First post, by gerry
many of us have been interested in computers and indeed vintage computing for some time, our own hobby has become vintage!
in looking back over decades, especially the last 20 years i note a few ways in which my interest has changed:
back then i was much more into DOS and Win98se in particular. Now i have no plain DOS machines and very few Win9x machines available to use, and i rarely use them. I have moved on to almost exclusively win XP and W7 for 'retro' machines. This in part reflects a slow loss of pre P3 machines, i really don't have that many now. I don't have any pre pentiums anymore - and i don't really mind at all. I would have imagined i'd feel more of a sense of loss if thinking as myself 20 years ago! maybe these things are in some way less important to me now.
there were still hobby programming scenes around qbasic and the like back then, although they were fading away (and remember allegro, it still exists). Now there are tiny islands of activity around some language implementations like freebasic and game libraries but mainstay hobby game programming has moved onto unity and so forth, its all about dropping models into environments and coding as fine tuning rather than building up from source and libraries (although that's still around too). It's also very web focussed much of the time, the idea that hobby games target a platform and that we download and run an .exe is very much the minority now. What is great now is the interest in programming for diverse platforms like the GBA and other consoles. On the whole though i feel a bit left behind now compared to back then but in a good way - there is so much more opportunity.
speaking of consoles, i have a few but have stopped collecting anything for them. emulation already covers everything i have amazingly - I am not preserving anything after all!
I was never that bothered by having to have specific PC components, my experience back then showed me that you could play plenty of games on a celeron 500 with a tnt2 card and one thing that has stayed the same over 20 years is that i dont get much from optimising components - and to be frank the game experience is the game experience once graphics and sound reach a fairly modest level, it never mattered to me that you could see more or less leaves on a tree during a game. I let all my CRTs go some time back and don't regret it either.
on playing games and hardware compatibility - i really have taken the dosbox, gog and hack/workarounds route in recent years. It's just easier to have one machine that runs nearly everything you want and then a small number of other machines to cover the rest and to be honest i never did care much about eax or whether one setup showed the correct shade of blue and so on. I appreciate the efforts put into this area by many enthusiasts but i wouldn't do the same now
i still have the same rescue mentality though - cant let a working pc go into the waste if i can help it and hence i have kept so many going and 'rescued' so many that to be honest i have simply 'too much' measured by the ones i actually use regularly. I still enjoy setting up a PC, the fresh install process and so on - that never gets old 😀
how about you?
