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It always stuck with me when announcing the Virtual Console on Wii U that Satoru Iwata said it perfectly "It can be fun to relive your childhood but just for a little while".

It is fun to look back but we tend to forgive a lot of things that kind of sucked. It is like how some people who live through Hurricanes and then a decade later speak about how fun it was coming together even though it was just horrible. Memories can be deceiving.

"When you wear rose tinted glasses, red flags just look like flags" - Bojack Horseman

Definitely, I always felt just a tinge of bad for how awful I was at the original Super Mario brothers. The NES and SNES games. After playing them on the classic consoles as an adult I realized they were just unforgiving and let my youthful self forgive that. I’ve done much better on the newer Mario games. SMB3 though really does shine.

There's even a name for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard

The difficulty helped hide the fact that you were paying $50 in 1980s money for a game that took approximately an hour to beat. If you could beat it. But I suspect the more common gameplay loop was the one I and my friends encountered: you put the game in, played for 20-35 minutes, got a Game Over. If you were really motivated maybe you tried again and got to Stage 4 instead of Stage 3, but at some point said, screw it, turned the game off, and played something else.

These days every game is made with the intention that it can and should be beaten, which is part of why there's so much needless padding in games to stretch them out beyond the 40-hour mark and make the player feel like they're getting "value" for their money.

Much of this design also feels like a hangover from the arcade days where you wanted players to die cheap deaths so they plugged more quarters into the machine.

I think all of those games were offered as arcade boxes. Plus you have to figure the audience then was in that sort of mindset. Very good point. My 4-5 year old self can relax at last.

Sometimes they were also made harder so it couldn't be beaten on a rental encouraging you to buy the game.

I remember saving for months to buy each game. Would get 1 for birthday and Christmas. So a new game maybe every 3 months on average.

3 months on the same game and you get good at it. Do this several times and you need a hard game to not just finish it an hour.

Super Mario Bros 3 is the BEST Mario, imo

For what it's worth, as a born and raised Floridian, hurricanes are always fun before (laughing as people panic buy, watching the track, wondering if it will turn at the last moment or unexpectedly linger on top of you), during (admiring the wind/rain, wondering if we'll have to run the generator this year), and after (marvelling at the damage, having a good excuse to run the chainsaw, wondering when we can stop running the generator); and that's not even considering how much fun road trips can be when you have to evacuate.

OTOH, maybe I'm just weird.

They're fun right up until you lose your house, or someone you know dies.

It could be just a stage of denial as in the 5 stages.

Or it could go deeper and as the world around us always change, by event we cannot determine and affect us totally … like say death and we have several possible path

Subject - actively deal with it - actively not deal with it - inactively deal with it - inactively not deal with it

Ignore us as subject - let others deal with it - …

Many religions and life philosophies are around this for, well, death.

Death is sad, but it comes to us all one way or the other. Death by hurricane can be mostly avoided by leaving for significant storms and direct hits, but I know several folks who have had very close calls (e.g., tree fell through the roof and clobbered the bed while they were eating dinner) even in light, non-hurricane storms.

Losing the house sucks, but that's why we carry insurance. Any Florida house worth its salt (a unfortunately dwindling percentage due to significant development in recent years) is CBC and isn't likely to take significant damage unless you lose the roof or take a direct hit from a tree or tornado.

Not to refute your (accurate) statement, just to offer my perspective.

That Iwata quote kind of rubs me the wrong way, especially with Nintendo and Sony releasing extremely flawed emulators in the past. On top of games designed for CRT TVs often not looking as good on modern screens, we have emulators introducing low FPS and jerkiness (Sony PSone Classic) or making games look worse by rendering certain scenes without fog (Switch Online N64). With commercial emulation of early 3D consoles especially, you often just aren't getting an accurate representation of what the games were actually like.

(Although credit where credit is due, Nintendo's recent Game Boy Advance releases ship in one of most accurate GBA emulators around.)

What's funny is they both had much better emulators in the past. The PS3/PSP/Vita PS1 emulator is pretty good, ditto the Wii's N64 emulator. The Wii U's was a step back, so was the Switch's although they've worked on it.

It depends upon what you're trying to achieve.

To run software, emulation is great. To develop software, emulation is great. Anything that deals directly with hardware, well, emulation isn't going to cut it.

Then there are the other reasons, ones that have nothing to do with the hardware itself. Personally, I use vintage computers as an escape from modern computers and as a reminder of what the technology could have been. I'm not talking about it being slow, unreliable, or downright difficult to manage. I'm thinking more along the lines of being simple enough to understand and a lot more personal. A lot of what we call progress is a mixed bag. Yes, the performance of modern computers is amazing and it comes at the cost of complexity. On the other hand, we have a lot of complexity that is not necessary for day to day use. Yes, having access to a literal world of information at our fingertips is amazing. On the other hand, our computers are also at the whim of the outside world. In other words, there are a lot of tradeoffs.

For some things, emulation is the perfect solution. For other things, it simply won't work.

nearly all of the old stuff just sucked. there's a reason we threw it all away (for the most part) and have turned to emulation.

the new low power SoC systems with actual connectivity are much more interesting... probably why they can barely keep the stuff in stock. as a bonus, they can run emulation just fine. old, and new, in one package.

I feel the same way about computers of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. I owned several of them, used them a lot (mostly programming for fun), and much of the experience just sucked. I do not understand the appeal of retrocomputing. But I'm happy that there are a lot of options for people who like that sort of thing.

"I do not understand the appeal of retrocomputing."

But at least one knew what was going on. If one didn't then one could probe the hardware with a logic analyzer and an oscilloscope. Try that today and see how far you get.

Mind you, the 8088 was a dog of a processor, too little too late and far tooooo slow (nobbling the 8086 was a dumb retrograde idea).

Yeah, using an 8088 in this thing seems dumb. My first thought when seeing this was: put a 386 or 486 with VGA in this and I would buy one. This would be instantly useful for retrogaming. 8088 with CGA, not so much (for me at least).

My thoughts exactly, especially the 486. It was a good all-rounder, worked well—thoroughly debuged unlike the Pentium—and fast enough to be useful even today for some work.

Also, I'd heard accounts that some influential third parties (companies developing stuff for the military etc.) were still using it long past its used-by date because it was the last of the 86 line whose internals they could fully understand. IBM was second-sourcing it too.

Incidentally, I wonder where those 8088s come from, same for the 8087. Seems someone still makes them.

__

Edit: Just occurred to me the main/intended use for this computer is as a training aid. The ready access to the chips and that they've sockets for removal would allow access for an ICE (In Circuit Emulator) bond-out chip/board to be inserted. Thus, there's no need for it to run any faster.

It's an OKI M80C88A-2, and the genuine Intel 8087.

Thanks. Presumably for use embedded in their hardware products. A genuine 8087 must mean Intel still makes them or there's a lot of old new stock around.

Depends what you're looking for. I have fond memories of programming an 8088 in high school with BASICA and Turbo Pascal. I could definitely see getting this to play around with. A 486 could do more but it wouldn't take me back to my roots in quite the same way.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug

One thing that didn't suck that we threw away was 4:3 screens though.

And chunky plastic builds with easily user-replaceable parts.

And nice full 7 row keyboards that felt good to type on.

And rounded laptop edges so it doesn't kill your wrists.

And ports, lots of ports.

> 4:3 screens

The 16:9 craze drives me mad: it's jack of all trades master of none, compromise every other way. Maybe nice to watch TV shows, not really good to watch movies, not tall enough for a single screen, not wide enough to 50:50 split left/right (each side is too narrow). Putting two side by side makes you face the bezels, and constant-tilt your head either left or right when you focus. Three side by side is way too wide. Probably why some folks put three but have the two outmost ones be vertical. Which brings me to 9:16 which is way too thin AND tall.

A triple head 4:3 setup was terrible for movies, but reaaaally nice for a battlestation. Maybe 5:4 would have been quite something but I never experienced that.

I do like the Ultrawide things though, 2.4:1 feels like two 4:3, only continuous, no bezel in the middle. 3.5:1 is technically about two 16:9 but feels like triple head 4:3. They're especially comfortable when curved, but damn, none are HiDPI, which kind of ruins it. And of course that's kind of a no-go for laptops (or maybe not, but I bet the manufacturer attempting that would somehow botch the execution)

I actually do use three 24" 16:9 screens, side by side. Though small by anyone else's standards, 24" is sort of the perfect size for the three monitor setup. It doesn't make me strain my neck _too_ much, but also isn't so gargantuan that I can't fit three on my 5-foot desk.

I split each monitor down the middle, treating it essentially as a viewport for two windows. Optionally I sometimes fill one screen with a single window, but I never overlap screens. On my home computer running Linux (Cinnamon) this functionality is built in; on my work laptop running macOS, I use Rectangle to accomplish the same thing.

I did have three 19" 4:3 CRTs, way back when - beautiful Sun Trinitrons. They took up the entire desk, but I could conveniently stack equipment on top of them (speakers, a clock, an FM radio, etc), because they were so large. But my workflow for those was different - each monitor _was_ a single window, as splitting them resulted in windows that were too narrow to be useful.

16:10 is the widely available sweet spot. That small bit of extra height makes a world of difference.

The 3:2 displays available on Surface tablet devices are also great, although my Surface Go is a tad small for more than one window at a time.

Agreed!

In my experience, a big enough 16:9 display also works as a 4:3 in practice – a 55” 4K OLED TV is great for this. It’s like a 2880 × 2160 4:3 display… with three little 960x720 4:3 displays next to it, heh. Window managers can enforce the split. It’s nice!

I used a single large TV for my monitor for a couple of years. At first I used a 50” 4K LCD TV. Some aspects of this were very nice. As you describe, being able to split the screen up into multiple areas or use a portion of the screen as a monitor with different aspect ratios was very nice. The downside with the LCD was the backlight on the areas of the display that weren’t in active use was very distracting. It was also nice having the flexibility for games, watching TV and movies.

I briefly tried my 65” LG OLED TV as my monitor. It didn’t have the backlight problem at all but the auto dimming of white screen areas was too distracting to be usable.

I’ve now gone to 2x 32” 4K monitors. It’s okay but either too wide if both monitors are horizontal or one is too tall if I turn one vertical.

I’d like to revisit using a large OLED again when their use as monitors has matured a little. With a little software tweaking for window management, it was almost perfect.

i use a sony 48" oled and yeah, the only annoying thing is the auto dimming. otherwise it's fine. i may buy an oled actual-monitor (they're starting to be released now...) once this one dies, but my previous sony (non-oled) led tv monitor lasted 6 years so it could be a while.

There an easy fix for the sharp edges on laptops: don't buy macbooks.

Nearly any desktop has user-replaceable parts, and so do many laptops. Laptops get to be compact and lightweight, so they are very tight internally. An Amiga wasn't too easily portable, to say nothing of an Amstrad.

Keyboard quality differed drastically: an Amiga or a Yamaha MSX had nice keys, but good luck typing on a Spectrum ZX.

The repairability depends on the laptop. Framework is the obvious choice if you want a lot of control over the device hardware, but I was pleasantly surprised at how many user-serviceable parts were in my HP Aero 13. Battery, m.2 storage, RAM, wifi card, input devices, screen, speakers, webcam, etc.

Plenty of mech keyboards feel great to type on.

Have been enjoying Lenovo's rolling out of 16:10 displays, it isn't 4:3 but it is still better than 16:9

not always because they sucked.

Some were replaced by cheaper, easy to mass produce but somewhat inferior products.

Others by some insane reasons by manufacturers to increase their profits or differentiate amongst themselves, pushing for thinner, lighter devices. i would gladly use bulkier devices for better specs and reparability.

But the point of such devices is emphatically not daily computing. It's like saying you can go and buy a more evenly colored, stronger, cheaper, and less fiddly brick instead of a Rubik cube.

Equally, to me the point of devices like this, or fantasy consoles, or old limited machines is in being a puzzle, providing an intellectually stimulating pastime. Spending time on them is more fun and likely more useful in various senses than activities like solving Sudoku or watching TV.

I dunno about the ST but my Amiga 1200 very much has an FPU and and IP network. I would be very surprised if that wasn’t something that you could add to an ST as well.

Amiga 1200 is in the ballpark of Atari TT/Falcon and yes STing for IP, browsers etc. were available. But ST was same year as Amiga 1000 which also had just MC68000 without MMU, both Commodore engineers (who designed... Atari ST) and Atari engineers (who designed in HiToro Lorreline - than then became Amiga) had own external MMU.

Early software was designed to feel as fast as possible, even resorting to hacks like temporarily turning off DRAM refresh to write text on the screen as quickly as possible. Though hardware was very limited, when you pressed a key you generally got a response right away.

Fast forward to 2023, and everything runs on top of a non-realtime multitasking OS, causing periodic little glitches as background stuff hogs up resources. Graphics is too complicated to guarantee consistent 60 frames per second. And web is incrementally loaded from shared servers, often with delays of many seconds. Animations introduce intentional lag.

Modern hardware could be of course amazing at being fast, but nobody put in the effort into software designed for that goal. Plus obsession with device thinness and fanless designs introduces thermal throttling that no software can overcome.

> Modern hardware could be of course amazing at being fast, but nobody put in the effort into software designed for that goal.

A lot of effort has being thrown that way, it's just that their definition of "go fast" is "having lots of throughput", not the things you are looking for: goodput, low latency, low jitter.

We got faster mainframes instead of faster minicomputers - computers and network systems that are optimized at doing batch jobs.

We can submit a whole bunch of blocks and the graphics processing unit can display accelerated smooth video for us. Or we can push a whole neural network to a tensor processing unit and have it do inference in very few operations, after the model is loaded. But both of those operations while having smooth output have horrible startup latency.

I think is very naive to call what the devices have today as a "single computer" when in fact, for a long while they're several interconnected computer components joined with lots of buffer.

I think I will always start my sentences with "As a nerd of a certain age," now. It will give so much more context to all my conversations :)

They are fine for the enjoyment of certain games and reliving or just getting a reminder of my younger years. Yet these home computers of that era lack so much. No MMU, no FPU, no IP networking. Very limited CPU cycles and memory.

People just had more patience back then.

45 minutes to LHARC my text file? Sure, I'll talk to my wife.

Four hours to download an ILBM? OK. I'll read a book.

Today we're so used to living at the business end of a digital firehose that if something takes too many clock cycles we walk away. Some people can't even sit in a chair in their own homes without having music on.

That 95% of the retro computing scene seems devoted to games tells me that people just crave a quick hit of digital content and then move on.

But what is it that you want to do with these retro computers beside playing Wolf3D? As you mentioned even the most basic of RPi can run the pants of the Atari ST machines, so it is hardly a fair usage of the computer if you want to do modern tasks.

This is why I refuse to so my retro computing on anything without a floating point co processor. As such the 486 DX/2 66 mhz is ideal. Not too fast. But crazy powerful compared to rubbish 8086 machines.

>No MMU, no FPU, no IP networking. Very limited CPU cycles and memory.

Isn't that the whole point?

lol true. Although I would say: MMU bad, FPU good, IP bad. ;)

An FPU is an option though