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ZFH's comments

ZFH | 1 year ago | on: The GTA III port for the Dreamcast has been released

Probably true for the US. In Europe, it was very country-dependent. Here PS2 sold simply because it was the new PlayStation, to a public that for the vast majority wasn't even aware there was competition.

ZFH | 1 year ago | on: 3dfx Voodoo 4 video card in MXM format

Got to agree here, in fact what I remember is that the Riva TNT 2 already was the smart pick vs. what 3Dfx had out at the same time, even though Voodoo was the cooler brand and had all that previous goodwill.

ZFH | 1 year ago | on: Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did [video]

It's one of those rare cases where being in the US or Europe gives an uniquely skewed perspective.

It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise.

From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious.

At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.

ZFH | 1 year ago | on: Synth wars: The story of MIDI (2023)

I was waiting for this comment :)

I'm sure nobody expected it to live this long, as the grumbling about its various shortcomings must've started in the late eighties at the latest. The curse of good enough strikes again ...

ZFH | 2 years ago | on: I accidentally deleted a bad game revision from MAME

I agree it's not optimal. It's not like every game changes on every MAME release, but some indeed get re-dumped from time to time. The usual example is encrypted audio data or color palette ROMs. In an earlier version, lacking the ability to decrypt them they would be emulated with samples or code respectively, then once it's possible to dump them they get integrated into the romset for better accuracy.

ZFH | 2 years ago | on: I accidentally deleted a bad game revision from MAME

That might be the first recorded case of a subpar headline detracting from actual quality content :)

What about "Adventures in MAME ROM dumping and games preservation"? It's the one that might stand the test of time to be useful for posterity.

ZFH | 2 years ago | on: How Doom didn't kill the Amiga

Those prices are not what I remember from back then, at least in Europe. Comparable 386 and 486 PCs cost way, way more than an Amiga 500 or later 1200 respectively.

The filfre.net Digital Antiquarian articles on the Commodore/Amiga history are incredibly well researched, and paint a more comprehensive, nuanced version of the usual 'mismanaged to death' narrative. There is a very cogent insight that I first read there, that roughly goes as this:

the Amiga architecture of a 2D oriented console-style custom chipset was badly suited for the gradual transition from coding to the bare metal to having an OS managing the hardware, accessed through APIs.

Keeping up would've meant a complete reinvention of the platform and its ethos, with a much bigger push on OS development, not only the next hot chipset. Commodity, standardized hardware running Windows ultimately got good enough and won.

And as someone else remarked, +1 on Wing Commander, and later the golden era Lucasarts adventures, being the actual beginning of the end.

ZFH | 4 years ago | on: JAMMA Video Standard

It's generally called 'Attract mode', and at least from what I recall from the golden era arcade games (from the mid '80s up until the mid '90s) it's never an intro video, rather something done completely in-engine. Unless you're thinking lasergames, but that's ... all video.

ZFH | 4 years ago | on: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

"Apple says it will scan only in the United States and other countries to be added one by one, only when images are set to be uploaded to iCloud, and only for images that have been identified by the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children and a small number of other groups."

First reference I read about adding other countries as a done deal, and especially about an incredibly opaque "small number of other groups" being involved as well.

Man, after all they've said about being obsessed with privacy they're really not doing themselves any favors here. What a tragedy.

ZFH | 4 years ago | on: Reclaim Windows10

Possibly misreading you, but updates behave differently in LTSC. It stays at the same level (1809 in LTSC) until the next major release and just auto-installs (very quickly, in between reboots and without forced prompts) security updates every couple of weeks or so.

ZFH | 4 years ago | on: Reclaim Windows10

This, a thousand times this. It's strange it's still somewhat under the radar, it should be much more widely known. They call it LTSC, but it's really Windows As It Should Be.
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