Datadrainer wrote on 2021-10-16, 11:32:Your remark is relevant and I had never noticed that here. There is a thread called [Console & Arcade Emulation] but there is a […]
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Tetrium wrote on 2021-10-16, 10:43:
This does however remind me of something which has been kinda bugging me for a while now and that's that there was a thread here on Vogons for to show your games collection, but once someone showed some pics and stories of some games which were not PC games the OP changed the title to include only IBM compatible games and then went a little ranty about it which I thought was kinda frowning. I always thought that was kind of a dick move especially since there probably aren't that many non-PC games collections here on Vogons anyway.
Your remark is relevant and I had never noticed that here. There is a thread called [Console & Arcade Emulation] but there is a very few talking about console hardware in [General Old Hardware]. None I have seen talking about consoles software from a collection PoV.
A 80486 PC is just an old hardware, as is a SEGA Mega Drive, a PDP-10, a HP-35, a SONY Betamax SL-C7 or whatever else. They are just old electronic stuff with some being digital, some being analogue, some being a mix of both. And with some working with a software to drive them in the form of interchangeable media storage.
One can find an interest only in a particular machine, one other can love a category of machines over a given period and one other can just love everything because it's a fan of electronic in general. Who can tell he is the one who is right and the rest are just stupid people who don't understand the Truth?
Unfortunately, there is people who are close-minded. They do not accept different opinions and don't recognize other rules than theirs. It's impossible to talk and reason such people, but fortunately, for now, they are more like a bad SNR on a still working fine hardware, we can measure the noise and know it's there, but the signal is still stronger.
And for a community like Vogons to work, there need to be rules and they exist, Terms of use:[ucp.php?mode=terms] and they just need to be respected. Most of the time they are though, cg. the age of the service and the number of actual users.
And if they are not, sanctions must be applied... Maybe there is work to do here by recruiting moderators. Because in no case someone have to be rejected because he "Think different".
I'm only going to comment on a portion of what you're trying to convey here at first:
The console stuff I perhaps I can understand?
I wasn't around at the very start of Vogons though, I'm pretty sure one of the really ancient (and hopefully not completely fossilized 😜 ) veterans can convey a more accurate answer about this 😀
This site was always about emulation and having the old hardware itself to test with etc really helps in this regard.
But this was also a non-profit thingy, basically people trying to tinker with emulators, trying to get favorable results in their spare time I guess 😜
But when it came to tinkering with hardware, PC hardware is the kind of hardware that has probably the largest amount of games available for it, a vast array of old parts 'needing' to be emulated correctly and tons of exceptions to otherwise standard hardware/software rules along with old PCs (back then at least) being perhaps the most accessible due to the modular design of PCs and the (back then) low prices and wide variety of hardware components.
When I started reading here, this site was above all, about tinkering I guess. Tinkering with old stuff, hardware and software. And there's simply less to tinker with when it comes to consoles and Apples with most of the older Computers used for gaming (like arcade machines and most of the lesser known (to the general public) types of computers, with Compiters like Amiga and Atari being amongst the types that are probably the most well known of these otherwise relatively more unknown types of systems) being less accessible for a variety of reasons.
And when you put a bunch of people together who like to tinker with this stuff, when you put a lot of brains together, something beautiful starts brewing (I mean just look at all the projects that saw the light of day here and sites like VCF (I mean XT-IDE is a perfect example of what was imo a really important hurdle that was solved, imo, even though that one afaik did not even originate from Vogons)). The knowledge of emulating kinda resulted in the accumulation of a lot of people who liked playing older games and ended up using older computers for this purpose.
Also the vast amounts of data gathered and the amount of expertise is imo (part of) what makes Vogons great. The knowledge and the people and the data and the files, all being available and (re)searchable.
A natural step from there is the accumulation of vast amounts of hardware which only later looked more like a collection (I do know the difference between someone who has parts to use as spare parts and someone who wants the parts to put into a glass showcase etc). Imo the collectors don't contribute as much in this regard if only because it is less about tinkering, less about thinking.
Tinkering kinda requires being open minded.
Learning is part of the way to gather more knowledge and knowing when to apply that. It's not about being wrong or right but about improving yourself and improving your opinion (to learn when you are wrong and improvehow you perceive the world, kinda like how I improved when I saw that Northwood wasn't too bad or more recently when I turned out to be wrong about early Pentium non-MMX CPU multipliers).
Just collecting hardware you're never even gonna use and only store for money and the hype, less so.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that with regards of consoles, the proprietary stuff like ROMs is also a bit of a hurdle (copyrights etc) which is easier to circumvent on PCs, for several reasons.