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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

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jcranmer

Oh, don't worry, they have a list of boot times:

> Television - 3 seconds

> Automobile - 2 seconds

> Microwave oven - less than 1 second

> Video game - less than 1 second

> Unix workstation - 120 seconds or more

Yeah, those times are bullshit. Please tell me what platform has a video game boot in less than a second, because it hasn't been true for any generation of console I've played on (which dates back to the Sega Genesis).

This feels like it was written around 1995 (the newest reference is 1994, and the "hot new technology" they're shitting on is C++, which suggests that Java hasn't come out yet). There's a general smug air of "real programmers use assembly." For bonus points, they also criticize computer scientists on the basis of "most NEW ideas are feared and rejected", which is honestly a pretty good summary of the diatribe.

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Back when video games came on ROM cartridges (before CD-ROMS), there would be no 'loading process' at all since all data is already mapped into memory. There may be a couple of logos at startup, but that's just wasting user time, not to hide any 'loading'.

The fact that game consoles have become more and more like PCs in terms of user experience over the decades is actually pretty sad.

My NES will boot games in < 1 second (at least when it was new - nowadays I have to fiddle with the buttons a bit)

8-bit computers:

instant on to command prompt

  READY.

computers get a floppy disk drive:

boot from floppy disk wait for command prompt

  DOS VERSION 3.3

computers get a hard disk and can store more stuff like startup scripts:

boot hard disk, startup script runs, wait longer for command prompt

  C:\>

computers get Graphical Operating Systems:

startup screen, wait for desktop to load, wait even longer to open a command prompt program

computers can be multi-user:

start up screen, wait for desktop to load, login, wait even a bit longer to open a command prompt program

  Password:

computers and the internet are ubiquitous:

start up screen, wait for desktop to load, login, get distracted by web browser, forget to open the command prompt program

www

tiny devices are everywhere:

the battery in my phone is dead.

I mean, isn't that kind of the problem? The technology of yesteryear was orders of magnitude slower and less resourceful, but today many tasks take orders of magnitude more time and resources for not even close to an order of magnitude more utility.

Ha. Thanks for mentioning video games in 1 second. I was wondering what universe had video games booting in 1 second, because I'd like to get in on that.

Given the rest of the paper it's probably referring to the SNES and Genesis, which is about right.

I don't know. I count the logo loading screen (i.e. Sonic the Hedgehog had an incoming "Sega!" announcer and logo, which is at least 2-3 seconds). It's much faster than the loading times of current consoles, but not 1 second.

NES might qualify, as it often "loaded" (turned on) right into the title screen.

Is there really any "loading" going on, or is that just a branding screen? Those consoles use ROM chips that were fast enough, and the Genesis, for example, only had 64 KB of RAM, so there wasn't even the need or possibility for "loading" a lot of things into the RAM like today, nor was the CPU fast enough to compute anything during boot that couldn't be pre-loaded into the ROM.

I also remember some of those being totally skippable as well, not only in the Genesis but also in other consoles. On the Neo Geo, for example (same CPU as the Genesis, 68000), putting a coin completely skips the (kinda long) 7 second logo intro.

> I count the logo loading screen

That's a pretty unfair metric, then, considering that said delay is entirely artificial and is part of the game itself.

What actually happens while the logo is showing? Is that really a loading screen or does it always have to be there for contract reasons?

N64 booted immediately. Popping Yoshi Story in and hitting that switch gives you an immediate "NEN-TAYN-DOU" in the voice of a small army of Yoshis. I'd say it boots in under a second.

Any cartridge-based game console before CD-ROMs became popular did that (at the cost of smaller game worlds, obviously). The cartridges contained ROM chips which were directly 'bank-switched' into the CPU address space instead of providing a 'filesystem' to load from.

Basically every console before Xbox and PlayStation loaded games in seconds.

That’s not because of better software though. Games were just so much smaller then.

So if a 128k game loads in less than a second, and the 4.7G DVD version of the same game takes 30 seconds, I would probably wait 30 seconds for the DVD version.

From the user's perspective, a PS5 appears to launch the most recently played game in about 1 second. A better word would probably be "resuming" than "booting."

By that logic resuming the “unix workstation” from sleep is <1 second

Minesweeper open instantly.

It's running on top of an already booted OS, though maybe that's what the author had in mind.

I think the point here isn't about how quickly videogames or consoles boot, but rather that if your program takes longer to start than a significantly more complicated videogame from the same era, then you're doing it wrong, and as a result wasting your users' time.

It's a view I shared in the past - it held throughout the entire "desktop computing era", until consoles and PCs started to converge, and the asset bundle size of a typical game inflated rapidly.

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