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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry’s and it being clear because the quality of software developers in that field have went down.

Having been playing computer games since the mid 90's I don't know if that claim is actually true. Once upon a time there were games that would delete your entire hard drive when uninstalled and wouldn't last a 15 minute game session before blue screening the whole system. Honestly, given the complexity that modern games require I don't think it's bad at all.

I think the problems we're seeing with modern games actually being worse (the new Arkham game compared to the old) are strictly dollar and cents choices. The ability is there, but the industry has become far too pragmatic.

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> would delete your entire hard drive when uninstalled

> before blue screening the whole system

TBF at the time the number of possible configurations a game could run on was close to infinity

Nowadays platform are much more stable, drivers are much more polished and you have 2/3 max manufacturers that make all the hardware gamers use which mostly is top of the gamma components specifically built to run games.

I remember assembling my PCs in the 90s by putting together components cannibalized from everywhere I could, using esotic hardware that took weeks of debugging to make it work, CPU, RAM and BUS were constantly abundantly overclocked, air flow was a joke at best and software configurations were highly customized

The fact that they even booted it's a miracle

A lot of your concern of older games has been fixed over time by the development of emulators and wrappers. Multiplayer (and live DRM) components of modern games can't be easily RE'd in most cases. Especially with services like Xbox Live the most helpful data is actually packet captures where one can actually go through and replicate the protocol used.

I honestly would challenge you to find games from the mid 90's+ that won't work on a modern machine. Many times if there's a feature that straight up doesn't work it's due to online services being discontinued. There's been some work done to rebuild services like GameSpy or Westwood Online, but once more forms of encryption and anti-cheat or DRM were implemented in these sorts of services, the harder it's going to be to preserve their experience.

That wasn't my argument here - the older games, at the time they came out, were often a mess. Some bugs were patched out, some weren't, but the quality at the time they were relevant wasn't any greater, it was often worse.

But yeah, we're in a new phase where publishers kill games and then they are gone forever and that's a real shame. I think there needs to be some sort of legislation around abandonware so that people can host live services and MMOs after the publishers give up on them.

I agree. I think a lot of copyright/patent laws have gotten in the way of game preservation. What bothers me is many people in the industry have held onto old code/assets over the years, but have no legal way of sharing that with others. It's odd, sheet music can be documented and distributed, but with games being more complex and tangled it's almost an impossibility to have clean-room REs/decompilations. And yet distribution of source code while maintaining copyright is pretty darn easy. Release the source, protect the assets behind copyright.

In my experience, aside from DRM issues, it's the early 3D games from the late 90s and especially early oughts that run the worst : 3D acceleration is a pain to make to work correctly, and they are too resource hungry to be run well in emulation.

I my experience, Wine (+ dgVoodoo for some DX7/8 titles) runs these pretty well. There are exceptions of course but usually there is some way to make them work. Some also work fine in a Windows XP VM without any 3D acceleration.

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