ZFH

15khz 320x200 with proper CRT scanlines (like in arcade games and home consoles and computers on a standard TV) is immensely more pleasing to the eye than the same resolution displayed on a PC monitor.

It was all about saving RAM on the Amiga.

cries nostalgia tears in Propellerhead Rebirth

Thanks.

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.

The PS1 monstrous success sealed the DC's fate. It created a huge new demographic of first time gamers that equated "PlayStation" to "console".

Yes, SCART was for all of Europe. Mass adoption was kind of slow though, low end TV models often lacked the port well into the early 90s.

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.

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.

Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this

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 was waiting for this comment :)

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 ...

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFDBs15EYjs

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.

Works fine - thanks!

That might be the first recorded case of a subpar headline detracting from actual quality content :)

What about "Adventures in MAME ROM dumping and games preservation"? It's the one that might stand the test of time to be useful for posterity.

Don't let the clickbait headline dissuade you, this is a great read if you're into emulation/retrogaming/any kind of software preservation.

Those prices are not what I remember from back then, at least in Europe. Comparable 386 and 486 PCs cost way, way more than an Amiga 500 or later 1200 respectively.

The filfre.net Digital Antiquarian articles on the Commodore/Amiga history are incredibly well researched, and paint a more comprehensive, nuanced version of the usual 'mismanaged to death' narrative. There is a very cogent insight that I first read there, that roughly goes as this:

the Amiga architecture of a 2D oriented console-style custom chipset was badly suited for the gradual transition from coding to the bare metal to having an OS managing the hardware, accessed through APIs.

Keeping up would've meant a complete reinvention of the platform and its ethos, with a much bigger push on OS development, not only the next hot chipset. Commodity, standardized hardware running Windows ultimately got good enough and won.

And as someone else remarked, +1 on Wing Commander, and later the golden era Lucasarts adventures, being the actual beginning of the end.

You're better off without the Store, but in rare event that it's actually needed for something there are scripts on GitHub to add it back in.

"I have no moat, and I must scream"

It's generally called 'Attract mode', and at least from what I recall from the golden era arcade games (from the mid '80s up until the mid '90s) it's never an intro video, rather something done completely in-engine. Unless you're thinking lasergames, but that's ... all video.

"Apple says it will scan only in the United States and other countries to be added one by one, only when images are set to be uploaded to iCloud, and only for images that have been identified by the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children and a small number of other groups."

First reference I read about adding other countries as a done deal, and especially about an incredibly opaque "small number of other groups" being involved as well.

Man, after all they've said about being obsessed with privacy they're really not doing themselves any favors here. What a tragedy.

Possibly misreading you, but updates behave differently in LTSC. It stays at the same level (1809 in LTSC) until the next major release and just auto-installs (very quickly, in between reboots and without forced prompts) security updates every couple of weeks or so.

This, a thousand times this. It's strange it's still somewhat under the radar, it should be much more widely known. They call it LTSC, but it's really Windows As It Should Be.

Rufus has other use cases: imaging distros for Raspberry Pi, and (especially handy) reformat HFS, APFS and Ext4 pendrives for FAT or NTFS under Windows without jumping through hoops.

You're right, with a caveat. While it's true that 320x200 VGA DOS resolutions didn't have scanlines, arcade games and home computers did, and generally looked much better. A MS-DOS arcade port for example would look very blocky, while the Amiga counterpart would be fine in comparison. Scanlines are integral to that correct old-school look IMO, so it's very cool to have the option of replaying old classics like the Lucasgames stuff with that vibe.

Too little too late. It's telling that they sell so few Mac Pros that they can ignore the Osborne effect of soft announcing a new model at least one year away in favor of some fluffy PR.

It's strange they don't understand that doing nothing but keeping the Pro up to date spec-wise would've signaled mild disregard already. Keeping it frozen for four years is a clear, prolonged, 'we don't care about you' message to pros.

And everyone could've told them the trashcan design made no sense, and in fact did when it debuted. No need to wait four years for that. Probably Ive really really liked it and nobody managed to stop him.

Audio user here too. I just updated to 10.12.4 yesterday on a test install and it went without a hitch, but only because I checked Tonymac and updated Clover beforehand, which I wouldn't have done otherwise. And I'm on a old GTX 650 Ti that doesn't need the Web Drivers. Meanwhile my main 10.9.5 work install keeps gloriously chugging along.

Been running hackintoshes since 2007 or so. Mostly smooth sailing. Off the top of my head:

- It's all about making it easy for yourself. In short, motherboard and GPU choice change the experience from 'almost effortless' to 'never gonna work'. Get a $20 USB external soundcard to get rid of any audio configuration quagmires. Get the most compatible, widely used motherboard and Nvidia GPU, so you can get support on Tonymac should you need it. Stick to wired Ethernet to avoid meddling with bluetooth and wi-fi if you can. Everything else (PSU, CPU, RAM, hard drives and case) isn't an issue.

- The tradeoff is time invested into initially understanding how it all fits vs. money saved and increased knowledge of how MacOS ticks (a good thing regardless, if you're a power user). How much time depends on how much of a PC tinkerer you are already. If you already built PCs and tried getting Linux distros going it's gonna be second nature.

- You'll still need to check out Tonymac when a point update comes out for tips and warnings. The easiest solution is to install the fully up to date next-to-last MacOS version (install El Capitan 10.11.6 now that we are in the Sierra cycle, for example) and keep it going until you're forced to upgrade. Staying a generation behind, both in hardware and software, is the safest strategy. Hackintosh and being on the bleeding edge don't really mix.