DOS Gaming Is Better Part XXII: The Choices in Hardware

[@tamsinlm]

You keep coming back to the word "convenience" and I honestly am steadily growing in the opinion that there's a lot of issues around society chasing "convenience" above all else in far more ways than you note in this episode.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

I absolutely agree with you. The "convenience" of an Apple iPhone, a pre-installed Windows PC, Google search and Gmail, plus many other "conveniences" of today is usually paid for with your privacy and personal data - especially if some of those services are offered to you "free of charge". Ultimately, the individual has to decide whether or not that is the fair price to pay - as a long-time computer person who works in cyber-security and privacy today, I do not believe anything is worthwhile sacrificing my privacy for and therefore I don't use any produces by Microsoft or Apple, and I only use Android in a "de-Googled" format where any location and data tracking by Google is disabled. I also use no social media (apart from here very anonymously, and on Discord to do nothing more than chat with friends when we play a digital board game on Steam like "Lords of Waterdeep", "Ticket To Ride" or "Terraforming Mars") and therefore avoid Facebook and related privacy-hating services. Learning to rely entirely on Linux (I ditched Windows completely when support for Windows 7 ended) has meant sacrificing some "conveniences" initially but none that I haven't learned to work around completely and now Linux is "convenient" for me to use (and has been for some years anyway as I started using in back in 1996) having adapted my workflows accordingly. I still love games too - but I wasn't interested in signing up to the AAA "games as a service model" around 2010 and I am very pleased I didn't do so some 14 years later given the turgid and derivative rubbish being consistently churned out by AAA games companies. Just how many open world games of running around in third person hitting with a sword can there actually be anyway? In turn, I don't have to get "mummy and daddy to donate a kidney" every year at Christmas for the latest piece of overpriced and proprietary NVIDIA GPU rubbish, I can buy my hardware cheap and used online and happily run all the games that I do play in Linux. "Familiarity" breeds "convenience" and comes from stepping away from "The Hive Mind", putting in time and effort to learn how the devices you use work, how you can make them work how you want them to, and then adapting your workflow (and entertainment needs) accordingly.

[@sentrysapper45]

Absolutely. The reckless pursuit of "convenience" has left us worse off in many ways, from the slow death of physical media and ownership to the growing loneliness epidemic for younger generations as they come of age in an increasingly atomized world with less and less meaningful human interactions.

[@getoffmylawn6692]

If you get what you want all the time with almost no resistance due to convenience, then everything becomes meaningless and you're miserable all the time! Then you buy more stuff, because of that misery! Then the corporations make more money! Fun!

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@getoffmylawn6692 I'd argue that that is how it's designed to work anyway - commoditise everything, make it bland and "short term" so the customers spend more money buying new stuff regularly.

[@getoffmylawn6692]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 Absolutely it's by design.

[@JimLeonard]

In this video, I learned that scots love to use the word "clutch". Once we added multi-platform support to MobyGames, we were curious to see which game had the most ports. I think the current leader is Lemmings, but I haven't checked in several years.

[@getoffmylawn6692]

I'm Northern Irish, Jim. Close but no cigar! My accent is all over the place, so you couldn't have been expected to know. I really should have given this script another pass of editing, but oh well! At least it resulted in something humorous! It goes without saying but I'll say it anyway: THANK YOU for Mobygames.

[@Cur8or88]

You made a clutch of good points here.

[@getoffmylawn6692]

The word 'clutch' really came in clutch during the writing of this script. I mentioned it more than a clutch of times unfortunately!

[@thewiirocks]

I occasionally write homebrew software for old hardware like the Atari 2600, Gameboy, Commodore 64, etc. And it's interesting how much you're really coding for the hardware itself. For example, reading the GameBoy developer guide, it isn't a manual on how to do X or Y like such guides are today. Instead, it's a detailed description of the hardware that you have to figure out for yourself! Most importantly, once you understand the hardware you have to start planning around its limitations. Where will your status bar be? Do you need to do anything special to deal with the maximum map size? Can you use scrolling to overcome resolution limitations? All the thought and care that goes into programming for the hardware itself shows up in the game itself. And these well crafted gems become timeless. On the flip side, bad programming also shows through clearly and we quickly forget about such poor attempts.

[@getoffmylawn6692]

Forget until some idiot thirty years later decides to subject himself to all the badly-programmed efforts, that is! Yeah, seeing some of the porters of the time basically remake the game from scratch for another system was nothing short of wizardry. It was an industry-standard practice too! The fact that this often resulted in better art assets than the original was the real gem in the crown too.

[@mikesol1162]

I didn't know Might and Magic II was on that many systems. Interesting.

[@StormkeeperPU]

Interestingly, it can also run on an 8088 CPU, which is impressive considering how advanced the game would be by that point!

[@Zontar82]

100% agreed