Don't build them like they used to!

after 17 years in a closet, I broke out my Saturn, model 1. I plugged it in, hit power and she fired right up. thing looks mint, I only used it about a year then stored it.

well I ordered a mod chip from segastyle, the universal one along with a 4mb memory cart. installed the chip and it worked just as advertised. pretty much plug and play, only had to solder the 5v for power.

now to locate my trusty old dreamcast.

 

Except that phrase is complete bullshit.

 

What do you mean?

 

Older systems are sturdier because of a less complex design. (in general)

 

Amen to that brother.

 

The Saturn was complex, it still runs longer than any other console today.

 

He said LESS complex. Not that it wasnt complex at all.

Otherwise he would have said the Saturn was simple.

 

At the time, it was seen as complex...

 

At the time everything didnt break all the time either.

We are talking about now compared to then, hence the "they dont build them like they used to" - which is now vs then.

 

Not to mention we haven't had the chance to store a modern gen console in a closet for 17 years yet.

in 17 years, I bet you someone will yank out an old PS3 and it'll still fire up.

 

x

 

Electrolytic capacitors are like bitches if you neglect them for a long while.
That's why your machine went up to smoke.

 

And it will still require downloading fifteen different software updates before you can play the game :sorrow:

Consoles may or may not be made better/worse/the same nowadays* as they were in years gone by, but I miss the days when consoles booted up, loaded the game, and you could play straightaway, instead of all the messing about downloading patches (usually to fix bugs that would have been found and fixed in the old days before release, as back then games were properly tested before release**) and system udates. I want a console to be for games, not social media...


* Older consoles are more reliable than newer ones, but that's at least partly due to them (a) producing much less waste heats (since they are slower than modern consoles), and (b) having no moving parts (console based cartridges are often *hugely* more reliable than disc based consoles for this reason, as the disc drive is usually the first thing to go on a disc based machine.

** Back in those days, a game *had* to be properly tested, as if it had a major bug in the release version, then the release version (being on cartridge or disc, and the console never being online or never being able to host a game patch) had to be replaced with a working version, which meant the hugely expensive process of making new cartridges or discs, and destroying the existing (bugged) ones. Nowadays of course, console manufacturers just treat the public like unpaid beta testers, the same way that PC gamers had been treated for a decade and a half or more.

 

Once upon a time (And I'd LOVE to find the quote), Microsoft, having shipped XBox360 before the PS3 promised that all games would be shipped free of any major bugs, and that XBL's addon content would not exist to serve as bug fixes.
So much for that, with a number of games that are nearly unplayable without update patches having been released, I can highly sympathize with the above statement, and in reality, what good is physical game media if it's unplayable without online access? A different matter than the core of this discussion, but game systems are now far less a "single purpose device" and more simply a gaming delivery platform.

 

x

 

Starfox is like 1MB, some games now are like 25GB+

There is quite a lot of difference

 

I don't know the costs, or if the fee for game patches is only for XBLA games or also for commercial games, but the commercial game companies obviously consider it worth the cost over delaying the game for a couple more weeks, otherwise they'd do the latter to avoid the former. It is possible that there's not a fixed fee on releasing patches, and that games companies take advantage of this in ways we are unaware of.

Some games are, true. But many games, such as first person shooters, reuse libraries of code that are proven to work, and so require much less testing than new code would do. True, even games such as these need people to check *every* possible viewpoint (i.e. crouch and look up the chimney in every burnt out house, to see if the sky box overwrites the chimney) and every possible action (i.e. try to reload the rifle then switch mid-reload to the gattling gun and shoot the NPC who is telling you message x whilst you yourself are jumping backwards), but this was true even for first person shooters on the N64.

And that is such a large part of what is wrong with the gaming industry. I *really* miss the days when teams did everything they could to make a game as fun and replayable as they could, when they had no one saying "We must release this game in two weeks time", and when they could release the game when they themselves were happy with the finished product. I don't think this time existed since the early 80s, when most coders will tennage bedrom coders, but there have been occasions since when this happened, such as id Software with Doom and Quake, or Rare in the N64 days.

Not nearly as much difference as your example would suggest. Almost all of that 25GB+ is data, not program code, and it's program code that takes up the vast bulk of testing. Most data, providing it corresponds to specific parameters (which most will, and the exceptions (it any) can be treated separately) is soak tested via software designed to find anomalies, and human monitoring is minimal. The actual program itself is a totally different matter, of course, but even so, the amount of testing needed is far more dependant on the game type/complexity than the footprint size of the finished game. Daggerfall, for instance is what, fifteen or twenty years old, and takes up what, 100MB to 300MB, yet it would require far more testing than Singularity (an XBox 360 game I've currently replaying), which is probably about 5GB in size.

Not that Daggerfall saw anywhere near as much testing as it needed. But then, it is a Bethesda game...

 

Even without the textures, graphics etc, its many numberous times over the code in a 1MB game.

even if its 20MB - thats 20x larger.

Say its 200MB only out of 25GB - thats 200x more code to test...

 

It's quite simple - today they use lead-free solder and trying to save some money on cooling systems at same time = failure in less than a year, or three (if you're really lucky). Mechanical parts are made from cheaper components too.

My old PC - A64-3500+@3.3GHz/3Gb/6x300Gb Samsung SpinPoint HDDs/GF7950GT AGP worked 6 years 24/7, sometimes 2 weeks with 99% CPU load (mass video encoding). And it still works.
Then... 6 360s including 2 XDK failed in less than a year. And that PC is obviously more complex than 360 and got more hard drives, it's just fat 360 cooling sucks, that's all. Same with fat PS3, except that simple reball + heatsink upgrade won't help here.

One guy forgot working Fujitsu MPG hard drive in a locker and found it 12 years later. And it was dead like a brick because of bad flux they used back. In PS3 there's lead-free solder which isn't so reliable too.
But i think my DS lite and PSPs will boot 20 years later without any problems, except dead battery.

 

No it won't because by then this will have killed it:

http://www.aciusa.org/leadfree/leadfree_verdi-11-5-04.htm