Christine Lemmer-Webbertell me what your favorite computing aesthetic was or is. a real one or even fictional!
go ahead! you're being given permission! infodump away in my replies here!
Patrick Loftus 🖖
@cwebber Probably just a first love thing. Atari 800XL, attached floppy, and a few controllers.
My sisters and I always fought over the red handled joystick.
An old CRT with dials and a button for switching between Black & White and Color display. The color didn't always cooperate.
Brooke Vibber 
ɹ uɐp 
we had the regular 800, and my friend had the XL
I was so jealous, though I'm not sure it made any actual difference.
What i really wanted was an Atari ST, which one of my Dad's work friends kids had, and it ran this insanely awesome game called BRATACCUS
And then I wanted an Amiga, and then I wanted a NES. But no, we stuck with the friggin' Atari 800 (and a 2600) all the way up until we got an 80286.
we may have have 2 disk drives and a custom "cartidge emulator" circuit board which allowed for playing pirated games. who can say
sigh
Brataccas Quick Play - Atari ST
@dannotdaniel @pwloftus @cwebber i think of stuff we used when i was a kid, only a couple of games actually made use of the full 64 KiB RAM on the 800XL (the 800 only went up to 48 KiB)
of which one was Sublogic Flight Simulator 2.0 (cousin of the modern Microsoft Flight Simulator line) which required the additional memory to display the wings/tail in the side/rear views, and to enable radio navigation features
(I still can't believe how much they packed into that flight sim for 8-bit computers!!)
@cwebber @dannotdaniel @pwloftus utterly ridiculous how little storage we made do with
back when pixels were the size of rocks and bitmaps were small ;) <3
@brooke @cwebber @dannotdaniel Meanwhile in 2026 - got any spare terabytes for this uncompressed multilingual audio for your game?
You only need 1 of the languages? Too bad.
Language packs and high res textures should be optional DLC. Just ranting but it would be a low-hanging fruit of optimization.
@pwloftus @cwebber @dannotdaniel you jest about terabytes, but microsoft flight simulator (2020 edition) was notorious for a 100+ GiB base install that ballooned to the better part of a terabyte if you installed enough add-ons
they rearchitected some stuff in the 2024 edition to stream more stuff over the network and only cache what you're actively using on disk
(which, naturally was itself controversial in the simmer community because they were also notorious for bad server download / streaming performance for users in many countries. some people are like "yeah i'll set aside a terabyte for flight simulator gimme the download ahead of time so my flight time is clear and consistent")