I also love the feel of using these old systems, but I wonder how much of it is also to do with the physical experience.
Do you think you would get a similar or diminished experience with e.g a raspberry pi and a little LCD screen etc that booted straight into a minivmac emulator? ... I must admit I get a sense of satisfaction from turning on certain old electronics, like the resonating "clung" of the e transformer in my amplifier when I flip the switch, so maybe that's all part of it, the sense of an appliance, something less fallible, and also the absence of all those layers of complexity under the emulator.
I’m really not sure honestly. I think there is something to be said about having the real thing, but I’m not really convinced in the physical hardware over emulation debate. I get the same enjoyment in emulated SNES games as I did as a child on a real SNES for example.
In this case? I enjoyed saving the Mac, fixing it, making a few minor upgrades along the way. Apple hardware and software integrates so well together and I think there’s a lot of reason to have the whole package. That said when using it I’m looking primarily at the screen alone.
I think it’s really subjective and depends on the person ultimately.
> Do you think you would get a similar or diminished experience with e.g a raspberry pi and a little LCD screen etc that booted straight into a minivmac emulator?
With vintage hardware, you are constrained by what the machine can do. With emulation, you are constraining what the machine can do. It does make a difference. To give you an example of what I mean:
I collected vintage hardware in my university days. It was a time when you could get something like a Mac IIfx for next to nothing and still expect it to work. Well, crunch time came and I found that I was getting far too distracted. A vintage Mac provided an ideal work environment since it was great for preparing technical documents and didn't have all of the distractions of the Internet. Boot it into System 6 with Multifinder disabled, and it reduced the distraction of other software installed on the machine. Doing something similar with an emulator simply would not have been as effective. It is too easy to escape the sandbox in a multitude of ways.
Is this a physical differentiation (i.e. based upon the capabilities of the hardware) or a psychological one? I really don't know and I really don't know if the distinction matters. The outcome is the significant part, and that outcome suggests physical hardware does make a difference.
For me it's not so much any of the physical properties of the machine in question (though those can be nice in their own way), but more of an intangible sense of "realness" that's difficult to attain with an emulator. It may just be placebo effect but I think that long time computer users can probably pick up on subtle differences, and that likely shapes the experience more than is often thought.
Certainly, pulling out my PowerBook G3 Pismo is a significantly different experience than firing up SheepShaver or qemu_ppc running the same operating system.
> an intangible sense of "realness" that's difficult to attain with an emulator.
I wonder if this is due to input latency, because no matter how good the emulator, input devices have gotten waaay slower due to all of the layers in between, before even getting to the emulator... unfortunately it's not really something you can throw money at with modern computers.
> PowerBook G3 Pismo
I owned one of those, that thing is capable of frying an egg for real!
Personally: the lower the “action to result” latency, the more compelling and tactile something is.
We all know about the sub 100ms “golden zone”, but if something is ~10ms (custom hardware with optimized software) it’s significantly more real to me, and if something is <1ms it’s almost irresistible.
Like; 100ms is the barrier to entry and it goes up logarithmically from there.
Totally agree, ~100ms feels really subpar to me, but unfortunately seems to have become the status quo, most input devices seem to end up on the order of ~10s of ms usually closer to the 100 end by the time they affect pixels... every wired mouse i try on a modern machine and can whip from side to side and see the latency clearly, like a beat in my head, if the first beat is my hand movement, and I can clearly "hear" the second distinct beat of the computer responding, which means it's clearly perceptible... if you can perceive it in that extreme then it means it affect normal use more subtly, giving a comparably laggy feel that most people will never put their finger on.
From everything I've read it seems that this is just not going to be solved any time soon, because the latency is distributed across so many layers, each contributing a little more. Even going beyond the input bus the older computers are lower latency in terms of how long it takes for a pixel to move on the screen based on the new coordinate. It's a shame this isn't something that can be solved even in a niche way without making completely different hardware... I guess an FPGA could possibly come close, but only if you also abandoned USB input devices and had a custom (simpler) input bus.
I was so happy to see John Carmack leading the charge a few years ago, using Oculus to push for low-latency and high frame rate.
I think it’s because of him and others like him that we now have 240Hz displays, talk about OLED pixel responsiveness being much higher, and real industry progress around reducing the latency throughout the total pipeline.
I remember a time not that long ago when people were trying to argue that “the human eye sees at 60fps”. We’ve thankfully come a long way since then and I am hopeful for a future where we finally get lower latency than the old tech.
Do you think you would get a similar or diminished experience with e.g a raspberry pi and a little LCD screen etc that booted straight into a minivmac emulator? ... I must admit I get a sense of satisfaction from turning on certain old electronics, like the resonating "clung" of the e transformer in my amplifier when I flip the switch, so maybe that's all part of it, the sense of an appliance, something less fallible, and also the absence of all those layers of complexity under the emulator.