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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Do you think artificially constraining compute resources would bring great software into being?

For example, Pico-8 gaming engine: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

These are way too limited, but I could imagine something a little more powerful - 1024x768 pixel buffer, 64 MB ram and 100 MB space. All apps natively running on this (or even emulation) would instantly load and the latency would be unreal.

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Anyone interested in building something like this in physical form? Have access to ME/EE expertise and supply chain that's second to none, contact info in the profile.

Adding to your point, even with the artificial limitations of pico-8, massive hits have been born in it, such as Celeste: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145

Imagine MSAccess Webbased Online, with GUI + Report + Query Designer + Free backend database + scripting and repl.

That's the basic offering of Microsoft's Power Platform, except for the repl part. Scripting is done graphically through Flow, the backend database is CDS, and reporting is through PowerBI.

As a developer, I think the whole thing is so convoluted and asinine it should curl up and die in a fire. It will spawn an entirely new area of bespoke, non-maintainable yet critical business tooling.

Great software at great (big) prices. I mean if minecraft would have been published in the 90s it would prob cost 80$ which is 160$ in todays money (making up numbers here) instead of 10$. It is harder and more expensive to make software in constraint environments.

Why? Original 1994 System Shock was released at $34.99. Internally it was pretty much Minecraft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr3_6gb92Kw ;-)

Maybe country specific. Here any game was 80 (but probably i remember wrongly)

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