> It took me a long time to get past my feelings of loss when we saw the future slip away.

I think that for many Amiga users, they've never gotten over their feelings of loss. Among retrocomputing enthusiasts, Amiga users are an extra odd bunch -- often making and selling commercial shrink wrapped software for years.

While it's not entirely unusual for people to put effort into a special game or whatnot for their favorite retrocomputer, and charge people for a special nostalgia filled limited run, Amiga users seem strangely tied to trying to make creating Amiga stuff a viable commercial venture [1][2][3] it's as quaint as it is bizarre these days.

1 - https://www.amigaos.net/

2 - http://entwickler-x.de/emotion

3- http://www.pagestream.org/?action=Store

I saw this mentioned by a YouTuber, who went on to say that many people believe that the SNES was originally intended to be backward-compatible with the NES.

IMHO that's not quite right — there's a lot of simple things Nintendo could have done to make the SNES a lot more backward-compatible with the NES, that would have had to have been done right at the beginning (and so stuck around as additional evidence of this), just as the few places that do line up (e.g. controller read-out + MMIO address) were certainly done right at the beginning.

Instead, I think what Nintendo was imagining, was that — as long as the NES and SNES were still both "alive" in the market concurrently — then companies would want to concurrently release both NES and SNES versions of their games. And, with some careful planning, development studios would be able to have a single 6502 macro-assembler codebase that compiled to either a NES or SNES target. Developers could either add MMIO address pokes / JSRs inside #ifdef-like macro structures; or just write two subroutines, one for NES and one for SNES, and then compile-time branch to determine which would get compiled in.

This makes sense of where the NES and SNES line up in compatibility, and where they diverge: they line up where there's an obvious way to support both consoles with one block of instructions; they diverge where developers would have to write separate subroutines to support the different hardware anyway, so instruction-level / memory-map-level compatibility isn't so crucial.

This seems so obviously "possible" (though definitely challenging!) that I've always wondered whether there are any games that are actual examples of this — where the game came out at the same time in both NES/FC and SNES/SFC releases, and binary analysis reveals that the majority of the game's engine code is shared between the two, with differences mostly in the subroutines/coroutines composing the "graphics engine", and in the static data.

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On a separate note, I feel like it would be even simpler — and a lot more performant! — to ahead-of-time recompile a NES game to run on the SNES. The NES doesn't tend to do tricks with dynamic runtime code generation, so NES games are good candidates for being statically analyzed and transpiled. (And the SNES has such a similar architecture, that even those dynamic runtime tricks might map cleanly onto the SNES, too.)

I've used something similar to get MAME's VT240 to talk to a WSL instance. Had to go dig up a forum post I wrote a few years back to find the exact commands.

On the WSL Linux side: socat -d -d exec:'bash -li',pty,stderr,setsid,sigint,sane TCP-LISTEN:11313,reuseaddr,fork

On the Windows side: .\mame.exe vt240 -window -host null_modem -bitb socket.10.0.0.2:11313

This is a frustrating question, I wrote a big long comment and then deleted it because I watched the video more carefully and I think my conclusion from last time I looked into this was wrong.

Let's start with what I can assert as facts: computerized NYT typesetting began with an IBM 1620 and a Linofilm mechanical phototypesetter. This is not the system we see in the video, the 1620 was a paper tape machine primarily and did not support graphical terminals. I would think that the video might have elided the paper tape part of the process but it also shows us an engineering console that has IBM vibes (formal method in computer history) but is definitely not a 1620. Not surprising anyway, the 1620 was quite old by the time this video was made in 1978 and would probably have been replaced.

The graphics terminals that we see in the video are probably not IBM, because they don't look like any IBM VDTs I know of or can find. They have "Commodore PET vibes," which unfortunately was a popular aesthetic at the time, and a lot of '70s terminals looked generally like that.

I tend to zero in on Harris, though, as in defense contractor L3Harris. At the time, Harris had merged with Intertype, a major competitor to Linotype for hot-metal typesetting in the day. Harris continued to make phototypesetting systems, and they also made full-on Data Processing Systems (computers and terminals) including some for typographic applications. The terminals we see in the video look kinda-sorta like some older Harris VDTs but not exactly, unfortunately it's not easy to find good information on old Harris computer products.

If you look carefully at the video you'll notice there's actually more than one type of terminal, and they look to be of slightly different industrial design eras. So one of the puzzles here is that NYT in 1978 was very likely using more than one phototypesetting system. Elsewhere in the video we see the console of a Data General minicomputer, and a Metro-Set CRT typesetter, underscoring that there are multiple systems depicted.

IN FACT, in a pleasing conclusion, while looking for more info on the (not very popular) MGD Metro-Set CRT typesetter, I found a 1976 NYT article stating that "Early this summer, Harris will install facilities to hyphenate and justify copy and send it through the Times's MGD Metro‐set photocomposing machines."

So we are definitely seeing some Harris terminals, Metro-Set typesetters, I'm guessing the big operator console we see is a Harris Data Processing System that controls the terminals, and who knows what's up with the Data General machine, it might just be for accounting or batch jobs to the typesetters or something.

Computers were a lot less general-purpose back then, as the "hyphenate and justify copy" part of the quote suggests. It's very likely that the article text was written on one computer system, moved to another (by magnetic tape or disk pack or even I/O channel) for layout, etc. Even in the '70s, "store and retrieve text files (by newspaper section, publish date, etc)" would be the requirements for a complete hardware/software system, and Harris seems to have had a focus on that kind of system because of their combination of Intertype legacy and a full computer division.

The film can be a little confusing because I think people watch it and come away with the conclusion that the NYT started computer typesetting in 1978. They didn't, I believe they were doing computer typesetting by the late '60s, 1978 was just when they dropped hot metal entirely. I'm not sure what was happening in the intervening period, but it wasn't at all unusual for publishers to mix-and-match, for example doing articles in hot type and classified ads (which really benefited from computerized management) by computer.

The "paste-up" process that we see at the end, to prepare "camera-ready" pages to be photographed and used to etch plates, had the benefit of incredible flexibility on the input. You would routinely combine output from different typesetting systems (e.g. headlines were often done on their own system), mechanical systems, hand drawn illustrations, etc into one paste-up.

What's wrong with selling goods and services for more than they cost?