pouët.net

Go to bottom

Oldschool demos getting vendor locked?

category: general [glöplog]
I just don't get it. Why would I do something fun now that I still can, because maybe sometime in the future I won't be able to anymore. Duh.
added on the 2014-02-17 20:40:25 by yzi yzi
Quote:
You are very right that the retro hardware isn't dead. But maybe dying? One difference is that both pen, paper and vinyls can be produced by everyone and is still being produced. So if your current pen breaks you can by a new one and if it breaks in ten years you can still just go buy a new one. So there is no problem in relying on a pen to do your work.

Where is the intrinsic value of the original device?

Quite many of the emulators have reach the points where the in-accuracies in emulation are more or less on par with the variants in behavior of the different models of the original hardware, so the emulator experience really is no different.
And if you really want hardware, most of the hardware I can think of has been reimplemented in FPGA or equivalent.

When my Oric Microdisc broke at Solskogen, I was having problems working on my next demo, but then I switched to pure emulation, then I received my Cumulus (floppy disk drive emulator) and continued the development on that. It happens that the code works on emulator, cumulus, microdisc with HxC and real hardware as well: Is the experience more "better" on some of these solutions than on other?

Perhaps you are like these audiophile people who have perfect audition and hear the sampling in CD's and can't use anything else that vinyls else their whole experience is gone?

Even at the time when my machine was mainstrean, people would not have the same experience: Some would use black and white tvs, some would use color tvs, some had amber of green monitors, and even on color tvs some were connected with the aerial antenna while some would use scart and get much crisper color. And then came the LCD screens, which have a different appearance than CRTs. And some plugged the computers on the stereo system instead of using the internal speaker... which one gives the 'real experience' ?

Imo, you are thinking the whole thing too much, just take it as it is.

And considering Adok's piece, well, I never thought of what I was doing as Art, so I could not care less if I'm retrograde: I see myself as a craftman, not an artist. Now if the resulting craft looks like art, it's not up to me to judge and if it's the case it's only a nice bonus.
added on the 2014-02-17 21:26:29 by Dbug Dbug
Quote:
And one of the reasons why I do that is exactly that I don't want to be dependent on any closed/proprietary environment/product. Actually I wouldn't even want to create anything that only worked on Windows because then in a way my creation would be in the fate of Microsoft.


You are either joking, trolling or misguided... code I wrote after the 90s for windows still works on my current hardware without recompilation of it, let along the darn operating system. pop my old usb caddy in, and boom it works.

Outside the 'because i can' hardware hacking on either obscure, or retro hardware for some one of the goals of demo creation is to show it to people. Which means targeting a VALID desktop OS that people have, which real people actually can use.

Linux isn't one, and all the people I know who use Mac's mostly have Parallels or VMWare Fusion running. There isn't a lot on OS X either. Because IMO a large percentage of people using Mac's are consumers and have them for a conspicuous consumption based reasons.
added on the 2014-02-17 21:49:47 by Canopy Canopy
Quote:
I just don't get it. Why would I do something fun now that I still can, because maybe sometime in the future I won't be able to anymore. Duh.

Based on that statement I think it's pretty clear that we don't think alike. Back when I was a child playing flash games I had a period where I avoided playing those that I couldn't find a way to download because I was afraid the site that hosted it would go offline and then I'd prefer not to end up liking the the game. Maybe that doesn't make any sense to you. It's some kind of irrational strive for perfect "eternal" things.

But in this particular case it's more the product of ones work that I'd like to have some kind of longevity.

Quote:
Where is the intrinsic value of the original device?

Quite many of the emulators have reach the points where the in-accuracies in emulation are more or less on par with the variants in behavior of the different models of the original hardware, so the emulator experience really is no different.
And if you really want hardware, most of the hardware I can think of has been reimplemented in FPGA or equivalent.

No, I don't really care about the hardware. But I was under the impression that the emulators were never the real thing. And that development for instance couldn't be done just with an emulator.

Quote:
Perhaps you are like these audiophile people who have perfect audition and hear the sampling in CD's and can't use anything else that vinyls else their whole experience is gone?

If I was able to hear the sampling in CD's it's likely that I'd be like that.

Quote:
Imo, you are thinking the whole thing too much, just take it as it is.

Yeah. You're right. But I don't think I can help it ^^
added on the 2014-02-17 21:56:23 by paldepind paldepind
as a c64 coder, I can tell you there *is* audience. and its not only about the audience. its about sharing and discussing ideas. its about the ammazing fact that having coded the machine 20+ years in assembly you can STILL find new ways, and show new / better / nicer effects. How ammazing is that? I'd also use the retro car comparison. It's like a bunch of nerd retro car fans, you dont have mainstream audience, but hell you know the last bolt of the car, and can discuss it with other zealots, that which factory has made the bolt, and how it makes the car 0.01% faster if used in a specific way, and piss your pants in joy for the sheer discovery of that :)
added on the 2014-02-17 22:00:40 by Oswald Oswald
Quote:
You are either joking, trolling or misguided... code I wrote after the 90s for windows still works on my current hardware without recompilation of it, let along the darn operating system. pop my old usb caddy in, and boom it works.

Call me misguided. But if you create a demo today using DirectX for instance you're depending on that proprietary technology surviving in some form.
added on the 2014-02-17 22:02:28 by paldepind paldepind
You always depend on things. Operating systems, libraries, processor architectures, file formats... Anything can go out of style, even if it's open source.
added on the 2014-02-17 22:09:39 by Gargaj Gargaj
Quote:
there *is* audience

And as Oswald points out, it's a quality audience!
added on the 2014-02-17 22:25:14 by baah baah
Well, with non mainstream technology there is more fear that creators would simply seize to exist or loose interest and then you are left with an unfinished API. For example, in my job we used to work with openscenegraph. Which was not bad, but documentation was crappy and nobody was interested to improve, some things were quite buggy and even if you had the opensource we didn't have the time to go through all this and fix it. It's an opensource project with a niche community where you beg someone would be interested to continue. We moved to Unity, it's used by lot's of people in indie game dev, bigger community, better documentation, etc. I am not afraid that Unity will dissapear oneday. It's big and people care.

Even if I like open source, proprietary software that is used by everyone scares me much less than niche open source projects that maybe one day I won't have the support (and not everyone who simply wants to watch a demo would like to hack the kernel or something).

I think our demos are going to be watched more certainly after 10 years with a mainstream OS. Not that I care at the end, I would happily code for a machine not many are able to have (GP32, my own broke, I couldn't see my demo. Hehe,. even the emulator is not complete because nobody is interested, see niche communities :). Demoscene was never about OS preference, it's only about doing some cool amazing stuff in whatever platform you please.
added on the 2014-02-17 22:40:11 by Optimus Optimus
Quote:
Quote:
You are either joking, trolling or misguided... code I wrote after the 90s for windows still works on my current hardware without recompilation of it, let along the darn operating system. pop my old usb caddy in, and boom it works.

Call me misguided. But if you create a demo today using DirectX for instance you're depending on that proprietary technology surviving in some form.


Ugh, not this horseshit Windows bashing again....

Why must you FOSSpeople always act like this?

OpenGL is the same shit, OGL1.1 got deprecated in favour of the OGL4 standard you have now.
added on the 2014-02-17 23:00:36 by mudlord mudlord
So you're saying that you can't enjoy the endless wonderful and unique possibilities you have each day, because... you might not be able to experience exactly the same thing again? Then you're missing out on MOST things in life. I guess you weren't able to enjoy being a teenager, because you realized that you'll get older, and then the fun will end, and then it will be unbearable? Let me tell you some facts of life. You are going to die. Each of us only gets this one life, this one chance. Appreciate it. Some people even think there's something called afterlife or something, and what you do now, has an effect on the future, yours and everyone else's. Every second of your life has been and is going to be unique, one use only, no refunds, no returns. It's a fine old vintage of wine, you can save it for later but eventually the bottle will be empty. No more Commodore 64. No more CRT displays. But even then we'll have our memories. And if there are still children in the world, they'll have something else, and they'll have memories of that stuff.
added on the 2014-02-17 23:13:19 by yzi yzi
b-b-But they were able to preserve the talking heads alive in Futurama!
So there IS a life after. i swear!
added on the 2014-02-17 23:20:26 by gentleman gentleman
Maybe I should stop going to live concerts, because I don't own the venues and the artists and I can't replicate the gigs at will? Great idea.
added on the 2014-02-17 23:30:14 by yzi yzi
And so yzi takes the lead.
added on the 2014-02-17 23:37:56 by noby noby
Because C64 is the future. Soon the whole scene will realize this and move to this platform. Then us early movers will have a head start and be rulers of the future scene.
added on the 2014-02-17 23:48:14 by cruzer cruzer
this thread makes me LOL. and what cruzer said. and oswald. :=)
added on the 2014-02-17 23:52:40 by groepaz groepaz
Quote:
Quote:
You are either joking, trolling or misguided... code I wrote after the 90s for windows still works on my current hardware without recompilation of it, let along the darn operating system. pop my old usb caddy in, and boom it works.

Call me misguided. But if you create a demo today using DirectX for instance you're depending on that proprietary technology surviving in some form.


the technology will survive because billions has been on microsoft getting windows and directx up n running as a viable gaming platform. 3/4 of all desktop machines out there run windows, linux barely 1/100.

opengl for various reasons isn't, and i doubt will be taken seriously especially for games outside "certain" mobile/tablet platforms.

now to show the contradiction, i'm currently working on opengl stuff under windows but I know if my goal were to write "killer" demos for the platform I *should* be using direct x.
i don't have aspirations to be the next "demostar" or have anywhere near time to try to do that, my goals, as pointed out elsewhere are 'self set restrictions', a personal challenge. i'm also restricting myself to C (no c++). for various reasons based around the style i have in mind, and what i want to do with it.

you can use linux for the same reasons i choose to use gl, but justifying your decision on the fact that the market leader might just crap on the hard fought war over the last 20 years to get its platform gaming is just plain bonkers. especially when you're sticking up for a platform that is massively fragmented and fraught with all the issues direct x has solved.

but as has pointed out been before. BOTH api's are back compatible, and some of that code i mentioned from "way back when" wasnt gl, it was directx nased too. it all still works.
the only stuff that doesnt is my old DOS based stuff.

there is little desire for either of the two big api's to kill backwards compatibility. deprecate yes, but killing bad.
added on the 2014-02-18 00:26:15 by Canopy Canopy
Quote:
Quote:
You are either joking, trolling or misguided... code I wrote after the 90s for windows still works on my current hardware without recompilation of it, let along the darn operating system. pop my old usb caddy in, and boom it works.

Call me misguided. But if you create a demo today using DirectX for instance you're depending on that proprietary technology surviving in some form.


If there's anything you can learn from retro-sceners using C64s, Amigas and such, it's that it *doesn't matter* whether or not the software or hardware is still in production, or if even the company that used to make them still exists.
All that matters is that the technology is preserved in some way. A lot of working hardware is still around, and aside from that, a lot of effort is put into making emulators as compatible as possible with the real thing. And software is preserved in various archives online.

DirectX will survive for ages even if Windows/Microsoft ever disappear. Either because you can still install older versions of Windows on the latest hardware, or because of emulation (yes, even your beloved linux has support for DirectX via Wine, and as such it preserves DirectX).

But for now, I wouldn't even worry about DirectX ever disappearing.
added on the 2014-02-18 02:09:47 by Scali Scali
Quote:
but as has pointed out been before. BOTH api's are back compatible, and some of that code i mentioned from "way back when" wasnt gl, it was directx nased too. it all still works.


Indeed, even in Windows 8.1 I can still run my old DirectDraw 1.0 code, and the earliest Direct3D stuff.
I wonder how many early linux demos still run on today's distros. Not many I guess.
Always had problems with OpenGL-based demos on Windows as well.
added on the 2014-02-18 02:14:11 by Scali Scali
I wonder what the op's grandchildren do when they find out the op was there when all this retro demoscene thing was happening, but DID NOT PARTICIPATE. What were you thinking grandpa?? It was an exciting unique one time thing in history and you did not go.

The show is now on. The stage is set up, the musicians are there, audience is there, incredible music is playing. There's still enough retro hardware, there are people interested in creating prods, there is an audience, and some people go through a lot of trouble and organize parties. Enjoy it for as long as it lasts, because it will end, and then it will be over. It's 1969 and you're in Woodstock, go watch the show.
added on the 2014-02-18 07:58:46 by yzi yzi
I think it's actually easier to keep the old 8-bit machines running in one way or another. See, they are simple enough it's already possible to write an emulator, or replicate them with some more modern hardware such as an FPGA. If you wait 30 years, current versions of Windows/Linux/whatever will be old and long forgotten too. Will there be some nostalgic still running and using them? Yes, probably. And, there will be emulators for those as well (we already have Wine).

Anyway, what I like in 8-bit coding is knowing the internals for the whole machine, being able to do cycle-accurate timing, and bare-metal tinkering. Yes, some of this could be done on a modern platform (FPGA based, or using some ARM CPU or whatever), but, there is no such platform with an active scene, no winner in that category yet. That restricts this kind of work to the "wild" category - an interesting one, and for example lft did some great work on that, but not the same thing.
Quote:
So you're saying that you can't enjoy the endless wonderful and unique possibilities you have each day, because... you might not be able to experience exactly the same thing again? Then you're missing out on MOST things in life. I guess you weren't able to enjoy being a teenager, because you realized that you'll get older, and then the fun will end, and then it will be unbearable?

Come on. It's almost like you're trying to misunderstand me and drag what I'm saying to the extremes. I have no clue what your point in doing that is.

Quote:
Ugh, not this horseshit Windows bashing again....

Why must you FOSSpeople always act like this?

There was no Windows bashing. If you're able to see Windows bashing where there is no Windows bashing I'm not surprised that you see a lot of Windows bashing.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your answers in this thread. I think I understand better now why working on retro platforms aren't a problem for most of you guys even though it's not really the angle I'm coming from. I'm sorry if I upset anybody (it certainly seems that way) but my question was an honest question based on genuine wondering.
added on the 2014-02-18 08:27:27 by paldepind paldepind
welcome to pouet! soon with more ponies!
added on the 2014-02-18 08:57:15 by psenough psenough
So, this post will be completely off topic, but I think the original topic is done anyway.

Quote:
opengl for various reasons isn't, and i doubt will be taken seriously especially for games outside "certain" mobile/tablet platforms.

You don't think OpenGL will be taken serious? I'm pretty sure it will and already is. Windows is no longer the dominating platform it was five years ago. Mac is winning big these years. When I was in "high school" 70% of my classmates where using Mac, the only significant group not on Mac where the gamers (for obvious reasons). At my current job (software firm) it's the same – about 70% are Mac users. Obviously that doesn't prove anything in itself, but I think it's pretty safe to say that Apple is winning market share. Combining that with the fact that the market for mobile games is huge and that the web is also becoming a viable platform for 3D stuff you'd be pretty crazy not to take OpenGL serious since DirectX is not available on any of these platforms.

Valve for instance, which is a significant player on the market, and is aggressively pushing both OpenGL and Linux (they apparently really fancy both even though Linux IMO is still a pretty crappy platform for gaming/3D (driver issues, transition to Wayland). Heck, even Microsoft is taking OpenGL serious by supporting WebGL even though they for quite sometime refused to do so. DirectX is Windows only and can only survive as the leading 3D technology in a world where Windows is the only relevant platform and that world is no longer.
added on the 2014-02-18 18:48:12 by paldepind paldepind

login

Go to top