sirocyl

@sirocyl

noted computer gremlinizer

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platform sec researcher, OS dev, systems architect, composer; Other (please specify). vintage computer/electronics nut.

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sirocyl @sirocyl1/19/2024, 8:30 PM

Phil Salvador @shadsy

Phil Salvador @shadsy1/12/2024, 9:49 PM

All-time great new Will Wright quote just dropped

This comes from a super rare magazine we just acquired for the Video Game History Foundation: The First Decade of Computer Games, a supplement for Game Player's PC Entertainment from 1992 that tries to tell the early history of the game industry. It has a ton of unscanned interviews with big names in the early computer game scene, including Dani Bunten, Trip Hawkins, and Sid Meier.

This quote in particular was about the computer platform wars between Commodore and IBM. The point Wright was trying to make is that, in his view, in any format war, the cheaper, lower-tech standard will win, and I guess he was unhappy we went with DOS instead of Amiga.

#game history #will wright #spanish inquisition #not a lot of people using the "spanish inquisition tag"#games

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in reply to @shadsy's post:

John Colagioia @jcolag1/12/2024, 10:46 PM

Honestly, the early PCs and clones looked bad even against a Commodore 64, let alone an Amiga. Granted, I was only a kid when this was important, so had extremely uninformed views on (for example) business software. But a lot of us thought it was hilarious to watch people spend thousands of dollars on a computer (and dedicated monitor, because you couldn't use a TV) to get a slightly faster processor, no repairability, no easy programming tools, a whopping four colors on the screen, and a sound system that had you covered whether you wanted an irritating beep or no beep at all.

I kept my C64 in active service until compatibility became too important...and Commodore had gone out of business, dashing all hopes of a comeback.

JP @vectorpoem1/12/2024, 10:53 PM

This quote in particular was about the computer platform wars between Commodore and IBM. The point Wright was trying to make is that in any format war, the cheaper, lower-tech standard will win, and I guess he was unhappy we went with DOS instead of Amiga.

I don't get the impression it was primarily about price - Amigas were pretty pricey at launch, the 500 was way more affordable but still a fair bit above the NES / C64 tier - so much as game-friendliness, how much juice a given machine had for games per dollar. The PC was absolutely terrible for this for a majority of the 80s; even after VGA and the Adlib card came along a decent gaming PC would be quite pricey, and until around the 386 was introduced the Amiga was way ahead in horsepower and audiovisual tricks. And it was much more in continuity with the C64's dramatically cheap, game-friendly (hardware sprites, damn good audio chip, reasonable affordances for screen scrolling) architecture. The PC for so long was just IBM shrugging vaguely in the direction of anyone who wasn't a productivity software developer. (Then it turned the corner pretty dramatically in the early 90s and became the best platform around, as the Wintel era set in)

Phil Salvador @shadsy1/12/2024, 10:57 PM

Another Wright quote from elsewhere in the magazine is, "It is a well-known principle that when several systems are in competition to become a standard, the most technically inferior one will always win." I'm editorializing a little by saying "cheaper," but I think that's implied when he mentions "technically inferior" in the same way Nintendo tends to learn into the "withered technology" angle. (Whether or not that's actually why IBM's platforms succeeded!)

JP @vectorpoem1/12/2024, 11:08 PM

What's odd about the IBM PC vs its competition is that it was only "technically inferior" to the Amiga, Mac, and ST as a games machine; I can't remember seeing 68k vs x86 benchmarks for that era but horsepower-wise its CPU was perfectly capable, and until the cloning market caught up most of the models you could get were just as or more expensive. Whereas Gunpei Yokoi's "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" was about finding ways to work magic with cheap shit (eg Z80s that could be produced for peanuts and run on AA batteries), which carries through today with the Switch being cheaper than a PS5 or Xbox and using a mobile-esque SoC.

Phil Salvador @shadsy1/12/2024, 11:30 PM

(I went back and added "in his view" to the OP, there's enough caveats here that I want make it clear that this is Will Wright's narrative!)

Ξ @exerian1/12/2024, 11:01 PM

(Then it turned the corner pretty dramatically in the early 90s and became the best platform around)

you can thank amd for this. without them we'd be another decade behind.

@Janet1/13/2024, 12:50 AM

ahh.... i would have very much enjoyed if amiga had been a bit more successful... that was some good hardware...sure, not very modular, but they made a modern and very responsive graphical system that way...

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