Had a bunch of kids over on the weekend, 2 SFC controllers with long leads, DisplayPort to HDMI on the 52" Soniq teevee...bit of a pita having to route audio with 3.5mm audio patch cable, but the 9020USFF has no DisplayPort+ thus no audio over HDMI...
...kids are willing guinea pigs when there's games involved ~ I decided to test how they'd get along in a 'holding pen' environment ~ it's a bit of a kiosk mode running on the back of links as per previous vid...this is runlevel 2 in effect...
...machine boots, auto-login the amiga user, and (re)spawn links to the whdownload landing page..if you quit links, it respawns. There's only 1 tty active, and the only way to shutdown the machine is via the Amiberry GUI shutdown button, or pressing the machine power switch..so it's play Amiga games or die (I suppose you can still browse the web with links, which can sort of be a game in itself =)
I had thought they'd find it a rather lack luster experience ~ after all, how exciting does this look, relative to modern times?
Not very, huh...and yet, if you can just look at that through the eyes of seeing name to click on in the left = play some Amiga game (you never heard/knew of before), it starts to look like a smorgasbord...oops, sorry... more like a lolly shop really 8) Apart from one of my nieces breaking the game controller config at some point, nothing went wrong... aside from normal factors like not every title actually works, and some games are worse than others, but practically speaking there's soooooo many titles to choose from, and it'd take you literally hours to check them all out, and of the small number you end up trying, better than 90% are going to work, so that's not too bad really.
Got a message this morning, that one of the parents wants to buy one as a present for their daughter, as (apparently) she thought it was great. It's one of those 'social anomalies' that not all of the younger generation like the older, simpler look/style of computer games, but those that do like it really get into it...much like I did nearly 40 years ago.
It's an interesting aspect for me, to know when I played these games, we were near the cutting edge, but when kids play these games, they're reliving the past ...for many of us, we can realize this by thinking about how average life was, before/after the advent of mobile phones ..<grin>..but they didn't mind putting down their phones to pick up a gamepad... to be able to play from thousands of titles ...lol, it's a bit like the Steam Store having an 'everything for free day' ...
....I've got another 9020USFF ...this'll give me impetus to peel off a working cut of system + console only amiberry emulator atop the LFS base system, no toolchain, no headers, just what's required...that'll be a small image ; I should rebuild base to the amd64 target on Pilot, so it's more applicable to other x86-64 hardware...
...more stuff ...
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