Yeah, Nintendo themselves were all-in on the FDS for something like a year after it debuted. They didn't release any of their own games on cartridge during that time.

It's fascinating IMO, but gets overlooked since most eventually made their way onto cartridge later (in the US if not elsewhere).

Eh, I think the linux kit was a case of Sony wanting to pretend the PS2 was a computer so they could get tax exemptions. Mad Ken ramble-hyped about PS2s networking together so you could jack into The Matrix (???) but Sony never put any real effort into the PS2-as-a-computer thing once it launched.

I'll take one bar of whatever the fuck they've done to KitKat this month ("strawberry yoghurt and macha" or something).

100%, yeah.

The only CRT I own that looks perfect to my eyes had ~10 hours on the clock when I got it. It's a 21" Samsung monitor, and it was the first time in ~20 years that I paid real money for a CRT. It's also the best tech purchase I've made in a decade. Waiting for the same luck with a TV...

I've spotted a few NOS TVs on eBay UK recently, and yeah all were low-end late-era ones. One day I'll snag a nice big 4:3 NOS trinny and I'll be done with the hunt.

Hey, a man can dream, eh? A man can dream.

"it has other small problems that i haven't been able to fix, so it's sitting on a shelf now.

.. well, it describes all my TVs now, pretty much."

Welcome to my world 😅

"A bottle of vodka in the hand is worth three in the bush" though, right? I think that's how the saying goes.

Sounds about right. So often when I'm reading about (or watching on YouTube about) copper thieves, they're trashing valuable equipment that they could surely have sold for many many bottles of vodka if they had a bit more sense.

I feel like I remember you posting about this here, you got in pretty deep repairing one of those, right? I remember it was impressive stuff. Any CRT saved is a good thing in my books :)

(In linux you're expected to configure servers manually, which is a drag, but kind of understandable.)

Surely they can only force British VPN providers to do this? I wouldn't use a British one anyway.

I use Privado, it comes "free" with something else. No complaints, their servers are reliable, and their Win/Mac client is less awful than the other VPNs I've tried (why *is* VPN software so bad?)

To add another point of data here, I was once presented with an age check by bsky when I forgot my VPN, but I cancelled out of it and they've never asked again. Account isn't restricted in any way that I can tell.

Inconsistent is about right.

For me personally, it's just sad that so many games are being completely lost to time.

I remember a class in film studies where a young cal-pol found out to his horror that ~75% of all the classic silent-era movies are just gone. No copies available in any condition. That is a goddamn shame, IMO.

And I'd like to see more companies release (or employees leak) their server-side code for ancient games, so that server emulators can be provided by the community, if the devs can't handle it.

But I do get that there are all sorts of licencing agreements and such that muddy the waters on this.

Yeah, fair point.

I guess the point I was getting at is that a more mature medium would be taking this more seriously.

It's not strictly your responsibility to act as an archivist, but we should at least have industry bodies grappling with the growing black hole in online game preservation.

I'm a little surprised how many CRTs are still around/working. eBay UK gets a dozen or so added each day, there's several hundred on there to sift through on any given day. Unfortunately 90% are crappy 14" combi units.

Anyway, most of the interesting ones are in London, and I'm too far away.

I used to regularly see CRTs on the kerb, or sitting next to skips full of household renovation detritus etc, but it's been a while now. The last kerb find I brought home was five years ago now.

My friend nabbed a widescreen 24" Trinny a year or so ago from the kerb, usual geometry issues though.

Wow, seriously? That's so sad. Always a shame to see working tech turned to a bulk of e-waste just because someone wanted go burn off the wiring and get like $3 for the copper from some dodgy scrap merchant. (Better that stealing catalytic converters I guess.)

A random copy of the Daily Mail is worthless, but a full archive can have historical significance; you just don't know where. And since you never know which article will be important to someone in the future, you preserve everything.

Devil's advocate here - from an archivist perspective, you preserve everything possible is because you don't know what will go on to be important. Newspapers were never meant to be eternal, but we've stored newspapers in microfiche for posterity for over a century.

In the UK, for the most part we seem to have jumped straight from 100Hz CRTs to flat panel HDTVs (most of which had component, at least in the early days).

("Looted" CRTs?)

I nope'd out when the xenomorph arrived in Alien: Isolation. I got the feeling that the hiding and sneaking and the rest wasn't going to be for me.

I did love SOMA and the Amnesia games, though I suspect that my medication at the time I played them (a few years after A:I) was helping out.

We're talking about something that's finding vulnerabilities that humans have missed for decades. That isn't a "you should learn to do that" problem, it's a new class of capability. That doesn't mean we should venerate it, but I'm not sure that downplaying it like this is wise either.

Forgive me if this is just my literalist autism speaking, but serious question, if Mythos is real (and the infosec community think it's real, which is enough for me), what do you propose we should do about the datacenter thing? Is it better if we don't build them, and leave bad actors to have at it?

The late era 32" widescreen CRTs are in a class of their own on that one though. It took two friends to help me move the WEGA up one (very awkward) flight of stairs and they made it clear they weren't going to help with anything similar in future, haha

Can relate. I've been eyeing up 29" 4:3 Trinitron sets for a while now, but I'm mostly concerned about how to get one into my flat. Those things are huge.

If I could find a Loewe with component support I'd probably pick it up, just because (native) component support is so rare in the UK on CRTs. CRT TVs with VGA are rare too; I now regret getting rid of the WEGA, but it was such a big chunky bastard that I wouldn't have been able to find room for it.

It's kind of interesting in retrospect the degree to which TV manufacturers at the time considered gaming an afterthought. It's not like you can miss the glitches on those sets if you're playing 15.6KHz retro gaming content.

It was controversial, for sure.

If all you watched was TV and movies and you were particularly susceptible to 50Hz flicker then you could make the argument for it, since that flicker became much more pronounced as screens got bigger. I had a colleague who loved his big 100Hz set, for instance.

But most people don't have the space to dedicate to a 32" behemoth just for a handful of EDTV resolutions.