A collector is selling every Super Nintendo game for $24,999

Reddit started out like Hacker News, because it was initially best known for being funded/mentored by Paul Graham, so people who were interested in him went there. It mutated into the Reddit we know today - which is why pg felt the need to fork a new community a year or two into reddit's evolution. HN would probably do the same thing given a laissez faire attitude. It's up to HN to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I have an arcade cabinet in my living room so I usually just stick to joypad tho :)

One of the things that fascinate me is the architectural trade-offs made to deal with the differences in memore and storage.

I grew up with a C64 and Amiga, and have in particularly been delving into old Amiga software. And while a "big" computer compared to the C64 or Oric (which I only remember from the regular "doorstop" insults from C64 users...), you see the difference all over the place.

E.g. a symbolic disassembler that, instead of assuming what we'd likely do now, that it could read everything into memory and build all kinds of structures to help disassemble things, would do two passes, one to identify code sections and one to attach labels and outputthe result.

Or how cut and paste from the shell on the Amiga was structured so that writing the data to the clipboard would happen in a separate task (thread/process) to the one you cut and pasted from, because your clipboard could be located on a floppy or other slow device (most would have it assigned to a directory in a ram disk, but for people with only 256KB or 512KB RAM who wanted to be able to cut and paste "a lot" of data, it might very well be assigned somewhere weird, and even a harddisk might be extremely slow), and so there was otherwise a risk of locking up the UI.

I come away from processes like that thinking about how wasteful a lot of modern development is. Of course most of the time it doesn't matter. But when it does, a lot of modern developers just have never been exposed to styles of development that would help them easiest conserve resources.

(And for a lot of development it does matter greatly. E.g. it annoys me greatly that my Android phone with a CPU several hundred times faster than my Amiga (the comparison being particularly interesting because the Amiga at the time was in competition with the Acorn Archimedes range, running one of the earliest ARM CPU's at around the 8MHz mark, and it was a pretty even match), and a screen resolution and bits per pixel that's not more than about 10-15 times higher, and read/write speeds even to the slow flash of current phones that's still ten times higher than the 20MB harddisk I had back then, is still substantially more sluggish even for basic user interface updates when nothing much is running...)

There's a large gap between games that appeals to me and games that are approaching uncanny valley territory.

For my part, I'd date the "end of interesting games" to approximately the rise of Doom. These games are nowhere near realistic enough to enter the uncanny valley, but to me that's when enough games lost their appeal to me that I stopped playing much.

There's nothing objective about that timing, of course.

Just to me, Doom never appealed, and indeed most FPS's don't appeal, and Doom heralded an age where most games changed in a way that made them less interesting to me. It is conveniently also a way of indicate roughly the timing of the fall of the Amiga and other not-so-3D-capable computers and game consoles, and the styles of games popular on them.

There's definitively exceptions - I bought Sim City 3000 and Alpha Centauri and Terminus long after Doom (those specific games because I've never owned a console nor a Windows PC, and they were amongst a small set of commercial Linux ports available after my last Amiga gave up the ghost).

I'm actually contemplating making my own "retro style" game (only thing stopping me is lack of time to devote to it at the moment) exactly because I keep seeking something that evoke the type of fun for me that the games I grew up with did (what I'd like to do is some sort of mix between International Karate + and Chambers of Shao Lin - never martial arts games don't interest me much).

Of course a lot of this is down to pure nostalgia, and a lot of people would get disappointed if they actually went back and played these games again (with exceptions - I have a Minimig, an Amiga FPGA reimplementation, - and there are certainly games that survive even being blown up on a crystal clear 42" LED TV despite the fact I last saw them on a grainy 26" CRT 20+ years ago).

But there's also a stylistic difference, whether in graphics (cartoon-ish pixel art with lots of metallic gradients vs. "realistic" art that often try to look real), music (80's chip-tune electronica with lots of inspiration from a strange mix of Jarre, heavy metal and others), as well as big changes in gameplay (e.g. 80's games were usually far less forgiving in terms of losing lives and ending the game), and 2D vs. 3D (even for games which today are nominally 2D the graphics is still often in a 3D style).

The Pandora really is a fabulous machine - maybe its too expensive - but to the HN crowd that shouldn't matter much. Its an amazing amount of power in my pocket, and with MOAI now onboard, I have the ability to use it to develop apps for Android and iOS and Windows, and so on, simply by ssh'ing to it and firing up vim. ;)