Sorry to be jumping in on such an old discussion - I've been away for three weeks. Some comments:<br><br>-Wikipedia's decisions to cut information or edit information are paradoxical because a) information is submitted by independent sources (users), b) information must be verified (but the 'verifiers' here seem to be foggy - and there IS no expert in games, for even Steve Kent's book has errors and myths that now became history), c) information is not verified by experts, d) outside sources are often other websites that may or may not be accurate anyway.<br>
<br>-Shouldn't we just co-opt the information into a games history wiki? Mobygames can certainly fill this function. If they want to delete an entire entry that contains historically important information (say statements from the designer), then just save it elsewhere and abandon Wikipedia. Academia doesn't accept Wikipedia anyway, even though most of the information is accurate.<br>
<br>-Buggy game information is important to the history of a game (especially modern PC games). Game bugs can affect sales, user experience, and game meaning. It tells us a lot about game culture and game design as well - a game must meet a certain launch date in order to make up development costs, gamers are willing to buy a buggy game, but the game is still 'WIP' until the major bugs are fixed. Each patch is therefore important, and should be noted.<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:55 AM, Andrew Armstrong <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:andrew@aarmstrong.org">andrew@aarmstrong.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Neat bit of history :) someone really needs to write a book about programming games over the years. There are books which mention certain programmers, but most just detail the design, art, music sides of games (if they look at development at all - usually they are just looking at the gameplay and story).<br>
<br>
Since I didn't grow up then, I don't have the knowledge of those systems. Certainly I'll be looking into them sometime or later in emulator form though :) now that'll be fun, in a way, hehe.<br><font color="#888888">
<br>
Andrew</font><div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I have an entire bookcase of my software collection dedicated to games that wrung every last drop of performance out of a machine notoriously difficult to program games for (the original IBM PC with CGA). Games like Starglider, Turbo Champions, Elite, Interphase, Flight Simulator, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator (and CYAFTrainer, after the original name got them sued :-), ICON: Quest for the Ring, and others are truly works of programming art for that platform.<br>
<br>
[soapbox]A lot of people think the original PC, with it's 5MHz 16-bit processor, would be easy to write fast software for; in reality, it took 4x as long as a C64 to access memory and 6x as long to perform most simple calculations. Add to that an odd graphics memory structure and no graphics hardware assistance at all, and you have a nightmare to program for.[/soapbox]<br>
<br>
I am probably the only historian here who has a category for "most clever/efficient programming" for software history...<br>
</blockquote></div><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">
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