Hacker News Reader

Comment by djhworld | Hacker News Reader

I really liked this video, it highlights that a lot of software we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop working.

The frequently updating title thing is cute, it'll be interesting to see what dies first - YouTube pulling the "title update API" or Tom's script running wherever he's put it

View on HN

I can go find NES games and Gameboy games in my parents basement. If the NES worked I could play it or find a knock off on Amazon. Pretty sure I have a Doom floppy.

Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile games. Let alone be able to play them.

Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?

I have a humble bundle set of android APKs I think.

It's pretty easy to backup and install Android apps to/from a file.

I have a huge folder of iOS apps, but.. unfortunately in I think iOS 9 or so, Apple made it so backing up your iPhone stopped backing up the applications, and I believe made it impossible to install applications from your hard drive backups (that may have happened in a later iOS version - I forget). Meaning... iOS apps are now simply unrecoverable once they aren't on App Store anymore. Good thing I have a couple old iPhones which actually allow installing these old backed up applications. Even then, the entire ecosystem is completely reliant on internet authentication to even install the OS, so if your phone needs to be restored -- good luck. Very sad times, indeed.

Yeah the personal effect of this for me is, I can't show people the song I had in Tap Tap Revenge anymore. I do have an old iPhone that still has it installed, but it's not like I carry that around with me. The app is no longer on App Store and I thus could never install it on my newer iPhone, nor restore my backed up copy to it (and even if I could restore it, it wouldn't run anyways because of the breaking of backwards compatibility in recent iOS updates). Overall, a whole ton of user-hostile product choices in the iOS ecosystem, sadly. Not the Apple I grew up with, where I could modify anything to my heart's content (ResEdit, anyone?)...

Some of those NES and Gameboy games might not work as originally intended. Lots of them had internal batteries in order to save information and those batteries are starting to die. Floppies from that era and early CDs are also at the age in which they are likely to degrade. So while some of this old tech might have a longer shelf life than tech today, as the video says, entropy will get us all in the end.

Well you can still download the rom and the machine is fully emulated, forever. Not sure there is a way to play geometry wars in any fashion. Besides batteries can be replaced and even then you'll miss your high scores but you'll still be able to play.

I've still got Geometry Wars on my 32-bit iPad. It's my go-to airplane game—if there's a 120v outlet to plug into.

No multiplayer, though.

Could you reinstall it if it was uninstalled?(real question)

I don't think so. It's part of why I haven't.

Replacing the battery isn’t hard. There are plenty of youtube instructional videos on it.

Most of my floppies are dead, but most NES games did not have batteries, and it's really easy to replace the batteries in the ones that did (it's usually just a CR2032).

> Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile games. Let alone be able to play them.

I'm already feeling the pain of this. There was a game for iOS called GeoDefense (and a sister game, GeoDefense Swarm). To this day these were my favorite games on the phone. But iOS 10 ended support for one of them, then a later OS update bricked the other one.

The developer hasn't updated these games to work in new iOS, so they're lost to time.

If I had a time machine, I would go back and warn past-Me to reserve a 4S for just playing these games.

Sorry for self-reply , but hopefully someone out there can point me to some similar tower-defense games? Everything I see on the app store now is bloated with graphics or IAP and shitty gameplay. If you're familiar with the GeoDefense games[0], you know what I'm talking about.

[0] http://www.criticalthoughtgames.com/geodefense.html

Mindustry and Infinitode are both lots of fun

+1 for Mindustry. Factorio with more tower defense emphasis. And FOSS!

It's not exactly tower defence, although i think it's close, but i am currently recovering from a pretty serious Bad North obsession:

https://www.badnorth.com/

You defend procedurally generated islands from viking hordes, but rather than towers, you use up to four squads of soldiers from an army you grow over dozens of islands. The art and sound design are lovely, and the gameplay is engrossing. Each island takes a few minutes to play, and a campaign lasts a few hours.

It's something like 5 dollars on iOS and Android, and has no ads or IAP.

I still miss Aurora Feint from the dawn of iOS.

GeoDefense! Oh hell yes. I played so much of that. I still have a 4 and a 4s somewhere. Might try it out!

The will once emulating an iPhone is something that people can feasibly do. While there's been commercial interest in this area, it's not widely available yet.

This is what I experienced with Tap Tap Revenge on iOS. What used to be one of the highlights of iPhone and iPod touch gaming was eventually bought out by Disney, ported to Android (poorly), and then phased out. Luckily, users had dumped some of the song packs and put then online, and with some reverse engineering and hooking, you could swap the game’s server endpoint with a custom one and play it again. This was my main side project in high school junior/senior year and a highlight in my college application.

Unfortunately, it also became victim to Apple’s discontinuation of 32bit apps.

You see, that’s not in Apple’s business plan. If they can’t extract money from you while pushing down developers, they don’t care to do it. We don’t own our devices like we used to. The terms of service alone are egregious.

Forget kids, I'm an adult that's missing some early adulthood games.

Flash, man.

iOS and Android have been dominating for a decade - i bet there will absolutely be ROMs out there.

The flash games I played as a teenager at the turn of the century are about to be completely gone, like tears in the rain.

* https://www.kongregate.com/games/scarybug/chronotron * https://www.acno.tv/acno/

You might be happy to know about Flashpoint, the Flash games conservation project: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?

Yes. Torrent sites are littered with archives full of apk files already.

The developer of the game has the responsibility for it. It's very simple: He/she can just release the code and game assets. That will make sure that the game lives on forever. Anyone interested in it will pick it up and port it over to new platforms.

Even if the developer does not do this, it's still possible. Some people will get the game assets and reverse engineer the game. There are countless examples for this. Unfortunately sharing the game assets will be illegal (at least for a while, until the copyright ends), so this will make it harder for the game to survive.

Also, there will be emulators at some later point, where you can play the original game binaries.

All the software we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop working.

That's a grand assumption :) Who knows whos GitHub code will be included in the "Big MasterScript" that is written into the consciousness of the universe in the future, making it forever.

I know, far out there and in theory, I agree with you, everything is temporary and nothing is forever. But who knows, maybe in the future, things will no longer be ephemeral.

Probably left-pad

Like ourselves and the rest of the universe.

I think that thinking this way is a coping mechanism in response to the massive loss of control we experience being subject to the whims of giant corporate platforms deciding what we can and cannot run on our own devices.

The alternative is to face how insanely unfair and belittling it is to have bought an app and a device and due to circumstances out of your control arbitrarily no longer be permitted to run “your” app on “your” device.

You think that being aware of our own inevitable deaths, and the eventual end of the universe, is a coping mechanism to avoid the unbearable reality of closed software platforms? Am I talking to Richard Stallman?

You never know.

If humans discover a way to defeat entropy, even at a limited scale, whatever device is created to preserve information into the era of a universe solely made of black holes and hawking radiation will be capable of running doom.

I fully expect the last computer to ever be built by humans to still be able to load original .wads.

Unless you're a game developer! Lots of people are still playing Super Mario Brothers daily! They're running it in an emulator now, most probably, but all of the original code is doing the work.

Obviously it won't outlast the heat death of the universe or anything, but I'd say it's has the potential to live as long as any other human creation.

You can say that about anything we do.

However, at my previous job I integrated an LFBGS[1] implementation into our production code.

That was written in the early 80s in Fortran '77.

The code outlived all hardware that it ran on when it was first written (we ran it on an OpenMP cluster for a scientific-computing problem related to lithographic mask optimization), if not its authors.

It will continue to exist, and run, for a very long time.

Sure, all software is ephemeral. But as you say so, you probably used SciPy/NumPy. Deep inside, there's an implementation of LAPACK/BLAS doing the heavy lifting for you[2]. It started in 1979, and is still kicking.

(And it's still in FORTRAN)

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprogra...

Wow, I'm actually using some of the C++ code based off of MINPACK for one of our current projects at work. It is quite humbling to realise this dates back so far.

> lot of software we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop working.

You're giving me a lot of credit by implying the software I write works to begin with! Can we hurry up and get to the day with software like Facebook and Twitter stop working?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com