What that doesn't mention is how much better the game looked when you ran it on something like a 3dfx Voodoo card. I remember when I upgraded from an S3 card to a Voodoo 3, the game suddenly had things like windshield glare and partially transparent water, and much higher texture resolutions.

Ah yes, the dreaded S3 Verge

It had excellent VESA support though. Ran any software-rendered hack you threw at it, no exceptions.

I had a Pentium III with S3 savage, the thing ran anything, I remember being pleasantly surprised when I could play hardware accelerated Need For Speed 4 for example..

3D-decellerator

Haha so true. I remember I had an S3 Virge DX back then, and it was actually slower to enable 3D 'acceleration' in the few games that supported the card, than using software rendering. It didn't add much if anything to the quality of the visuals either ;-)

S3's horrendous drivers cost me months of my life, trying to get XFree86 to run on a Toshiba laptop in about '95.

Now compare this with modern mobile devices which run slowly and can do a fraction of what PCs were able to do 15 years ago having 10x lower clock rates.

So much wrong, I don't know where to start.

1. Compare apples to apples. What could something the size of a phone do in 1998?

2. The current resolution of the iPhone 5 is 1280 x 2272. The game ran on 800x600 with a fraction of the colors,

3. That game sold for what... 35 bucks? Are you comparing what two developers make in a month and a half, selling for 2 bucks with a AAA budget game? Yes, an HTML5 game is going to be slower, but compare one of the top games for the mobile systems and the mobile game today is more impressive. Perhaps 'Need For Speed: Most Wanted'?

4. Clock Rate Isn't Everything. It never has been. Further, the equivalent Pentium 133 laptop is lasting 1.5 hours max with a battery the size of a half dozen iphones. Power matters.

5. Could a mobile-sized device, sans phone (FCC issues) be created that is tuned for speed instead of battery, with a lower grade resolution (compromise for battery and speed), that was faster? Sure. Would anyone buy it? Probably not. Engineering is about compromises.

And yes, I'd like to be able to use my computer as a general purpose device, but nobody has stepped up to the plate yet. I mean, we could start with a Cyanogen mod and build up from there, but it's a bigger effort than it looks.

But I'll tell you what, let's put it on the backlog. ;)

The iPhone 5s resolution is 1136 x 640. How did you arrive at exactly 2x those dimensions? Just curious.

Drank the retina Koolaid? I couldn't believe it myself when I started doing the math. The Nexus 5 has 1.5x the detail for each screen point compared to a Retina iPhone. The iPhone's @2x retina assets are outclassed (somewhat) by the @3x assets of a 1080p phone...

Haha, this had me so confused.

I was wondering if I had missed some amazing technological advancements. Still waiting for that resolution on standard widescreen lcd's.

Isn't the iPhone 5(s) resolution 1136 x 640? Unless you know about the upcoming ultra-retina display... ;)

You're right. 2048x1536 is the retina iPad resolution.

Still doesn't change the fact that 15 years ago "we"(as in, programmers, industry, whatever) were much, much more efficient with limited resources than what we are now. Some people consider it a good thing, some of us consider it a bad thing.

"were much, much more efficient with limited resources"

You are cherry picking which resources you care about. What about power consumption? What about heat? What about physical size? What about noise? I remember the fans in those old PC's, mine sounded like a jet taking off.

None of them are related to software or software bloat, or putting resources to good use.

This is a meme. Everything high quality happening on mobile is crazy resource constrained.

1-2 gb of ram is insane luxury compared to say, the Amiga which typically had 1000 times less - 512k or 1mb of main ram and the same amount of 'chip' ram (for video/audio processing).

I'm not a mobile device expert, but programmers don't have to think that much about 512k on an iphone, do they? On an Amiga it was often all you had for the entire system including the OS.

Yeah but the Amiga drove 640x256 at 16 colors (4 bits), so around 80kb. Contrast that with the newest iPhone which drives 640x1136 at 24-bit color, so around 2.08mb. This is 26x the number of pixels. Keep in mind you also have a networking stack and lots of semi-realtime sensor data.

Not to mention that the demands on the system in terms of features and performance are so much higher.

26x the number of pixels, but you have over 200 times the ram available and that's assuming your app only gets 100mb (and that AmigaOS takes up zero resources). The default Amiga had an 8 MHz, 16 bit processor which again is less than 100 times what's available now on an average device. I just can't see modern devices being construed to be nearly as resource restrained as personal computers from the 80s.

While it may in fact technically be a 'meme', I think a better word is 'myth'.

Well I consider my time a limited resource. In trade for my developer time I can use an extra 8MB of ram for a little html web game I am making I think it is okay.

"So much wrong, I don't know where to start."

There is nothing what so ever with that post.

It says "Now compare..." It is an instruction. You just followed it. So you proved that the post has nothing wrong with it.

Exactly. Yet every media out there says that "mobile gaming is the future - it will soon catch up with what the consoles and PC can do". Ha!

Are you saying that mobile devices aren't capable of playing games of the same graphical and technical complexity as a Windows 95 game? I assure you that isn't true.

No, what I'm saying is that you will never see an iPad displaying the same complex scene a 500W-PC with a double-SLI card has no problem of taking care of. There is and there will always be a large gap between what you can do in fixed based devices and mobile systems, because of their inherent design goals.

They certainly can but the input experience is shit and the piddly little screen gives you a headache.

Mobile gaming is ok for chopping ropes, throwing birds or cutting up fruit but I'd rather have a windows 95 game with a keyboard and a mouse myself.

Interactive gaming with VR? Maybe. Mobile gaming? I'll eat my hat when that happens.

While I agree that fitting 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag is not possible, which device's iteration/selection pressure is greater?

What's the difference between gaming 3 years ago on the desktop, vs the mobile platform?

I don't even enjoy mobile games usually, but to me it seems like the signs are written in the sand for anyone to see.

That's what you get when everything has to be implemented in JavaScript or else it's not hip enough to put on the internet.

Huh? My Galaxy S3 is noticeably more powerful than my Micron Pentium II system from 1998, in terms of specs as well as actual performance. The fact that it's running Android and not Win98 doesn't hurt.

Don't you think Win9x would _scream_ on your GS3 though? ;-)

We should do it: the Win9x on ARM project!

Win9x is not a portable OS. Because of its DOS and Windows heritage, the underpinnings are very much tied to x86 and would be difficult to port to ARM. (Although not as difficult as OS/2, which uses the dreaded ring 1.)

Whereas Windows NT has always been portable. Except that Microsoft has already ported NT to ARM.

Indeed, I realize this. My comment was mainly facetious, I admit. Porting DOS/Win98 would be totally silly anyway unless you needed a blue screen generator. Porting ReactOS would start to make sense, if anyone wanted that - say, there was a desire to run windows programs on modern mobile hardware without licensing fees (rendering farm? Most use cases I can imagine would be better served by Linux anyway). Otherwise... Emulation such has DOSBOX makes the most sense for anyone who desires to run legacy Win32 software.

Speaking as someone who lived through that period of time, I think anyone using Win9x would scream.

What 'modern' mobile devices are you using?

I'm actually pretty amazed with what my iPad and Android can render (considering the resolution/colors).

I raced cars and played footaball on the iPad. The experience is great.

I love this review[0] on Amazon:

>The system requirements are a bit steep, but if your computer can handle the game, you'll find this an extremely fun game to play.

[0]http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Monster-Truck-Madness-2-PC/p...

A 28.8Kbps Internet Connection used to be considered fast!

Optional: 28.8 or higher baud modem for head-to-head play For LAN play a local area network supporting either TCP/IP or IPX protocols is required Internet access required for internet play; connect time charges may apply Microphone for instantaneous voice communication during head-to-head play Graphics accelerator card compatible with the Microsoft Direct3D® API (for Windows 95 only)

Compatibles: Supports force feedback hardware compaticle with the Microsoft DirectInput® API (for Windows 95 only) Supports MMX technology Supports Pentium II processor platform with AGP

In a way, that modem might still be considered good: the head-to-head play meant that one player had their modem dial the other player's modem, so the link that was established was a direct 28.8k symmetric connection with no IP routers in between. As long as you weren't going long-distance, you would have sufficient bandwidth and latency that was good, not great, but very consistent because the PSTN cares about that in a way that ISPs don't.

I remember doing that but it was a shit. We didn't have mobile phones back then as a side channel so the outcome was basically designing a manual protocol in case of failure. This consisted of stuff like assigning who was responsible for calling who when it dropped and what to do when someone else in the house picked up a phone.

Um, yep. I remember being stuck on 14.4 back in the day.

Waiting for webpages to load... Well, it was like waiting for webpages to load on an edge connection. Waiting 2-3 min per page load, basically. 2 hours for a browser upgrade download, you know the ones chrome does in the background now... And it might not successfully download the first time. Ahh, those were the days. Napster could take 20min to download an MP3 and still corrupt it.

Oh man, I don't have a CD-ROM drive. Guess I can't play :(

Windows NT itself was sometimes a pretty awesome game back then :)!

I tried to install the demo and it failed on needing DirectX 5.2

Worked fine in Windows 8.1, just use compability mode and then this: http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide

TheGreatCodeholio is working hard to improve Windows compatibility in his DOSBox X branch.

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=31881

I actually played this game on a Pentium 60 with 8 MB of RAM. It ran pretty well if you turned down all the graphics settings.

"IRQ 5, DMA 1" anyone?

Oh god, the memories :|