This demake is an additional game. Seems like it will just add to the energy load required to run a computer programs. Which I think is fine, frankly. Perhaps some people will play it instead of portal but even still there is the overhead of developing it. I guess if we cared about ecology we'd shut down more game servers faster.

To 'save the planet' you want as many people playing video games, watching TV, or arguing on social media as possible.

If they're doing those things, consuming digital entertainment (eventually powered by renewables), then they're not out in the real world, travelling around using fossil fuels, consuming physical products, using up physical resources and emitting CO2.

Pretty bleak future though.

Or simply less people, busy doing what machine can't, with a bit less free time to spare. It's as bleak if we put ourselves in the shoes of the humans who wouldn't exist, but not that bleak for the ones who would...

Our free time is likely dwarfed by the labor spent on inefficient means towards inefficient ends if we're going to this level of analysis though

You raise an interesting question: how many people would you be able to bus how far into nature to spend how long with zero electricity consumption to make it net-negative compared to the consumption incurred in the course of their habitual lives?

My naive orders-of-magnitude guess is ~20 people in a bus going ~100 miles (each way) would only need 2-4 days before the net goes negative.

It's kinda crazy how much compute is dedicated to streaming HD video or serving an endless scroll of Instagram.

Those people out in nature are likely to be doing physical activities, even if just walking, and those extra calories will need replenishing too

I was thinking the same - ecology. People need to have 3d Tetris with raytracing while there are millions of hours of old games to be played through. There are few titles that are avant-garde and IMO better in 3d, like GTA VC/SA, Minecraft is revelation of a sandbox game. But otherwise we don't need such good graphics and DLC, when we want story and playability. Recently we played with kids Pokémon fire Red - the world is huge and full of secrets. But I guess this only applies to me and my kids, because other kids I know (my brother's e.g.) don't like pixel games at all

While I agree with the sentiment, and it's awesome that a lower-specced version of the game exists...

> port [...] to consoles like Xbox original

Uuh, in the name of energy efficiency, let's not. My smartphone is much more powerful and has a much lower power consumption than these systems. My Steam Deck even more so, though it's higher-power than a phone.

Targeting energy-efficient, low power hardware should be the goal, not porting to inneficient obsolete HW, IMO (though it's pretty cool, and demonstrates that you can do a lot with little computing power).

Still, I agree that something that runs well on old commodity hardware can run well on most existing hardware, reducing the need for hardware upgrades.

But my point is, running ond old HW is probably counterproductive if you only value ecology. At best, you could emulate old HW with much more efficient modern HW, and integrate most of the system on a single low power chip.

> But my point is, running ond old HW is probably counterproductive if you only value ecology.

Do you have a calculation for that? It's not entirely clear that this is the case if you factor in that the old hardware already exists and new hardware needs to be produced.

I will try to answer later with actual math, though a commenter above did a rough estimate. I would think it pays back relatively quickly. Moreover, this approach cannot really scale as old hardware and parts is scarce, and using it at a larger scale would make it scarcer (due to more normal failures). That's if you look specifically at one kind of system, but I believe the real value is in making code portable across a range of low-power systems, including recent and old ones.

You're also looking at it from the perspective of not needing new hardware, but I already have both my phone and my Steam Deck.

Incidentally, I bought a Steam Deck in part because it was cheaper than a GPU upgrade for my desktop PC, while being more powerful and efficient than my current setup. My PC has been collecting dust as I boot the same disk on my Steam Deck, at 1/10-30 the power enveloppe. As an added benefit, I don't have to turn this high-power system on while it's 35C in the room.

Since i wrote from a more abstract perspective, a systemic perspective, i am looking in the perspective of Reducing the rate of consumption for computing, and i feel the electrical consumption factor is a case of missing the forest because we paid too much attention to the trees. Too many state and NGOs lean into that.

The actual math of concrete examples we can come up will not change the underlying fact that consumerism fueled by corporations will always trump over whatever perceived or real efficiency gains, and i do not agree it ''pays back relatively quickly'': even the favourable example of replacing an Xbox Original for a Steam Deck demanded at least 2000 hours for the electrical consumption to match the incorporated energy, but this still had to incorporate whatever is needed to reprocess the xbox as the new trash it became (recycling and discarting). What will the math look like in the future ? because over time, the tinier processors demand more and more energy and resources to manufacture, over the older ones. How many hours of use will the (presumably) more eletricity efficient PS6 demand to offset the PS5 it will be set to replace ?

It does not matter if the Steam Deck, which is subsidized by Steam like almost all consoles and because of that it is cheaper for the end-consumer, consumes less electricity, it still made you pretty much discard a fully functional and capable computer and buy another one, a computer that will degrade with time and have less lifespan, that could have continued in use with a technically possible upgrade.

I feel a computing culture that sees normal to discard functional computers every 3-5 years because of minutiae like slightly less eletricity consumption or even more facial hair in characters will never really be sustainable. Eletricity consumption is being solved with renewable energy, hidro and nuclear , but the rate of material and natural resources consumption, and pollution, of non renowable stuff, is not being tackled.

''running ond old HW is probably counterproductive if you only value ecology'' I could be wrong, but i think the opposite than you.

You are being reductionist, and only accounting for the factor of direct eletrical consumption during use, and not the total energy and natural resources spent during the equipments lifetime , specially its manufacturing (which i think is the real measure of ecological efficiency we should aim).

The old hardware was already produced, resources were spent and pollution and emissions were made, so it is a duty that we should use it as much as possible until irrepairable breakdown happens, and reduce our consumption of new stuff that would only replace it. Like your example of a new smartphone or new steamdeck replacing the old Xbox Original: it is almost certain that the electrical consumption gains would not compensate, in terms of total energy and resources spent and pollution made, the discarting of the original xbox (in fact, it would generate more waste that would need to be reprocessed, generating even more pollution).

Remember the 3Rs ? The 1st R is REDUCE, not ''replace stuff every 3-5 years to get slightly less eletric consumption''. It is kind of the point of the Permacomputing movement the OP mentioned: perma comes from perma-nent, make computers that last much longer lifespans than the current system. If people could repurpose old PS3s and Xbox for playing indies, and bigger games we demaked to it, people could keep using the stuff and buy less.

A Few texts for inspiration: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stop... https://www.iltascabile.com/scienze/sostenibilita-digitale/

> Like your example of a new smartphone or new steamdeck replacing the old Xbox Original: it is almost certain that the electrical consumption gains would not compensate, in terms of total energy and resources spent and pollution made, the discarting of the original xbox

Citation needed. We're talking about a huge difference in electrical efficiency.

The “embodied energy” of a new tablet like a Steam Deck is estimated at roughly 1 GJ, which is ~275 kWh. Original Xbox draws around 100W, so you’d need to play for more than 2000 hours to get anywhere close to the energy cost of creating a new device.

https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Embodied_energy#:~:t....

2000 hours is very possible, I have 1000+ hours in single games, let alone on a single device with many games.

That's 500 4-hour days of gaming. I imagine a large number of gamers would easily do more than that over a few years of console ownership, so I imagine a large percentage of devices did use more power than the embodied energy.

People ignore the energy and scarcity of the materials involved in creating the hardware. It's like recharging a car battery with power from a coal plant.

Charging a car with 100% coal fired electricity is about as dirty/clean as driving a hybrid. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myt... https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=bt2

The most coal intensive region of the US is 67% coal.

Instantaneously that may be true, but what about factoring in the environmental costs of manufacturing, including mining the raw materials and transporting the completed product (mass) to its final location?

Worst case, the EV is only slightly better. Typical to best case, the EV is 2-4X better.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...

You're now talking about the entire life cycle. I'd be interested to see how many EV drivers today are expected to keep their vehicles for that long before moving on to flashier, longer-range, etc. vehicles before they reach EoL.

Why wouldn’t the entire life cycle be the most important thing? As long as the used car market doesn’t become so saturated that good cars are getting scrapped, or everyone starts buying multiple cars just for fun, I don’t see how the duration of initial ownership matters. If anything, I thing a lot of people depend on the used car market. If everyone likes their EV so much that they never sell it and drive it until it dies, the used market will dry up and some people may not be able to afford cars.

As an anecdote, my car (ICE) was owned by someone else for about 6 months before I bought it used. I’ve been driving it for the last 16 years.

The typical modern gaming PC uses a lot more power than the original xbox. Yes maybe it's more efficient because it's doing "more", but in the end it's one person playing a game.

This isn't an issue. A lot of us who mod old hardware, etc... Once we get the project working, we'll play the game for like 10 minutes a few times a year at most lol.

Can't wait to fire up my 128mb ram modded og xbox today, to test the unreleased debug build of the need for speed game mvg dumpped yesterday. I'll probably play it for 10 minutes before I pack up the console again.

No, I think you miss the DNA of the point ;;

We should have a digital-DNA-Lineage-for [CODE, GAMES, APPS] etc...

Where in 100 years, we can follow a digital evolutionary time-table-mind-mad that routes us through all the code, apps, games that got us [HERE]..

And it will connect logic of thought and problemsolving through generations.

This is a thing we should through a (NON-HALLUCINATING) AI at?

Let me know when you've built that non-hallucinating "AI" and shown that it cannot hallucinate.

Serious q - do you think all AI hallucinates

> I imagine it would be much more straightforward to port pretty much any indie games to consoles like Xbox original onwards, PS3 onwards, Wii onwards, maybe Windows 7 average desktop and notebooks (lots of indies already use older direct x and are compatible with windows 7 ,

Not a game developer, but given the lack of ports between current gen gaming systems I would assume that it is not straightforward. Sure, a game engine will magically pump out your game for different backends but even supporting Vulkan and Metal results in much gnawing and mashing of teeth (and a lack of games on Apple hardware).

Then there is the developer ergonomics. I know that I hate having to write code to maintain compatibility for even 5 year old standards. Each GPU and game engine is also a unique clusterfuck of incompatibility and subtle bugs that crash the shit out of games. If you want to support that old hardware, you will need to test on the actual hardware. Why bother with all that when there is no money in it and your team just wants to move on from a project that already took 5 years of their lives to develop?

Forward compatibility is something I strongly agree with but backwards compatibility is a logistical nightmare.

Forward compatibility is promising. - The computing systems are kinda standardized now, with consoles and pcs using X64-86 architecture, Xbox using a optimized windows os, and PS4 (almost certainly PS5 too) running BSD. Industry standards would bridge the gap even more, like making open software mandatory (everyone just incorporates their code). More companies investing in FOSS like Vulkan instead of the proprietary ones would be helpfull too. - The proton software on Linux makes a compatibility layer between the game and a newer system, and you can choose an older version.

I think we could eventually just leave the ''XYZ Game of the Year'' v.2.1.4 and never touch it again, and future gamers would at most have to select the proton layer version and vulkan-directx-other game engine version of the game release time, and it could be automatically done in the instalation.

> PS3 onwards

By most accounts the PS3 was not fun to write software for due to its unusual specialized processing units.

The PS3 sucked. OTOH, targeting at most GL 2.1 for a game would be one of the best tools to avoid buying new machines.