the last time they did this it was industry leading, it was also 1993
the mac talk is cool but iām really concerned mainly with iOS, and specifically preservation. not nearly as worried about preservation of mac stuff, itās mostly already handled.
likeā¦ it seems fully possible that i will literally never get to play ziggurat (actionbutton) ever again. that is crushingly sad. and it seems like there is almost nothing anyone can do about it other than beg apple to do somethingā¦ not holding my breath
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there is actually a recent solution on that front,
https://gameclub.io/ contacted a bunch of developers who had stopped maintaining their iOS classics, obtained the source, and started compiling them again with screen/DPI awareness for modern iOS. I got to play hookchamp again just last year!
itās a subscription service and they havenāt gotten after @108 yet but they oughta
on any other platform I would say ādeprecation is fine if thereās emulationā but we donāt have adequate emulation of touch platforms (not to mention Appleās constant threat of litigation) for that to work on iOS
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As a piece of software Visual Studio works much better than Xcode ever did. There was a bug for YEARS in Xcode where undoing wouldnāt always leave the document you were editing the way it started. Or halfway down a file the syntax highlighting would break.
There is certainly a different ethos between the two companies and I can appreciate that some would want to feel āengagedā with the platform theyāre working on, but for me itās simply not worth the additional effort.
There are plenty of iOS apps that have terrible interfaces too; forcing a specific paradigm on bad developers doesnāt make them any better, and a lot just ride the line doing the bare minimum to get accepted, without actually subscribing to the intent behind the rules.
Microsoft and Apple are two extremes and I think the platform I would be most happy with would be something in the middle. Apple is too prescriptive, and Microsoft doesnāt have any cohesive plan on how to move forward.
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now this is starting to sound like a conversation with my poor wife who does enterprise web design and has to worry about theming and user studies and Iām over here like āI had to make a UI today for the first time all year, you wouldnāt believe how many undocumented electron behaviours I had to override to make it a tray app only since no one wants to see a damn window am I rightā
my UI design tool of choice is still macOS automator but only one of the departments I work in is mac-only so that paradise is fleeting, we hired someone new who wanted to use Windows recently and the entire staff tried really hard to shame them out of it
fwiw Iām on a Mac at work too 
Itās sad but likeā¦ the costs of maintaining a platform to keep everything running indefinitely are not worth the advantages unless your entire business depends on it. That only applies to Microsoft, and even then, no one has a contract with Microsoft guaranteeing that their focus on backward compatibility will continue indefinitely. All anyone has is faith based on 27 years of consistent behaviour.
There are some interesting developments on Catalina right now that have restored support for some apps that shouldnāt be working anymore and given the little Iāve looked at it, itās possible some of this could be ported over to jailbroken iOS devices given the shared foundation? But there never really was much effort being poured into backward compatibility work in the scene while I was a part of it, and most of the brightest minds have left the scene, so thereās not too much hope there. The best you could hope for is some kind of translation layer that lets you run ARM builds of iOS apps on top of historical versions of Intel frameworks in the iOS Simulator, but then that would be with keyboard and mouse, and iOS SDK versions are only running on specific versions of the Mac OS tooā¦
i know this isnāt really the point but fwiw i have an iphone 4 with ziggurat on it, i can bring it to salt butt at least
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I know, I canāt help it
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Who is going to be the Nightdive Studios of resurrecting mobile games
yeah, i would love to play it again. thatād be much appreciated.
of course, it doesnāt need to be in appleās best interest for preservation to take place. but their specific position (walled garden, rapidly iterative hardware+OS, breaking older software frequently+permanently, no emulation) has made it difficult. e.g. video game companies didnāt necessarily do much to preserve stuff; it was pirates and archivists and people with other motivations, in many cases explicitly against the platform holdersā wishes. the best archives of iOS software are still piracy sites, but essentially no one has any way to run this deprecated software now. if apple doesnāt care (and as you pointed out, they are often incentivized specifically not to care) then it just straight up looks like weāre fucked for the foreseeable future. things are actively being lost.
and this is historically important software! incredibly historically important. i donāt believe the status quo is acceptable, but i donāt see any good solutions either.
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I still have no idea what anyone means when they say āwalled gardenā if not āwin32 x86 software is taken to be the entire universe of software and anything not designed for that platform is by its nature foreign.ā I can run the software thatās important to me far more easily on mac than on windows! I can compile my own emulator builds for my iPhone!
lots of other good discussion itt but that phrase makes the vein in my forehead pop out
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i donāt know what it means either, really. i donāt honestly know why this situation is so bad. the whole thing just feels like a disaster from a preservation perspective.
yeah it definitely is but most of the factors at work there are not much better on android which has the same problems around a centralized distribution method for software that doesnāt really care about game preservation and is happy to dump stuff permanently when itās no longer maintained and is quite difficult to emulate faithfully, android just has fewer unique games and less aggressive deprecation of its runtime environment in the event that a good pirate archive did exist
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am i wrong in assuming android archivists have more options? arenāt there working emulators for android? and yeah, i tend to prioritize iOS because i think thereās a lot of unique & historically significant software on there compared to android, but i could definitely be wrong about that. both are very important to me
I have no idea how Iād go about playing this again if I wanted to:
(it controls with the gyro)
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Android has a bunch of preservation-friendly things surrounding it, like how most games are easily ported to PC, and the breadth of emulators. But yeah even with all that mobile is still a perpetually dying space. Doubly so since every company now operates on the GaaS model for their P2W city management sim whose design they copied from Civony.
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You can run android code on PC with the right app, canāt you? I mean you could years ago, but itās been a while.