banished to the tarpits of technology.

[bill]

so as i spent the day cruising about in the new old car i happened across a ancient device for a paltry 20 bucks.
its nice silver metal case surrounded the lcd screen and it said twenty dollars needs charging.
it was called a palm pilot. i seem to remember back in the day when i had a job and those guys in the cheap suits with way to much cologne would come in. the ones from head office with the manicured nails and there cliche phrases of ineptitude.
you know the type. the guys who took people for lunch in a nice crowded resturaunt to fire them. all these guys spent money on these devices they would beam there business card info back and forth to each other. write on them with a metal inkless pen called a stylus.
they would congregate around the water cooler beaming eachother and basically measuring there latest techno trash gadget against each others.
well this six year old device was cheap and it was new in the box so hey why not.
i took it home along with its three ring bindered manual and all the fixings. no sd card but i got one kicking around here some place. sure enough when i got home i found it inserted into the once top of the line digital 5 mp camera of mine.
i threw the 512 mb card in there and skimmed through the manual and looked at the onboard processor speed ect.
126 hz processor 30 mb onboard ram.... wow this was only six years ago and how times have changed.
i plugged it in and it flicked to life . i loaded up all the software a mp3 player a video player and editing software.
so lets see what it can do i figured. wow usb 1.1 is sure freaking slow compared to todays standards. almost forty five minutes to load 214 mb of mp3s onto the thing.
i nearly gave up thinking it must have been broken or something.
the nice little lcd screen played back the mp3s through its tiny tinny onboard speaker.
this must have been pretty hi tech back in the day. i mean touch screen and all.
no wifi no blue tooth nadda nyet nope.
the lcd screen compared to the one on my psp made me think that maybe the better half was right about getting off to the optometrist and getting the eyes checked.
i loaded up a video and sure enough it played back after using the proper codec to do it. not much space on the card for anything longer than maybe a hour long show and some mp3s.
the thing that is really shocking is i can remember guys going out and spending thousands and thousands of dollars for a home computer that could touch this device in terms of its perfomance.
palm obviously tried pretty hard with this one back in the day but due to a lot of oversites and changes in technology in a very short period of time it just never took off.
i doubt very much most of the people who owned one ever really used it for anything really. i mean the interface is easy enough for me.
wow tho i have to say this the handwriting recognition of it is pretty damn intuitive. i did not expect that. who knows how long these lasted for tho.
so curiosity got the better of me and i searched for palm freeware. theres a few things out there. calculators photo editors and of course music making software. i downloaded a couple of demos of the later and well they were so bad i just bailed out on that .
i wasnt expecting much and a good thing too because there was not much out there. i have a feeling tho some of the geek kids will come up with something for this unit. i mean if someone was able to turn a com64 into a cult synth someone could do the same with this i guess.
i spent some time playing with the mp3s i loaded into it. hmmmm to bad wifi wasnt around when this was made i could use it to surf the net with.
its kind of like a cel phone but with out the phone part.
now when you compare this to a modern celphone it is really aparent the rate of techno trash evolution and consumption by consumers is at such a hi hi hi level.
this also must have fueled some of the credit crisis i mean i wonder sometimes if there is people still paying off there techno trash purchases on obsolete items.
you know wide screen hi def crt tvs,hi def dvd players ect ect ect.
back to the palm tho.
so at this point i figured i have a twenty dollar mp3 player with the ability to show me a few pictures and less than stellar video play back. as i said i wasnt expecting much.
i poked around a bit more and came across a emulator for it that allows it to play rom files of snes atari and pretty much every classic gaming system ever made.
hey thats kinda cool. so i gave it a shot and despite it being rather hard to control the games from the palms nav controls it was pretty fun.
i had the original nes metal gear up and running in no time and wow did it ever work well. flawlessly actually. all the games can be found for free and they take up such a tiny tiny ammount of memory you could lterally fill a modest sd card with scores and scores of games.
what a antique this thing is.
i mean is this the future of collectible electronics i am thinking that it is quite feasible that it is.
i poked around some more and found there is a way to load linux onto it so you could run a lot of different home brew apps on it. thats also pretty neat.
i think tho that i will most likely just use it to play music on.
for twenty bucks i got my days worth of entertainment out of it.
its not anything mind blowing thats for sure but thats not the point of my little study of this ancient device.
i am just really shocked with the advances in speed storage capacity and well in such a short period of time. i am thinking there must be thousands of these thrown in a closet someplace because either it was too intimidating for the purchaser to use or it was just eclipsed by rapidly expanding computer technology. i think perhaps a little of both.
i mean beaming your business cards to one another sounded like a great idea to someone but when the units failed where did that info go.

 

[Radio raheem]

gadget i have just just bought is a ps2 man im suprized the grphics are so shiat compared to a ps3 and i think they were £500 when they first came out, just like the ps1 i think that was £500 also, just goes to show how expensive technolagy is when it first comes out, i mean now you can pick up a ps2 for like £20 lol

 

[bill]

i still play some of the ps2 games. they still sell new ps2 consoles.
i mean its really crazy how that system just wont go away.

 

[Radio raheem]

What suprizes me bill including myself who bought a ps2 new is how we paid so much for one new i mean the graphics are so crap, i remember the graphics seemingly to be good, but now i have just bought the system again i was questioning whether it was faulty or not cuz the grapics are so bad but sure enough the system works fine lol.

Im gunna take her apart and give her a good clean cuz the system fan is full of dust etc plus im bored as there dosent seem to be much happening on here as of late.

 

[bill]

ten years ago the graphics on the ps2 were great. i mean i think it ran at 60fps and well being able to play game like gt4 on a five foot wide screen was pretty incredible.
i would say on some games it still stands up if you are playing it on a newer lcd hidef tv i sure it probably shows its strings .
that being said there is no system past present of future that is going to have so many games written for it. i mean i am thinking we are now sitting at fifteen hundred titles kicking around for the old ps2.
games like guitar hero even have sold decently for the geriatric system.
this was most likely the best selling profit making product sony ever realeased. yes the game was hi priced back in the day when it first game out. stand alone consoles were being made to compete against computer systems. at that time i think a full blown p3 system was commanding three or four grand with all the bells and whistles. wifi was something still in star trek and the lcd television was something you saw when you watched the sci fi channel still.
i think i paid 199 bucks for my ps2 with one controller and gt3 was about sixty bucks.
that was the first game i used with mine.
i had a psone at the time and well it was just a great system as well but... the leap between graphical quality between those two was massive.
when i compare the ps2 to the ps3 there is also a huge leap.
the ps3 for sure takes advantage of the new televsion technology.
i remember playing my new ps2 with the old psone games.
the psone became my home cd player and the fact i could reuse it for that was a nice little bonus.the psone has kind of become cult with the audiophile crowd you can read about that online. in fact there was a company adding tube preamps to the psone and selling them for big money.
my ps2 still sees duty in the bedroom from time to time. watching a dvd or even playing some grand theft auto series games.
those games never had great graphics but they are still to this day fun games to play.
the thing with that old system is that it is the only dvd player i owned that has lasted and is still working.
if the lens it out of alignment i can open it up and turn a screw and off i go again.
the thing has been left on by accident for months at a time and still keeps going strong.

i think if you did a survey of hardcore gamers you would probably see that the ps2 is the top rated console of all time for durability and reliability. i also think that it most likely would have the highest replay value on a lot of its games.
i am not sure how much longer the console has left for this world i mean with the price of really fast computers continuing to drop and the trend towards handheld do everything devices things are really changing now.
soon the new versions of the ipod are going to have projectors built into them and that technology is really exciting.

 

[Gluecifer]

** WARNING - this reply contains more off-topic tangents than is recommended for your daily intake**

Awesome thread Bill!!
I was thinking a similar thing just yesterday. I picked up a Game Park Wiz (http://www.gp2xwiz.com) solely for it's video game emulation. I know emulation is nothing new on PC's, but to have accurate emulation on a tiny handheld of Super Famicom/Nintendo, MegaDrive/Genesis, Neo Geo, Pc Engine/Turbografx and every earlier machine just blows my mind.

To think that 20 years ago I was paying 600+ dollars for Neo Geo games that I can now dump the entire back catalogue of roms on a SD card shows things have changed a great deal. I think there will always be value in technology that had a very focussed gimmick that can't be emulated today, a classic example is Nintendo's Virtual Boy. The other technology that just gets faster and smaller however doesn't really have any staying power and just gets a shorter and shorter shelf life.

You look at the price of netbook computers these days, it goes to show you how cheap common computer parts are to make these days. A reasonable spec laptop 4 or 5 years ago that would cost the buyer $1000+ is now a $400 purchase for the same kind of features.

I did read a couple of years ago that one of the hot soon-to-be collectors item was going to be the first generation iPods. This makes sense to me, especially being they were nowhere near the most successful model as they were so expensive and certainly didn't offer anything beyond playing mp3s. Remember when the click wheel was the most incredibly futuristic input device? I remember the first time I used one and couldn't get the grin off my head. It's only been 10 short years since those times.

And those ten short years. Another decade. One must remember the kids growing up in the 00's. Just like the 70s and 80s, give it another 10 years and there will be a recognised collectables market from the 00s. What? I have no idea, I personally thought the 00's was a very non descript decade that offered very little new things to popular culture beyond movies. 00's music was easily the worst decade ever I thought. But what about technology that people will want to collect or remember? Mobile phones? Facebook? Harry Potter merchandise? iTunes store purchases?? As an aside, I think the 00's killed the toy/ac tion figure market for anything to be of genuine value in the future. As soon as the toy manufacturers realised they could market new lines to the collector's market it was the beginning of the end. It's an all together different subject, but it just contributes more to there being so little of value the 00's offered. It's a true indictment of a decade when most people's main memory of the 00's is that the 80s became fashionable and respected by the general population over the decade.

Ahem, back on track to the original topic (haha, I've a bad habit of going off-off topic in discussions like this) I do think there will always be a collectable game market and I consider myself a reasonably serious video game collector/fan. But as gaming gets more mainstream, I think the modern titles will have little chance of becoming really collectable. Two things that'll kill the value is 1, emulation and 2, 'special editions' of every other modern game released. I've already said a bit on emulation, but these 'special editions' are a joke beyond a joke. It seems every 'big name' release has some collectors version with some chintzy box, useless 'art' book and a poorly produced figurine. These cost more, of course, but are just more fake-value items.

In my opinion there's no chance in hell of any of these things retaining their value in the future simply because games these days are more disposable entertainment. It's like special edition DVDs, I know I paid up to $100 for more than a couple 'ultimate collectors' editions. And you know what they're worth now? Pittance. Now theres an even MORE special high definition release! Just like VHS, DVD is not something that will retain any kind of value in any broad sense. Sure they'll be isolated instances, like everything, but it's disposable first and foremost.

Which gets back to my gaming point. As graphics is still (unfortunately) the defining feature that drives the gaming industry (especially the last decade, although the Wii's success should change it for this decade) the older the graphics look, the more 'crap' the game appears. BUT, there's one caveat for this, and that's the graphics have to be 3D to age. 2D art from 20 years ago still can look beautiful and modern 2D games will age far less quickly too.

Realism in games is the main thing I think is wrong with the games industry and the 00's drove this home like never before. I see realism in games as the ultimate hallmark of the games designer having zero imagination. And because of this, the imaginative and fun video games have now taken second place to realistic FPS titles. I'll be the first to say that Call of Duty Modern Warfare was a very,very impressive and immersive game, I loved it. But it's not the be-all end-all. When you look back on the last decade and how games have progressed you've really only got graphics and online where anything's really progressed (excluding the Wii).

Onto the PS2, and even though, by comparison to the PS3, the graphics are dated, there are numerous titles that still deliver massively entertaining gaming experiences regardless. Which is the argument most retro-gamers go on about and that's the gameplay that matters most.

The true PS2 gems that I played and loved: Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Psi-Ops, GTA Vice City, Twisted Metal Black, E.S.P Galuda, God of War 1 and 2, Silent Hill 3, Okami, Katamari Damacy and Gitaroo Man. PS2 was a great console, but I don't rate it personally very high.

My favourite console ever is Dreamcast, and for my tastes, that was the high-point for much games development that allowed lots of new ideas. I still collect anything to do with the Dreamcast's japanese market and still play my Dreamcast as regularly as my PS3, PSP, Wii, DS, etc, if not more so.

Ok I think thats enough tangents for one post!!



Rock On.

 

[bill]

dreamcast was such a great system and for many the first foray intot he internet.
its really wierd how fast stuff is changing now. i mean it seems something is obsolete by the time christmas comes around. i am fine being a generation or more behind. it certainly is cheaper.
i saw the ipad was all over the news today. personally i think this thing is a joke. i mean what is it really. a laptop without the keyboard. i mean its kind of like a giant iphone.
allthough they are saying it can do so much more. personally tho for handheld gaming i will stick to my little psp. i mean it does enough for me and i am happy with it.

the little palm i picked up this week has beeen a blast revisting all those old console games via roms.
good games for the most part are still good games. the graphics might be really really dated but many are still fun to play.

electronics are such a throw away item now.
i mean theres lots of killer 5.1 surround sound systems to be had now for nothing.
i never got into surround sound or any of that stuff. in fact i am not sold on hidef tv yet. yep it is clearer and sharper but i will sitck with my crt as long as i can.
i am sure they will be pushing 3d tv in the not to distant future.
going off topic is fine glue it makes life a lot more interesting