I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans.
Pretty different, actually. You don't have to worry about possible malware, and you get to support the developers of games you like (aka "vote with your wallet"). Also even if you get your license revoked it's not such a big deal as in other stores, where in some cases they may even delete the game from your devices remotely, without warning. The offline installer is a guarantee for you as a consumer.
Malware is easy to avoid if you know where to download from and if you engage in the herculean task of uploading the .exe to something like virustotal.com in case of any doubts. Not like it matters much anyway seeing how there are examples of GOG games using cracks from the internet anyway.
Supporting developers is a weak argument considering that GOG's claim to fame is that they're selling old games where the development studio no longer exists or has been bought out by a corporate entity like EA.
Revoking my license isn't a big deal? I paid real money for the game.
The offline installer is about as much of a guarantee of anything as a pirated ISO is.
Am I the only one thinking that 1.7x is a very weird way of saying "70% more"? It's even wrong since, like other comments point out, 1.7x MORE would in fact be 2.7 times as much. Which is not what the bug numbers say.
We may be facing a grim situation in a few years because of this. Right now most consumer-grade storage is flash memory, and all of it suffers from this problem. SSDs, pendrives, SD cards, Compact Flash... Apparently games for the Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita are already suffering from this, and people losing photos in faulty SDs is hardly news.
I think what the author means here is that doing prep work is useless if you don't follow on it. No amount of investigation, planning or organization is going to be worth anything until you finally apply it to do the actual core of the thing.
A long interview with ZSKnight, creator of the awesome ZSNES (one of the first SNES emulators). The interviewer is Zophar, host of the well known Zophar's Domain, classic site for emulation and romhacks. So 2 retro legends here!
Things like Borland C and VB/WinForms really do take me to a simpler time. There was joy in being able to write simple programs very fast, in a more intuitive way, without needing to use browsers or frameworks or writing shaders to do the simplest things. Current systems are more powerful and versatile for sure, but for a teenager curious for coding they are a much less welcoming environment in a lot of ways. The ever growing amount of technologies you need to learn now does not help either.
Another aspect of the sheer number of technologies that you have to use is that you can’t do very much as a solo developer. It introduces a social aspect. You must work as part of a team. Especially when you have a public facing website or large scale. So the field is less appealing for someone who is a typical introvert. The types of personalities are completely different compared to those from the mid-90s or before.
I was talking about this with a friend earlier this week. The people who work in software these days seem much more extroverted and outgoing than the 'introverted nerd' stereotype from the 90s.
This is also due to the popularisation of computers, the internet and internet culture.
Everyone and their aunts now are into computers, and one in x is a software "engineer". Back in the day, it was only the hardcore nerds that were attracted to these things :)
VB6 was a revelation to me, coming from C and C++ at the time. It was so much easier and still plenty performant for the kinds of little business applications I was building at the time.
It used a language that few know and that has little local knowledge and support. It uses its own widgets and conventions to be cross platform instead of using native controls. These things are real downsides.
Maybe a good idea for you would be to have a few cards per system (like: SNES plaftormers, or Game Boy RPGs). Or even just 1 card per system: SNES card, Game Boy card, etc. with the full catalogue. There would still be wasted space, but much more practical.
Not saying you are wrong about that, but if you don't know about 90s console gaming and you only used the XBox as media center you are likely not the target audience for this project anyway.
