gerry wrote on 2021-02-02, 15:00:

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-02-02, 13:39:

I'm much more concerned about the future. Cloud shit, rolling release Windows, digital only games can easily kill retro gaming on contemporary hardware. GoG is light in the darkness with its DRM free library you can archive and play offline, but not everything releases there. 20 years from now when the GTX1080 Ti and Ryzen 7 1800X will be close to a quarter of a century old (the same age as the Voodoo II now), you really won't be able to do much with them beyond putting them in a display case. Unless you rely on pirated software.

I think the quotation "nostalgia ain't what it used to be" is going to be very true

barring various 'creative' methods of spoofing online contact and so on how will any of this current stuff work 20 years from now!?

That's the absolute saddest part. We're going to have a lost decade or more of gaming's cultural heritage. It's already bad enough with all the games as a service which will have their servers shut off. Having digital purchases that should otherwise run, but won't because the launcher can't be run is just adding insult to injury.

It'll probably come down to extra-legal means to preserve the scene. Not an endorsement. Just a statement of fact.

Spitz wrote on 2021-02-02, 14:30:

Hmmm.. Good example is Amiga - that is no more produced as being a pure retro hardware.

Depends on what type of Amiga you want to use. Classic Amiga, then you are correct, however there are this: Amiga x5000

Spitz wrote on 2021-02-02, 14:30:

In past I was playing many first released games (even those from 70's) so this makes me a witness of both hardware and software evolution almost from the beginning.
So imho retro means something that was released (both software/hardware) but due to time ticking and evolution it was abandoned due to customers expectations to get sth else near realistic (yep generation change too...) which gives them new hardware/software only. The problem is since ~2000 there's nothing new going on in computers... Not counting VR (maybe?). x86 is just... boring and we can describe new hardware in short term: "Hey! We managed to get 8000Mhz, 128 Cores, 512MB cache from this new CPU and it's working with DDR7 6000Mhz and Nvidia 10080Ti! I'm sure Doom 7 will run fluent ~ 120 fps!" ppl won't take it as a retro anymore just treat like old junk in next decades. As for games - they are short, all the same plot, aiming to give producers a lot of money... No unique ones. This market is overcause it's getting to flat! That's why we can't measure it in years anymore. EOT.

Modern stuff are truly generic and today, just as the Amiga, the exciting stuff is in software. Things have become too tiny and too integrated, to be serviceable on the same level as 20 to 40 years ago. Perhaps it is a good thing, because we see more and more vintage kits pop up these days. Going back to the roots, and actually building your own C64, Apple1/2 or Amiga from scratch are like the new gold standard for vintage computing as a hobby. We also see more and more of the old chips, being reproduced in direct drop-in replacements, using ARM-Controller based or FPGA based incarnations. The ARM-SID and the FPGA-SID are good examples of this. Hell... Even 8086/88 and 80286 homebrew kits are popping up from time to time.

Spitz wrote on 2021-02-02, 14:30:

The problem is since ~2000 there's nothing new going on in computers... Not counting VR (maybe?). x86 is just... boring and we can describe new hardware in short term: "Hey! We managed to get 8000Mhz, 128 Cores, 512MB cache from this new CPU and it's working with DDR7 6000Mhz and Nvidia 10080Ti! I'm sure Doom 7 will run fluent ~ 120 fps!" ppl won't take it as a retro anymore just treat like old junk in next decades.

I disagree. Just as the 80s gave hardware accelerated sound and the 90s gave us hardware accelerated 3D, the 2000s gave us hardware accelerated physics and the 2010s gave us real time hardware accelerated ray tracing. You can add many more things to each decade, these were just examples. The difference is that the (pre-)80s and the early 90s were the 'wild west' of computing with a lot of manufacturers and a lot of proprietary solution which mostly got standardized by the 2000s.

hardware accelerated ray tracing has been around since the 90s :p
and not much has changed regarding proprietary solutions, I mean, you literally just named one, it's just that there's less choice now.

imi wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:02:

hardware accelerated ray tracing has been around since the 90s :p
and not much has changed regarding proprietary solutions, I mean, you literally just named one, it's just that there's less choice now.

Sure, if you count industrial stuff in, then a lot of things existed for much longer, but commercial graphics cards with real time ray tracing is not the same.
Also many things start out as proprietary, but then either that or a competitor gets standardized (freesync instead of G-sync).

imi wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:02:

hardware accelerated ray tracing has been around since the 90s :p
and not much has changed regarding proprietary solutions, I mean, you literally just named one, it's just that there's less choice now.

Well... True that, and even in software only, I clearly remember tools to do ray tracing back in the mid-90's. Sure it was not as implemented as today's Ps5 and Xbox consoles. Yet it was there and you were able to do ray tracing from home in 1995. (on a 486dx2-66 with 8mb Ram running MS Dos, that is) So when I see Sony push ray tracing as that brand-new-just-invented technology. I kind of hear a buzz-word. Just as when Oculus rift and other came, and said that Virtual Reality was this new thing, and all I had, was a picture in my mind of this below....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7mtN7Sxk-E

Yup.... I played that platform FPS shooting game, against my brother in the summer of 1992. So when these young teen's at 14 to 16 years of age, talk about VR as this brand new tech they are playing, I am all like: Well.... You have absolutely no idea what I have seen. Admitted... Modern VR are indeed something different, however at the end of the day, all it is are just a more polished version of what the a3000 were used for. 😉

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:12:

imi wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:02:

hardware accelerated ray tracing has been around since the 90s :p
and not much has changed regarding proprietary solutions, I mean, you literally just named one, it's just that there's less choice now.

Sure, if you count industrial stuff in, then a lot of things existed for much longer, but commercial graphics cards with real time ray tracing is not the same.
Also many things start out as proprietary, but then either that or a competitor gets standardized (freesync instead of G-sync).

We created stuff, using ray tracing technology. On a 486dx2-66 with 8mb Ram running MS Dos 6.22 and VLB cards, back in 1995. And that was from our dorm room. Yup it took days to render, yet it was ray tracing. Not exactly industrial stuff, right?

brostenen wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:22:

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:12:

imi wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:02:

hardware accelerated ray tracing has been around since the 90s :p
and not much has changed regarding proprietary solutions, I mean, you literally just named one, it's just that there's less choice now.

Sure, if you count industrial stuff in, then a lot of things existed for much longer, but commercial graphics cards with real time ray tracing is not the same.
Also many things start out as proprietary, but then either that or a competitor gets standardized (freesync instead of G-sync).

We created stuff, using ray tracing technology. On a 486dx2-66 with 8mb Ram running MS Dos 6.22 and VLB cards, back in 1995. And that was from our dorm room. Yup it took days to render, yet it was ray tracing. Not exactly industrial stuff, right?

And not exactly real time, right?

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:46:

brostenen wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:22:

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:12:

Sure, if you count industrial stuff in, then a lot of things existed for much longer, but commercial graphics cards with real time ray tracing is not the same.
Also many things start out as proprietary, but then either that or a competitor gets standardized (freesync instead of G-sync).

We created stuff, using ray tracing technology. On a 486dx2-66 with 8mb Ram running MS Dos 6.22 and VLB cards, back in 1995. And that was from our dorm room. Yup it took days to render, yet it was ray tracing. Not exactly industrial stuff, right?

And not exactly real time, right?

It was ray tracing. That is the point I am putting forward.

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:12:

imi wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:02:

hardware accelerated ray tracing has been around since the 90s :p
and not much has changed regarding proprietary solutions, I mean, you literally just named one, it's just that there's less choice now.

Sure, if you count industrial stuff in, then a lot of things existed for much longer, but commercial graphics cards with real time ray tracing is not the same.
Also many things start out as proprietary, but then either that or a competitor gets standardized (freesync instead of G-sync).

That's what I enjoy about learning the history of this stuff, you find out that a lot of things major companies tout as "New" are not really all that new....

- The CD-ROM was out by 1987, most PC's did not have one until 1993
- Burning CD's came out around 1993-1994, nobody really started doing that en-masse till 2001
- Circa 2013 Touch Screen Win8 Machines were all the rage....1993, NEC Ultralite Versa with Color Active Matrix Touch Screen and Pen on Win 3.1 for Pen
- Of course there's the raytracing example here, ID Software was already doing that by 1992, maybe not in hardware, but it existed
- 3D Graphics via Headset?......There was a 3D headset for DOS in 1993 that came with demos for Whiplash, Descent 2, and Greed

Most of this stuff never got far at first because it was both expensive, and buggy - but they learned how to make a lot of it better.....except the touch screen....those old touch screen devices (Versa, Dauphin, Thinkpads, etc) had a nice 1+ inch border you could rest your hand on, writing on a modern "borderless" tablet can be a real pain with a stylus - Wacom notwithstanding.

brostenen wrote on 2021-02-02, 17:08:

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:46:

brostenen wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:22:

We created stuff, using ray tracing technology. On a 486dx2-66 with 8mb Ram running MS Dos 6.22 and VLB cards, back in 1995. And that was from our dorm room. Yup it took days to render, yet it was ray tracing. Not exactly industrial stuff, right?

And not exactly real time, right?

It was ray tracing. That is the point I am putting forward.

And the point I was putting forward from the beginning is ►real time◄ hardware accelerated ray tracing, people still started hairsplitting. If anything I would have expected it about the 90s giving hardware accelerated 3D because I didn't mention real time there.

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-02-02, 17:26:

brostenen wrote on 2021-02-02, 17:08:

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-02-02, 16:46:

And not exactly real time, right?

It was ray tracing. That is the point I am putting forward.

And the point I was putting forward from the beginning is ►real time◄ hardware accelerated ray tracing, people still started hairsplitting. If anything I would have expected it about the 90s giving hardware accelerated 3D because I didn't mention real time there.

My Futura 100 (Innovion PGSIII) was originally used for computer animation circa 1987 which could include ray tracing, these systems ended being used as rapid computer portrait systems due to the built in video toaster

gerry wrote on 2021-02-02, 14:51:

whilst what you say is true i really like that era - the last of the 32 bit cpus and the agp cards, the ultimate in the 'old' architecture of PCs before 64 bit, multi core and always online became normal. A late series P4 or A-XP is such a nice platform for a windows 98 / XP dual boot system for DOS all the way through mid 2000's software

True that. I had a few P4/AMD rigs that I only recently started to sell/scrap as I realized my i5/XP build can do all the gaming from '00-'10. I used to keep a few different configurations (Geforce/ATI, AMD/Intel, SB/Terratec) just for shits'n giggles, but then I realized that I don't really play much of those games at all (I had around 200 DVD case games from the early '00s.) so there's no point keeping all this hardware. I still have a P3/Voodoo3 for the late 90's stuff and a ton of Pentium, 486 etc. that I can't yet let go for sentimental reasons, but I doubt there's much point in keeping so many around. For gods sake, I have like four 286's that I never use. 🙁

I mean I can also do all 80s and 90s gaming in dosbox... the point of having "retro" PCs in the first place apart from preservation and collecting for me is to play it on the hardware I used to x3
that still counts for the very early 2000s for me, playing such a game on a early 2000s PC just tickles me differently than just running it on a overpowered "modern" PC.

imi wrote on 2021-02-03, 14:23:

I mean I can also do all 80s and 90s gaming in dosbox... the point of having "retro" PCs in the first place apart from preservation and collecting for me is to play it on the hardware I used to x3
that still counts for the very early 2000s for me, playing such a game on a early 2000s PC just tickles me differently than just running it on a overpowered "modern" PC.

there is something about that which has a quality that cant be emulated, a 'physicality' or something

there are a number of games that don't do well with dosbox and some windows games that struggle on later windows versions - but most of the time one can get a 'good enough' result, maybe its the way many games seem 'at home' on period machines

at other times, especially with windows machines its fun to take a 15 year old game that used to strain the PC and just turn up all features and let it fly on a newer machine - a bit like a console emulator having features such as save state, online vs play and so on - possibilities that weren't there back then are made possible in newer systems

Crysis was out in 2007, in a couple of years it will enter the fuzzy 'is it retro yet' age bracket, i wonder if it will run on almost any new windows PC though... (probably not!)

gerry wrote on 2021-02-05, 10:23:

Crysis was out in 2007, in a couple of years it will enter the fuzzy 'is it retro yet' age bracket, i wonder if it will run on almost any new windows PC though... (probably not!)

I think it's already there. Didn't people think Duke Nukem 3D was retro 10 years ago already? It was about the same age as Crysis now.
I think part of why people don't think ~15 years old things are retro is because of the higher degree of compatibility with modern systems, like you don't need XPBox just to run most older games as you needed DOSBox. And also a lot of games released in the mid-2000s still look presentable. If you make them work on wide screens and install a high resolution texture mod some of them almost looks modern. Just look at how much progress was made between 2000 and 2005 (Quake III Arena / Quake 4) and how much in any 5 years interval since then.

It's natural if someone can't think of something as retro because it runs without issues and looks decent compared to recent releases.

It's interesting the discussion about what nowdays is considered "new" that instead already existed in the 90's and it's a subject I often talk about from my point of view that see most modern consumer things as just a re-invented "wheel". Usually most people would argue about the usual "time to complete/render" difference but that's not the main point imho too. I still don't see much modern consumer innovation as groundbreaking as they are supposed to appear. What has changed is the perception of the time we expect things to run just like everything else in everyday life that nowdays is so fast and absurd that you see people driving and texting and eating at the same time with their cars.
I suppose that if in another world we'd find ourself to use ONLY 486 machines with the time correct components (for example) we would simply slow down expectations and code web pages in text only way and get used to old analog modems without many differences after a while.
Even games like Doom when released looked like "realistic" in their 2.5D rendered world... is it much different compared to modern Doom from a perception point of view? I don't think so. When I first saw a 486SX running the Broderbund game 'Stunts' (4D Sports Driving) in the 1993/4 I was shocked by the realism of the graphic and the physic much more of the modern games.

One thing to note about gaming is that even though you can emulate almost anything, there is still the difference between the CRT and a TFT. I recently tested Alone in the Dark 4 with both, and on TFT it just looked atrocious. Jagged edges all around, pixelated color gradient, poor colors, 5:4 screens stretch the image and on 16:9/16:10 you get the black bars. That's why I still keep a 19" CRT around. Not for an authentic experience, but for a correct one.

sf78 wrote on 2021-02-06, 08:37:

One thing to note about gaming is that even though you can emulate almost anything, there is still the difference between the CRT and a TFT. I recently tested Alone in the Dark 4 with both, and on TFT it just looked atrocious. Jagged edges all around, pixelated color gradient, poor colors, 5:4 screens stretch the image and on 16:9/16:10 you get the black bars. That's why I still keep a 19" CRT around. Not for an authentic experience, but for a correct one.

Not only with games but also with movies. I'd still prefer a CRT with some hardware decoder PCI card and a good Matrox card than a modern PC with a dvd sw player and a TFT even if obviously the latest might be more detailed but still imho not as "natural" as the old analog tech. The colors were much more realistic beside the CRTs weren't exactly easy to look at for our eyes and for their weight.

I read this thread a while ago, but whomever mentioned 'retro is before integrated sound-cards', has my vote. Everything after that should be post-retro, everything before 'classic' .

And this is all based on my momentary thinking of today 😉