At 30, Game Boys live on in unexpected ways
latimes.com
latimes.com
Whereas the multipurpose OG iPhone isn't even a good paperweight because it has dated styling.
And it's not just electronics. The Browning M2 is still in service. It's one job is to deliver reliable .50cal rounds. Versus the m16/4 or m246, which are constantly under scrutiny because they promised multirole capability.
Aviation, B-52 is projected for 100 years of service.
F-35 too comes to mind.
You could have had 3 generations of Marines using the exact same weapon. Unlikely of course, but not technically impossible.
This has some details: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/86q47c/i_revived_an_ol...
Get an iPod classic, 5.5 gen if possiible (best DAC, for a nice warm sound)[1] A broken one, as long as it's not totally physically destroyed, is one way to go from ebay.
Get an offical iFlash device, I got the Quad with slots for up to 4 SD cards [2] Get some large capacity micro SD cards (x4 slots in the Quad, meaning several TBs are possible, for relatively cheap as the cards are getting cheaper by the day)
Upgrade the battery, if desired, optional but highly recommended [3]
Replace the front + back covers, clickwheel, screen as desired (pay attention to thin and thick back covers) [4]
For instructions on opening the case correctly, and replacing the parts, look on Youtube there's a bunch of decent videos explaining the process.
Look into installing rockbox[5], an open source firmware. It supports loads of audio formats and let's you escape the cluthes of itunes, to a much nicer application like Musicbee. WARNING for some reason, rockbox never worked correctly with my iPod 5.5 gen. I reinstalled several times, but songs would constantly skip while playing, even though they were fine on any other device. Therefore, I wiped rockbox again back to the Apple factory firmware, and everything works fine. I even figured out a way to sync Musicbee with the default Apple firmware.
If you really want to go nuts, you can install a bluetooth transmittor inside the newly freed up iPod case[6] I read though that the bluetooth has limited range inside the metal case, and it runs the battery down much more quickly.
[1] https://macintoshhowto.com/ipod/which-ipod-has-the-best-audi...
[3] https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...]
[4] (note these links are random examples, pay attention to the ipod generation you wish to purchase for) https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Onjess-Thick-Metal-Back-Hous...
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Onjess-Black-Front-Faceplate...
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Click-Wheel-Key-Button-Repla...
[6] https://www.instructables.com/id/Mod-Your-5G-Video-iPod-With...
My iPod Nano was similarly replaced with a 6G version. However, I also received a cheque for $5 approx. in lieu of an earlier class action lawsuit, which I never banked and still have it somewhere.
https://www.cultofmac.com/166069/bought-an-ipod-between-2006...
Just give me theming, the Rockbox media playback support we know and love, the DSP system, playlisting system, etc. and I'm good to go.
To be fair, the original design was ruined by committees of bureaucrats and "rules because rules."
I wouldn't take an original M16. But I would take an original M2 or M1911.
...Er. Going and looking at the wiki page... Do you mean the M1921, which was a water-cooled fixed-barrel machine gun that had originally been designed to fire .30-06 and was repeatedly trialed by the military between 1921 and 1937 and rejected for being generally terrible? Or do you mean the version that the military eventually adopted circa 1935 as the M2, which was still water-cooled but not quite as terrible as the other options? Or do you mean the air-cooled variants that were finally developed circa 1940 to put on tanks?
Like, I understand the point about the 1911, but even there I have a feeling that if I went digging I'd find a decade of prototypes. There are a lot of patterns out there that people think were first set to paper in their final, perfect form but are actually the result of twenty years of iterative refinement.
The CIA guys in Nam loved the early M16 because it came with IMR rounds.
Yes the M2 had a few hiccups in development, specifically related to making it mountable in more applications. But it's singular intent to sling 1/2" lead downrange was never compromised.
A gun's "singular purpose" is not to sling lead. It's to sling lead at an enemy, which means slinging lead on a battlefield, and those are far more complex and multifarious tasks than you're making them out to be. The navy ditched it because it turned out to be useless against WWII-tech aircraft. The army was about to ditch it because the water-cooling setup was too finicky and vulnerable and it couldn't be mounted on anything useful. You find the same story in the history of almost literally every piece of weapons technology. There are hundreds of guns out there that are fantastic pieces of focused lead-slinging intent but cost four times as much as the alternatives and are so heavy that you're better off literally carrying two cheaper and less-reliable guns and just swapping when one of them jams.
It's the same way with literally any technology. Yeah, Peter Watt had the great idea to condense steam in a different chamber so you didn't have to re-heat the cylinder after every stroke. He then spent twelve years figuring out how to improve the piston seal so this idea actually worked. TCP is simple, right? Literally all it does is transfer packets. Sequence numbers, three-way-handshake, resend unacked, done. Except that we then spent thirty years learning how to fine-tune all the parameters and if you get any of them wrong (TTL, backoff, window length, fast-open) you can't actually transfer any packets. Multipole electromechanical relay: AND or OR. Spring, magnet, connection. Not fast, reliable, cheap, or efficient enough to be an improvement over analog mechanical calculators until almost a hundred years after their invention. I, Pencil: Put graphite on paper. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
But I think the point the above poster was making is, those deficiencies you listed was due to the obsolescence of continuing to use a .50 caliber round in that role. The M2 fulfilled its role as a .50 caliber machine gun continuously. Sure, it may have originally been designed as an anti-tank gun and by the time it saw major service using .50 caliber rounds for anti-armor was totally deficient. But the guns found other niches like vehicle mounts and aircraft mounts in its lightened version. I think you're indexing a bit too heavily on the fact that water cooling was ditched. Air vs. water cooled isn't an especially large design change - just rip out the water jacket and replace the jacket with a barrel shroud if needed. It's more a trade-off between mobility and ability to sustain fire, and as the battlefield changed an air cooled variant became better suited. The fact that an M2 mounted on a Stryker is nearly the same overall design as the one originally developed for WW1 is still impressive. The only substantive change to how it operates that I know of is the addition of a bi-directional feeding mechanism.
If the design were really the ideal of the perfect tool that only cares about exactly one simple task, these trade-offs wouldn't exist. These items haven't been in service for so long because they sprang fully-formed from the designer's mind with perfect purity of purpose. They've been in service for so long because they were flexible enough to support a literal century of refinement, adaptation, and evolution. The M2 was originally water-cooled because it was meant to be a fixed weapon in emplacements or on ships. They rebuilt it with air-cooling because they needed a gun to put on a tank and it turned out that it was useless on ships. Then they made it fire faster because they needed guns to put on airplanes. Then they added a quick-change barrel system because they needed extended courses of fire. Then they completely redesigned the bolt and chamber because modern machine tools allowed them to use a cheaper, more reliable, and more maintainable design. Then they changed some of the ergonomics to improve mobility and barrel-changing even further. You don't actually want an "original M2". Those were junk, everyone knew they were junk, and it twenty years for them to stop being junk. What the parent is thinking of as the "original, basic M2" is the one with twenty years of adaptations and refinements, and that puts a very neat hole in the entire idea that the pattern was somehow endowed with some kind of lost simplicity. The original M2, compared to the version the OP is thinking of, is just as obsolete and dated as the original iphone is now.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that "those were junk, everyone knew they were junk, and it [took] twenty years for them to stop being junk". Strange for a gun that was "junk" to be adapted for use by foreign companies only 6 years after release[2], and imitated by other foreign powers[3] less than 10 years after release. For a gun that was such junk, other countries were eager to imitate it. The M2 was a particularly effective and long-lived design, and one that went largely without adaptation since its initial release in 1933. What other piece of equipment is so similar to its original design from over 80 years ago?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Browning
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrailleuse_d%C2%B4Avion_Brow...
Hmm, you're right, I think that I lost my train of thought here. Let me start over.
I understand that the M2 that we all think about is an excellent design, but claiming that it was an ideal pattern from first conception is incorrect, and comparing it to the iphone of all things is asinine. I wouldn't have complained as much if it'd been compared to, say, a Pixel 1 or iPhone 6, since it is annoying that those stopped getting software updates after only 2 or 3 years when smartphones as a concept are only 12 or 13 years old. But comparing the M2 to a first-of-its-kind transformative revolution, then complaining that the revolutionary front-runner was obsoleted in a hurry? Duh. That's what happens when you find a new region of configuration space. The M2 was not in any way something you could hold up as an "original". It was not the first gun to use its action, it was not the first in its role, it was not the first in its class or type, it wasn't even the first to use its cartridge. It was the very end of a long process of refinement.
If you want to compare cell phones to firearms, you shouldn't be using guns from the 1930s as examples. You might as well compare it to the early telegraphs, which had one wire per letter, signaled by electrolyzing bubbles of hydrogen out of a vial of acid, and could barely go from one room to the next because they didn't have high-voltage sources or relays. You should be looking at firearms from the 1890s.
The Maxim gun came out in 1884 and revolutionized the concept of the firearm. It blew up. Everyone started trying to improve on it and refine it. And they did, in all sorts of crazy ways that were obsolete almost before they'd left the factory. We didn't start seeing solid designs until things like the luger in 1989 and the springfield in 1903. By the outbreak of WWI the Maxim gun was thoroughly obsolete, though it did have descendants. Not only are modern electronics more complex, with vast design spaces to explore and multiple orders of magnitude more room to improve into, we're barely 12 years past our Maxim gun equivalent. We'll remember the iphone forever, but it was no more timeless than the Maxim gun was, and I doubt we'll see a "timeless" cell phone for at least another decade. Maybe two. Or maybe the entire idea of the cell phone will turn out to be a an inefficient, clunky in-between that'll go the way of water-cooling.
> "those were junk, everyone knew they were junk, and it > [took] twenty years for them to stop being junk".
Turns out I did misread something, sorry; I'd lost a comma on the wiki page and thought the air-cooled version hadn't been introduced until the start of WWII. Even using the 1933 version, though, it's still more than a decade from the first labeled pattern of the gun in 1921, which was... not great.
And in air combat well .50 doesn't work as well for dogfighting that's why Germany then the UK went for 20mm cannons.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-...
And you've got Mario Kart 64, the best version for playing Kario Mart (finish a beer before the race ends), Mario Party 2, smash 64. On and on.
The iPhone isn't an eyesore, but it's definitely of it's time.
I'd argue that the same applies to the N64 hardware.
How usable is an original iPhone? Is it acceptable as a phone these days? Is it even functional? Hell, can you even get the OS image it needs and software to run on it?
Nintendo still has people on staff at the 1-800 number listed on their machines who will help you troubleshoot your system.[1] They don't have replacement parts anymore though, but they might help you source some.
Good design just keeps working and working. Style might change, but a design's utility should not.
[1] http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/04/random_nintendos_sn...
Other than that the old standalone software (stuff that didn't require a cloud service) still works fine. I use mine as a music player sometimes.
I don’t have an original iPhone, but I do have a N original iPod touch with basically the same hardware.
The built in apps still work except for Youtube. You can still sync music to it from iTunes and Google backed Apple Maps still works. You can still restore it from iTunes as far as I know.
The original iPad and any device running iOS 5 is a better story. If you go to the App Store and try to download an app that at one time had a iOS 5 version, you can download “the last compatible version”. Netflix, Crackle, Hulu, Plex, and Spotify still work. Also all of Apple’s iWork and iLife apps still work and sync with newer versions. Google Drive also still works. I can read PDFs stored on it.
Most websites are unusable though. HN being an exception.
Of course I have newer devices.
Other than perhaps the original PlayStation, almost all old gaming hardware has aged far worse than the original iPhone’s industrial design in my eyes. It’s also industry trends I’d argue that aged that design of the iPhone as much as the design itself. Modern phones are typically much larger screened devices than what the market expected in 2007ish. A console is still just a plastic box with ports we shove under a TV much as it was in the 90s.
But then they shipped with Mario 64 and no one gave a second thought to the D-Pad.
And yeah, I was harsh on the OG iPhone. It's hard being a new design.
Nintendo dove deep into 3d on the n64 and they knew they were going to, but they put the dpad there assuming they'd be as successful as they were with the snes and there'd be a much wider diversity of game types for the platform.
Really though I don't think the design is really much of a mystery and I always wonder how the people confused by it tried to hold it. Did they try to grip the outer handle and reach in to the stick or something? It was never unobvious to me how to hold it or why they did it that way.
Personally I'd rather play 3d games with the n64 controller than the dual shock/analog, in terms of layout, just because the stick is in (one of the) primary position. Modern controllers with stick primary and dpad secondary and two grips are, to me, superior to either for 3d games though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_DHC-2_Beav...
https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/20/after-15-years-of-whipping...
https://archive.org/details/winampskins
The late 90s/early 2000s had a very unique and IMO under appreciated aesthetic.
However I do think I’ve been exceptionally lucky not to have even one bad egg amongst my archive.
Ironically it’s not the games that’s caused me battery issues but the consoles themselves. My Saturn, Dreamcast and Xbox all needed to have batteries replaced despite being several generations more recent.
That is, not the DESIGNs from the 70's or 80's, but the actual rockets themselves!
I don't know much about space flight but I found that to be fascinating.
But a lot of commercial launchers are incremental improvements on old designs. The Delta family is based on the Thor ICBM.
Soyuz was first launched in 1966, and it's the only way to get humans to the ISS at the moment.
Documentary about this on Netflix
https://www.netflix.com/title/80119093
I think the documentary makes some great points about how limitations drive creative solutions.
One can argue that their continued proliferation in the 21st century was due to the large number of legacy designs and legacy systems, that's true. But, yet, few still use 8080, 8085, or some forgotten chips from the same era.
So apparently there's another crucial reason for the success of these long-life chip: they were made to do one thing, and they did it well, and still are still doing well in low-lost devices.
People don't buy for the tech, they buy for the [games | experience | brand]
https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio
Still getting lots of use out of my childhood Game Boy.
Also, I honestly would love if more modern mobile hardware was built as solidly as the Game Boy was.
The last thing I owned like it that felt kinda similar to it was my netbook, an Asus Eee 1005HA-P. I have an absolute powerhouse of a laptop now (Lenovo P51) and I'm extremely happy with it - it basically feels like I own the power of a desktop PC but in portable form, but I have to say, that little laptop served me really well for many years (especially after I put Lubuntu on it). It had an unbeatable battery life, and trying to squeeze as much performance as possible out of that little machine was weirdly addictive. I'm considering pre-ordering a Dragonbox Pyra to see if it will have a similar feeling, or I'm just being nostalgic but really prefer this big beast of a laptop these days.
If you take a computer now, you’ll end up using modern websites, stuff like Slack, etc, which will not mech well with older form factors or software.
Meanwhile my grandparents had a computer with XP, Diablo 2, and .... codeBlocks? The C/++ IDE.
Many years beyond a lot of this software, the computer experience is still pretty excellent. Especially when i can turn on a radio next to it to close off the last piece (having some music to listen to)
It’s been many years since I’ve used that machine , but it was great because I wasn’t trying to use the machine to watch YouTube or use Twitter
Her main computer is my old Sony Vaio 1.66Ghz Core Duo (bought used from Woot in 2007) all in one desktop with 2Gb RAM and a 1600x900 17” monitor. It’s running Windows 7.
Neither feels slow.
My Plex server until earlier this year was a 2009 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell business laptop with 8Gb RAM, gigabit Ethernet and one of the last great 1920x1200 displays.
For those who still have a netbook-class device laying around, Debian GNU/Linux still works quite well on those, better than Lubuntu in fact. (Of course in most cases you're limited to the i386 branch due to lack of amd64 support in hardware.) With 1GB RAM or more, you can even do some light web browsing in current versions of Firefox.
(Today there are cheap ultrabook-class laptops from Chinese OEMs that are broadly similar in some ways, perhaps even more solidly built with metal frames - but the Linux support is very hit-and-miss, and there's essentially zero reliability in the longer run. You might be better off buying a cheap refurbished ultrabook that's from a well-known brand and with verified Linux support.)
I kept that thing around for a long time, because it was great for flights and road trips.
Nowadays I stick to podcasts (an iPhone can run a long time with wifi off just playing audio) but I wish more manufacturers would focus on battery life instead of folding up phones like a wallet.
[1] going by this source I dug up since memory is fuzzy: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/09/ever_wondered_how_...
Some people enjoy the modern features or graphics of a game above all else. (and so from this perspective, there would be no real reason to return to Borderlands 1 after you have Borderlands 2) But at this point, those people would have left gameboy behind at least 15 to 20 years ago. A gameboy was already incredibly simplistic next to a PS2 in 2001, and was therefor limited to much simpler games, graphics, and music.
Why? The simplicity and laser-sharp focus of the original beats the chaotic overdriven mayhem of the second.
https://www.lookmumnocomputer.com/projects#/gameboy-megamach...
His youtube channel is good fun. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafxR2HWJRmMfSdyZXvZMTw Top entertainment.
Unfortunately not if you store one with poor quality batteries that leak and destroy it :(
I mean I have no issue with back light mods which takes the original and improves it subtly and without taking any essence away from the original hardware design. But I’ve seen so many people rip perfectly serviceable innards of retro systems just to shove a Raspberry Pi in its shell. Then 6 months after the mod when the hacker is bored with his or her creation, the bastardised console ends up in the junk heap because nobody wants it anymore. Meanwhile the stockpile for original parts becomes evermore scarce.
I couldn't imagine doing that when I got one. It was so precious to me then, but now the GBA is practically worthless except to archivists and the sentimental.
It makes me wonder if someone will be doing wearing a necklace made of an iPhone in a couple of decades.
Gameboy games are the one area of retro consoles that hasn’t ballooned in price during the last few years plus Pokemon Yellow is a pretty common game too.
That said, GBAs aren’t exactly commanding a high price tag either. So there isn’t actually that much between the two price wise.
https://www.apriliaforum.com/forums/showthread.php?101978-DI...
I had a Gameboy as a young boy. It was cool. But we got way better tech and stories now.
This all feels like the 60-70-80 and now 90's marketing cycle to me.