One of the reasons why our industry produces slow, bloated software is because the engineers building it often have the fastest computers with the most resources. It should be a requirement before shipping to have your whole team personally use the software for a week on 10 year old computers.
One of the reasons why my data management system (https://www.Didgets.com) is so fast is because I regularly ran it on an old Core-2 Duo machine with a slow hard drive and limited RAM. I didn't stop tweaking it until it ran fast on the old hardware.
Optimizing Android builds and decreasing Android Studio resource usage tends to be a common talk at Android related conferences.
Sometimes it is not possible to compile the software on the target computer, e.g., an MCU, but we should still be able to compile and flash the MCU software using underpowered computers. We should not need a large, graphical operating system and graphical software to create software for tiny computers that do not support graphics. I continue to be baffled by the large, graphical Windows software people use to program MCUs. There are exceptions,1 but they seem rare.
1. For example, https://github.com/PaulStoffregen/teensy_loader_cli
I’m surprised to see commenters here who don’t see portability as important for preservation - or maybe just don’t really care about preservation at all.
If your develop for highly locked device (iPhone) which requires the very latest version of huge dev environment -- maybe choose some other development target which does not evolve quite as much. Qt, Java, etc.. are not updated for years. And don't forget to make sure that your OS does not break without updates either.
Gimp is more clunky than Photoshop, but it will never fail because of lack of license server.
This part is especially annoying:
> At sea, without internet, if I wanted to look up how to fill a polygon, I couldn't do it, but if I had printed it?
.. or maybe you could have gotten some e-books? They take much less space that paper books (important on yacht!) and lasts forever. Postscript format, from 1985, is still readable by all modern systems. Plain text ASCII, from 1968, is still being written every day. Even HTML 1.0 is rendered by all modern browsers.
> Qt, Java, etc.. are not updated for years.
Hmm. Have you really been paying attention? They very much are, and in exciting ways. They don't make old versions unserviceable though, and that's great.
And yes, there are all sorts of exciting things in Qt and Java world, but you don't have to use them. We currently build some tools on Qt 5.9 (2017) and feel no pressure to upgrade at all. And my computer still has Qt 4.8 available (including dev headers) from 2011, which I assume still works. Which is great, I agree.
Also when your powersource is solar powered batteries, the small differences probably don’t matter a whole lot.
The games that don't work in some way or form 20 years after creation are in minority due to effort of community. I dunno what author is smoking.
> chains of emulators eventually break down
<citation needed>, arguably some emulation experience is better than original
> The download is at 7 gigs with three more hours left to download the update, it won't finish, and we will have spent all that data for nothing.
Resume download existed for better part of internet. Also torrents are great for that use case...
> There was a time when computers were super playful, but now they feel cold, and have been weaponized against people.
They still are, just gonna join the crowd of weird penguin people instead of buying another windows/macbook box, all the power and weird stuff you can do with computers is still there, using current software.
Maybe not in "I built everything from scratch way" but still
> The Commodore 64 emulator was extremely complex, more complex than I could grasp. It was the limit of what I think a single person could understand. It seemed like a simple system, it was just a box, but writing an emulator for it was more than a weekend project. I was looking for something that I could nail in a single weekend.
Huh, I kinda hit the same thing. Started writing Z80 emu (in Go, then Rust for funzies), got a good framework and some way in into implementing instruction set then realised "damn, now getting it cycle accurate and synchronized with peripherals is a lot of work. And peripherals are more work than CPU itself".
The games that don't work in some way or form 20 years after creation
are in minority due to effort of community. I dunno what author is smoking.
I would say what you're seeing is biased towards popular games - there is an immense amount of games out there and most have no community to try to preserve or emulate. It also really changes after a certain point in time & with specific platforms - old, popular (but still simple compared to modern PCs) systems like the PlayStation 2 or Game Boy Advance? Not a problem. DOS games? For the most part ok, especially popular ones like Doom/Quake/etc. But choose a random not-very-popular computer game from 1996 and there's a fair chance it won't be easy to make it work properly.An iPhone games from 2009 or a Facebook Flash game from 2010? Now there's a real chance you have no way of making it work unless the game is so popular that the developer/publisher have kept it alive and on the market all this time.
>An iPhone games from 2009 or a Facebook Flash game from 2010? Now there's a real chance you have no way of making it work unless the game is so popular that the developer/publisher have kept it alive and on the market all this time.
Weirdly enough (not really) despise all the whining about loss of Flash games community people stepped up and wrote the emulators required for that. No idea how iphone side of that looks tho
> But choose a random not-very-popular computer game from 1996 and there's a fair chance it won't be easy to make it work properly.
In most cases it will probably be as easy as average game because it is average game and most emus carry for needs of average games of that time just fine.
You'd have to look pretty hard to find unplayable ones, and most other... wouldn't be much harder than trying to make the DOS game work back in the DOS times with various special things you needed to do and set back then so the game worked.
Sure, games nobody wanted to play in the first place when they were released will be neglected but that's not exactly that huge a loss. If game deems to be more important than it was back then someone will figure out how to run it, as long as data is preserved.
The online-only ones are a big problem, sure they can be cracked just fine but the moment they are server based that's a whole shitton to reverse-engineer, and while some popular MMOs got that done (mostly so people can play without paying but still...) it's by far rarity to see.