Comment by tom_
1 day ago
If you used them when they were current, the emulator experience is never quite the same. The input latency is always detectably worse, especially without a CRT (and even now you're no longer 15-25 years old), and there's always at least a bit of sound latency. Also, you're using a modern keyboard and mouse.
On the flip side, all the original hardware is now ancient and at least somewhat broken (or going that way), and it's a pain to keep it running as an ongoing prospect. CRTs, floppy disk drives, floppy disks, hard disk drives, key switches, mice with balls, aging capacitors, batteries, little plastic bits inside the keyboard that you didn't even realise were there until they crumbled into dust - they all go bad in the long run, and the repair always eats up at least a bit of time. (Even assuming it's actually repairable! Battery damage can be literally unfixable. Parts supply generally can be an issue. Mouldy floppy disks are time-consuming to rescue, and can damage the drives as you attempt it. Those little plastic keyboard bits are theoretically 3d printable, but you'll need to figure out what shape they were originally and how to glue them into place. And so on.)
The long-term prognosis for modern computers is uncertain too - but the nice thing about them is that you can always just buy another one. Turns out they're always making more of them!
> On the flip side, all the original hardware is now ancient and at least somewhat broken (or going that way), and it's a pain to keep it running as an ongoing prospect
Fortunately there are FPGA implementations, though you might want a non-USB gamepad and keyboard, and a CRT (or maybe a 120Hz or better HDMI display?) to get closest to the original performance.
https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/
> The input latency is always detectably worse, especially without a CRT
Apple 2e for the win! 1 MHz is (apparently) enough for anyone. ;-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25290118
Assuming they’re not doing any kind of fancy processing and are just pumping data straight to pixels, shouldn’t some OLED displays now be capable of latency close to that of CRTs?
Yes, in fact I believe BlurBusters was working on some display modes at high refresh rates to emulate CRT displays: https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks...
That’s not the whole picture. I have a “mini Mac” I built that runs BasiliskII directly on a Raspberry Pi 3’s framebuffer (using SDL on a directly attached LCD) and the thing is _much_ faster and snappier than the SE/30 it sort of looks like.
Were it not for the size (it’s 1/3 scale, so the screen is tiny), it would be pretty “usable” with Word and Excel.
You could use a freznell lens like "Brazil."
> freznell
Fresnel[1]?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens
Yup. I've got quite the collection of old computers, including all that were mine in the past, dating back to my Atari 600 XL, Commodore 64 (several of these), Commodore 128, Commodore Amiga 500 and then a few others I collected throughout the ages: a cool Texas Instrument Ti/99-4a (had one for a few days in the past so I had to get one), a Macintosh Classic (as in TFA), the little Atari Portfolio that young John Connor uses in Terminator 2 to hack doors (I had to have one), etc.
But these are complicated to keep working, especially when you know nothing about electronics.
As the years are passing by, fewer and fewer of these are still working (yup, I did remove the batteries when applicable). And they don't bring much, if anything, compared to a modern one.
My most prized possession is however a vintage arcade cab, complete with its CRT screen and both original (and bootleg) vintage PCBs and a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA (an arcade cab standard) adapter and thousands of arcade games on MAME.
There's something about an actual arcade cab with a CRT and proper joysticks that a modern PC with a 4090 GPU cannot reproduce. Say playing Robotron 2084! with two 8-directions joysticks (one in each hand): that's simply not an experience you get on anything else but a proper full-sized arcade cab.
Even kids, who have no nostalgic appeal to vintage arcade cabs, are drawn to that thing.
That cab I plan to keep working for a very long time. But all my 8 bit and 16 bit computers? I'm not so sure.