blakespot

I started playing NMS at age 44. I'm 54 now.

I am the author. I've been running the blog these 10 years.

I sat down to write about the game, summarizing it and how it has grown over the years at this huge milestone. And then, as I started writing, it occurred to me that ... I -- a person who has been playing this game daily for ten long years -- am probably more of a story that some may find notable than anything I could write on my "just for fun" NMS blog as a general recap of the game's history, with so many mainstream gaming sites surely doing the same in articles and YT videos.

So, instead, I just told about my time playing it. Obviously a lot of people couldn't care less about what I've been up to all this time (that's not lost on me!), but I'm still happy with how I decided to mark the occasion and what I decided to write about.

From the engoodening video:

“…they never added pay-to-win, they never added microtransasctions or paid DLC, they never made VR as a second game. They didn’t give up on the game or scale their resources back to do it. They didn’t come out and call gamers entitled, they didn’t have loot boxes, they didn’t start work on the next big project or sequel. They didn’t do much of anything except get back to work.”

https://nmsspot.com/2020/01/09/a-walk-through-the-no-mans-sk...

More photos of the DualUp can be seen in my Mac Studio photo gallery, over on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/albums/7217772030208...

Indeed not, sadly.

Indeed, it is a DualUp -- the best display I have ever owned. I love it so very much, I planned to get a spare for when it dies, before they EOL'ed it. (I assumed it would not last long, as there can't be widespread appeal for such a display.) I missed that chance - but after months of setting eBay alerts, I found a local teacher that had a used one with just 400 hours on it (I have 17,000 hours on mine), and I bought it ($50 above retail price) and have it cleaned and waiting in a cloth sleeve for its time to shine, one day.

I talk about it and using it on a Mac with HiDPI display modes in this blog post from several years back:

https://bytecellar.com/2022/11/08/4k-scaling-is-not-a-proble...

Yep, I was lucky. We were a middle-class family and my mom and dad did support my extreme passion in computers. I went through a huge amount of systems.

Here's the list: https://bytecellar.com/the-list

I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally put the first in the newspaper for sale ( https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that! (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)

Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.

Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use.

Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.

Indeed, I got my first Amiga in October 1985 - I believe it was the first Amiga sold in Virginia (U.S.) and one of the first ever sold - period.

https://bytecellar.com/2020/10/27/looking-back-on-35-years-a...

I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience, playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga 2000 in 1988 and that was a great time - a peak time to be an Amigoid.

1992 does seem late for a first Amiga - and a 500; I had an A1200 in '92.

I still have two Amigas that I use often (1000, 2000 '020) and a PowerPC "Amiga," that I rarely power on.

I gave Linux on the desktop a good shake once, back in 1994. I installed Debian from a dev branch that came on 15 floppies. I was running it on an AMD 5x86 160 with 24MB RAM and had a lovely 17-inch (unusual for the time) trinitron display from Nokia. I used it for about 4 months, then went back to Windows 95.

https://bytecellar.com/2015/07/16/that-time-i-ran-linux-on-t...

An interesting hitch was that I needed to purchase a commercial X-Window system to get color from my Tseng ET-4000/W32p graphics board. XFree86 would not hit the modes I wanted. It cost $99. Here is the manual:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/5665910382/

This is a great look at the creation of the Tinitron aperture grille CRT. My preference for aperture grille over shadow mask technology cannot be overstated. Once I got my first aperture grill display (a Nokia 447Xi with a Trinitron tube) in the early '90s, I never went back.

I still have my 19-inch Sony G420 that I use almost daily.

A good handful of variants were tested as well, as explained in the article. It doesn't seem it could be items on the list. (Fake chips were discussed and identified as well.)

The comments in some of the news posts covering the auction popping up are curious / amusing. Lots of supercomputer hate - "let's use a few PCs," etc.

ex: https://wccftech.com/iconic-5-34-pflops-cheyenne-supercomput...

Pretty slick. I've been listening to lots of "new" tracker tunes on the 486 + GUS over the past few months, and it's been lovely. A sample: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot/111990410300125218 (so to speak...)

I set it up on my 486-class PC tonight and did my first toot from it (followed by a selfie of sorts).

https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot/111898550167322715

I will say that the Atari ST version of Rogue was one of my favorite games for the ST back when I had it in 1986, published by Epyx as mentioned in the article. Nice tile graphics on that one.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/6710836583/

Though, the article's conclusion that,

This in turn also helps encourage consumers to buy AMD hardware, whether it is just an AMD GPU or an AMD CPU and GPU combination.

Is a flawed notion, as AMD FSR can run on most any modern GPU and a is not tied to those of AMD, which is a particular benefit of the technology, as compared to Nvidia's DLSS, which is tied to Nvidia's RTX hardware.

Interestingly, I've never owned a 386. I was not much of a DOS/Win PC person until 1994, when I got a 486 to run NEXTSTEP. I've had an i8088, NEC V20, i80286, i80486, AMD 5x86, P4, and then on with the Mac starting in 2006 with (well, just before) Intel Core microarch. In those early days I was more Amiga, ST, etc. ( https://bytecellar.com/the-list/ )

I felt more spiritually connected to the MC68K line back when, for lack of a better term.

Amusingly the i386 system I spent the most time with was in college in 1993/4 on a Sun 386 tower running SunOS or Solaris in the APCS lab.

Didn't I use some online payment system in 2001 or so, called Kagi?

I wonder if a Mac Plus could do this equally well. I am guessing it can. Would be fun to print from the Mac Studio through the Plus to the Imagewriter II.

It loads fast and fine for me in the DC area of the states.

I had an Apple IIgs and a PowerMac G5 across the room from each other (still have the GS, but in the G5's spot sits a Mac Studio, now). To get files from the net onto the IIgs, I attached a Keyspan USB to serial adapter to the Mac, with the Mac-style miniDIN RS-422 connectors, and connected the GS to the Mac's serial port via RJ-11 using phoneNet adapters on each end. Worked great for filesharing to the GS. (I've got an ethernet card in the IIgs now, so I just FTP to the Mac (or wherever) to get files I want.)

I didn't use a Windows PC for very long at home, but I did from 1994 to 1998, and I had Word 6 during that time. It was pretty nice.

I've certainly use a number of more basic word processors in my time. :-)

https://bytecellar.com/2016/06/05/a-look-back-at-three-decad...

This was the first domain I'd ever seen with a .zip extension -- I didn't know it was on offer.

I have a Mac Plus I've expanded to 4MB and expanded with a 512MB SCSI HD and an Asante SCSI-to-Ethernet adapter by which it's wired to my LAN. I use an FTP programs to browse my Mac Studio via a little FTP server I've got running on it, if I want to install something new on the Mac Plus. Works pretty well.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/albums/7215760433593...

I also have an Imagewriter II hooked to my Apple IIgs, but I did attach it to the Mac briefly for a test print.

What about VIP Professional??

I need one.

3nm should be (small) enough for anybody...

XboxAhoy linked me his IFF, and here it is on my Amiga 1000 and 1080 CRT. (Obviously that old 1080 doesn't like to lie on its side...)

Std: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52835711339/in/album...

Rotated: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52834954342/in/album...

So lovely in phosphor!