Month: December 2023

A Rant: Sony didn’t need to ruin the PlayStation Classic, and it could have been great
Look at this nugget.

Ah, the PlayStation. Sony’s debut in the world of video game hardware thanks in no small part to a colossal fumble by the once and future kings Nintendo. It sounds like apocrypha, but the old legend is true and we have the proof, thanks to Ben Heck getting his hands on some prototype hardware. Once the final product was released, first in 1994 in Japan and 1995 most everywhere else, it rapidly turned the Nintendo/Sega duopoly into a bona fide three horse race, and would eventually lead Sony to beating Sega out of the market entirely, but that’s yet another story for another day. Maybe when I talk about my custom Dreamcast, we’ll go there.

Anyway.

Sony hit it out of the park with the original PlayStation, thanks to Ken Kutaragi’s choices to combine what Sony learned from the MSX with their early and thorough understanding of CD technology and his own experience working with Nintendo as far back as the early days of the Super NES. Did you know that Ken Kutaragi designed the SPC-700 sound chip for Nintendo for the SNES? Now you do! With all of that knowledge and experience wrapped into the PlayStation, it actually doesn’t come as much of a surprise that it was a hit. The lower MSRP compared to the Sega Saturn (not to mention being far, far easier to develop for), the included ability to play the then-still-nascent audio CDs, and Sony courting third-party developers out of the gate with extremely favorable terms had the PlayStation flying off the shelves, and by the end of 1999, it had become the best selling home console in history, and only trailed the Game Boy range for consoles as a whole.

It's real.
It’s real.
Thanks, Ken!
Thanks, Ken!
Remember these? Probably not!
Remember this?
Probably not!

Fast-forward to the late 2010s, and nostalgia is new-in-box, in stores now. Nintendo have dropped miniature, modern recreations of their NES and SNES, complete with built-in (emulated) games, recreated controllers, save states, and HDMI output, to massive hype and fanfare. Sony decides, reasonably, to get in on the same idea (as will Sega, SNK, and NEC, with the mini Genesis, Neo-Geo, and TurboGrafx-16 respectively over the coming years), and puts a plan together for a nostalgia-tinted celebration of the glorious 32-bit era. And there was very much rejoicing! Sony had already won over fans the world over by making not just the PlayStation 2 but also the PlayStation 3 backwards compatible with PS1 discs and memory cards. With the PSP and later the PS Vita, Sony would further support the PS1’s library by releasing emulated versions of games digitally through the PlayStation Store. Sony’s reputation for respecting the fans of their debut platform was unquestionable. Or so we thought.

When the first 5 of the planned 20 included games were revealed in September of 2018, the reception was… mixed. Three of them, Final Fantasy VII, Tekken 3, and Ridge Racer Type 4, made perfect sense. FF7 and Tekken 3 were the 2nd and 5th best selling PS1 games of all time, and Ridge Racer (between the original and Type 4) might not have sold as many copies but had just as loyal a following. The other two, Wild Arms and Jumping Flash, drew more confusion than anything, as both had fallen well out of the common canon for the PS1’s library. Neither is a bad title, just, they’re not the sorts of games people think about when they think PS1. But, that’s only the first 5, and you can’t expect them all to be bangers and classics, right?

Right?

Fuck yeah!
Hell yeah!
Riiiiiiiidge racer!!!
Wild huh???
Jumping what???

The final list dropped a month later, and the reaction went from lukewarm-leaning-positive to downright cross. Sony went from 2 games from the top 20 best sellers among the first 5, to 4 games from the top 20 best sellers among the entire final lineup. Only two more top 20 titles made the cut, those being Metal Gear Solid (#10 all time) and Resident Evil Director’s Cut (#17). Some of the other choices made perfect sense, like the inclusion of Rayman (#21) and Oddworld: Abe’s Oddyssee (#23). Both of those sold well over 3 million copies (which thanks to the PS1 selling around 100 million units, means we can just use percentages to estimate the saturation of the games in the market), meaning that most people nostalgic for the PS1 at least knew about them, if not owned them outright. Totally sensible. Syphon Filter (#52) makes an argument for inclusion off its stellar reception and status as the launching point for a long-lasting successful franchise. Not the worst pick, but hey, I had a copy of it as a kid, I’m one of those people nostalgic for it, and even if I wasn’t, it’s still a good game. We’re still making some sense.

What was far less sensible was the rest of the lineup. The next highest charting games to be included were Battle Arena Toshinden (#85) and Cool Boarders 2 (#87). I had never heard of Battle Arena Toshinden before despite having played multiple other Tamsoft games (and I’m not alone on either point), and Cool Boarders 2 was more famous for living in the shadow of a much more popular series about “boarding”. The only other included games that sold more than a million copies (i.e. 1% of the PS1’s audience) were Intelligent Qube (#100), Twisted Metal (#107), and the aformentioned Ridge Racer Type 4 (#111). That still leaves 8 games included that fewer than 1% of PS1 owners saw fit to purchase.

Oh, no.

I could go on further about how bad the included games list is, but honestly, I don’t feel like it, because pretty much every other game they included was included because it’s part of a successful franchise that got big long after it dropped, or because that game got a remake/port/etc that blew up later, which is pretty much the same reason with the serial shaved off. Not much else to say.

Instead, let’s get angry. I’m going to list off just a few of the bestselling games that Sony didn’t include. Gran Turismo and Gran Turismo 2. The Crash Bandicoot trilogy. The Spyro trilogy. The Tomb Raider trilogy. The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater trilogy. Right there, that’s 14 games that I had as a kid that all kick ass. That’s a PS1 core library, right there. And that’s excluding a lot of things from JRPGs to Hideo-games, Need for Speed to Parappa, and don’t get me started about MegaMan Legends.

Sony knows this. These games have been re-released on other PlayStation services, and nearly all are currently available (with the exception of THPS and Gran Turismo) right now as PlayStation Classics. Sony is selling these games now, and was selling these games in the same state as emulated files in their ecosystem when the PlayStation Classic launched.

Let me make absolutely certain I make this clear. On the day the PlayStation Classic released in 2018, one could have spent less money to get a dozen more iconic classic PlayStation games than what was included from Sony themselves, on a PS3 or PS Vita.

Oh, and that brings me to another point of annoyance, the price. The MSRP for the PlayStation Classic was $99.99. Yeah, that’s $5 per game, which sounds reasonable in the context of the PlayStation Store downloadable titles, but compare that to the NES Classic ($59.99, 30 games) or the SNES Classic ($79.99, 30 games), and Sony’s decision is baffling. If Sony did something radical with the hardware, maybe the price tag could be justified. But they didn’t. The internal specs are comparable to those of a Raspberry Pi 3, which was widely available at the time for around $35. Even if one were to go to a store like Micro Center, buy a full Raspberry Pi 3 kit, two basic USB controllers, and a 16gb microSD card for storage, they’d have spent less money for a more capable device.

Right, the controllers! Sony didn’t include a throwback to the original DualShock controller, or even its more primitive cousin, the Dual Analog controller. They included two USB-based replicas of the original, all-digital PlayStation Controller. No analog sticks, despite the bulk of the games included supporting them.

Analog with rumble!
Analog sticks!
Yikes!

But wait, it gets worse! 8 of the 20 games included were actually the PAL versions, not the NTSC versions. If you’re unfamiliar, as TV went colour in the 1950s and 1960s, two different standards for colour broadcasting were developed. (There’s also the Franco-Russian SECAM which is a whole other story but it doesn’t matter here, I’m just pedantically defending against other pedants). NTSC was created for the North American market and later got exported to Japan, whereas PAL was a European standard from the start. The details and differences don’t matter much here, except that the refresh rate for the screen and the inherent frame rate of the game are both derived ultimately from the root frequency of local AC power. In most NTSC regions, the AC frequency is 60Hz, which leads (thanks to some very strange and fascinating math) to an inherent analog refresh rate of 59.94Hz, and timing built around a 30fps framerate. In PAL regions, the AC frequency is usually 50Hz, which gives us a 50Hz analog refresh rate and a framerate of 25fps. For some scenarios with gaming, the games were re-compiled to run faster so that the 25fps gameplay on PAL hardware wouldn’t feel slower, but most weren’t. And for those 8 games on the PlayStation Classic, they’re running at 83.3% speed, making them feel sluggish and laggy. All of these games had native NTSC versions, and on an emulator going through HDMI output, there is literally no need to use the PAL versions at all. There’s no more analog signal or processing going on here, it’s all purely digital. This is extremely, confusing and frankly unacceptable.

It’s also not even the only reason why games feel sluggish on the thing. Sony’s software is running a version of the open-source emulator PCSX-ReARMed, a perfectly cromulent choice, although many features like rewinding or network play, or most of the tweaks and settings used on similar hardware (like the aformentioned RasPi3) are absent. This has led to the community finding ways to get better performance and more features out of the device using custom firmware, something that shouldn’t be functionally required for a product with a $100 MSRP.

And yet, I bought one. Why? Because this thing flopped so hard that within months it was floating around for $30, before a final price cut to $20 at some retailers. I paid $25 at Nebraska Furniture Mart, and yet I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth from the stupid nugget. It’s one of two of my 7 classic mini consoles owned (NES, SNES, Genesis, TG16, Neo-Geo, Commodore 64, and this) that isn’t currently wired into my overkill home entertainment center, mainly because I haven’t been assed to get the thing modded and happy. I’m also planning to stick some extra cooling on the primary SOIC (System-on-a-Chip, combo of CPU and GPU and other things into one chip) as I’ve heard that a basic-ass Raspberry Pi heatsink can make it even happier once it’s modded.

Back to the central point of this rant. Sony knew these things when they developed this product. They knew they had the licensing rights to digitally distribute much more iconic classic games as they were selling and distributing them at the time on other platforms. They knew what games people most often paid to download. They had the NTSC versions, and they had the staff with more knowledge of PS1 emulation on hand to make something better.

And they didn’t.

And it flopped.

And it’s Sony’s own damn fault.

The Techronomicon: Adventures in Nuggeteering Part I

Well hello there, oft-neglected personal site I’m still paying for. It’s been, what, two years and change since the ThinkPad T530 project post? Yep, that’s long enough. More accurately, it was long enough long enough ago that I’m wasting time with this “bit” for an “introduction”. Time to finally shake the rust off and get back on my bullshit.

When I did the T530 project, I knew it was going to be a thing that had approximately a negative chance to end with just one laptop – given that it had already escalated to two during the making of that post. It felt good to get my hands metaphorically and literally dirty under the hood of some ThinkPads, and just the act of taking apart and tweaking old laptops brought back a lot of nostalgia to some of the utter nonsense I lugged around in my teenage era. When most of my friends at the time were rocking netbooks or MacBooks (the two classes circa 2010), I had beasts with Pentium CPUs, IDE hard drives, single cores, and sometimes even batteries. Trash, really. Since that time, I’ve gotten to be a both MacBook-Toting App Developer, and also a real human normal laptop person (allegedly), but I never got to give netbooks a spin during their heyday.

For the unenlightened, Netbooks are (were?) a category of subnotebook (read: tiny laptop) popular from around 2007 through to around 2013 or so. The idea behind the netbook is very much of-its-era, in a time before smartphones became ubiquitous. Netbooks offer an internet-capable device with rather solid battery life in a lightweight package. They usually sport lower-spec, lower-power, and lower-price hardware to achieve this, which helped give them a major advantage in schools. A laptop that’s perfect for doing homework, for $500 or less, was extremely attractive to parents and teachers alike. If this sounds like a ChromeBook, you’re not wrong. ChromeBooks are the direct successor to the Netbook, carrying forward the same ideas, only with a larger variety of sizes, and actually taking the bold step of switching from a full-fat operating system (usually Windows or Linux for Netbooks) for the ultra-light webapp-only Chrome OS. As a result, my thoughts on ChromeBooks are complicated, but that’s a much longer story for another day, and I’ll need to acquire one and actually use it first before passing judgemement. But I digress.

My first properly-hands-on interaction with netbooks came not in their heyday but a decade later, when I found among the e-waste piles a Dell Latitude 2110. This absolute beast, originally released in 2009 for a whopping $389, rocks a single-core, single-thread Intel Atom N470 that even at the time was considered to be slower than dirt. Compared to the lowest-spec MacBook of the time, it boasts around 1/5 the performance for around 1/2 the price. Not great. That said, it was an computer for less than $500 new. Its 10.1 inch, 1024×600 screen can best be described as a 10.1 inch 1024×600 screen, the original storage was an 80gb spinner, and it’s hard-capped at 2gb of DDR2 memory. The keyboard is extremely cramped, the trackpad even moreso. It’s a piece of junk. And I love it dearly.

The Nugget in Question

I know you’re thinking right now, what can a laptop like this actually do? The answer won’t shock you; not much. It’s long-obsolete in multiple ways and orders of magnitude slower than even a budget smartphone. But also, it’s still able to do far more than it reasonably should, like run modern versions of 64-bit Linux, something that even I didn’t think was possible when I first found it. This thing has actually been kicking around my junk heaps for years, spending most of its life as a decorative object on a shelf in my office, until I decided to actually give it a go and get my Nuggeteering on.

Views of my office from The Before Times
The ThinkPad 380D as featured in the last post, along with the 2110

A brief sidebar: what is nuggeteering? Nugget engineering, using tech skills to get the absolute most out of nugget electronics. And what’s a nugget? I’ll let DankPods explain that for you. In essence though, it’s anything (electronics, cars, instruments, etc) that was never actually all that good, but was still “usable”. Sometimes that word gets stretched a bit (or extremely) thin and pulled narrow, but doing something with a laptop that shouldn’t be able to do anything is extremely, extremely fun.

Back to the Latitude 2110, or as I christened it, “NugBook”. Powering it up for the first time, hearing that rusty-old spinning idiot hard drive screech to life, and seeing the screen come to life, was magical. This thing shouldn’t do anything. I’m surprised the capacitors haven’t all either long-since leaked or gone on strike the second I connected it to power. Imagine my further surprise when I discovered that the battery was completely and totally fine. Like, 80ish-percent of its listed capacity after over a decade. That never happens, and in fact, a cooked battery is the most common discovery with any old laptop I acquire. So, with a good battery, everything seeming functional, and enough spare parts to restore just about anything, I set about reviving the NugBook and dragging it to new heights.

First thing first was getting the bastard opened up. On the bottom, I spied 4 conspicuous Philips screws. “Perfect!” I think to myself, “opening this is going to be so easy.” So I remove the 4 screws, and attempt to pry the bottom cover off. Nothing happens. I go at it with a guitar pick. Still nothing. I bust out my metal spudger used for cracking open iPods. Nope.

Turns out, this thing opens like an idiot, and the 4 screws in the bottom can be ignored for a hot minute in the disassembly.

Instead, one is supposed to start by removing the battery, and then removing two hidden screws underneath it that hold the keyboard down. One then takes a long stabby thing and pokes through the screw holes to push the keyboard out. Then, gotta be careful to not pull the keyboard too hard once you have it popped, as the flip-up FFC connector is fragile. Observe:

Once the keyboard is out, note the 3 more screws underneath it. These are the ones that actually hold everything together, and need to be removed before the 4 bottom screws do anything useful. But, once these 7 final screws are out, the laptop’s bottom cover easily slides off, revealing the glorious guts inside.

This, by the way, is the “after” photo, if you didn’t immediately notice the SSD. But, for the purposes of making this an interesting narrative, let’s just look past this as I run through what’s been done. First up, out came the spinning rust and in went a basic SATA SSD, of which I keep a stash on hand for random stuff like this, as even a cheap, bog-standard SSD will knock the pants out of any mechanical hard drive for speed and power usage, plus when I say cheap I really mean cheap. I’ve gotten multiple of these for under $10, and for some as little as $4 on eBay or in other random deals. Usually these simple ones are 60, 120, maybe 240gb, enough for an OS and some software but not so big that it feels wasted in a nugget, and cheap enough that the project expense won’t break the bank. Next up was upgrading the stock 1GB stick of DDR2 ram to 2GB, the maximum that’s supported not just by the laptop’s motherboard but by the CPU architecture itself. I also repasted the CPU, something I insist on doing every single time I open an old laptop for the first time, even though it’s not the most necessary, but because it’s technically best practice, and also feels like the right thing to do.

Hardware-wise, that’s it. We’re left with the fastest, most optimized Atom N470 netbook possible. Everything else we want to do will need to be done with software to make the most of these paltry specs.

The choice of operating system was a difficult one. While the Atom N470 is technically a 64-bit cabable CPU, it’s only just barely, to the point where a lot of modern software flat out refuses to run due to missing instruction sets. A lot of that is due in no small part to its age – it is, after all, a CPU from 2010 – but that alone doesn’t explain it as some of the Intel Core CPUs from the same era hold up far better in the current day. And here lies the unique quirks of Netbooks and Nuggeteering: Netbook CPUs don’t work the same as regular laptop CPUs. They’re cut down to run at lower voltages and lower wattages, to achieve that battery life over a comparable laptop while putting out less heat (since wattage is both the electricity consumed and the heat expelled), at the rather substantial cost of performance. There’s no one smoking gun that they remove, either, it’s a lot of corners cut and “minor” features removed which all add up to a very slow experience.

But I digress. We’re talking about operating systems. When this thing was brand new, Windows 7 was still in its first lap around the sun, XP was at peak juggernaut status, Vista was, well, Vista, and 2010 was set to be the year of the Linux Desktop for real this time. That helps us narrow down things to try installing on here. XP is always a strange giggle to fire up again, moreso given that my muscle memory of XP is more-or-less gone at this point, but that also means that dealing with fiddly laptop drivers (read: hell) in an OS that hates connecting to the internet. And in my recent experience doing some legacy shenanigans, Windows 7 is dramatically easier to get going with (thanks to some extremely dedicated nerds backporting patches), in some ways even moreso than when it was new. But I’ve done plenty with Windows 7, even running it as a primary OS either at home or at work until around the pandemic, so it’s not nostalgic so much as it’s what I think of when I think about Windows.

I guess that leaves Linux, then. And it’s not a bad choice here; the Latitude 2110 (and many of the Latitude 21XX series netbooks) offered Linux installed from the factory, usually Ubuntu. In fact, I recall several of my friends in high school rocking Ubuntu on netbooks from Acer or Asus or Toshiba back in the day, and I myself first got serious about using Linux around the same time. Linux it is, then.

Next question: which distro? No, shut up, I’m not installing Arch on a netbook… yet. I already did an Arch install on my X230. And no, not Gentoo either. I’m having fun with old laptops, not torturing myself. The choices are going to be restricted to the Greater Deb-untu ecosystem. Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc. These have the right combination of easy-enough to install, with light desktop environments available out of the box, strong support for random hardware (especially wireless networking!), and plenty of documentation online for solving any weird problems that pop up.

Narrowing things further is the desktop environment, and out of the gate, I’m ruling out my beloved KDE because it’s just not going to be happy with only 2gb of RAM. GNOME is out too not just because it’s hungry for RAM now too, but also because current GNOME sucks. This project is likely going to require something even lighter than the normal lighter options, where stock XFCE might be pushing things.

My first attempt at booting a live installer is Debian XFCE to see what happens, and it’s slow. It takes more than 10 minutes to finish booting into the live environment. This is that 2GB of RAM crying out in pain while this silicon Frito converts electrons into lukewarm keyboard keys. This thing is not happy. I hard reboot to the Debian Installer to try and conserve resources, but it’s still a challenge. I’m running off ethernet in my old office (a windowless former conference room lovingly christened “The Bunker”) to try and get an OS installed as easily as possible, but it’s a slideshow. I get to the actual meat of the installer, give it literally hours to try and finish, but when I leave to catch the bus to my series of 3 trains home at 5:30, it’s still running. I leave for the weekend, and on Monday morning, I discover that the NugBook has hijacked every DHCP lease and IP address for the building, knocking everyone offline in the process. Oops!

After helping m’colleague un-fuck the DHCP problem I caused, I try firing up the installed OS, and find that surprisingly, it’s OK. It’s not as bad as I expected it to be, it’s usable, it gets online, but the idle RAM usage is high and the desktop environment lags too much to not annoy me. I’m used to slow tech. I love slow tech. I love slow tech more than I reasonably should, and evangelize it to others as I think it’s legitimately better to use. But this copy of Debian with XFCE is not doing it for me. Too much of a headache, it’s not fun. Time to find something better.

Another quick tangent, on why it’s good to use slow computers: Slow computers build patience and character. Instant gratification, whether through shopping on Amazon Prime, streaming media with Netflix or whatever, high speed mobile data connectivity, any of it, it causes impatience and breaks the brain’s ability to cope with boredom. Having to wait for your computer to do things, whether its starting up or opening Discord, this is good. Same reason why I rarely use instant streaming. I’d rather acquire and organize any TV or movies or music I want, with the deliberateness and consideration that it takes, than click a button and stream anything immediately. Faster isn’t always better, and instant is rarely good. If you don’t believe me, take a break from immediacy for a week, and see how much more you appreciate everything you do. If you’re really feeling bold, swap a laptop for your smartphone when you’re doing things around the house. Having to take the time to get a laptop out and open and turned on, you’ll spend far more time doing something fulfilling or meaningful, and less time doomscrolling. Trust me. We used to live like this, and we lived happier. I’m already happier putting my phone down and rocking nugget laptops instead.

Back to the OS hunt, and for this, I turn to one of the best websites for anyone looking to play around with Linux: DistroWatch.com. This place has been around seemingly forever, it’s filled with information on nearly every Linux distribution to ever exist, and has – by far – the best search function for finding the right distro, even including BSD, Solaris, and other even weirder things! Using this happy little tool, I punch in OS Type = Linux and Category = Netbooks, and mash go. Out pops five results: Puppy Linux, Bodhi Linux, Lubuntu, wattOS, and Runtu. Puppy and Lubuntu, I’m already well familiar with. Puppy is fantastic and delightful. It runs on actual garbage (I’ve done it!), can exist entirely from a live USB without requiring an install, and is the fastest and snappiest OS I’ve ever used, ever. It’s extremely limited in what it can do for a permanent OS, but for what it is, it’s amazing. Not super suitable for this project, but thought I should mention. Lubuntu is a flavour of Ubuntu using the LXQt desktop environment, and would be extremely promising, if not for a grudge I have with Ubuntu’s mothership. If this post weren’t already sufficiently rambly and verbose, I’d dive down that tangent, but that one can be saved for a latter day. That said, the grudge also rules out Runtu (which is also primarily aimed at Russian language support anyway), leaving us with two things to try: Bodhi Linux and wattOS.

Bodhi gets first crack, and I go through my normal process of downloading the ISO, dropping it on a bootable USB, firing it up, and… nothing. The thing gets stuck perpetually loading. I try again with different versions and different ISOs from the website and the best I get is an extremely glitchy live experience that seems to not properly recognize the laptop bits of the NugBook, namely the trackpad. Next!

wattOS is interesting. At its core, it’s a stripped down version of good ol’ Debian running LXDE desktop, designed to be as efficient and simple and fast as possible. And it is! Not only does it boot pretty quickly, it feels pretty good to use! Since it’s Debian based, that means bodging in random nonsense works just as it would in Debian or Ubuntu or my good friend KDE Neon, so signs are promising. And yet. I start using it more heavily, watch the RAM usage climb, and start to think “we can go lighter!”. So, back to DistroWatch. This time, instead of Netbook specific, we’re going for Old Computer specific.

Right away, I find antiX, a distribution that prides itself on running on Pentium III machines from the 1990s with 256mb of RAM. Perfect. antiX achieves this by using extremely streamlined window managers rather than a full desktop, allowing for a lot of mix-and-match configuration to get it dialed in. I fire it up, and sure enough, it’s great, it’s actually fast on the NugBook, and this laptop has become pleasant to use. It’s still slow browsing the web (or more accurately, attempting to), and trying to get Discord to work on it led to me getting API rate limited, but it does in fact work. Last thing to do is to make it mine with a bit of customization.

Perfection.