Conversely, games had little to no resale value back then despite self-evidently coming with the entire contents right there on the cartridge. Basically everything in my NES library when I was a kid except, perhaps ironically, SMB3 came from yard sales and so forth where I bought them for a quarter or fifty cents or whatever.

It looks to me like a chipping sparrow.

Helicon Focus. Some of the errors may be due to the thing moving in between exposures, partly due to my doing this without a tripod and also what with the flower waving around in the wind.

For science!

I’d doubt that would work. You’d also be changing the distance to the subject, and in so doing changing its size in the frame each shot.

You could probably do a burst and twist your focus ring manually throughout, though.

I’m going to give a non-answer here, but spend some words pointing out that there is an entire TV Trope explicitly named after the phenomenon contributing to much of the current-day Seinfeld hate, namely that it feels trite and predictable only when viewed through the lens of modernity. Seinfeld is unfunny as we decry that it’s all been done before, forgetting that it’s only been done before because Seinfeld did it first and lots of others imitated in the wake of its popularity. In its era it was actually truly groundbreaking, in a way that Friends definitely was not.

Seinfeld (along with Married… With Children) was the original raunchy sitcom that broke the genre free from bland family friendly predictability and opened up the possibility of one being entertainment aimed squarely and indeed only at adults. The core cast of Seinfeld are all terrible people, in retrospect probably because Jerry Seinfeld himself was writing from what he knew, where nobody learns the important lesson at the end of the episode on purpose. Sex, relationships, and even failed relationships were openly discussed. There is no central family unit, and every family we are shown in any detail (mainly Jerry’s and especially George’s) are highly dysfunctional. Before it, the concept of an episode having A and B plotlines that intersect and eventually entangle with each other hadn’t been done, even though this is such a staple that it’s outright expected of any show today. It had a deliberately misanthropic sense of humor that was the perfect fit for the cynical point in history in which it occupied.

In a way Friends is aspirational, an idealized imagining of a hypothetical urban lifestyle that the viewer may hope to achieve even if they don’t personally identify with it. Seinfeld, conversely, is an outright freakshow. You are on the outside looking in at these vain and deceitful people much like a jar full of scorpions someone’s just shaken so they’ll fight. And you’re glad to be on the outside of it, because you really don’t want to be them. But there is a certain bile attraction to it nevertheless, a sort of twisted catharsis in that despite how horrible and selfish as the core cast may be they are also somehow able to live without remorse, speak without filters, and act out without consequences in ways that we only wish we could get away with. (The fact that they spout so many zingers and precipitate so many quotable moments probably also helps.)

“But my cousin told me the fox fire is used by hackers or something, and the Google one said it was faster.”

'98 does have a banger attract screen song, it’s true.

The following game choices are objectively correct from a long time Neo Geo nerd. What anyone else tells you is wrong. (I kid, I kid. Mostly.)

• Twiklestar Sprites
• Samurai Shodown 3 specifically
• The Last Blade (not its sequel)
• Twinklestar Sprites
• Money Puzzle Exchanger, but only its attract screen
• Viewpoint
• Twinklestar Sprites
• Blazing Star
• Waku Waku 7 (and to a lesser extent its predecessor, Galaxy Fight)
• Aero Fighters 2
• and lastly, Twinklestar Sprites

If you’re going to play KoF or Metal Slug anyway, the best King of Fighters is '99, and the best Metal Slug is 2.

Not much, other than the handful of games that are specifically compatible with the 6 button pad. Street Fighter 2 is the only one I had any direct experience with back in the day.

Close but no cigar on that Genesis/Megadrive controller, there.

The original Atari VCS/2600 had 128 bytes of RAM. It is astonishing what programmers were eventually able to achieve on it with basically nothing. Although additional memory could be included on cartridges, and many games did so. Or had to do so, I imagine.

And the Power Base Converter. I don’t think that will pass through the 32x, though. I’ll have to dig mine out and try it some time.

I think the main impact here is that there are plenty of embedded system-on-a-chip sort of things specifically designed for industrial applications not only still out there in the world, but still being actively manufactured that are based on the 486 architecture.

For retro gaming nerds, their 486 machines would all be running some variant of DOS anyway.