245: RGB Has Gone Too Far

07/28/24 • 67 min

Q&A time! The last episode of July sees us discussing topics such as turning a childhood computer into a VM, mandatory open source software in government institutions, the strange and continuing ubiquity of 3.5" card readers, building your own private television channel, the death of corporate email, how we fed our early tech obsessions growing up in rural areas, and more.

The non-Euclidean Doom video we mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZSFRWJCUY4

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The non-Euclidean Doom video we mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZSFRWJCUY4

Previous Episode

244: Otaku Christmas

We're putting the time machine back into service again this week with another magazine review, this time of Next Generation issue 36 from December 1997. Notably, this was the issue when the venerable thinking-person's game magazine first declared the PC the best place to play games, along with an in-depth assessment of the N64, PlayStation, and Saturn's places in the market. Plus, we also run through a whole bunch of other interesting material, including an early call for an independent game development scene, a look at some entry-level mid-'90s game dev tools and early Dreamcast development kits, the surprisingly silly origins of Gran Turismo, a review of Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and a bunch of other stuff. Check the show notes for a link to the issue!

Follow along with the magazine here: https://archive.org/details/NextGeneration36Dec1997/mode/2up

Next Episode

246: The Guy-in-Chicago Problem

Matchmaking: it's hard. Wait, not the online dating kind (well, maybe that too) but the kind where you have to match a bunch of different players with different hardware and different geographic locations together over high-speed Internet and let them have fun in a game together. Prompted by Activision's release of a white paper about Call of Duty's skill-based matchmaking methodology, this week we dig into the technical and sociological ins and outs of creating a rewarding online experience for players, from server types to hosting heuristics, player behaviors, ranking types, and a bunch more.

Activision's COD white paper about matchmaking: https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/CallofDuty_Matchmaking_Series_2.pdf