8-Bit Home Computers in Daily Use?

[LaLoneDigi]

Sample synths got little time to shine sadly. Few people wanted to program them correctly and few people had them. Creative pushed Sound Blaster FM, MIDI, and DAC in everyone's faces and sought to destroy sample synth competition.

The sound wars of the 80's and early 90's were so interesting. Soundblaster Cards and the rise of the CD really killed all the interesting innovations. I'm glad there are people keeping the scene alive.

 

[Cottontail]

Ah so don't screw up your IPL or you'll never get it back. Or do you have user software control over the reset on the Arduino side?

Ha ha. If you mean "Is it possible to 'POKE' yourself to death on the 5A22 side, or otherwise overwrite the BIOS?" the answer is "yes." No protections are implemented, so everybody has to play nice in this little sandbox. At present there is no sort of "watchdog" on the Arduino side, though it wouldn't be hard to implement one with the current hardware.

 

[LittleAndAlone]

I never had a Playstation. But to suggest that Nintendo somehow "lost the console wars" to Sony is only half the story. I did have a Nintendo 64, a Gamecube, and portables from an original Gameboy to a 3DS XL. Nintendo's advantage was content. Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon were licenses to print money and still are. There's an animated movie that looks like Super Mario 64 playing at a theater near you.

They have always had that fallback. But losing Square, Capcom, Namco, Enix, etc back on N64, along with N64 over promising and under delivering on the arcade "Ultra 64" promises was something that hurt them for a very long time.

Losing Final Fantasy and Mana alone at a time JRPGs were going mainstream on PS1 and PS2 put Nintendo out of the spotlight of SNES glory days for a few generations. It's really not a good spot to be the 3rd console that you buy for 3 or 4 first party exclusives every 5 years.

SNES was also the last time they had cutting edge hardware, or even just current. Every console since had left something to be severely desired. Who enjoyed hooking up analog interlaced SD video to their brand new 1080p HD flat panel and reading blurry stretched fonts?

It's not that Nintendo won't get by, it's that they were king of the world with SNES and they threw it all away with numerous bad decisions

 

[PaigeCherubiel]

All I can say is "I respectfully disagree". The 3D of the N64 was way ahead of anything else.

 

[LittleAndAlone]

All I can say is "I respectfully disagree". The 3D of the N64 was way ahead of anything else.

All I can say is only 296 games most of them masterpieces like Superman 64 and Quest 64 and looking like smeared lipstick and melted playdoh.

And 3DFx Voodoo.

To be fair the most timeless PS1 games were still 2D and or pre-rendered.

First gen 3D was terrible across the board. 3D was just not ready and should have waited another console generation. Thank Sony and people being impressed by their stupid dinosaur for that.

All the fancy N64 stuff like bilinear filtering and MIP mapping was wasted on 4k texture cache, interpolated 320x240 frame buffer horizontally smeared to 640x240, composite video/RF, lack of storage space, and slow bloated non game optimized RCP code. The final N64 was nothing like the initial hype and speculation surrounding Project Reality or Ultra 64.

But the real killer was loosing 3rd party support that defined SNES. If you can't see that losing Square in 1996 was attempted suicide, there isn't much else to say.

 

[PaigeCherubiel]

Unfortunately, this has devolved into something like a Ford guy arguing with a Chevy guy. I saw the gaming world of the 1990's from the viewpoint of a parent. Nintendo content was like Disney content - you could trust it was safe for children.

And you can't deny that Nintendo has made a cultural impact outside of the "gamer community". In 1999, Pokemon made the cover of Time Magazine.

 

[LittleAndAlone]

Unfortunately, this has devolved into something like a Ford guy arguing with a Chevy guy. I saw the gaming world of the 1990's from the viewpoint of a parent. Nintendo content was like Disney content - you could trust it was safe for children.

I'm just reciting known history here. For what it's worth I currently own a Ford and a GM both in apex trims.

I will credit Super Mario 64 for finally kicking me in the ass to force myself to learn and understand 3D programming fundamentals that Christmas evening. I had no personal stake in N64, as I'd migrated from PS1 to PC with a 3DFX Voodoo by the time N64 arrived too late.

 

[PaigeCherubiel]

OK - I'm a Chevy guy (my grandfather was a mechanic at a dealership) and my dad and my wife drive Fords.