| IcaroRibeiro said: Buying second hand is literally the opposite of preservation. It means someone needs to given up their copy to other people to get the copy. With time those copies will suffer malfunction and will literally dissappear. Worse, being tied to specific hardware to will be unplayable regardless of how many time the copies endure |
NES/SNES/N64 carts last (have lasted) decades as it's ROM.
Optical discs are hit and miss... Disc rot is a real issue with CD's on the PS1 and early DVD's, but not much of an issue these days.
If you have physical media, if your console dies, you can buy another second hand console and keep playing your games, all your eggs are not in a single basket.
And obviously supply/demand pressures will exert itself over the following decades, meaning your game purchases actually increase in value... Can't really resell your digital games to another person.
| IcaroRibeiro said: I think you misunderstood what I meant about losing my DS and PS2 libraries. The physical copies still exists, but they are literally unplayable because there is no functional hardware to play them. I can only play some PS2 games that I have bought again on Switch or PS4. Again, digitally |
You can play PS2 games on the PS3.
You can play DS games on the 3DS.
Both of those consoles have newer platforms you can play those games on.
And the original consoles still exist in the second hand marketplace... In-fact the PS2 is the worst console as there were 150~ million of those devices sold.
The_Liquid_Laser said:
What you are describing is the exact opposite of "perfect backwards compatibility". Either I have a different VM for every past version of Windows or build an era-correct PC for every era. That isn't perfect backwards compatibility at all. I should just go around saying "consoles have perfect backwards compatibility. All I have to do is buy the right console for each library of games and bobs your uncle. Perfect backwards compatibility." The closest any device actually came to "perfect backwards compatibility" was the Wii. It could play games from NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, and Wii eras and even some Genesis and TG16 games. Most importantly, this was all easy to use. (I didn't have to hack my Wii or set up a VM to make it happen.) It had the appearance of perfect backwards compatibility. However when they closed the Virtual Console, that destroyed the idea we could actually ever have perfect backwards compatibility. That is what is needed though, an easy to use system that can play any game. Now that the VC is closed, Steam or gog.com is probably the closest we have to "perfect backwards compatibility". I consider their account systems to be more reliable than Nintendo or Playstation. |
VM is a software layer. It allows old software to run on new hardware. Perfectly. And once set-up is extremely seamless.
And you don't need a dozen different VM's for different hardware/software configurations. - Just one for Win9x running Voodoo+Geforce... That gives you full DOS compatibility as well.
NT and newer based games (Think: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 10) run without issue on Windows 11.
And unlike consoles, you don't need a dozen different pieces of hardware.
The Wii wasn't "perfect backwards compatibility". - The NES, SNES, N64 were emulated and the entire software libraries didn't exist on the Wii.
Perfect backwards compatibility is ironically the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X as they share the same x86/Radeon hardware base as their predecessors, negating the need for any kind of emulation, just clever abstraction - and virtualization in the OG Xbox/Xbox 360's case.
Software libraries need to be carried forwards in the digital world. - We have that with the current Xbox and Playstation consoles, but will that continue for next-gen? Nintendo broke backwards compatibility with the WiiU and 3DS... Which reinforces the idea that it's never a guarantee.
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