The progress of technology

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Gizmodo lists things on sale, daily. In the iPhone Apps section, something caught my eye:

and I had a little bit of a nergasm. (It also didn’t hurt that I was drunk at the time…drunk iPhone Store-ing can be dangerous)

I remember when this game came out…it didn’t use computer graphics, man! is was done by that Secret of N.I.M.H guy! Holy crap! It costs FIFTY CENTS A PLAY? Well, I guess they have to cover the cost of that awesome laser disk player…

Now, it’s a 200 meg download, for $0.99, play it all you want. (the sale is still good, BTW)

In commenting to a cow-orker, this led to the talk bout my massive (quasi-legal) MAME collection*. The one that was a real PITA to move around as it was bigger than a DVD-R at something like 12 Gig…which I then noticed was about the amount of free storage on my iPhone…a significant percentage of ALL of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s arcade games could fit on my damn phone!

  • = I live in hope that a band of roadworn and weatherbeaten Video Game Archivists will come to ME as the only hope to save the world…we’re under attack, and the only way to defeat the aliens is to give them a 1982 Japanese Ms. PacMan Bootleg ROM
2

I’ve had moments like this.

When I was a kid, I helped out in the family repair shop. Among other things, we worked on arcade games, so I got to see the guts of the old machines–big cabinets full of board after board, all packed with as many chips as they would hold.

Fast-forward to the 90s. I stumbled across a collection of about half a dozen of my favorite old arcade games…on a floppy disc. Which was only about half-full.

Fast-forward again, to the present. Those games would not only fit on a storage device smaller than my fingernail, they would take up a completely trivial fraction of the space (around 0.02% of a 4GB micro-SD card). My entire movie collection fits on a device smaller than a paperback book, with space for my music and e-book library left over.