Hacker News Reader

Comment by verytrivial | Hacker News Reader

Old games, old productivity software. If they were good when they were new, I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes.

It's a weird marketing and social undermining of comfort and control. Sure there is the 'security' argument, and an accretion of various quirks, but people were often happy dealing with these quirks in the day, and as OP says, making interoperability frictionful has an definite upside with all the media and IT giants trying to mine your attention span for money.

View on HN

I'm not going to argue about old productivity software, but some games do indeed "age badly".

Obviously the game stays the same, but game designed has advanced and, if you are used to play modern games, some problems that are mostly fixed on all games from the last decade become annoyingly obvious.

For me, the main one is controls:

* Once you are used to WASD+mouse for FPS, going back to ctrl+arrow-keys (with some awkward keys to strafe and look up/down) is awful. If you are able to patch the controls to WASD+mouse, some games then become much easier than intended (since they were not designed with circle strafing in mind).

* Controlling the camera in old 3D platforming games is also a pain. It's amazing how long it took to move the camera controls from the bumpers to right the analog stick. The limited ability to control the camera is also partially responsible for it to get stuck in corners a lot.

There are also some level design choices that are arguably bad, but were required at the time, such as loading tunnels or abusing backtracking/repeated assets (e.g. fight all bosses again) to make the game longer.

Eh, this is PowerMacs. Games used WASD + mouse from long ago.

> I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes

Because your needs grow, and you want to able to do more stuff with it.

A great workstation from 00s won't render your 4k video project or compile Chromium from source in reasonable time, or let you mix an entire virtual orchestra with several dozens of Kompakt sample libraries at all. All of those things are just something you couldn't do on the computer in those days with such fidelity and quality, and now you can, and this is awesome.

Slight straw man there. :-) I referred explicitly to games and productivity software.

The problems you cite here, namely 4k video and Chromium are both arguments in favor of retro computing in my opinion -- Both are solutions looking for a problem that succeed only in perpetuating the churn in hardware, no intrinsic value added, like the 100th re-imagining FPS machine gun splatter fest game. Yawn! :-)

To me it seems the big thing 4k improves on is video immersiveness. After all, reality is 210 degrees field of view, not a comparatively tiny rectangle metres away, and it's crisp and sharp, not somewhat blurry-ish like Full HD at somewhat closer range. I like being able to have a considerably bigger rectangle in my face while still getting acceptable quality; 4k at 60fps is a joy, feels real in a way movies usually don't. Besides, on mobile devices and tablets especially, it's really neat to be able to pinch-zoom into a video and still get some quality. That's not possible with Full HD.

As for Chromium (and by extension all major modern browsers), it's played a pretty important part in making the web a platform to reach pretty much everyone with comparably little effort. A lot of the productivity applications I use day-to-day are web apps, and I guess most wouldn't exist in their anything like their current form if there had to be native Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android apps that people would have to download and install and update and secure (and certainly no Linux app – way too few users to even think about).

To my mind that adds a lot of intrinsic value, at the price of much higher resource consumption, true, but I'd rather have that than the snail pace of innovation and still usually questionable quality we had in the "old days"...

Of course, that only matters if your needs include rendering 4k video or compiling Chromium.

If they don't, then the old hardware is still good.

> Old games, old productivity software. If they were good when they were new, I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes.

So much this. It upsets me when new reviewers take a look at old games and claim things like they are "dated" (usually they mean pixel graphics, which is a whole category of misunderstanding art) or that they were "good for their time".

No. If they were good when they came out, chances are they are still good. One of my favorite games is Microprose's Sword of the Samurai -- to this day I haven't played a better, more artistically sensible, and more comprehensive simulation of feudal Japan. Even the Total War series is not as good.

Conversely, some old games were bad, and we simply didn't know better. But masterpieces remain masterpieces.

Not to mention that a lot of that "old" productivity software is so much faster than its "modern" replacement that running it in a Electron-based VM is still faster.

If you can work with it, work with it.

Normally things do get better and even if its small, it accumulates.

Display resolution Display colors, refreshrate Battery lifetime Weight (x220 is much heavier then my x390) Thickness Techstandards like newer/better/faster wifi USB-C (I love! charging my laptop with the same cable as my switch and my smartphone. Makes travel easier etc.)

If you are happy with it, feel free to keep using it, but i don't get why it is a possitive thing to not update/upgrade anything at all.

90% of the additions are bloat, but modern versions of Word are far more stable than the ones we used in the past, it has a built in thesaurus and you can mouse over the different designs, fonts, etc and see them update the document in real time, which makes it far more straightforward to find something suitable.

Its grammar and spellchecker are also much better.

Old computers never die. Their users do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com