Japan's Real First Console? Bandai's TV Jack 5000 | Hacker News Reader

Japan's Real First Console? Bandai's TV Jack 5000

nicole.express

43 pointszdw15 comments

It's insane how fast things were moving in the years between 1980 and 2010 in terms of video games. My favorite example of the disgusting rate tech was advancing during this period is that in about ten years we went from Doom 1 to Doom 3.

I feel like I'm lucky to have lived this period of fast progress, not only for video games but internet as well.

By contrast between 2010 and today the progress seems pretty slow.

> By contrast between 2010 and today the progress seems pretty slow.

I think you're just getting older and with more experience, it takes more to impress, while the technological progress is more and more in biotech and other high tech fields that consumers aren't exposed to as often.

I mean, we literally just had a global pandemic where the vaccine was developed in weeks and brought to market in under a year. That's nearly Star Trek levels of tech where they develop some brand new cure within an episode.

Any sufficiently advanced tech is magic to those who don't see under the hood. Common folks thinking chatgpt is AGI for example.

mRNA vaccines wasn't some sort of green field, companies just plugged new virus into products and methologies they worked on for decade(s). What made it fast was all the bureucratic red tape removed, instead of 10 years of staged trials and processes we got few months iirc and massive fingers crossed.

Star trek level would be finding 100% vaccine with 0 side effects and instant cure of infected on spot, in few minutes, by single doctor/medic in tiny 1-room lab. Not yet there. Not diminishing the mammoth continuous effort of all involved here just to be clear

When patents and all the burocratic bullshit gets away because, well, virii don't give a shit on lawyers, Science skyrockets.

I agree and I don't think the guy who previously responded to you had a very constructive or relevant response, considering that you and the person you were responding to were clearly referencing consumer technology. From 1980 till 2010, we went from smartphones not existing, to smartphones not only existing in the form factor that they still exist in today, but also being important parts of everyday life, in most ways that they still are today. We also went from games without 3-D polygons, which hadn't yet made use of GPUs, to modern high definition 3-D environments. Controller design innovations also went through many iterations over that three decade period, but have mostly been stable since 2010.

Other innovative technologies, used by smartphones, consoles and other consumer electronics, which are also now ubiquitous, like low-cost high-definition LCDs, broadband internet, wi-fi, Bluetooth, cellular data, flash storage, active-pixel sensors, USB and HDMI, were also developed during that period.

What? USB dates back to the 90's. The same with Flash storage.

Most of these things peaked at 2004-5 at most.

Way to observe the obvious. That is exactly my point, hence the wording "were also developed during that period". All of the developments I mentioned up to that point were pre-2010, so I'm baffled how you interpreted this as you did. The context of the period in reference is in the top comment.

I saw a canny observation the other day:

The first three full-3D Grand Theft Auto games, III, Vice City, and San Andreas, all shipped on the Playstation 2.

Grand Theft Auto V, by contrast, has been the latest game in the series across three successive console generations.

To be fair thats an outlier and says more about Rockstar than the state of technology. The only other game I can think of with that kind of cross cutting is Skyrim.

It says more about the consumers. You could run Doom in 1997, but there were more more interesting things to play. Latest GTA is still interestong enough to surive the console generations.

Two games out of the whole market is hardly indicative of a trend.

It's an entirely different game in scope. According to Wikipedia Vice City featured 8000 lines of recorded dialogue, III a quarter of that. GTA V apparently features 160.000 lines of dialogue, Red Dead Redemption 2 apparently half a million(!) with 1200 voice actors.

It isn't even comparable. Modern games have thousands of hours of recorded motion capture, people in the hundreds and thousands recording professionally acted and written dialogue and three music albums worth of a soundtrack. No offense to the original Deus Ex and what have you but it had like four people (https://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/video-games/Deus-Ex/) reading the entire script and it sounded sometimes like it was recorded in someone's closet.

Things always seem more compressed in time looking back. At the time it felt quite slow. I can tell you that around 1990 when I was programming my Atari ST the summers lasted forever! I used that machine for about 5 years. Then there was Windows 95, another 5 years, etc.

3dfx changed everything, right?

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