Now compare this with modern mobile devices which run slowly and can do a fraction of what PCs were able to do 15 years ago having 10x lower clock rates.
1. Compare apples to apples. What could something the size of a phone do in 1998?
2. The current resolution of the iPhone 5 is 1280 x 2272. The game ran on 800x600 with a fraction of the colors,
3. That game sold for what... 35 bucks? Are you comparing what two developers make in a month and a half, selling for 2 bucks with a AAA budget game? Yes, an HTML5 game is going to be slower, but compare one of the top games for the mobile systems and the mobile game today is more impressive. Perhaps 'Need For Speed: Most Wanted'?
4. Clock Rate Isn't Everything. It never has been. Further, the equivalent Pentium 133 laptop is lasting 1.5 hours max with a battery the size of a half dozen iphones. Power matters.
5. Could a mobile-sized device, sans phone (FCC issues) be created that is tuned for speed instead of battery, with a lower grade resolution (compromise for battery and speed), that was faster? Sure. Would anyone buy it? Probably not. Engineering is about compromises.
And yes, I'd like to be able to use my computer as a general purpose device, but nobody has stepped up to the plate yet. I mean, we could start with a Cyanogen mod and build up from there, but it's a bigger effort than it looks.
But I'll tell you what, let's put it on the backlog. ;)
Drank the retina Koolaid? I couldn't believe it myself when I started doing the math. The Nexus 5 has 1.5x the detail for each screen point compared to a Retina iPhone. The iPhone's @2x retina assets are outclassed (somewhat) by the @3x assets of a 1080p phone...
Still doesn't change the fact that 15 years ago "we"(as in, programmers, industry, whatever) were much, much more efficient with limited resources than what we are now. Some people consider it a good thing, some of us consider it a bad thing.
"were much, much more efficient with limited resources"
You are cherry picking which resources you care about. What about power consumption? What about heat? What about physical size? What about noise? I remember the fans in those old PC's, mine sounded like a jet taking off.
1-2 gb of ram is insane luxury compared to say, the Amiga which typically had 1000 times less - 512k or 1mb of main ram and the same amount of 'chip' ram (for video/audio processing).
I'm not a mobile device expert, but programmers don't have to think that much about 512k on an iphone, do they? On an Amiga it was often all you had for the entire system including the OS.
Yeah but the Amiga drove 640x256 at 16 colors (4 bits), so around 80kb. Contrast that with the newest iPhone which drives 640x1136 at 24-bit color, so around 2.08mb. This is 26x the number of pixels. Keep in mind you also have a networking stack and lots of semi-realtime sensor data.
Not to mention that the demands on the system in terms of features and performance are so much higher.
26x the number of pixels, but you have over 200 times the ram available and that's assuming your app only gets 100mb (and that AmigaOS takes up zero resources). The default Amiga had an 8 MHz, 16 bit processor which again is less than 100 times what's available now on an average device. I just can't see modern devices being construed to be nearly as resource restrained as personal computers from the 80s.
Well I consider my time a limited resource. In trade for my developer time I can use an extra 8MB of ram for a little html web game I am making I think it is okay.
Are you saying that mobile devices aren't capable of playing games of the same graphical and technical complexity as a Windows 95 game? I assure you that isn't true.
No, what I'm saying is that you will never see an iPad displaying the same complex scene a 500W-PC with a double-SLI card has no problem of taking care of. There is and there will always be a large gap between what you can do in fixed based devices and mobile systems, because of their inherent design goals.
Huh? My Galaxy S3 is noticeably more powerful than my Micron Pentium II system from 1998, in terms of specs as well as actual performance. The fact that it's running Android and not Win98 doesn't hurt.
Win9x is not a portable OS. Because of its DOS and Windows heritage, the underpinnings are very much tied to x86 and would be difficult to port to ARM. (Although not as difficult as OS/2, which uses the dreaded ring 1.)
Whereas Windows NT has always been portable. Except that Microsoft has already ported NT to ARM.
Indeed, I realize this. My comment was mainly facetious, I admit. Porting DOS/Win98 would be totally silly anyway unless you needed a blue screen generator.
Porting ReactOS would start to make sense, if anyone wanted that - say, there was a desire to run windows programs on modern mobile hardware without licensing fees (rendering farm? Most use cases I can imagine would be better served by Linux anyway). Otherwise... Emulation such has DOSBOX makes the most sense for anyone who desires to run legacy Win32 software.
