I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D, but I guess I missed some versions. So many games, like Railroad Tycoon post RRT2 and Worms went full 3D and gameplay was never the same.

I actually keep a Basilisk II System 7.5 Mac environment just so that I can play SC2k from time to time ...

A small frustration I have with playing old games is that the GOG/Steam version is always the PC original and the Mac versions almost always had far better sound and music and sometimes graphics.

You can run the Windows 95 version of the game (similar to the Mac version) on modern computers with this patch: https://sc2kfix.net/ . It's definitely disappointing that GOG doesn't distribute that version. Stuff like this is why I have to keep a CD drive around.

I feel like that's true for early/mid-90s games where the PC version targeted DOS (+ the varied universe of PC video/sound hardware), and the Mac version could just target the much more uniform Mac platform.

But SimCity 3000 is from 1999, and the PC version was a normal Win9x game. I own (still have the CD) the SimCity 3000 Mac port, and it is not very good. Maxis didn't port it themselves, it was done by Software MacKiev. System requirements were quite high for the time, it was sluggish, often unstable, and the file open/save dialogs reused the Windows-style dialogs which was very awkward.

The soundtrack is great though.

And when you say “PC original”, you really mean “DOS version wrapped in DOXBox”, because it's easier to ship that on both Windows and Mac than patching the Windows version for Windows, and shipping a Wine wrapper for Mac. (Have they ever shipped a Wine wrapper for anything? I don't think so.) What a shame.

I do really wish an application-level classic Mac OS emulator existed. There are lots of great full-system emulators for classic Macs (Basilisk II, SheepShaver, DingusPPC), but no Rosetta-style “make the old application run in the context of a new machine” execution environments. I'll grouse to whoever will listen that all of the best edutainment software of the '90s and early '00s is trapped on PPC Mac OS.

Probably the closest thing I remember existing to this was (in its "modern"-ish form) https://github.com/autc04/executor

Not quite what you're looking for I think but it was a Wine-style reimplementation of MacOS.

I think that is basically exactly what I've been looking for. Thank you!

Marathon Trilogy. Ambrosia SW games. Spectre VR. My childhood was so flavourful. The one downside is that nobody on the playground were talking about the games I had access to.

I loved Marathon and we even had enough Macs in our lab to have a few lan parties. Wonderful memories.

And the Ambrosia folks were giants! So many great games - Maelstrom, Ambrosia and the EV saga! There was such a thriving ecosystem of plugins for EV!

It definitely touched others because the original Marathon still exists as Aleph One, and Endless Sky does a great job of capturing the essence of the Escape Velocity games!

Naev is a good choice for Eacape Velocity fans looking for a modern game. Naev has a lot of depth and polish, very well crafted.

Almost forgot the OG Bungie hit Pathways Into Darkness! I keep that on my Basilisk env too for the occasional hit of nostalgia.

PiD is probably my favourite game of the FPS-Text-Based-Horror-Adventure-RPG genre.

Maybe you can play using an emulator. I use VMware to emulate Windows XP to play The Sims and it works great.

You're thinking of simcopter maybe, which follwed 2K and was full 3D.

> I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D

You recall wrong.

The only 3D SimCity game was the one released in 2013 that was simply titled "SimCity" but is frequently called "SimCity 2013" to differentiate it from the original classic.

2K, 3K, and SimCity 4 were all 2D games.

I believe 3k and 4 used 3D assets "in the editors" but the actual created tiles were 2D.

In 3k you could rotate the camera to 3 (or 4?) different angles, but each was fixed isometric rendered. Meaning they did all assets in the game at multiple angles.

I'm very confident that you could do the same in 2k.

(Looks like this screenshot confirms it, those two blue arrows rotated the view: https://pressakey.com/gamepix/101/simcity3.jpg)

Every corporation of sufficient size turns into a blind elephant, walking in one direction and trampling everything in its path. This is just the nature of bureaucracy, but there has always been someone somewhere within the organization that could tug on the elephants ear or whack it with a stick in the right place, to make it avoid an obstacle now and then.

The trick was always finding the person, but now the elephant has no handlers because all of the people are gradually being removed. It's like all the tech bros watched "The Matrix" thirty years ago and said "What a great business model!"

I ran a plex server for about a dozen years just to watch local movies and photos on a couple of rokus. No matter how they pushed, I never created an account because I didn't like the idea of remote access proxied through them.

It ran on a desktop pc that we would just boot when we wanted to watch something. It met our needs. Considered a lifetime pass back in the day just to support the project, although the constant churn of "look at me!" stuff made me quickly realize that their goals were not mine.

A few months ago I finally got around to building a NAS, and discovered that plex won't even run now without a pass. Moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. Getting hardware accel configured took a day or so, but we now use it 10x as much as the old plex server.

FYI, getting hardware acceleration for Intel working with Jellyfin is pretty straightforward. The key thing is that you have to put the server acct into the render group, then pass through the dri device. I also pass through the video group, but I don't think that is strictly necessary. NVIDIA seems a bit different but I can't speak to that. Docker compose file looks something like the following (uids and gids may vary)

  services:
    jellyfin:
      container_name: jellyfin
      image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
      pull_policy: always
      user: "1007:1003"  # jellyfin / jellyfin
      group_add:
        - "44"   # video
        - "992"   # render
      network_mode: bridge
      ports:
        - 8096:8096
        - 8920:8920
      volumes:
        [ ... config, cache, and content ... ] 
      devices:
        - /dev/dri:/dev/dri

I had a jellyfin server on the same machine as my plex. I really tried to use both, the jellyfin experience was so much worse overall.

It had one technical feature that I valued (the ability to tone/color map dolby vision content for non dolby vision devices), but that was such a minimal feature for me (very little of my content is in the proprietary dolby vision colorspace).

I have a lifetime Plex Pass, but I'd gleefully dump it for open source if the experience were as good.

But as you say, it's not, and the lack of churn (only patch releases and one blog post this last 6 months) doesn't inspire me to think it's getting better nearly quick enough.

Are you talking about the Jellyfin server? It is quite an active project. Last release was 10.11.8 about a month ago, and github says that there have been 1049 commits to master since then.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/releases/tag/v10.11.8

The clients are even more active

> I didn't like the idea of remote access proxied through them

This is not and has never been required. If by remote access you mean actually streaming from the public Internet, their proxies are a low-bitrate fallback in case you can't connect directly - and it can be disabled altogether IIRC.

The solution I use for remote access is tailnet plus exit nodes. It also is probably more secure as the attack surface is wireguard + the tailscale control plane rather than an entire internet facing Plex server.

Agree, same here.

Remote access is provided through them. The content is not. The access is. We're far past the point of quibbling technicalities to defend your chosen celebrity-company

Was the attempted offensive remark required to make your point?

I came to this film late. Somehow, despite being quite active at the time of its release, I never knew of it until a colleague turned me onto it in the 90s.

Watching it with the benefit of 20 years of history, the influence on subsequent films, like Skynet, was obvious.

I loved the film, and think fondly of my departed colleague when it is mentioned, but I can't bear to watch it often. Like Cassandra, sci-fi films keep showing us a path that we should avoid and as a society we keep saying "Oooh! Candy!" and barreling down that path.

I never thought I'd witness a Butlerian revolution but I'm expecting that next.

The Win7 UI was comfortable, and still configurable enough that I could make the tool work for me rather than having to work for the tool.

I'd be more interested if it brought back the performance of Win7. That OS was released into a world that still had HDD boot drives and had to pay attention to the details. I still run a Win7 machine that boots in under ten seconds.

Sadly no extension can bring either of those back and we are unlikely to see anything along those lines from MS ever again.

I still have a windows 7 system from 16 years ago. Works great.

I large part, the sticker trend is so that people can distinguish one gray rounded slab from another. It is the reaction, not the cause.

I agree with you and ChrisMarshallNY, I think both can be true. I have a work laptop and personal laptop that would be identical if not for stickers, but at the same time I enjoy stickers because they lend personality to something that would otherwise look the same as every other one; I'm sure signalling plays a part for some people, but mine are all novelties.

Maybe, but I always assumed that it was for the same reason that people put them on their cars.

They are really signals to others.

I think it can be either. Mine are all novelties that help me to distinguish my grey squares from each other and bring a bit of joy.

Vanguard is mutually held, a rarity these days. Which means that if you own some shares of their SP500 index fund, you own a part of Vanguard, and they work for your benefit. They are as big as they are because they solved the original alignment problem.

So if I invest my meager peasant earnings in Vanguard funds, my holdings are considered equally as important as the Rockefellers?

And it was the solving of this alignment problem that attracted all the Rockefellers, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, etc to Vanguard? So they're not insiders, just big customers with no relationship to the firm itself.

Most very wealthy individuals (not sure your examples fit this group) do not use Vanguard. They are more likely to use private wealth management. I feel like you actually have no idea what you are talking about?

So your conclusion is that very wealthy individuals do not own and control Vanguard--they have nothing to do with it at all--that it's collectively owned by the rabble--and all is well as we little people have everything in control via our company Vanguard (that we little people collectively own) and together we're heading into a bright shining new tomorrow? Definitely nothing sinister going on here involving big monied interests vacuuming up ownership of the entire economy through relentless consolidation.

Never got around to The Backrooms, but the follow on Oldest View / Rolling Giant series of videos are absolutely fantastic. It captures the tension between curiosity and dread perfectly, which seems to me what all of this fascination with liminal space is all about.

On a technical level, his work is brilliant. With no budget, he puts me in a CGI space that I really can't tell is CGI, and invokes all of the feelings that are familiar to anyone who has snuck around where they really shouldn't be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oldest_View

I can only second this. I personally got more out of “The Oldest View” than I did out of maybe half of all commercial shows I recently watched, and I consider myself pretty picky.

At a meta level, there’s something amazing about fiction that feels like it ought to be constrained in what it can do by its budget/production capabilities and then constantly surprises you in execution.

Shut up and take my money!

I'd be delighted to spend that for a Blu-ray of the series but I'm afraid of getting the mangled version that they released on DVD.

For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the future. Alas, the digital assets were not preserved properly and when the time came for DVD, nobody wanted to pay for more work. There may be places where they used the 16:9 masters, but anyplace where there was CGI, particularly where they were compositing over live action, basically chopped the top and bottom of the 4:3 resulting in a sub-VGA mess.

It made everyone weep.

Blu-ray version is definitely not perfect but I wouldn't call it mangled. It is presented in 4:3 which might be an issue for some viewers but it is absolutely the best this show has ever looked: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Babylon-5-The-Complete-Series...

Have we just forgotten the DRM issues with Blu-Ray? I can't even watch them on Linux without relying on leaked keys.

That's why legal unencrypted availability online is such a boon.

Why do you care about "legal"? Buy some version to have a legal and moral right to watch the show, and torrent a good version you can actually watch.

Or rip the Blu Rays, which is pretty easy these days, especially for non-4K releases.

Reading the review, it looks like they gave it the best treatment they could with what they had, definitely better than the DVD. Still a shame that WB didn't go the extra mile and redo the CGI, but maybe that will happen in time.

The CGI was preserved well enough for the fans who got access to some of it to re-render it in HD and upload to YouTube [0]. If WB cared even a little, fully CGI-rendered scenes could have been remastered relatively easily. The only scenes that are truly un-recoverable without redoing from scratch are those composited ones.

But like the others said, the BDs are fine, by far the best the series has ever looked, even if the difference between the crisp live action and the blurry upscaled CGI is rather jarring.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlDaygRhrg8

I watched a chunk of the version on Tubi which I believe was the same as the BluRay, and I thought it looked great. They just do the whole thing in 4:3 which is maybe not the ideal solution to the problem but is seamless. CGI shots are obviously upscaled but it looks good enough not to intrude.

You know, AI might actually be able to fix this!