10 Years

[Vigo]

[wp34]

Congratulations.  Looks like it is time for a haircut.   

[Hoopz]

Congrats. I joined in March of 2005 and my goal was to get either 5 or 10 posts so I could PM Ponyboy to order stuff.   

[yotsuya]

Celebrate!

[Vigo]

Thanks, guys!


The only celebrating I can right now is having my last hour of freedom. In an hour I get to pick up my mother-in-law from the airport and she will be staying in my house for the next 3 months.   
#ANTICHUFF

[pbj]

Holy ---fudgesicle---.  Thoughts & prayers, dude.

[knave]

Holy ---fudgesicle---.  Thoughts & prayers, dude.

Seconded...what did you do to deserve that?

[opt2not]

10 years eh, and how many times in your tenure did you delete your account? 

[JDFan]

So if you're still around in 3 months you'll have to let us know which seems longer the 10 years here or the 3 months with the Mother-in-Law 

[Slippyblade]

Holy ---fudgesicle---.  Thoughts & prayers, dude.

You kill a busload of nuns and orphans in a previous life or something?  That's a karmic kick in the nuts.

[Hoopz]

She lives in Asia, right?  Thailand?  If she's cooking, I'll be up this weekend.   

[edekoning]

Congrats. Funny I should read this on my 10 year wedding anniversary day

[Vigo]

Yeah, she is staying over because she just retired this year and we are having a baby in a few weeks. I'm just hoping she will be willing to help enough that I can sneak out of the house a few times to go do stuff.

She lives in Asia, right?  Thailand?  If she's cooking, I'll be up this weekend.   

Close! Taiwan. And just because the country is filled with awesome food, doesn't mean she knows how to cook it. She sure is good at complaining about my cooking. Yesterday I was told about 7 times that my chicken is too salty.

[yotsuya]

Close! Taiwan. And just because the country is filled with awesome food, doesn't mean she knows how to cook it. She sure is good at complaining about my cooking. Yesterday I was told about 7 times that my chicken is too salty.

You should serve her that random hot dog you found on your grill....


So, 10 years.... how have things changed?

[jdbailey1206]

[Hoopz]

Congrats on the baby! 

[Vigo]

Congrats on the baby! 

Thanks, Hoopz! The tally will by 3 boys in my house in a few weeks.

You should serve her that random hot dog you found on your grill....

  There is a blast from the past.   

So, 10 years.... how have things changed?

10 Years ago, hrm...things were more...intense. I think we were probably at the second generation of MAME cabs at the time. (Goodbye shelf paper, hello lightning effects). I think the first bartops were being invented with laptops inside, and there were a lot more restorations and conversions. Project threads were less of a WIP thing because troubleshooting was heavy around here. I think it was much more normal to troubleshoot on various threads until your cab is near completion, then start a thread about it. I think once photo hosting became more mainstay, people were more inclined to document things step by step.

I don't remember many of the "rules" existing, like angled joysticks, avoid frankenpanels, etc. But there was definitely good and bad form. Things like titling your machine VigoCade would have been acceptable. Machines had trimmed down to a normal upright size, and people were getting a grip on what works.

There were a lot more guys who worked in the industry and restorations were big. Emulation wasn't quite there, so people didn't ever focus on their machines needing to play anything modern. There were only a handful of games with CHDs that people were hoping to get working on their machine and were usually dissapointed. I remember a lot of people asking about how to get X game playing on their machine, or things like N64 emulation.

There was more of a hangout and a lot more joking around. It felt a little more like a smokey pool hall in the everything else board. Inside jokes everywhere, if a thread didn't have at least a couple snarky posts, it wasn't fun. PnR was also open to everybody, which was sometimes fun, but I think added to conflict. stuff spilled over into other threads, and it was messier. People were a bit angrier then as well.

I think there was also a better coordinated effort to do things. I remember how much of a to-do it was to have the BYOAC tokens each year. There was involvement in making stuff like front ends and utilities. Not too many people carrying that torch these days.

People were also getting ripped off more. People complain about vendors now, but that is nothing compared to 10 years ago. There were a lot of people out to rip you off. It was cool to have this site, because it was a safe haven to know who the awesome vendors were. Of course, there were a few times when these vendors slipped through the cracks.

[yotsuya]

Nice!  Thanks for sharing.

[pbj]

I'd say 10 years ago is just about when the bubble popped.  Seemed like 2000-2005 was when you could still drag something out of a barn cheap and flip it high.  All the Gen Xers had jobs and disposable income.  People regularly selling Ms Pac-Man for $1,500-$1,800.

Then, oops, those $20 TV joysticks.  It was a pretty reasonable argument for the "purists" to be bitching about the state of the emulation experience back then when people were trying to flip a MAME cabinet for $1,500..... but when your competition was a "good enough" $20 toy... yeah...

The software peaked years ago so I guess we all had to turn our attention to the cabinets.  It'll be interesting to look back at all the people that lost their ass trying to sell bartops, but overall the builds got better.  This will be a much, much smaller hobby in 10 years.

[Howard_Casto]

The state of emulation has slowed considerably as well.  Late 90's / early 2000's you were seeing games emulated from just 4 or 5 years prior.  It was so synced that mame instituted a policy to keep games that are too recent out.  Now even if a recent game is emulated, you need a state of the art pc to barely run it if you are lucky.  I think the lack of demand for cabinets is directly related to this.... no new games means no reason to build. 

The front-end/utility software end has slowed, ironically, because the emulators have gotten better.  When I started back in ancient times mame was "the enemy" and any third party emulator tried to distinguish itself as much as possible by not doing anything mame did, including printing reports and command line options.  Now people are a bit smarter and 99% of your emulators just do what mame do... heck most emulators are now made by people that also work on mame. 

It's scared a lot of hobby developers off because both in terms of emulation and utilities, all that is left are the massively hard projects.  Not many people are willing to go as far down the rabbit hole as us few remaining stalwarts are.   

[eds1275]

Oh man the hot dog. I remember reading that and thinking that you were overreacting. Sure, it'd be annoying. But later I was like... that is gross in so many ways! Who knows where that meat has been or where it came from, or why they were even disrespectful enough to not even get rid of the evidence!

[BadMouth]

Yeah, she is staying over because she just retired this year and we are having a baby in a few weeks. I'm just hoping she will be willing to help enough that I can sneak out of the house a few times to go do stuff.

She lives in Asia, right?  Thailand?  If she's cooking, I'll be up this weekend.   

Close! Taiwan. And just because the country is filled with awesome food, doesn't mean she knows how to cook it. She sure is good at complaining about my cooking. Yesterday I was told about 7 times that my chicken is too salty.

Just try to make everything flavorless.  My ex-wife's friend from taiwan used to bake us a wide variety of desserts that all tasted like unflavored cake.  She'd also bring us happy fun time gum which tastes awesome for the half second the flavor lasts.

[Hoopz]

10 Years ago, hrm...things were more...intense. I think we were probably at the second generation of MAME cabs at the time. (Goodbye shelf paper, hello lightning effects). I think the first bartops were being invented with laptops inside, and there were a lot more restorations and conversions. Project threads were less of a WIP thing because troubleshooting was heavy around here. I think it was much more normal to troubleshoot on various threads until your cab is near completion, then start a thread about it. I think once photo hosting became more mainstay, people were more inclined to document things step by step.

I don't remember many of the "rules" existing, like angled joysticks, avoid frankenpanels, etc. But there was definitely good and bad form. Things like titling your machine VigoCade would have been acceptable. Machines had trimmed down to a normal upright size, and people were getting a grip on what works.

There were a lot more guys who worked in the industry and restorations were big. Emulation wasn't quite there, so people didn't ever focus on their machines needing to play anything modern. There were only a handful of games with CHDs that people were hoping to get working on their machine and were usually dissapointed. I remember a lot of people asking about how to get X game playing on their machine, or things like N64 emulation.

There was more of a hangout and a lot more joking around. It felt a little more like a smokey pool hall in the everything else board. Inside jokes everywhere, if a thread didn't have at least a couple snarky posts, it wasn't fun. PnR was also open to everybody, which was sometimes fun, but I think added to conflict. stuff spilled over into other threads, and it was messier. People were a bit angrier then as well.

I think there was also a better coordinated effort to do things. I remember how much of a to-do it was to have the BYOAC tokens each year. There was involvement in making stuff like front ends and utilities. Not too many people carrying that torch these days.

People were also getting ripped off more. People complain about vendors now, but that is nothing compared to 10 years ago. There were a lot of people out to rip you off. It was cool to have this site, because it was a safe haven to know who the awesome vendors were. Of course, there were a few times when these vendors slipped through the cracks.

Was it MarkRVP who started the original thread for hosting pics?  THAT was a brilliant idea and I agree with your point that it completely changed how people documented their builds.

PNR wasn't open that long to everyone.  And it was busy.  Heated at times but traffic there was significantly more than now.  And EE was too.  There were probably 20-30 regulars at least who were in every thread there multiple times an hour.  And if a thread there stayed on subject to the second page, I'd be highly surprised.

Huge arguments about "best" encoders, USB v PS/2,  joys, FEs etc were common. Some vendors were more active then defending their hardware choices/specs.  The <me> tag was used all the time as people watched the battles... 

HC is right that emulation was constantly changing.  It's leveled out but a new release 10 years ago was a big, big deal.

[opt2not]

Huge arguments about "best" encoders, USB v PS/2,  joys, FEs etc were common. Some vendors were more active then defending their hardware choices/specs.  The <me> tag was used all the time as people watched the battles... 

I remember this. Some of those vendors are still pretty active defending their hardware now-a-days too!
Encoder arguments and hardware arguments in general were plentiful back then. Leafs vs. microswitches was a point of contention, as well as what joysticks were best <--- not like this has changed.
And it seemed like everyone was trying to make a cabinet with a rotate-able monitor. At least, there were multiple attempts to reinvent the method. We rarely see rotate-able monitor projects anymore.