gxd

A solo-developed game generating 10K-30K in MRR over more than a handful of months would already put you on the top 10% of all released games on Steam. It's not likely to happen unless you have experience in the space and possess strong artistic skills.

They could be about modern retro games and modern retro synth music (Adlib, SID, PSG audio etc) - and by that I mean games and music targeting the classic platforms but made today. A single 3.5" floppy won't fit many games, but it would fit screenshots and a dozen tunes or so.

It would be the expected text+pics+music. If you charged $2 for it people wouldn't be too interested; if you had a pretty label, simple packaging and charged $10-$15 (the price of a magazine) for it, you could have an audience.

That's why some people see the C language as "portable assembly". I think C is at its best when you want Assembly-like memory addressing flexibility but don't want to deal with instruction-set specific idiosyncrasies.

This discussion contains well argued points about the 6502 vs other instruction sets. Does anyone know of resources/books that I could read that would help me have a more informed opinion on the pros/cons of each instruction set?

Thank you for the great links!

It can be really hard to get accurate emulation with a somewhat loosely defined, high level VM such as some of your examples. If it's that small and simple, programmers might accidentally create a dependency on implementation idiosyncrasies. Just see what happens on the retro computing scene when emulators aren't perfectly cycle and hardware accurate - applications, the "demoscene" being a good example of them, that rely on very low-level details of the architecture don't work on certain emulators.

If we want to create a new "forever VM", that VM would have to very strictly define behaviors across I/O, graphics, audio and other areas. I don't want the application to stutter or run too fast on future emulators. I want the emulation to be perfectly cycle accurate.

I had never heard of it, so I went to find out more. Yes, I think it's the same philosophy. Very cool project.

Unfortunately, it seems that they went against the project's very principle by inventing a new language, new VM and toolchain instead of simply targeting one of the existing platforms. I can see why they wanted to build an abstraction layer, so their code is portable across different classic (and modern) platforms, but this is one more case of https://xkcd.com/927/.

It would have been totally okay if they had said "The future of software is creating applications targeting the Amiga 1000", or anything else from the 80s-90s, which I'll arbitrarily define as "simple enough to accurately emulate forever".

Completely agree and I'll go a bit further. I see old consoles and computers as the only VMs that will last. In 500 years, assuming we all survive, I believe it's more likely that code targeting the NES will be runnable than code targeting today's browsers, .NET or the JVM. The reason is that while these competing VMs are well documented, they are extremely complex and code targeting them tend to rely on idiosyncrasies of current operating systems, browsers and even hardware.

Also, the retro hardware itself is the ultimate documentation. You can look at every chip using (nowadays) accessible equipment and create an absolutely perfect replica in software or FPGA. VM documentation, however, can contain inaccuracies.

My speculative fiction statement of the day is that only software targeting relatively simple architectures will stand the test of time.

I'm doing it right now. I left my job and created a game company during my sabbatical (https://galantrix.com). Feel free to drop by the company's Discord if you want to chat.

I don't know what to expect going forward. In my experience, as long as you can show that you're keeping your skills sharp, and have something to show for your year off, it can even work to your advantage. Taking one year off to spend your day playing Factorio probably wouldn't look as good to recruiters (although I can see people needing just that after a stressful run).

BTW, I'm near 50 with 20+ in FAANG/AAA Tech.

Cool! I've coded for the Gameboy Advance in the past, it's very fun to write software for well-documented and feature-rich hardware that also have rock solid debugging tools.

By picking the DS, the author might also have ensured his application will work hundreds of years from now...

I think GW-BASIC is a better introduction to programming than Python. Its limited power is an advantage for teaching and learning. Python is a much better language for solving real-world problems, but the student doesn't always understand what's actually happening in many cases.

I was obsessed with manuals back in the day too. Computer manuals were a gateway to a new world of possibilities and techno-fantasy. In my young mind, it was the 80s/90s version of the portal to Narnia.

The Spectrum was my first computer. I grew up in Latin America, where the Spectrum was popular, and I have such fond memories. BASIC is available within a couple of seconds and it has an incredible selection of games.

Speaking of games... I've lived in US for a long time and I'm intimately familiar with both the US gaming history (My dad had an Apple II) and the current gaming market. With this said, if you like videogames, you should absolutely try Spectrum games; not the conversions, which are generally poor, but the homegrown British games from the 1980s.

The Spectrum-centric, British gaming culture from the 1980s is the closest thing we have to a gaming culture from an alien civilization. I mean no offense to my British friends here, it's actually a compliment to its uniqueness. The Spectrum scene was very much like the current Steam-centric indie gaming scene, but with a particular British (let's not forget Australia and Spain) flavor that is hard to emulate.

So many homegrown games, so many small 1/2-people gaming shops, so many amazing gems unlike everything else you've ever played. If you are a serious gamer, you owe yourself to spend a few weeks looking into the Spectrum library.

By the way, you can get a taste of it in Black Mirror's "Bandersnatch" episode.

I started a game company and now working on our first game after leaving my FAANG job on a sabbatical: https://www.galantrix.com/blog/

Oftentimes, when you see someone proposing "just save 70% by installing open source XYZ", they are thinking like an individual and not a business. Fast-moving startups and medium businesses in areas with high cost of labor can save a ton by outsourcing labor to AWS/Azure if they are okay with the lock-in. Of course, each case is different and people shouldn't just blindly adopt AWS/Azure without thinking about it...

Too little, too late. As the owner of a game company, I cannot trust Unity for my business, it's too much risk. A new CEO looking for a fat short term bonus could bankrupt me (as it there weren't enough risks as it is).

Have you considered donating them to the Internet Archive? They can take your collection and make it available to the whole world.

https://help.archive.org/help/media-types-for-donations/

Every generation says that music is getting worse, but I think it's actually getting better. While in the past people were confined to whatever music was played on the radio, or available in the local record store, now it's possible to stream music in literally every conceivable genre. In the past, I wouldn't be able to access some terrific works created by small artists due to the difficulties in distribution.

The life of a musician is difficult today, but this has also always been the case. Musicians make money by playing live and selling merchandise; this was true in the past and still is true now.

The ZX Spectrum was my first computer. Sure, I'm nostalgic for the games, but what I truly miss was the feeling of having what was then a fairly sophisticated device while being able to fully understand it. Nowadays, with the one gazillion layers of software, firmware and complex hardware, that's pretty much impossible.

Decades later, memories of my early gaming and programming days inspired me to create my own game company, https://galantrix.com. Hail to the Spectrum!

VR is interesting; we think we want VR, and we probably do, but this is like saying we wanted airliners before we actually had the technology to build one. Most recent VR headsets feel, relatively speaking, like those crazy early flying contraptions that simply couldn't deliver on the promise. At best, the state of the art is equivalent to the Wright Flyer - amazing demo, not quite ready for mass adoption.

Until VR headsets provide a seamless, pleasant experience, they will remain in the hands of early adopters and enthusiasts.

Cool!

I'd like to see now an even smaller PS5 - preferably as small as the XBOX S. I find the PS5 Slim still somewhat bulky, although it's no longer a major problem like the original.

I always loved the design of the Connection Machine... So much that I was inspired by it for creating the very first screen for my company's new game: https://www.galantrix.com/blog/20240830/

Godot is excellent, and I believe it will be the "Blender of game making" in 5 years or so. Version 4 is ready for prime time and is able to tackle most indie projects. Where Unity beats Godot is in the "Triple I" and "Double A" categories, as it has better 3D/performance features, tooling and add-ons. Neither engine is the best choice for AAA projects.

For 2D and simple 3D games, I see no reason to use Unity anymore; I predict a steady decline in Unity's market share as Godot slowly overtakes it.

For a minute there I thought I had written your message and forgot about it. It resonates strongly with how I feel.

Infocom, the leading maker of the text adventures you talk about, used to advertise that the brain is the most powerful graphics technology (https://thedoteaters.com/?attachment_id=6312). When playing their games as a kid, I remember the sense of wonder with what then felt like an entire universe contained inside the computer. I tried to "trick the computer" into letting me go places that weren't technically part of the game!

When thinking about the games back then - and I say that not with a sense of nostalgia, but simply remembering how I felt about these games before I understood how they worked - I wanted to go to every house in the scenery, every city building I was driving by. I wanted to see if I could go there, knock on the door and there would be people and adventures waiting for me everywhere.

That dream was the metaverse indeed. Great graphics of course helps a lot, but they are not the main characteristic of this immersion. It's depth, content, the sense that every couch in the room could have a long lost and forgotten receipt under it.

Adding people often breaks the immersion, especially in Free to Play games. When you are in a medieval world and suddenly a player called "Memes4Ca$h" dressed in a pink armor shows up, it breaks the immersion. The ideal environment would either need true human role players or AGI-managed characters.

Good job!

Isn't it technically a Console RPG? For a minute I thought you had created an RPG where interaction was through command-line commands, like "rpg /attack:troll" with some sort of persistent process storing state :)

As they say, "I'm too poor to afford cheap things".

In the business world, that corresponds to "we can't afford to hire inexpensive, unqualified labor".

I don't think this is the core of the concern, other aspects are much worse IMHO.

For instance, the article says "Microsoft positions its Copilot tool as a way to make users more creative and productive by capturing all the human labor latent in the data used to train its AI models and reselling it.". The Copilot data could make it a lot easier to steal sensitive business procedures and intellectual property - the data would allow any third parties to fully inspect the company procedures and sensitive data in a scale that we've never seen. It would be next to impossible to manage, categorize and protect this data. It's an intellectual property nightmare.

A good version of the technology, which we don't have yet, would allow competitors to create a copy of every employee (in the business sense) and perhaps much more efficiently compete with that company.

There is no reason to get the original unless you're a committed retrocomputing enthusiast or collector (I am a retro games collector and decided against getting an original anyway). You can get an exceptional emulation experience using WinUAE or https://www.amigaforever.com/ (which is also WinUAE based).

A basic understanding of SQL is one of the most useful skills a software Engineer can have. Sooner or later, you will get to face a database system that requires it, either for actual application development or for data mining.

Even if you don't use it all that often, I think that every developer should get some exposure to Functional, Logic and Declarative languages - and SQL is a decent way to learn more about the "declarative way of thinking", even if it isn't used in a fully declarative fashion in many practical situations.