@ATE412: Dude, there's only four panels. If canv.as users didn't have the attention span of a speed-addicted goldfish, my reply would've dwarfed this entire thread :D

@tingle007: does anyone know the source for this?

@Jarod: i just started watching the 2005 version. did i miss anything great or should i skip anything or what?

@Anonymous: People are still fighting over console vs. pc? Why not own both? I do and get the best games on each platform. There debate over. Don't be poor, get a job and get both.

@Anonymous: deal. what kinds of gaming computers do you recommend? what brand?

@Crazydave21216: if you're really going for gaming just build it yourself. building your own computer isn't difficult, it's just a little tricky in a few places, but there are tons of people out there who know how and can help you.

@dmauro: I thought that's what the monocles were for... ?

@Anonymous: Maybe trying to play Red Alert or GTA or something.

All the same, you're gonna want 98SE for preference.

@lukesdrad: what ... er.... were you going somewhere with this?

also, which generation of Atari? VCS, 400/800, 5200/7800, XE, ST/STE, Lynx, TT/Falcon, Jaguar?

@Anonymous: Because there's never been a new generation of games consoles with little to no backwards compatibility ever since the dawn of time? Er OK.

If your PC is a decent spec already, then it's good for gaming for at least a couple years, and after that you either crank the graphics quality down for a bit, or progress immediately to gradual, piecemeal upgrading, maintaining compatibility with about 15-20 years of back catalogue and gaming evolution at any one time. 30 years, for the more compatible titles. and you can emulate pretty much any previous-gen platform you care to name, sometimes even current ones.

@Anonymous: in other words, what this guy said.

mind that i haven't kept my own one up to date as i srsly can't be bothered with the modern gaming scene when i'm still not up to speed on all the classics of the PS2/XBox1 gen. bumped up the ram and disc to make windows use more comfortable, but otherwise it's the same rig as 6 years ago. though that's largely because it's a laptop and so it's basically impossible. still more flexible and upgradeable than a console, but not the full fat experience.

plays everything upto and including the orange box quite nicely though. which puts it sort of on the Xbox1/360 cusp.

but, that's always how it was, and still seems to be for the people I know who are still PC gamers. all the show-offs with the cold cathode lit cases and water cooled quad-SLI cards are just that... ricers with too much money. a real gamer PC is a fairly ugly box that stays mostly hidden out of site, mid-high range CPU, decent amount of quickish memory, some kind of hard disk (if your HDD speed makes a serious impact on your gaming smoothness, you haven't got enough RAM), and a single decent video card, all dependent on how much money you have to spare. considering most people still wish to have a "real" PC in their lives for internet, media downloads, etc, you shouldn't consider the full system cost but how much extra it is vs a vanilla browsing client box... and it's only about as much as a console a few weeks after launch day, then.

@Anonymous: "and you can emulate pretty much any previous-gen platform you care to name, sometimes even current ones"

That's not really true at all. Dolphin, the GCN/Wii/Triforce emulator, is the only even remotely worth-while last/current-gen console emulator. PS2 emulators suck ass and even PSX emulators suck ass for the most part. As far as I know there is no Xbox emulator that works...

Unless your idea of playing video games is at 12fps with no sound. Then you can have the time of your life.

@urial: the fuck ancient PC are you using that can't get over 12fps in a PSX emulator?

i'll admit I haven't gone looking for ps2/xbox/wii emulators, but thats because i still have working ones in my lounge, so there's no point. but I've found functional ones for basically every system up to that breakpoint. including playstation, n64, dreamcast, GBA and the like. i assumed that in the better-part-of-a-decade since then, the state of the art might have moved on. there are iphone/pad and droid phone/pad emulators already after all, and the power of those machines is accelerating past that of the previous gen consoles and heading for the current ones. if not, well, that's a genuine surprise. maybe the prevalence of online play and the need to have verifiable accounts etc makes it more difficult?

as for them running at super slow speeds... huh. wonder why. i think my old laptop would have a decent go of keeping up with an x360 clock for clock (obviously not whilst trying to emulate it though), and it definitely exceeds the original's computing and rendering power...

@Anonymous: yes, well, which one, then?
stop taking the piss and answer the question.
"Atari vs NES" is like "C64 vs Sega".

@Anonymous: I said for the most part. It has nothing to do with my computer and a lot more to do with the fact that the PSX emulators are not really maintained or written very well at all. Obviously I was not referring to generations before that... My damn cell phone can run SNES emulators so I would hope computers wouldn't have a problem there.

Almost any newer computer would theoretically be able to "keep up with an x360 clock for clock" but clock speed is not why emulation is difficult... emulation to an entirely different instruction set regarding every possible instruction is why emulation is difficult. All current-generation consoles utilize Power Architecture but the Wii has such a weak and simple processor and gpu combo that writing an emulator, comparatively to the 360 and PS3, wasn't as difficult. We probably won't see working emulators for the other two for a fairly long time.

I do highly recommend Dolphin, though, if your Wii ever craps out. It works like a fuckin' champ. It would be even better if the community wasn't as cuntish as they are but at least they deliver a working product, haha.

@urial: okey dokes ... i do maintain i've had playstation games working quite happily on hardware that even my 6yo laptop would laugh at now though. that was before i got a psx of my own and was just borrowing copied discs off my brother...

wasn't the 360, or at least the original xbox supposedly based around a regular PC board and GPU? mebbe i've got that wrong, but i thought that was one of the things microsoft set down in the first place so it was easier to program for / port to & from. kind of like how the genesis was based on a 68k same as the amiga :p

@urial: and the 360 would be.....a pre-rendered cutscene on a dvd >_>

@Anonymous: Yeah, the original Xbox used a Pentium III and some custom nVidia GPU. The 360 uses a tri-core 3.2GHz PPC CPU called Xenon and a custom ATI GPU chipset called Xenos. It's got some fancy finagling that allows the 360 to output 4x FSAA and a bunch of other random graphical enhancements with no hit on the performance. That along with the encryption keys on the CPU itself are what I assume are the biggest obstacles to overcome for emulation aside from the PPC instruction emulation itself.

@urial: in which case, fair enough.

what they've basically done there is created an Apple Pippin 4 from an alternate timeline.