Poll of the Day > To whoever has one of those old Game Boy Bricks

(+) Yeah! (+)

Why don't you go and play it in public sometime, and then record other people's reactions?

Maybe we could bring it on a date?

Unfortunately I sold it to a friend a long time ago. For various reasons I no longer have any of my classic consoles. The only one that wasn't my fault was the Genesis. It broke

CacciatoPart3 posted...

Maybe we could bring it on a date?

Lol!
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Back in the mid-to-late 90s it was fine. I'd bring mine out if I still had it, as the part where the batteries went burnt out and caused the batteries to melt at the end of its life.
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I feel like even the 3ds looks weird out in public now. People just use their smart phones. I had a 3ds on the bus like 2 years ago and I felt kinda silly with it and wondered if people were staring

The OG Gameboy has 30x the computing power that put men on the moon and returned them safely to Earth.

Just let that sink in for a second next time you pick up your cellphone.

Most people have no concept of how insane the current state of technology actually is in context of the past century. There were people living when man walked on the moon that owned slaves. In the span of a lifetime we went from the telegraph to intercontinental flight.

Had you shown 18 year old me a modern cellphone I'd have asked you where your flying car or hoverboard were parked before calling the Pope myself to bring back witch burning and I'm an atheist.

It kills me what people take for granted these days.
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Pssh, why would you feel weird? People playing 'games' on their phones are the ones who look stupid. Get a real platform for games. I have no problem playing my Vita on the rare occasion I have to wait somewhere. Thing is most people won't know what it is and will just assume it's some odd mobile device.

I have 2 GB's. The rechargeable packs don't work but otherwise it's all good. Then again I'd use the SP for the backlight.

WhiskeyDisk posted...

The OG Gameboy has 30x the computing power that put men on the moon and returned them safely to Earth.

Just let that sink in for a second next time you pick up your cellphone.

Most people have no concept of how insane the current state of technology actually is in context of the past century. There were people living when man walked on the moon that owned slaves. In the span of a lifetime we went from the telegraph to intercontinental flight.

Had you shown 18 year old me a modern cellphone I'd have asked you where your flying car or hoverboard were parked before calling the Pope myself to bring back witch burning and I'm an atheist.

It kills me what people take for granted these days.

This has to be one of my favorite posts in a long time.

Funnily enough, I pulled out one of my GBCs today and played some Donkey Kong Country for a bit. Not bad for a port to something like that.

GanglyKhan posted...

Funnily enough, I pulled out one of my GBCs today and played some Donkey Kong Country for a bit. Not bad for a port to something like that.

It wasn't ported.

It was remade, and used a lot of assets like sprites, tilesets, and music from Donkey Kong Land.

GanglyKhan posted...

This has to be one of my favorite posts in a long time.

@GanglyKhan Thank you. I was born in '78. My first television was black and white. My first console was a second hand Atari 2600 from a cousin. I can probably still beat 1-1 and 1-2 on NES SMB with my eyes closed. I graduated high school in 96. Even back then I could have conceived of something like the Kindle Paperwhite. I might have even conceded something like a modern laptop, the Mac Lisa already existed at that point.

The modern cellphone still blows my mind on a profound level. I get the basic principles behind how it functions and all, but i still marvel at the fact that I have a device in my pocket the size of a Graham cracker that I can shout at for access to the collective sum of all human knowledge.

Look at ST:TNG. This took place what, 300 or 400 years in the future? With devices like the tricorder and PADD, they were on to the basic concept of our tech now, but even still, when Picard had to do personnel reviews, he still had 20 odd PADDs on his desk because in the late 80s-early 90s the concept of having multiple windows running on one device was inconceivable.

I love living in the future, but there was a reason the tower of Babel was razed. We've reached a point in human history where we've effectively hit the same barrier. Human communication hasn't even caught up to the ability we have now. Our technology has far outstripped our ability to process information.

It also kills me how fast science fiction ages at this point. I love Philip K. Dick, but damned if holotapes by mail order didn't age poorly in the age of Netflix and Hulu and Prime. Look at Gibson, he was a visionary 20 years ago but my cellphone makes Johnny Mnemonic look like a joke, and that book changed the way I saw tech when it came out.

I can literally carry an SD card the size of a fingernail that has 10x his storage space and he needed a brain implant the size of a pack of cigarettes to do a tenth of that.

Arthur C Clarke invented the communications satellite, and my favorite quote of his is "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

As far as I'm concerned, I live in an era of magitech. I grew up dismantling clocks and radios, knowing how to solder and make circuit boards, but if you get right down to it, as much as I understand the basic principles of current tech, it may as well be magic since if society ended tomorrow I might be able to carve up a blinking LED with a 9v battery and a 555 timer chip, but I damn sure couldn't cobble together anything better than a 1920s crystal radio tuner from scavenged parts and the best I could do from natural materials is make fire.

Spoiled brats laughing at a Gameboy as quaint and antiquated? Go show someone at the original Woodstock SMB on a Gameboy and tell me that hippie wouldn't burn you.at the stake themselves back when a mono transistor radio was still an absurd luxury that was the size of an Oxford dictionary, running on 4 to 6 D cells.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Had you shown 18 year old me a modern cellphone I'd have asked you where your flying car or hoverboard were parked before calling the Pope myself to bring back witch burning and I'm an atheist.

Had you shown 18-year old me a modern cellphone, I'd have been pretty chill about it, because when I was 18 I'd already seen more than a decade worth of computers getting more and more sophisticated over time, and this already existed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

When I was a kid the height of computing sophistication was an Apple IIc or a Commodore 64. By the time I was in high school I was playing Day of the Tentacle and 7th Guest. It's not hard to extrapolate that the next 10-20 years were going to bring even more advances, and that things in general would slowly get smaller (especially when you consider the original computers were warehouse-sized, and by the mid-90s we already had relatively smallish laptops) and more powerful (considering my calculator in high school had more computing power than most actual computers for sale in the year I was born).

Hell, can't even say I didn't see the Internet coming, because the first time I went online was when I was 17 (though I didn't really start using the World Wide Web side of the Internet until I was 19 and in college). That's right, I got my start on Telnet and BBSes, motherfucker.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Had you shown 18 year old me a modern cellphone I'd have asked you where your flying car or hoverboard were parked before calling the Pope myself to bring back witch burning and I'm an atheist.

Had you shown 18-year old me a modern cellphone, I'd have been pretty chill about it, because when I was 18 I'd already seen more than a decade worth of computers getting more and more sophisticated over time, and this already existed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

When I was a kid the height of computing sophistication was an Apple IIc or a Commodore 64. By the time I was in high school I was playing Day of the Tentacle and 7th Guest. It's not hard to extrapolate that the next 10-20 years were going to bring even more advances, and that things in general would slowly get smaller (especially when you consider the original computers were warehouse-sized, and by the mid-90s we already had relatively smallish laptops) and more powerful (considering my calculator in high school had more computing power than most actual computers for sale in the year I was born).

Hell, can't even say I didn't see the Internet coming, because the first time I went online was when I was 17 (though I didn't really start using the World Wide Web side of the Internet until I was 19 and in college). That's right, I got my start on Telnet and BBSes, motherfucker.

I see what you're saying, don't get me wrong but we both came from a time of tube TVs PO, and saying that you could really grasp a high definition display device as thin as a sheet of paper is bullshit and you know it.

The best we had to work with was Penny's book from inspector gadget, so I'm calling bullshit on this post. Sorry man. A laptop the size of an Oxford dictionary, perhaps back then but if you're really expecting me to believe you could have forseen a modern cellphone back in the mid 90s, yeah, I'm calling hindsight bullshit on that one since even a powermac still had what amounted to a box the size of 4 or 5 pizza boxes under a 12" tube TV.
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I gave up every handheld and console, either to friends or gamestop until the PS2. The two systems I own are the PS2 and xbox 360.

xbox is cool but god damn am i so glad i never gave up my PS2. best console of all time if you ask me

Half the scanlines are missing, and I lost track of the thing about twenty years ago.

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I see what you're saying, don't get me wrong but we both came from a time of tube TVs PO, and saying that you could really grasp a high definition display device as thin as a sheet of paper is bullshit and you know it.

By the time I was 18, I'd already played Duck Hunt in its own appropriate era (ie, the mid-80s) on a projection TV, where the screen was very much flat (even if it required three huge projection lens in front of it to put the picture there). I'd also seen LCD technology evolve from its most simplistic form in shitty handheld games in the late 70s/early 80s, to becoming more and more refined until there were things like the GameBoy in the very late 80s, and the GameBoy Color was just over the horizon (though we already had the Virtual Boy).

Laptops were probably the closest to what you're talking about, though. Paper thin? No. But certainly flat, and relatively crisp, and imagining a world where an inch-thick flat screen could become thinner isn't all that hard when you'd already seen computers go from being huge to being small enough that you could carry it in one hand.

Hell, 18-year old me had already seen and used touch-screen monitors (albeit with a stylus, not using fingers alone). So if you tried to explain the concept of a tablet to that guy he'd more than have the grounds to process the ideas of a thinner screen, that you can use by simply touching the screen, and with cell phone technology built in which can access the Internet. Yes, the idea that it would be so small might be surprising, but again, the idea that technology keeps getting smaller was already a very strongly established premise by that point.

I might be more floored by the sheer variety of apps we'd eventually see on an iPhone, and the idea that we'd essentially invent the tricorder from Star Trek (allowing us to do things like point it at the night sky and have it identify constellations by which stars it sees, or point it at foreign language text and have it real-time translate, or have it tell you where in the world you are at all times and real-world map your location and desired destinations well enough to give spoken directions). But the hardware would probably be less surprising.

8-year old me was playing Connect Four on a green monochrome CRT monitor built into the computer as a single solid block that had to be wheeled around on an A/V cart. High school me was playing games like Wolfenstein 3D and Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within on a computer with more computing power than the space shuttle and a monitor with crisper resolution than any TV I'd ever owned (and then college me played wire-frame VR with a headset and a harness a few times).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAE3XzIRX-Y" data-time="

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdcnQISuF_Y" data-time="

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybKV6rBfzV4" data-time="

Living through the 80s and 90s, you were almost primed to expect technology to keep evolving in ridiculous ways. If anything, I think the tech curve of the last 20 years or so has been more about refining and improving what is already possible in minor ways, as opposed to the reckless leap into the future the 80s-90s were.


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WhiskeyDisk posted...

but if you're really expecting me to believe you could have forseen a modern cellphone back in the mid 90s, yeah, I'm calling hindsight bullshit on that one

Cell phones were already a thing then. And I'd already watched them evolve from massive bricks anchored in a car into something you could carry around with their own built-in antenna.

Smartphones, no, but it wasn't entirely out of the question even then to put 2 and 2 together and potentially see how the various elements mind wind up getting integrated. Even harder sci-fi was already coming up with examples of that sort of thing, and cyberpunk had pretty much gone even farther than where we are now.

Someone in 1995 might have laughed at you if you tried to sell him an modern iPad or iPhone, but he wouldn't necessarily have thought you were insane if you predicted we'd have those sorts of things 10-20 years later.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

since even a powermac still had what amounted to a box the size of 4 or 5 pizza boxes under a 12" tube TV.

Older than most PotDers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Siemens_PCD-3Psx.JPG

Came out when I was 21, almost the same size as the laptop I am currently using:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Compaqarmada7800.jpg

Also older than most PotDers, and also not much larger in most dimensions than the laptop I am currently using:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Outbound_Systems_Inc._Model_2000.jpg

Came out when I was 17, and could easily be confused for a laptop you could buy today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:540c_open.jpg

Laptops weren't universally huge and ridiculous at that point. There WERE smaller models, and they were getting smaller every year. Again, not hard to predict a future reduction of size of 200% when you'd already seen a reduction closer to 1000%.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Living through the 80s and 90s, you were almost primed to expect technology to keep evolving in ridiculous ways. If anything, I think the tech curve of the last 20 years or so has been more about refining and improving what is already possible in minor ways, as opposed to the reckless leap into the future the 80s-90s were.

Moore's Law kinda gave up around 2005.
Advancements in computers are being driven largely by the falling cost of RAM, and the increasing brute-force in piping away heat from increasingly dogpiled CPUs and GPUs.

We're about to hit a physical limit, where electrons just start leaking out of integrated circuitry.

Questionmarktarius posted...

We're about to hit a physical limit, where electrons just start leaking out of integrated circuitry.

Yeah, we're what 1, maybe 2 chipset nm scale revisions before quantum tunneling becomes an insurmountable issue with current tech?

ParanoidObsessive posted...

By the time I was 18, I'd already played Duck Hunt in its own appropriate era (ie, the mid-80s) on a projection TV, where the screen was very much flat (even if it required three huge projection lens in front of it to put the picture there).

Terrible example there, because by the same logic you would have predicted the modern smartphone from 1930s movie projection...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'd also seen LCD technology evolve from its most simplistic form in shitty handheld games in the late 70s/early 80s, to becoming more and more refined until there were things like the GameBoy in the very late 80s, and the GameBoy Color was just over the horizon (though we already had the Virtual Boy).

Hence why I said something like a Kindle Paperwhite was conceivable then, and yes there were the giant car phones and phones that were basically civilian versions of Vietnam era military radios, but to say mid 90s us could really see all this tech being combined into something the size of a Graham cracker with a 1080p HD pentile display and enough battery power to get through a day is some ludicrous hindsight when this whole discussion started with an original Gameboy that was the size of a patio brick powered by 4 AA batteries.

Mid 90s we were still looking at devices we could disassemble and take a soldering iron to with identifiable components and such. You could litterally have built a Mac Classic from scratch with mail order components if you were dedicated enough.

Stretching that to say the advances in battery, processor, and display tech were totally realistic in hindsight is like saying we should have the flying cars and self tying shoes that were in Back to the Future 2.

I think you're wearing some Rose colored glasses to put it mildly PO. In 96 terms a modern smartphone was still in the realm of science fiction or magitech. I was very much a nerd then. Subscriptions to popsci, wired, popular mechanics and the like back when they were respectable publications and still something like a modern smartphone was going to be decades away.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Questionmarktarius posted...

We're about to hit a physical limit, where electrons just start leaking out of integrated circuitry.

Yeah, we're what 1, maybe 2 chipset nm scale revisions before quantum tunneling becomes an insurmountable issue with current tech?

This wouldn't be a big deal, were any viable alternative technology not still in the rough equivalency of early 1950s computing.
There's always gallium arsenide, theoretically being able to make chips in the 250GHz range, but it's expensive as hell compared to silicon, and the chip foundries to make them don't really exist.

I still have my old gameboy. Is it worth anything these days?

I too find it fascinating to live in a time with such technological advances. If you look at the telescoping nature of all the milestones we've been making, it's easy to realize that we're heading for something big.
Whether its something bad like accidentally opening a wormhole that damages our reality or something great like teleportation using entanglement is the big question.
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Firewood18 posted...

I still have my old gameboy. Is it worth anything these days?

If it has all the scanlines and the little cover for the link cable port isn't missing, maybe?

I'm pretty open minded to innovation so I've always been embracing to future tech and wild ambition dreamed up in fiction. Unless some dude gouges out his arm to turn on his telekinetic abilities that he can only perform inside the blood pentagram I wouldn't be too dismissive.

That isnt to downplay what we have today. Even regular citizens have access to basically magic, and more knowledge than can be comprehended.

Even shows like how it's made demonstrate making a button on the scale of what we do now escapes common knowledge and skills, let alone the basic infrastructure that enable us living past 20 years.

WhiskeyDisk posted...

There were people living when man walked on the moon that owned slaves.

People still own slaves.
Many people actually.
Owning slaves is a popular thing around the world.
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I'd rather buy another GB than a phone. Yeah the advancement in tech is neat to watch but there comes a point where costs outweigh usefulness. I mean I kinda want a 3D printer, just not quite enough to invest in one. 4K TV? Meh, the sizes I've seen don't have optical out. My car is an 03 and I don't know how much longer it'll go. But I don't want BT, satellite radio, or other gimmicks.

Meanwhile I have hundreds of games and a pinball machine because those will get use. Yeah maybe I'm not like everyone else.

.... what the hell happened to mine?

I had 2, sold one to my dad who flipped it for a profit.. then bought a used one to trade Pokemon (Red/Blue) to finish my Dexs
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DPsx7 posted...

Yeah maybe I'm not like everyone else.

Weve figured that out.

LOLIAmAnAlt posted...

WhiskeyDisk posted...

There were people living when man walked on the moon that owned slaves.

People still own slaves.
Many people actually.
Owning slaves is a popular thing around the world.

You're not wrong but when Saudi Arabia puts a man on the moon and returns him safely to Earth, let me know. I was obviously speaking in the context of the United States of America
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