More old stuff incoming

[Jim Manley]

Hi Grant,

It can be different stroke for different folks.  For many, it's the layout,
feel, and sound of the keyboard, joystick, buttons, etc.  There is a huge
market for early "clicky" keyboards with non-linear actions (keys somewhat
resist pressure until a threshold is passed, then they allow full travel) -
some are going for thousands of dollars ... each.  For others, it's the
graphics on a real, honest-to-goodness glass tube TV or monitor, smeary
color blocks, bleepy-bloopy sounds, and all.  It may make no sense to some
people, but crystal-clear digital graphics on an LCD display look nothing
like the originals on glass tubes, and yes, we have a couple of 27-inch
analog TVs with both VHF and NTSC inputs.

A big problem with emulators that attempt to be all things to all games, as
was pointed out, is that there are timing issues when not running on native
hardware that's not multitasking with a million things being spawned and
generating interrupts that the emulator has no way to predict and account
for accurately.  Many games depended on the predictability of the hardware
to perform certain things behind-the-scenes that fail running in
emulators.  Then, there's the problem of the timing being different from
platform to platform with wholly different hardware, OS, and other
application interactions.

I was the first in the U.S. to receive a Raspberry Pi (March 22, 2012, from
the first batch of 10,000) and established one of the first Raspberry Jam
enthusiast gatherings in the world, at the Computer History Museum.  We've
been running the emulators for the Pi, and while they're fine for showing
what the games were _like_, they aren't the _same_, and we have all of the
original game software and hardware right there to compare.  I've gotten
hundreds of Pii (as in the plural of octopus is octopi) since then, as they
really fulfill the educational mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and
they've been given to students where I teach, as well as kids participating
in after-school activities.

All the Best,
Jim

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 9:51 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> On 12/21/18 1:07 AM, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote:
> > no, emulators will not cut it
>
> Would you please expand upon that?
>
> Are you saying that things like a Raspberry Pi running RetroPi (I think
> that's the name) don't suffice / satisfy as the real thing that they are
> emulating?
>
> Or are you including things like the new retro consoles that original
> vendors are coming out with?  (The palm sized SNES from Nintendo comes
> to mind.)
>
> Do you have any idea why these newer things are not cutting it?
>
> I've also had great success with running '90s era games in DOSBox on
> what ever computer happens to be handy.  Does that not work at all for
> you / your crew?
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>