Game machine
4 March 2018
I had the yen to play some computer games. I used to play a lot, but haven't played any these last few years for various I-had-kids related reasons. Having kids is great, but the gaming has suffered. Now I have a bit more time, so I looked at what there was to play on a Mac. I looked hard. At pretty much every game that had been made for the platform. Ever. Ten minutes later I decided to buy or build another Windows box.
Then I had another idea. The games I wanted to play were mostly older, so I didn't need anything too fancy, and I had my old Mac Mini sitting in a drawer, unloved. Would Windows 10 boot? The machine was no longer able to get upgrades, it was the now nine year old 2009 model… Long story short, yes, Windows worked fine. It worked better than fine, it now worked better than whatever version of MacOS had been on there.
Windows still sucked. But Windows 10 sucked a lot less than Windows 8 did, and if there's one thing Microsoft does right it's backwards compatibility. The suckage & the backwards compatibility are not unrelated things, that's the compromise they, and now I have made. I was playing games from 1997, these games are twenty years old, and here I am, feeling nostalgic and happy.
So far the sound doesn't work, but I'm not too fussed about that, and stuff with 16 bit installers (some of these games are old) is off limits… as is the one game I had written with the XNA game framework (which I vaguely remember as a C# game framework from 2007 or so). But mostly (as someone else used to say) it just works.
For work and work related play my MBP hits it out of the park, but some of my evenings are now spent otherwise, in gorgeous and glorious turn based 2D.