As someone who’s currently interested in Atari 2600 development, I can tell you that MobyGames is way off in their count, even if you limit the count to physically-released games. There were well more than 10 new physical releases in 2025 alone.
It helps that developers do licensing deals with a few companies that produce physical cartridges with boxes and manuals on demand, but there are also still a surprising number of people making physical copies of games for sale in advance.
My first suspect is an incorrectly-terminated statement which looks like it should end on line 41. The compiler/interpreter probably read the newline and ticked over before uncovering the error, and didn’t recover properly due to some edge case.
When I was in my teens and twenties, I used to believe that if I thought of something that I’d never heard of before, I must have been the first person ever to come up with it.
Now that I’m older and the Internet is ubiquitous, when I have those moments I go straight to a search engine. And even if I’m not the first, I still feel pretty good about discovering whatever it is for myself.
I am stuck using an otherwise old but theoretically bearable PC at work running Windows 11 from a spinning HDD. But I’ll tell you, when I dug through the registry to turn off all the background indexing nonsense, it became damn near usable.
I think it depends a lot on context.
Wiping the dust off an old, low-spec ex-office PC, getting it barely functional, throwing a couple of RGB lights in it and trying to pass it off as a competent gaming rig for a high price would be completely unethical, I agree. But salvaging an old PC, actually refurbishing it into something useful for light day-to-day use, and selling it as such with a small markup to cover parts and labour seems completely fine to me.
You and I may have the skills needed to take a worn-out old PC and breathe new life into it easily, but not everyone who’d be happy with a modest secondhand system can do that.
As it happens, until just a few years ago I was running my high-end games on what started as a secondhand commodity PC with an i5-3470, without complaint.
Thank goodness it’s not just me! When I first saw this post yesterday, there were no comments and it was already quite downvoted. I wached the first 1/4 or so and didn’t find anything objectionable; actually it seems quite good. I started checking to see if the guy had recently fiddled kids or spoken out in support of ethnic cleansing or something. The downvotes don’t make sense to me either.
Not only do GB and GBC games work on the GBA, but some of them even have special GBA-only content. I know that at least one of the Legend of Zelda Oracle games has an extra house in the village on GBA. When you play the game on a GB/GBC, there’s just an empty lot in that place.
Seriously, the best option is whatever matches the brightness of your screen to its surroundings. I read about this decades ago and it eliminated screen fatigue for me.
If switching to dark mode works for you, great. When I worked on a PC in a well-lit office all day, I would open a program with a white background, hold up a blank white piece of paper next to the screen, and adjust the screen brightness until it looked about the same as the paper. I did this once or twice a week because I was near a set of picture windows and I was affected by weather and the seasons, but in a room with more artificial light it would be “set and forget”.
It seemed very dim at first, and several of my coworkers commented on it. It took a few days of resisting the urge to turn the brightness back up, but I got used to it and never went back.
My PC at home is currently set up in a partially shaded corner of a well-lit room, so I put a dim little light bar behind the screen to make the wall match the brightness of the screen and the rest of my desk/room.
A couple of other commenters have given excellent answers already.
But on the topic in general I think that the more you learn about the history of computing hardware and programming, the more you realise that each successive layer added between the relays/tubes/transistors and the programmer was mostly just to reduce boilerplate coding overhead. The microcode in integrated CPUs took care of routing your inputs and outputs to where they need to be, and triggering the various arithmetic operations as desired. Assemblers calculated addresses and relative jumps for you so you could use human-readable labels and worry less that a random edit to your code would break something because it was moved.
More complex low-level languages took care of the little dances that needed to be performed in order to do more involved operations with the limited number of CPU registers available, such as advanced conditional branching and maintaining the illusion of variables. Higher-level languages freed the programmer from having to keep such careful tabs on their own memory usage, and helped to improve maintainability by managing abstract data and code structures.
But ignoring the massive improvements in storage capacity and execution speed, today’s programming environments don’t really do anything that couldn’t have been implemented with those ancient systems, given enough effort and patience. It’s all still just moving numbers around and basic arithmetic and logic. But a whole lot of it, really, really fast.
The power of modern programming environments lies in how they allow us to properly implement and maintain a staggering amount of complex minutiae with relative ease. Such ease, in fact, that sometimes we even forget that the minutiae are there at all.
The woman in the article’s main picture is Japanese pop singer Hikaru Utada, although it’s probably just a little joke. I couldn’t find a connection between her and the naming of the Hikaru arcade board.
However, Sega’s Chihiro board was apparently named after the Studio Ghibli character, and I suspect that another Sega arcade system, the Lindbergh, was more likely named after the popular Japanese rock band rather than directly after the American aviator. Hikaru Utada had just started to become successful around the time the Hikaru board was released, so it’s possible, although Hikaru isn’t a particularly uncommon name in Japan.
I don’t buy AAA games, so YMMV, but I buy my games almost exclusively from GOG and Itch these days. I have loads of games on Steam, but now the DRM-free aspect is most important to me. If something is only on Steam, I may still buy it if I can confirm that it’s “DRM-free” (e.g. bypassable Steam check) there, or if it’s so cheap that I won’t mind losing it. As honest as GabeN and the Steam team seem to be, I’ve been shafted enough times already.
The one drawback I see for buying on GOG vs buying on Steam (which can also be kind of an advantage depending on your perspective) is updates. Steam seems to let publishers push updates out whenever they want. While a few publishers do actually seem to forget about GOG, I have read comments from a few different developers (in response to complaints from customers) that they had sent their updates to GOG but were stuck in an approval process. It appears that the GOG team manually tests every update before putting it up for customers, and there’s a large backlog for a small team, so it can be several months before a patch gets through.
“rd” and “rmdir” only work on empty directories in MS-DOS (and I assume, by extension, in Windows shell). “deltree” is for nuking a complete tree including files, as the name suggests.
JS has saved me many hours of mind-numbing, error-prone manual keyboard work by giving me a way to hack together a simple bit of automation as a web page.
Even when a computer has been ham-fistedly locked-down by an overzealous IT department, I can almost always still access a text editor and a browser that will load local HTML files.
Also over on itch for pay-what-you-want, with extras.
Many 8-bit home computer emulators have an option to recreate the sounds of their tape drives and disk drives as they load software. But are there any Dreamcast emulators that recreate that unholy screeching that made you wonder if your console was somehow already on its last legs even though it was still nearly new?
I wouldn’t want to hear it the whole time, but for the first major load of a game it might be pleasantly nostalgic.
When you use any piece of Internet-enabled software, any and all data that passes through it can theoretically be copied and siphoned off back to the authors of the software.
Should they do it? No. Can they do it? Yes.
Does Mozilla do it? They say they don’t, and I’m inclined to trust them. Do other major browsers do it? Absolutely.
As regards your physical location, geoIP databases can get pretty close these days.
There are all sorts of licensing shenanigans when dealing with HDMI, so I wonder if it’s compatible with their open source policy. But personally I’d have put a VGA output on it as a compromise between period correctness and modern usage. Easy to output as analog from the console, and easy to convert cleanly for modern displays with inexpensive adapters.
Sure. Almost 40 years ago I started learning to program as a kid, and the only reason I knew the word “syntax” at all was because the default error message in my computer’s BASIC interpreter was “SYNTAX ERROR”. I didn’t learn what it actually meant until many years later, in English class.
I taught myself with the excellent Usborne books, which are now all downloadable for free from their website. You won’t be able to use them as-is (unless you get your kids to use an emulator for an old 8-bit home computer), but I’m sure you can still get some useful ideas, and maybe even copy small sections here and there.
As others have mentioned, my school also taught us a little LOGO, which was a bit of fun for me but rather simple. I remember that most of my classmates enjoyed it, though.
Yeah, but Third Strike has the best version of her character design IMO.
Mitchell and Webb.
“Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?”