A Virtual System Standard
When people say "8-bit" they generally mean the Nintendo Entertainment System. Unlike almost any other time in history, that era is the only era dominated so much by one system. People have a pretty good idea of what "8-bit" is supposed to sound like, and also what "8-bit" is supposed to look like. When it comes to why the "16-bit" is different, the obvious answer is that there were 2 systems that dominated the era. This is true, but there's another; expansion. In the life of the SNES, the developers convinced Nintendo to let them expand the game's abilities by adding special chips to the cartridge that were basically upgrades to the SNES. The Capcom chips and the FX chip all augmented how their games looked. Suddenly you had non-pixel based art inside games that could scale and render wire frames and eventually 3-D environments. I touched on why the 16-bit era does not have unified music in another post of mine, here. The gist of it is that the SNES used fully digital sound instead of being its own synthesizer unit. Developers were able to digitize actual musicians playing instruments instead of trying to approximate them using a sound wave manipulator.
I just think it would be really cool if someone came up with a set of sound resources, created a game engine standard that had its own "on purpose" flaws, and its own "on purpose" limitations, and then got a lot of indie developers to make games for this virtual system. The standard would be pretty simple and so developing for it would be easy enough so that entire game jams brought up around the standard would be doable in a relatively small amount of time. Maybe switch it up and have teams be jumbled and mixed and matched to switch things up. With a common standard you can switch pixel artists and coders among teams and still have working teams because everyone is on the same standard.
30th of Thrimidge 2014
I have come to a weird decision that I had said I would not do for the last several years. I am not going to have an optical drive(DVD, CD) in my new computer build. To be clear, I am not going full digital, I have too many older games and too much distrust of all digital to go that route. I have decided to go with USB based external drives, and external card reader. I only use either of those things once in a blue moon, so I'm going to regulate them to a drawer until I need them and reduce the power needed and the heat produced by having these in my main case. Another reason? My old drives are Molex power cable based, and I am planning on not using any of those in the new computer. There are better and safer connectors now. I would have to buy whole new drives anyway, and new drives frequently take up USB headers, SATA slots, etc etc. This will simplify things and only cost me about $10 extra each drive to do this.
My headphones from Black and Mild came today. I'm always so skeptical about getting things that it genuinely surprises me when something like pretty nice headphones are given away for so little effort. In fact, I would not have bothered if my girlfriend had not got a free pair before I even knew about the give away. Also a few other nice things about them: free metal carrying case and wooden accent construction. Both of those make these look very nice and definitely not "cheap" for being a free set of earphones. The bass response leaves something to be desired, but for rock, metal, and podcasts, these earphones are better than what you'll find at walmart for under $20. Note: it took about a month for them to come in, so be patient.
Here's a good rule of thumb, you people take this to heart. If you come into someone else's home, and you use the last of their milk; don't stand there and bitch about how there's not much milk left. You could be drinking someone elses' whole breakfast away.
No comments:
Post a Comment