SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
As ever under such circumstances, I went through my list of email and Twitter contacts, seeing this as a good opportunity to offer some exposure to indie developers whose work I've enjoyed over the years. One response came back very quickly, albeit from a name I didn't quite recognise. The message was in fact from a developer's wife; the person I was trying to get in touch with had died the previous week.
The developer in question was Stewart Hogarth, who'd lost his battle with congenital heart disease; he was just 34. We'd only been in touch a few times, but I'd been captivated a couple of years ago by his truly excellent 8-bit tribute I Am Level for iOS and Android. This was a smart, charming, entertaining title that married eye-searing Spectrum-style graphics, old-school single-screen platforming challenges, and modern mobile tilt-based controls. It was still installed on all of my devices, and it was strange and very sad to think that the person who created it was no longer with us.
Another developer I was interviewing at the time expressed his shock regarding Stew's passing, and also concern that his work's availability was now potentially on borrowed time.
As a developer, he said it was almost like a little of his soul somehow went into each app or game he made; through what you've created, you can in some way live on if you're no longer around. This of course isn't new thinking — people often say similar things when it comes to art and literature, and even film and music. But those mediums[sic] have the kind of longevity that just isn't afforded to modern digital apps.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday October 22 2015, @04:13AM
Again you are arguing an "is ought" problem, here is the Wikipedia link [wikipedia.org]. You are arguing that because the code IS available it OUGHT to be able to port without accepting the rotting elephant in the room which is the vast majority of that code is worthless because it was written with such low level hacks to increase performance that the code will simply never run on a new system, it would be FAR easier to simply clone the game than to actually use that code.
Want a concrete example? The games that were in all the PC mags we bought in the early 80s, with those YOU HAVE THE CODE because that was literally how they distributed it, they would put the code in the mag and you would input it in the system and run it....yet I bet if you were to get a stack of those mags from 78-87 I bet my last buck a good 99 out of 100 of these games have NEVER been released for today's systems even though the code is literally in front of your face....why? Its simple its because its a mix of BASIC and machine code specific to the platform so you have say PEEK and POKE and JMP for the Commodore VIC and /64. What good will having this code do you? Its not like all those PEEKs and POKEs are gonna do shit, in fact it might as well be a page and a half of gibberish for all the good its gonna do you so again it would be much easier and faster to simply clone the game by copying the levels and play than it would be to do anything with the code but dump it in the trash.
At the end of the day a game or program being FOSS means ONE thing and one thing ONLY...you have the code. That's it, that is all it means. Doesn't mean that code will work, doesn't mean that its not written in code that can't be used or ported to a modern arch, all it means is you can look at the code, there it is...that's it. So many FOSS advocates seem to have trouble grasping this and end up jumping to an is-ought fallacy because they think all code is created equal and nothing could be further from the truth. If you truly believe having the code makes it so simple here ya go [advsys.net], lets see you take the Build engine code and make it SMP capable and update its physics. This is an engine written in ASM and C and requires DOS and Watcom C just to compile. What good will having this code do you? I'm betting not a damned thing.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday October 23 2015, @12:26AM
But if the game and architecture still exist it will still be possible to clone. If they're gone it is no longer possible to clone exactly. If no one has a clear memory of the game it is no longer possible to clone, period.
If the game and architecture is FOSS, it will be at least as easy or easier to port or clone, both technically and legally, than the alternative (proprietary, missing source code).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday October 23 2015, @03:18PM
But you DO NOT NEED THE CODE to clone a game, you can simply fire up the game on an old system and copy its levels and mechanics. Being FOSS, as the Build engine shows, does you absolutely no good when its written in a long dead language or using hardware specific hacks for critical functions because none of this is portable and when this is the actual guts of the game? Again the game itself might as well be written in gibberish.
If you really want to save old code? The answer is not simply having the code, because as I have shown this can often be worthless, but a MUCH better way to preserve and use those programs on modern systems is through the use of virtual machines. Thanks to virtual machines like DOSBox I can take games from 20 years ago like the most fun Redneck Rampage [gog.com] which I'm happy to own and which uses the Build engine I linked to and play this fun and funny game on a modern system with ease. Could you rewrite the build engine to run on a modern system so that Redneck Rampage could run natively? Possibly but it would require so much code being gutted that you might as well at that point throw out the code and just clone the look and feel of the game. But thanks to the rise of virtual machines rebuilding this code isn't required, just run it in a virtual clone of the system it was originally built to run on.
But as we see having the code for the engine really can't help anybody in this case as with many many other programs from those days the code is simply written to be too specific for the hardware it was originally designed to run on. This is one thing I will give Torvalds credit for, he always wrote the code to be portable and avoided hardware specific coding, thus making the code easy to port and update for new architectures.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.