There are thousands of amazing older games that run on old hardware. Forget AAA and wade into your backlog or pull out some classic from gog or a yard sale.
Don’t chase the high end, relax and start a game of CIV 4 or Anno 1404
In the past 2 weeks, I’ve played Tie Fighter and Dune 2. Glad I had over the minimum 640 KB of RAM for Dune - it’s pricey these days but worth it for a smoother experience!
Dune 2 was my favorite game as a kid. I tried to play it again couple of years ago and couldn’t. The UI is so clunky and the graphics are pretty bad.
Brother, we’re pulling out paper and pencil to play tic tac toe with the price of electricity these days
You mean civ V. Hexagons are the bestagons!
Technically very much a AAA game though, four was the first one published by Take Two and after it came out they bought Firaxis
Bought the Shadowrun trilogy for $10 bucks on GoG. That’s gonna be my next adventure.
New shit can blow me.
Enjoy. The first is a bit clunky but good lore points - the second is where it really takes off
Awesome. I don’t mind clunky so much with CRPGs. Comes with the territory.
You can jump into backlog of older game titles. Its never late to discover GOG gems.
It is weird to see people obsess over the price of a new release AAA game when the classics tend to be better made, less buggy, have a bigger mod community, and much lower specs.
Go back and play the Halo series. The opening scene of the first game still gives me chills. Play Portal. And then play Portal 2.
Check out some old school RTS titles. Planetary Annihilation is a reworking of the old Total Annihilation game and absolutely stands up.
Go try some indies - Blue Prince or Slay the Spire or Darkest Dungeon.
There’s no reason to spend more than $20 on a game anymore
There is a reason many good old games can’t be easily played on modern hardware.
If you’re not allergic to 5-10 minutes of looking at protondb or other resources to understand how to get the game running, this isn’t a problem.
I’ve not yet found a difficult process for getting old games running. They’ve been around so long that the community has typically documented everything you need to know to get up and running.
I mean… I am used to getting things like modding skyrim on linux, so this is not really a topic needed to preach to me.
But I met countless people who will give up after three repeats of basic installation attempt.
Emulators solve a lot of those problems
Exactly why I added the world “easily”. Those who can and know often overestimate what average person can and know.
You can pay more if you just want the Nintendo or Blizzard official remaster. But all the stuff is accessible
I gave my son $10 to buy some Steam games. And I was so proud that he didn’t spend the $10 on Roblox or anything, but on a few indie games on sale.
Bread and circuses are getting expensive. The emperor’s throne is held by one who could never wield it’s authority with the competence and loyalty of the one who built it. What year is it again?
I feel like everything is being priced to where we aren’t meant to have any savings.
The objective is to kill home computing :D (🤮)
Companies want unbounded exponential profits. Now guess where those profits are coming from.
spoiler
It’s from squeezing every cent they can from regular people.
Man ive been looking for updated unemployment numbers but this regime never shows the truth anyway.
The newest numbers are yuge, the best numbers everyone says so, it’s incredible, it’s all because of me, because I’m incredible, and if it’s not then it’s Bidens fault, but I’m amazing and Biden isn’t, thank you for paying attention to me
Wait until you’re not able to eat. That’s when real shit happens.
Can we throw feces at the wealthy at some point? We need to find ways to enjoy ourselves without money.
If you can catch one to throw a turd, sure. Seems a bit wasted considering what else you can throw but I can’t say what.
Sick ass ninja stars?!
Dipped in shit
I saw a man in San Francisco flinging excrement like 10-15 years back. This man is us, there is just a time wrinkle.
That man saw what the future had in store for us
Well, I mean, technically if you’re not eating you won’t be experiencing any real shits. Maybe if they’re down to hot dogs, although at that point starvation may seem appealing.
Luckily there are loads of good indie games at low prices with low spec requirements
I think know where this is going:
“NoBOdy wAnTs to BuY gAmeS AnYmORE”
🏴☠️
How do you pirate RAM?
have you tried downloading more RAM
Well you say that as a joke, but back in the day this was a real thing. Not exactly downloading, because the internet wasn’t really a thing back then, but using software to gain more ram.
I was a big fan of QEMM myself and had it in the original box with all the manuals and such. I already had a pirated version through the sneakernet, but got the original on sale as well. I still have that box somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM
At allowed DOS and other TSRs to be loaded into what’s known as upper memory. This is the memory in between 640KB and 1MB. This area often wasn’t used as it can’t be accessed through regular addressing. Tools that need more memory could often address the space above 1MB and was designed for machines with 2 or 4MB (or more). As most games and other software was limited to 640KB it could be a pain in the ass to manage that memory. Often selectively not loading certain drivers at boot to leave enough memory for the more hungry software.
With QEMM this was no longer an issue, shoving a lot of stuff from below 640kb to above, leaving a lot of memory free all the time.
Later some of this was also implemented directly into DOS (I think MSDOS 5 but also other non MS OSes had this). Although I think by that point high memory was often used (the first little bit above 1M). But by that time most machines had more than 2MB of memory and games and other software often used all of the memory, not limited to 640KB. Software developers often used DOS extenders to act as middlemen where the software can access all of the ram without any complexity needed. The extender could just handle it without any issue and the developer could focus on their software instead of mundane things like memory access.
Note the often wrongly attributed 640KB quote of Bill Gates stems from the era. But he never said it and nobody thought that at the time. It wasn’t even a real DOS limitation, more of an IBM architecture limitation. And that became the defacto standard which made it harder to fix.
Yeah, that’s the reason I need more hard drives, which are fucking expensive!
We’re forgetting food…
More Americans are skipping breakfast because it’s not in the budget anymore
This is the reason I didn’t know I was building that Steam backlog all along
I get slightly bummed about this possible future, but then look at my crazy backlog from over the years and all of the old spare hardware I have kicking around. I could spend years just going back through emulators, let alone the literal thousand Steam titles built up and waiting to be rediscovered. Plus all the fan projects and indie studios that don’t require frame gen as part of their base spec.
We’ll be ok, we just may have to revisit the Old Ways a bit.
picked up a steam deck as a piece of insurance a drew months ago.
it has simply become a darksouls 1 machine.
I love to hate it.
Unemployment max is 1200 a month in my state. Thats nothing.
I think he means the rate of unemployment, not unemployment benefits.
I know, I read it wrong at first too.
I think consumer devices are slowly going to not exist. It will switch to screens that stream from the data centers.
I don’t think it’ll ever happen fully. There’s waaaaaay too much money in selling even 1980s-tier hardware to individuals after a certain point.
Where there is a demand, there is a market. Life, uh, finds a way.
That’s no longer the way it works in this new economy (at least in the US). About 50% of all consumer spending is done by the top 10% of incomes. Companies have figured out they can either join the race to the bottom, fight with the competition and eak out meager profits. Or they can just make shit expensive as fuck, have record profits and still have enough customers in the rich. By simply doing less for more money, they can earn more even though the total amount of sales and customers has gone down. The decline in sales is easily offset by the higher prices, leading to more revenue and more importantly way more profit.
This is why there are so many people living pay check to pay check, unable to afford needed stuff and on the edge of losing everything. While at the same time the markets are doing better than ever, so many companies are having record profits across the board. And this trend is expected to continue in the near future. The rich are spending while the other 90% are unsure about the future and limit spending. This furthers the divide between rich and poor and makes companies target the rich and forget about the rest.
Maybe some crazy person would take the risk and try to make something for the other 90%. But in doing so they have to work a lot harder and margins would be slim. Costs are up on everything and anything, so making something regular people can actually afford is hard. Let alone do that and make a profit and be able to keep quality at a proper level. The quality would suffer, lots of outsourcing would be involved, meeting any sort of regulations is hard and costly let alone optional targets like the environment and being sustainable.
The only way companies see a future for less rich folk is with subscriptions. Just load everyone up with a shit load of cheap subscriptions. Can’t afford a new $1000 appliance? Not a problem, you get it now and pay later. Not mentioning that pay later means pay forever and the total amount paid is way more than $1000. Plus people have a hard time managing finances with a lot of small loans and subscriptions. It’s all abstract till they get overwhelmed with debt. Something that happens more and more each day.
It will be easier to control terrorists that way.
Thank the Lord! I’m sick of islamic terrorists™ killing me.
Or did you mean it will be easier for them to control the terrorists as in create them!?
Oh. All terrorists. Islamic, atheist, communist, animal rights, voting rights, environmentalist, democrat…
