Born a sconie right on Lake Michigan, lived in Iowa for a handleful of years for college, then moved to Sota where I live currently. Software Engineer for 20+ years, Ham Radio Operator, lover of retro graming, old time radio and the outdoors.

Mastodon: jecxjo@mastodon.sdf.org

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 9th, 2022

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  • Back then i only had a few games but among all my friends we had a pretty good collection. As an adult playing on a retro console I’ve started to go through a lot of the games i never tried or didn’t own and only played a few times.

    While I’d say the total NES library is a majority of garbage games (publishers just figuring out how to make games, not how to make good games) I think the big thing i noticed is that the good 8bit games look and feel drastically different than the garbage ones. When you learn the history of the games then it makes sense.

    The quality of the sprites, the extensive design of menus, transitions and other interactions, the storyline and dialogue. Even with only 8bits and crappy resolution the output for many of the good games actually looked and played well back then and even now. But I’d say about 90% of the NES catalog was garbage back then and still is now.


  • I think the difference is that in the 8bit generation yhe majority of the game were bad relative to each other. The peak of the bell curve for 8bit was between mediocre to kinda bad games.

    While there are more games in later generations, it feels like the console manufacturers took more control and regulated what was published. Bad games happen now because of shitty business decisions and bad story writing. You dont see garbage being published just because you can.






  • All of my gaming is super retro or low tech. I do have an XBoxOne but i rarely use it. Computer is old so games on there are mostly old old stuff from the 90s and early 2000s.

    Hardware wise i have an Anbernic 353V that I do a lot of retro gaming. Not a huge fan of the Gameboy style setup but its a good cheap machine.

    My kids have Switches and thats what kicked me from supporting Nintendo after they go obsolete. The Joycons on one suck and I’ve replaced the connector hardware twice now. The best version is the Lite but you cant connect it to a TV which is dumb. Their family sharing is broken (wife has digital game, i havs DLC, we are SOL).



  • Think less about time sharing and more about using all the computers you own together.

    You would have a netbook with no compute power as your UI sitting on your couch. You could connect to your beefy desktop to do all the computations for your video editor or playing a game and never have to be sitting at your desk.

    You could also have a big file store device with lots of drives to store stuff.

    We can do some of this now, I ssh into my desktop from my couch and have a NFS in the basement. But they all operate as separate devices that i have to really work at getting to operate together. Plan9 was designed where you’d just pick devices off of the network and the tasks operated normally. Pick your video card, local or over the network to the beefier GPU.




  • Yeah yeah the standard pedantic response to web services who use ads.

    But how about a real response? People want to block ads and still consume content. If you feel the cost is too high then shouldn’t people watch some ads and block others to only “pay what you want.” Everyone seems to want the service for free and then cry that when you don’t pay your get your videos.

    Explain how this is different than going to a grocery store and then being pissed they wont let you just walk away with food without paying?






  • Last time i moved i got cold called by Comcast to sign up for Internet. I asked them the price, they gave some deal. I asked what will be the price in 2 years when the contract was up. “Oh, well that really depends on what services you sign up for.” I tell them i want only Internet at this given speed and i will never sign up for anything else.

    …the woman on the phone just stopped talking. I asked can she not tell me the price after all the specials run out and i get my last bill in the contract. She said “i dont know what you want me to say.”

    Apparently they dont want people to know how screwed you are with Internet. I told the woman that i was going to write a letter letting them know that her inability to answer a simple question was the reason i was not going with their service. She hung up on me. Sent the letter and i got a call a few weeks later asking ifni wanted a super crazy deal they “never give to anyone.” I asked my question again and they couldn’t tell me my final bill so i hung up and reported the number as spam to my phone carrier.