Comment by adql
3 years ago
> 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
<citation needed>, 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".
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.
Biased toward older games too. Even on PC things are shifting toward more online based experiences, often without any sort of local server included.
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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Original point was that author thinks game made now will be less long-lived than game made 20 years ago so that's all irrelevant really but...
>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.
Weirdly enough (not really) despise all the whining about loss of Flash games community people stepped up and wrote the emulators required for that. No idea how iphone side of that looks tho
> 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.
In most cases it will probably be as easy as average game because it is average game and most emus carry for needs of average games of that time just fine.
You'd have to look pretty hard to find unplayable ones, and most other... wouldn't be much harder than trying to make the DOS game work back in the DOS times with various special things you needed to do and set back then so the game worked.
Sure, games nobody wanted to play in the first place when they were released will be neglected but that's not exactly that huge a loss. If game deems to be more important than it was back then someone will figure out how to run it, as long as data is preserved.
The online-only ones are a big problem, sure they can be cracked just fine but the moment they are server based that's a whole shitton to reverse-engineer, and while some popular MMOs got that done (mostly so people can play without paying but still...) it's by far rarity to see.