Trash cans, landfills, and incinerators. Erasure, deletion, and obsolescence. These words could describe what has happened to the various building blocks of the video game industry in countries around the world. These building blocks consist of video game source code, the actual computer hardware used to create a particular video game, level layout diagrams, character designs, production documents, marketing material, and more.
These are just some elements of game creation that are gone -- never to be seen again. These elements make up the home console, handheld, PC and arcade games we've played. The only remnant of a particular game may be its name, or its final published version, since the possibility exists that no other physical copy of its creation remains.
As a community of video game developers, publishers, and players, we must begin asking ourselves some difficult but inevitable questions. Some believe there is no point in preserving a video game, arguing that games are short-term entertainment, while others disagree with this statement entirely, believing the industry is in a preservation crisis.
Where Games Go To Sleep: The Game Preservation Crisis [more inside]
posted by timshel
on Feb 9, 2011 -
44 comments
Adachi Tomomi,
Alex Baker,
Ian Baxter,
Ithai Benjamin,
Lesley Flanigan,
Lorin Edwin Parker,
Peter Blasser,
Phil Archer,
Todd Bailey,
Tommy Stephenson & Patrick McCarthy,
Tuomao Tammenpaa, and
Vasco Alvo are all featured in Nicolas Collins' extraordinarily good book
Handmade Electronic Music.
posted by mhjb
on Jan 21, 2011 -
14 comments
Top 10s of 2010.
Each Saturday, we pore through our favorite tips and tricks to find 10 great hacks surrounding any subject, from food and thumb drives to browsers and Wi-Fi. Here are our most popular Top 10s of 2010.
posted by nickyskye
on Dec 9, 2010 -
15 comments
Grandpa laces up his skates: How would a single core, 3.8 GHz
Pentium 4 670 from 2005 compete against the latest offerings of AMD and Intel? How about a 2007 quad-core, the 2.4 GHz
Core 2 Quad 6600?
The Tech Report finds out in a
Huge 14-way Roundout, including a
price-performance evaluation (
2nd perspective). For the release of AMD's new midrange DirectX 11 graphic card, the somewhat disappointing
ATI Radeon HD 5830, they've done
Something Similar, this time pitting older cards, including a
Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX from 2006, against the newcomer and today's top performers.
(aggravation warning: hardware review sites love their multi-page layouts)
posted by Monday, stony Monday
on Mar 1, 2010 -
36 comments
The Colemak keyboard layout. Colemak is a new alternative to the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. Designed for efficient and ergonomic touch typing in English, Colemak places the 10 most frequent letters of English (A,R,S,T,D,H,N,E,I,O) on the home row. Z,X,C are preserved in their QWERTY positions for easy copy and paste operations. It gets rid of the Caps Lock and replaces it with Backspace so you no longer need to move your hand off the home position to correct errors. Available for Windows/Mac/Linux/Unix it works with all standard keyboards, including laptops.
[via: Projects], [Previously]
posted by Mitheral
on Jan 8, 2007 -
91 comments
To work around the proprietary whims of digital audio software developers and laptop processor limitations during the mid- and late-1990s, a small band of technically-minded people, including the electronic musician
Blitter, pulled together in the late 1990s to engineer the open-source
OPEN DSP EZ-Kit platform, a 16-bit computer designed entirely with a focus on low cost and extensible control and DSP arithmetic capabilities. While this project and
similar commercial offerings never seemed to gain the critical mass needed to sustain long-term interest, perhaps the new
Arduino hardware project from MIT's
Processing hardware group may gain a foothold with
Processing and
Pure Data audio software hobbyists and artists alike, allowing the creative community to extend, enhance and share inventive uses of new technology. Arduino's use has
already begun in
fascinating museum installations around the world, and has become a part of this year's
SONAR and
Ars Electronica festivals.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 12, 2006 -
10 comments
Bad Caps. A site dedicated to the faulty capacitors present in even highly-rated manufacturers' boards. There's a
forum with individual boards dedicated to identifying specific boards with faulty caps.
posted by cellphone
on Mar 17, 2006 -
17 comments
Bring dead LCD pixels back to life! Did you know you can often fix dead LCD pixels by forcing them to rapidly cycle through red, green, and blue? Neither did I, but the video linked here worked on one of my older screens after a few hours of looped playback. YMMV, but what have you got to lose?
posted by pmbuko
on Sep 19, 2005 -
32 comments
The clueless reviews the Mac Mini His chief gripes are "The Mini boots up into a stripped-down operating system which Apple calls OS X, similar to the stripped-down WindowsCE OS found on many handhelds." and "No serial ports, no way to connect a printer, no PS/2 ports, no floppy drive, no 5.25" bays." Let the hate mail campaign begin!
posted by StormBear
on Feb 2, 2005 -
47 comments
Trusted Computing. Microsoft and friends are proposing some major
alterations to the way that computers work, the ostensible goal being to increase security. But
others say that the real goals are much more insidious.
posted by bingo
on May 22, 2004 -
15 comments
Home Depot stops doing business with federal government. Home Depot Inc., the nation's largest hardware and home-improvement chain, has told its 1,400 stores not to do business with the U.S. government or its representatives.
[snip]
Most of Home Depot's managers interviewed by the Post-Dispatch shared the confusion. All the managers contacted declined to be quoted, but most said they didn't know what was behind the company's refusal to sell to the federal government.
posted by percine
on Jun 17, 2002 -
7 comments
If you're an old geek like me, you'll enjoy a nostalgic browse through the collection at
OLD-COMPUTERS.COM. If you're a young geek, you can laugh at all the boxen that we used to think were
cutting edge 20 years ago. What system currently in use today will be the
Intertec Superbrain of 2020?
posted by MrBaliHai
on Mar 3, 2002 -
24 comments
HP's proposed buyout of Compaq has run into some unexpected resistance -- from a couple of guys named
Hewlett and Packard.
posted by jjg
on Nov 7, 2001 -
17 comments
