I remember using that one time to make music for a presentation for a power point slide. We burnt the music onto a CD and brought in a boombox. I it was for my accounting class. It was kinda cool.
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.
This. Thrifty parents with no interest in gaming saw the PS2 and thought "Sony DVD player". The GameCube was merely an expensive Nintendo time sink. To this end my brother and I took out a loan to buy out GameCube but could have gotten the PS2 for free for Christmas - we wanted to play Super Smash Brothers et al that much and knew that we couldn't avail ourselves of the PS2's better-selling titles anyhow due to their M ratings.
As I write this it does feel like both Sony and Microsoft really started to push the whole living room entertainment convergence thing around this time while Nintendo happily stayed in their lane. The same dynamic continues to this day.
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.
I had a Voodoo 3 3000, friend had a TNT2. If the game supported Glide and/or had a minigl driver available it blew the TNT out of the water. Direct3D-games however the reverse was true.
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.
For another data point, as kids in Greece we made fun of our friend who first switched to a PC, (we had Atari STs). Even after he got a Sound Blaster and a VGA card we still had better games like Kick Off and Dungeon Master. But one day he invited us to his house and showed as Wolfenstein. I distinctly remember the feeling. It was over!
The filfre.net series of articles on the history of Commodore and Amiga is truly great work, and should give you a much clearer picture than pretty much anything else.
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 ...
I've recently come into possession of a number of back issues of "1/1 - the Journal of the Just Intonation Network" from the 80's and 90's. It's interesting how much content was devoted just to the topic of figuring out how to use non-12-tone-equal-temperament scales on the MIDI instruments of the time.
Most of one issue (volume 3 number 4 from 1987) was taken up with an article on how the author was able to reverse-engineer and modify the firmware of the Ensoniq Mirage to support the kind of microtuning he wanted.
How timely! I was watching a video about the ill fated Vector W8 supercar last night, and wondered about that awesome CRT proto-GPS thing seen in some shots.
Terribly written article (there's no flow to the writing, the author seemed to have just listed bullet points off a PowerPoint notes section), and a blurry video with cringy narration. To complete it, here's an HD video tour of the Vector W8's screens: https://youtu.be/3WEhsS9ybwk?t=631 , presented by a slightly annoying YouTuber.
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.
Yup... but the headline is still very clickbaity! In the end it turns out they didn't delete a game, they deduplicated it (i.e. deleted a game that was listed as a separate version, but was actually identical to the original), and they didn't do it accidentally, but on purpose.
without any experience in emulation or software preservation i still really enjoyed the post.
i was waiting in suspense for the author to make a mistake and was so relieved when i saw they did not. when they were talking about the socket i was thinking "oh no, they must have cracked something"...
Thanks.