Redkey

The woman in the article's main picture is Japanese pop singer Hikaru Utada, although it's probably just a little joke. I couldn't find a connection between her and the naming of the Hikaru arcade board.

However, Sega's Chihiro board was apparently named after the Studio Ghibli character, and I suspect that another Sega arcade system, the Lindbergh, was more likely named after the popular Japanese rock band rather than directly after the American aviator. Hikaru Utada had just started to become successful around the time the Hikaru board was released, so it's possible, although Hikaru isn't a particularly uncommon name in Japan.

I don't buy AAA games, so YMMV, but I buy my games almost exclusively from GOG and Itch these days. I have loads of games on Steam, but now the DRM-free aspect is most important to me. If something is only on Steam, I may still buy it if I can confirm that it's "DRM-free" (e.g. bypassable Steam check) there, or if it's so cheap that I won't mind losing it. As honest as GabeN and the Steam team seem to be, I've been shafted enough times already.

The one drawback I see for buying on GOG vs buying on Steam (which can also be kind of an advantage depending on your perspective) is updates. Steam seems to let publishers push updates out whenever they want. While a few publishers do actually seem to forget about GOG, I have read comments from a few different developers (in response to complaints from customers) that they had sent their updates to GOG but were stuck in an approval process. It appears that the GOG team manually tests every update before putting it up for customers, and there's a large backlog for a small team, so it can be several months before a patch gets through.

"rd" and "rmdir" only work on empty directories in MS-DOS (and I assume, by extension, in Windows shell). "deltree" is for nuking a complete tree including files, as the name suggests.

JS has saved me many hours of mind-numbing, error-prone manual keyboard work by giving me a way to hack together a simple bit of automation as a web page.

Even when a computer has been ham-fistedly locked-down by an overzealous IT department, I can almost always still access a text editor and a browser that will load local HTML files.

Also over on itch for pay-what-you-want, with extras.

Many 8-bit home computer emulators have an option to recreate the sounds of their tape drives and disk drives as they load software. But are there any Dreamcast emulators that recreate that unholy screeching that made you wonder if your console was somehow already on its last legs even though it was still nearly new?

I wouldn't want to hear it the whole time, but for the first major load of a game it might be pleasantly nostalgic.

When you use any piece of Internet-enabled software, any and all data that passes through it can theoretically be copied and siphoned off back to the authors of the software.

Should they do it? No. Can they do it? Yes.

Does Mozilla do it? They say they don't, and I'm inclined to trust them. Do other major browsers do it? Absolutely.

As regards your physical location, geoIP databases can get pretty close these days.

There are all sorts of licensing shenanigans when dealing with HDMI, so I wonder if it's compatible with their open source policy. But personally I'd have put a VGA output on it as a compromise between period correctness and modern usage. Easy to output as analog from the console, and easy to convert cleanly for modern displays with inexpensive adapters.

Nah, you're cool. I know my system's old, but as you say there's still plenty of life in it, so I'll keep it for now. Especially since I stick entirely to indie games these days.

But actually, I'm keeping an eye on auctions for something just a few years newer. Games that require AVX2 extensions are finally starting to come out, and my CPU doesn't support them. Even with indie games, most of them use third-party engines, so it might not be too much longer before it's an issue even for me.

Heh, TFW someone describes "resurrecting" a "low-spec" machine, and others talk about how old and out of date it is, and it's roughly equivalent to your main gaming PC.

How many techie types have had someone come to them and say something like "Hey, you know tech thing XYZ? You know how it sucks? Well I've got a great idea: make a BETTER one! So what do you say? You whip it up in an afternoon, I'll handle marketing, and we'll be rich!"

Like they really thought that the issue is just that no-one can see the flaws. They thought that the fix is super easy and they're just the first person clever enough to see it.

Not to take away from your very good point, but I think the word you might be looking for is "eqivalence".