little grooves.

Not lossless then. High quality? IDK. I thought there was something.

It is not even that, just some people like the "errors" in the playback. They say it makes it sound warmer.

Re: The Emularity

#86

Jason Scott is such a weird and wonderful person. I highly recommend watching BBS: The Documentary. Episode 8 was especially interesting and moving in a way I didn't expect. I would say, in brutal honesty, the production values are (unfortunately) low, but the content is pure gold, and well makes up for it. So my thanks go out to Jason Scott and the small crowd of computing historians he unofficially represents. As a…

Nope, I'm going to do it, I'm going to focus right on one sentence and ignore all the compliments.

The BBS documentary was shot across 4 years on my own dime (no crowdfunding, my family helped pay for the camera) and traveling to 20 states, from 2001-2004, and then released in 2005. (10 years ago). This means some footage was shot as long as 14 years ago.

"Production Value" is a very specific term - it is almost always used to indicate skill or attention to the final product. All along the way for the BBS Documentary, I had to make choices. Remember, the Canon XL1 I shot with cost me $4000 in 2000, when it was bought. And instead of going with a handful of people, say, under 15, to tell the whole story, I chose instead to interview 201 people. This meant that sometimes in a single day I'd drive to up to 4 different homes, with miles between them, set up all the equipment myself, conduct the pre-interview and interview, and then move on to the next location. In one case I drove 500 miles to grab an hour interview with a figure who had popped up, and then drove back.

This was before DSLR became prominent, before HD was the norm. I could have gotten a full crew, but everything else would have suffered: the breadth of subjects, the locations, the variant voices. It's a choice I'm fine with.

I recognized, after BBS Documentary was done, that I'd want to move to HD, but in 2006, when I started filming GET LAMP, that cost me $10,000. I paid larger numbers for the new movies - $20,000 for the DSLR equipment. (Both GET LAMP and the new films are crowdsourced, based on the reputation of BBS Documentary.)

Choose your words carefully, please. I'll take "Dated", I'll take "SD", I'll take "Videotaped", but please don't imply I didn't sweat bullets over every aspect of the production, and that everything in there wasn't a best-of-all-circumstances choice made with the intent of finishing a project that many (at the time) thought was impossible.

Re: The Emularity

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of the games will not run at a playable speed. Heck, a fairly large percentage don't even with the MAME software itself on 4Ghz+ CPUs. MAME's commitment to accurate emulation is amazing.

He said classic arcade games, which we'll put at the early 80's. Those have been working in in MAME since the Pentium II days.

That's actually not entirely true. There are some classic games that still have run super slow until recently.

Pac Man/Ms. Pac Man comes to mind. Donkey Kong too.

Emulating analog audio circuits accurately requires higher math functions executed millions of times per second. Some of the oldest classics run super slow on sub-3Ghz CPUs.

Re: The Emularity

#88
post #36

"This means that somewhere, this instance needs to be connected to a proxy server, which assigns a 10.x.x.x address to the “Windows” machine, and then forwards the connections through. Basically, world’s weirdest, most hipster ISP on the face of the earth." I wonder if there will ever be a business case for things like this. I sit across the hall from a startup that sells mp3 gramaphones, etsy is a huge success, ther…

Actually, PPP over Websockets has some really interesting implications. Raw TCP/UDP in your browser is a potentially powerful thing. It's like a VPN client in your browser - once you're connected, you can bridge private networks, or establish pure TCP connections to any server on the internet, without special-case wrappers or browser-imposed WebSocket restrictions.

Hopefully it won't ever be used for a serious VPN; tunnelling TCP inside of TCP (or UDP inside of TCP) leads to well-known stability problems.

Re: The Emularity

#89
post #81

it’s running inside the EM-DOSBOX system, since Windows 3.x was essentially a very complicated program running inside DOS. (When Windows 95 came out, a big deal was made by Gates and Co. that it was the “end” of the DOS prompt, although they were seriously off by a number of years.) Nitpicking just a little bit: Windows 3 didn't run inside DOS. Maybe "on top of it" if you want to put it that way, but not "inside". It…

It gets a bit metaphysical at some point, but 'on top of' or 'after' probably are better prepositions to use when describing the relationship between DOS and Windows.

'Instead of' would also work, in the case of Windows 95, as it would be fair to say that simply exiting Windows involves resetting everything back to the way DOS had it, then rerunning DOS.

And when you ran DOS inside a window in Windows 95, then that was DOS running inside of a VM.

Re: The Emularity

#90
post #80
post #65

I'm waiting for the day that the wikipedia entry on windows 95 let's you load up windows 95.

> I'm waiting for the day that the wikipedia entry on windows 95 let's you load up windows 95. We'll have the technical side of this solved before the legal side is.

The legal problem is already solved, in a narrow sense, for programs which are otherwise impossible to install in the usual manner: http://archive.org/about/dmca.php

Does Windows 95 qualify? Probably not quite yet, but if UEFI ever wins to the point where motherboards with the traditional BIOS become unavailable and then the available UEFI motherboards stop including a BIOS-compatibility mode, then it probably will.

That said, there's no reason why Wikipedia editors can't embed the player that Archive.org uses for console/arcade/dos games into their respective Wikipedia pages. It wouldn't be quite as easy as embedding a Youtube video (where every video gives you a snippet of HTML to paste into your page), but the emulator is just a js file, and the game is just a couple of small image files which you load and stick into the emulator's in-memory filesystem.

See https://github.com/db48x/emdosbox-loader if you want to see how Archive.org is currently loading those. It's not quite ready to just be plugged in everywhere, but I'm working towards that possibility.

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