BORK!BORK!BORK! Paris might sometimes be called “The City of Light” or perhaps “The City of Love” by the romantically inclined. Judging by this hotel’s elevators, “The City of Bork” is more appropriate.
Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Nathaniel in a Paris hotel, what we assume to be digital signage is instead stalled on the all too familiar American Megatrends BIOS configuration screen. The computer behind the scenes also seems a bit overpowered to serve information for hotel services.
Instead of enticing elevator riders into the undoubtedly delightful bars and restaurants of the establishment (apparently a Novotel not far from the Eiffel Tower) or whatever it should be doing, this screen has temptations of an altogether more technical nature.
A CometLake CPU? An i5 no less? Sort of up-to-date. And that 8 GB of RAM? The way memory prices are going, that might be enough to buy you a nice hotel room in some cities, and at least a decent coffee and a croque monsieur in Paris.
Programmers back in the day had to be super clever. I can’t say much about programs but games used to be very restrictive and some devs managed to pull out incredible mechanics and graphics having barely any memory to work with. Today they’d release 150gb game that is no much better than a game they’ve released in 2008.
This always made me respect old school games.
Also, the further back you go, the less the game industry was locked into a handful of game engines, which in some ways gave devs more creative freedom, though of course it was a lot of work to write the whole thing from scratch every time.
A big part of games taking up more and more space is due to higher resolution assets. Creating installers only installing needed assets would drastically reduce the size for anyone not playing on extreme or whatever they call the maximum resolution.
But games do still tend to be among the archetypes of software, which hits bottlenecks that needs performance optimisations. You only have whatever hardware your end user has, you can’t just buy a bigger server… well Google Stadia tried
I love how you can take an old game now and, assuming it’s still playable, the cut scenes often look really bad compared to the regular game play, since they were pre-rendered at what would be considered low-res today. It used to be the other way around!