pouët.net

What a year, what a year - and still going strong!

The Meteoriks team starts gathering again - and WE WANT YOU to join us as a juror!

• Help deciding on categories with your fellow jurors
  
• Review last year's productions for your category
  
• Identify up to five nominees
  
• Choose a laureate
  
• Represent your category live during the award show
  

All in all, this will take between four and eight evenings' worth of time, mostly spread across January and February.

Visit our website to learn more and sign up for jury "duty" until January 1st, we would love to have you!

https://2023.meteoriks.org/taking_part/juror/

We are looking forward to working and celebrating the best productions of the year with you!

- The Meteoriks Team

Waiting for better category qualifiers than "Oldschool", "Low/High End", and especially "Midschool", with less of a connotation. =)

Anyways, good luck to yous, Dear Madams and Sirs!

@Krill

OK, so three things:

* you were one of the folks pushing for the existence of the midschool category in the first place
* if you're opposed to names that allude to the platforms being old and limited, and also to names like "midschool" that were specifically invented in an attempt to avoid those connotations, then that doesn't give us a whole lot of other options
* "classic" and "8-bit" / "16-bit" don't work because virtual consoles don't fit those descriptions (and if you want to propose moving those into their own category, then you'd better suggest which category should be killed off to make room for it, which surely won't be controversial at all)

The category itself is fine, and the distinction is sound.

Yes, sort of, but the allusion is not regarding the platforms themselves. The categories are called things like "Best Oldschool Production" or "Best High-End Demo".

If anything should be sorted into its own category, it's virtual consoles. =) But if that isn't an option... okay, let's review:

Vintage/classic/antique etc. may work for cars, but come with a few problems for home and personal computers, granted.
There is little question about what sorts into 8-bit computers, and "High-End" could probably simply be called "Contemporary Platform" with little pushback.
The "Midschool" is the problem, not only because fantasy consoles are sorted in there, but also because "16-bit" for Amiga, Atari, Acorn, early IBM PCs and their likes is problematic because they're 16 or 32 bits depending on where you look.

Now, the actual relevant difference, mapping rather well to technological generations and Mean Demo Power (R)(TM) imho, is the magnitude of directly addressable RAM.

Consider...
"Oldschool": 8-bit -> "Kilobyte Platform"
"Midschool": A*, CVM[1], etc. -> "Megabyte Platform"
"High-End": Contemporary -> "Gigabyte Platform"

Contemporary should probably be called that for now, but when the time comes, there can easily be "Gigabyte Platform" along with the future "Contemporary" (which might or might not be "Terabyte Platform" by then, effectively) - alternative would be inventing an "A-level" category or something.

I'm also quite positive that this distinction is rather easily understood by people not privy to demoscene speak.

So the categories with explicit platform reference could be:
"Best Production on a Kilobyte Platform"
"Best Production on a Megabyte Platform"
"Best Intro on a Contemporary Platform" [2]
"Best Demo on a Contemporary Platform"

It may not roll of the tongue so nicely, but... it's the best i could come up with after coming home late on Saturday.[3]

Discuss![4] =) (And sorry for off-topicness.)

[1] I'm aware that programs running in fantasy consoles could easily allocate gigabytes of RAM. But is this sensible? This not normal method.
[2] "Intro" for size-restricted demo is another pet peeve of mine, but best left for another discussion.
[3] Sorry if i re-invented the wheel.
[4] Bring on the weird corner cases!

Thanks everybody who is involved in this / decides to get involved in this, your efforts are appreciated!

I think I would like to bluntly shut the discussion down before it grows further. We had a lot of internal discussion about the naming and decided after some back and forth that the current naming was the least horrible option. We are sufficiently satisfied with the naming and talking to people so far showed me that the majority of sceners (including the ones falling into said categories) are too.

In the interest of continuity we are going to keep the current naming, and I'm positive that as time goes by everyone including the folks who this rubs the wrong way will get used to them.

Krill, your point is well taken and appreciated, but the bikeshed stays green.

As long as the fantasy consoles are taken out of the shed, i think we're left with only minor differences of opinions ;)

Seeing the activity on C64 and how big it's scene is maybe C64 should have it's own award categorie...

Exactly. :) Without that sorted into "midschool" but instead "other" or "wild" where it belongs, we'd have 8-bit, 16-bit, and contemporary/current/modern/whathaveyou platform. =)

No it shouldn't. :)

Shouldn't fantasy consoles be in the "high end" category? Because you need a "high end" computer to run the stuff. Good luck in running TIC-80 on an alleged "middle school" computer. To me this whole thing looks like keeping as many award slots as possible clean and pure for PC stuff, and relegating the "lesser" stuff somewhere else. (Would be totally fine by me, just my 2 cents.)

TIC-80 has no cycle counter so it always runs at full speed of the host machine, I don't see why we'd consider it anywhere near "limited" platforms.

The system requirements of WinUAE don't make Amiga a "high end" platform. That said, even fantasy consoles with limited CPU speeds often have disproportionately fast CPUs.

Emulators and "fantasy consoles" are two VERY different things

Isn't the only difference that in the case of the fantasy console, the hardware doesn't exist, only the emulator?

Pico-8 and Tic-80 are both lua-interpreters, there's absolutely no hardware being emulated

Of course, there's no hardware to actually emulate, but isn't that the whole fantasy part? They pretend there's a CPU that executes Lua bytecode, and graphics and sound chips with whatever specifications the fantasy console has?

That proves my point.
"TIC-80s" are glorified Lua interpreters with a Window. Not only are they dead easy to program on, they themselves are easy to program.
I'm using my own "TIC-80" for prototyping. If people are too lazy to target a computer, then their stuff should go into the categories that are needed to run their VM on.

abscence: the CPU is the CPU of thr host computer and no graphics or sound chips at all, only artificial limitations

Thus "fantasy" and "pretend" ...

And thus nothing like an emulator

It's nothing like a console either, if you want to be pedantic about it, and yet people call them fantasy consoles. Perhaps fantasy emulator would be a more suitable matching term. :)

I give up

So you're dismissing the idea that most FCs are kinda like emulators because they don't emulate a fantasy CPU, but execute Lua or WASM bytecode? That's as arbitrary a distinction as any ...

I mean "to be an emulator, you have emulate something" isn't an invalid argument...

Fantasy consoles are virtual machines that have no physical incarnation, while emulators are virtual machines that do have a physical incarnation.
Implementation details are irrelevant. :)