ramblingsteve

I honestly never expected the final death blow for Firefox to come from Mozilla.

You know you're old when games you still play quite regularly turn up in retro reviews! The community master server is still pretty well populated, as are UT '99 servers. These games are still the pinnacle of their genre. No micro transactions, no DRM, no pay to win. Just you, your shock rifle, and as much amphetamine as your nerve endings will take. As the reviewer says, the level design and game mechanics are legendary at this point, and players of any ability can quickly get into a flow state that modern games can only dream of. These are fine wines in a world of cheap lager. New gamers should drink deep from the pc games of the 2000's.

just about any game from the 80's 8bit era was sold by the tape insert's artwork... but that artwork was so fine I do miss it today.

If only they applied the same rigor to big tech scraping the same content into large language models. I guess the bypass paywall team wasn't big enough to afford the legion of lawyers that Sam Altman and co can summon on demand. We can just wait for chatgpt to serve those articles direct to our search results and nobody will even visit their website, because we live in a world where stealing an article to read is illegal, while stealing all of them for profit is not.

3 of them:

• watching an Amiga 500 load from disk having only seen 8bit games on tape. Everything that machine did at the time was like magic.

• watching the castle fly through intro for Unreal on PC when the first 3D accelerators appeared. Everything changed after that.

• experiencing the shark diving demo on PlayStation VR. And also how nothing changed after that! xD

And to have been able to experience that evolution from space invaders to cyberpunk in a single life time has been a privilege.

I hope so. I hope there could be a future where Mozilla is purged of these people and returned to being just a browser. Not everything has to be a "platform" with a business model for MBA's to feast on.

Hunter was an early sandbox game on the Amiga and was quite good back in the day. Mercenary series too. Daggerfall was/is a huge sandbox rpg. Minecraft was the first to capture the lego style creativity though. Dwarf fortress is probably the closest to Minecraft.

Homeworld

I bet they struggle to compete with Electronic Arts these days! ;p

To flip this around, think of some projects you want to do. The languages are just tools and will be determined by what you want to do, and then each type of project has it's best tool chain. Think of the problem(s) you want to solve first and the rest will follow.

Lapce is an interesting alternative to vs code too: https://lapce.dev/

For me, vim is nice to use because it's ubiquitous across any system I log into. Any server will have vi at the least. It's also light and can load a file instantly on any hardware, reducing dependency to zero. Once you have a comfortable config, you're done for the rest of your life. Although, in reality vim config is a lifestyle and not a choice ;)

working link to the rom hack: https://romhackplaza.org/romhacks/jurassic-park-volcanic-edition-genesis/

It's very complex with hyper visors and virtualization technology. I don't fully understand it myself in terms of how resources are allocated across something like aws or azure, but take a look at openshift vs openstack maybe. Openshift is for deploying containers and openstack is virtual machines. Openshift is kubernetes with some customizations for enterprise. Openstack is same for vm's.

Instances are virtual machines which tend to host an operating system, and a container is lighter and only hosts an application where the code and dependencies are isolated from the underlying operating system it runs on. k8 is kubernetes, which is container orchestration. I think of virtual machines for jobs that scale vertically, while containers are suited to jobs that scale horizontally. But this isn't necessarily true as kubernetes is starting to get slurm functionality using tools like sunk.

For integrating these things it depends on the application. You can run services in either by exposing ports and interact through API end points that point at them, eg for frontend web app serving data from a database hosted on a server or a container via fastapi. But I'm no dev ops engineer and the field is very complicated. There are many discussions around building micro services (containers) vs monolith (vm). Many decisions depend on the project. Hopefully some actual dev ops engineers will chime in and correct all of the above! xD

With lashings and lashings of downloadable content and nft's, all wrapped up in sweet pay to win :)

I'm interested in the same question. There isn't a definitive text because the problem is infinitely broad. My approach is to build crud apps around the tech stack I'm interested in, currently Python with fastapi, arangodb, with some next and typescript for the front end. But you could swap out Python for Go and swagger. For security there is Keycloak. For scalability you could look at building your system as pods in open shift but that adds cost. Personally, I think unless you're Netflix kubernetes is probably overkill. But the biggest problem is that today's tech stack is replaced tomorrow by the next new shiny, and all of them are complex and will be entirely different for every team and every problem. A book for dev ops is almost impossible.

What's really bonkers is that in 1 generation we went from 8bit blocks on the screen to photo realistic 3D scenes. It's been incredible to see an entire industry appear in 1 lifetime.

Totally agree that what comes next will be incremental. We won't see that rate of advancement again, and more sadly we don't seem to see the experimentation either, at least not in the mainstream publishers. The 90's and early millenium was mad with everything from doom to MDK, deus ex, citizen kabuto, command and conquer, Nox, homeworld, mad experiments in voxel engines like Outcast, space sims like freelancer and freescape. Today it's much more risk averse with incremental updates to established franchises, unless you delve into the indie gaming scene. But that's also been cool to see re emerge like the legacy of the 80's bedroom programmers.

Yes, you are right. It matured. The mainstream publishers were definately similar to today's indie gaming scene. That's where I gravitated to as well.

I think the tooling is probably the greatest innovation of the current generation. For the first time you can download incredibly powerful frameworks like Unreal engine and godot down to Pico 8 that put professional quality production tools in the hands of anybody with imagination to create, plus the communities and the platforms to publish. There's never been an easier time to make stuff and put it out there than there is today.

Ha same! One day I'll remake that 8bit title in pico8... or watch the kids do it! It's a long ways from figuring stuff out from magazines, and complex technical manuals. It kind of got much harder during the 16bit era where the machine got harder to fully understand, like the Amiga compared to bbc micro or spectrum. 68k assembly was hard by yourself. But for sure, godot, gamemaker etc have made it accessible again, and programming is still a useful skill to have on your resume. It's fed me long after my uni certificates expired!

I always thought it played slow and while everybody raved about the soundtrack and graphics, it was style over substance. I preferred Hybris and Swiv back in the day. Deluxe Galaga was probably the pinacle of that genre on the Amiga.

Legendary. UT2K is still the pinacle of arena shooters.

I still remember seeing the original Unreal castle fly through in a computer store and realising that 3D accelerator cards had changed everything. Many hours spent tweaking config files to squeeze everything out of a 3dfx voodoo card for UT. Halcyon days. It's a real shame that Epic went on to sh1t all over it's original fans and pull the unreal series from digital stores to push their micro transaction fortnite garbage. I feel privileged to have lived through the 90's and early 2000's era of PC gaming with such titles in comparison to today's industry.

They're not hostile to new players, but there are a lot of veterans. UT2k4 is probably going to be easier than ut99 where the pace is a lot faster.

No computer should be without one! :D

Powerhoof and joy masher make some nice indie games.

ChinnyVision has some nice reviews.

Cool, now I can vomit like it's the 90's again, but with incredible lighting :p

Robotron on mame and yar's revenge on 2600.

Natsume games on NES have aged well, eg shadow of the ninja, shatter hand, and powerblade. But they're tough games so could be brutal on touch pad controls. Arcon is a cool mix of strategy and action, and had a good NES port.

I remember them from magazines in the 90's but they were totally urban legend. Never seen one in real life but it's been good to experience them emulated. Wind jammers, metal slug, king of fighters, last blade, so many classics. It's a shame it never went mainstream.

i hope this works with brutal doom!

Yes! That is a true masterpiece that at the time set a new standard.