Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   tom jennings (tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jun-2025 10:12:15 JST tom jennings

   in reply to

   • Wintermute_BBS :verified: ⛔
   • F4GRX Sébastien
   • ティージェーグレェ

   @teajaygrey @f4grx @Wintermute_BBS

   There's a genuine desire for something that feels -- is -- authentic, I'm just not certain where that 'authenticity' is located.

   I know what I want in computing machinery is an honest, approachable, KNOWABLE, hackable, social experience.

   And obviously, emulation is intentional fakery, lol, but it's been there literally from the start. Machines posing as other machines, and Turing's 1950 story (often misunderstood, it's about forcing a MAN to decide if the remote-thing is MAN or WOMAN; taken as metaphor for machine vs human, persecuted, out of the closet, gay man turing pulled a 'fuck you' in plain sight -- read the original in it's full length).

   Computers themselves fake any process you can code up.

   But that's definitely not the locus of the sensation of inauthenticity. We have so much deceitful fakery around, who wants more?

   I (ME! NOT YOU!) am comfortable with the eZ80 fakery well, because I fkn wrote it. But it's all there to see... and a feature of firmware in a Teensy is that it is not variable, not subject to shit sneaking in from the net, it's ersatz microcode, it's unchanging, its firmware, which is just complicated hardware.

   Also it's just more reliable than a 50 year old machine, and a tiny fraction of the cost.

   And the glory that is DR's 1970s code is quite still there. It's just so spare and attractive! And reliable! It's GOOD CODE.

   You can halt it with the reset button, poke at it with the ROM debugger, type "go" and it continues.

   The "best" CP/M machine I ever had was this ugly rack system Debbie Orbach labelled "Fido, office computer" (where the name came from). It had a BASF 24 MB, three platter, voice coil drive, with an SMB interface and Konan DMA controller. It was wonderful! And complex and horribly unreliable, the BASF drive was a piece of shit, and the Konan a two-board S100 monstrosity.

   Which parts of that do I want today? lol

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     ティージェーグレェ (teajaygrey@snac.bsd.cafe)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jun-2025 10:12:17 JST ティージェーグレェ

     in reply to

     • Wintermute_BBS :verified: ⛔
     • F4GRX Sébastien
     I found it vaguely hilarious (mostly ironic) that some of the most heated online discourse about "real" vs "emulation" has been within Amiga communities.
     
     It's as if they missed that when the Commodore Amiga was demonstrated at that black tie gala event with Blondie and Warhol? It was also shown emulating IBMPC software.
     
     Like, before you could even BUY one, one of the apparently selling points was emulation.
     
     For a while, Amax II blew my mind, because it ran the Macintosh software from my parents' computers on my friend's Amiga faster and in color.
     
     I've read from some (though never owned one myself) that the fastest MC68k era Macintosh was an Amiga (presumably one of those 1337 A4000 systems which shipped with MC68060s), with an Emplant board. I have no reason to doubt that.
     
     I mean, I get it, I want a "real" Amiga (and I will not part with my Amiga 1200 and wonder what happened to my Amiga 2000). I have tried MorphOS on PPC G4 PowerBooks and it is not the same.
     
     But, I would also be totally into a CPU upgrade. Sure there are MC68060 upgrades for my Amiga 1200. There are even vintage PPC upgrades (that cost an arm and a leg) that I would probably enjoy! But, in more recent years folks have come up with all sorts of FPGA Amiga CPU accelerators (what is a 68080? I don't know, but it's apparently FAST) and even more recently some ARM based CPU accelerators. Alas, I am not made of money, but a hot rodded Amiga, even if not "period" to me, still seems as if it would be friggin awesome, regardless of how "real" it is? Also, presumably such after market things are removable and it can be returned to stock.
     
     These are microcomputers after all, swapping engine blocks in cars is a lot more effort based on the mass and tooling required; with price points to reflect it.
     
     Similarly, if someone, someday, comes out with an Amiga laptop? I would be ALL OVER THAT! Even if it were "emulating" some things. Well, if I could afford one. Which, is dubious.
     
     CC: @f4grx@chaos.social @Wintermute_BBS@oldbytes.space
     
   • Embed this notice
     tom jennings (tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jun-2025 10:12:18 JST tom jennings

     in reply to

     • Wintermute_BBS :verified: ⛔
     • F4GRX Sébastien

     @f4grx @Wintermute_BBS

     I think you both mean, a vintage chip in 40 pins. But isn't it mostly about it everything not the CPU? The physicality of floppies, the sounds, tactility, ...?

     If it was a V20 in the box, would you know or care?

     Authenticity is an ideology not physics...

     I understand your objections, I think. At least to some point. But I "can't have" a cpm machine from 1978. In 2025 they're awful, or insanely expensive. Etc. Oh I'm not saying "my" features overcome these things, or make anything authentic. They do not.

     But having lived through and worked through that era on a number of them current machines, to me, personally, this thing creates important parts of that eras aesthetics.

     Clearly ymmv. But this whole area is really interesting, "what is real"!

   • Embed this notice
     F4GRX Sébastien (f4grx@chaos.social)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jun-2025 10:12:19 JST F4GRX Sébastien

     • Wintermute_BBS :verified: ⛔

     @Wintermute_BBS @tomjennings yes.