It always blows my mind that companies would rather just dump a product in a landfill, earning zero dollars on it, instead of just liquidating it to dorks like me who would happily buy a few just to futz around with, thus giving them dollars for their wasted time. It seems so blatently anti-consumer.
Like, I hate capitalism and all, but isn't the point of it to make as much money as you can by any means possible?
@NanoRaptor An ARM version of NextStep would probably run quite well on 3DS.
@NanoRaptor I would absolutely back this on Kickstarter.
@NanoRaptor (just wanted to say how much I adore the 𓃑 speaker grilles on this very fine device)
@NanoRaptor Many years ago one April 1st, PCW magazine ran an ad for a pocket-sized Cray-1 called the Cray Fiche.
@NanoRaptor You’ll never know how hard it was to make those itty bitty color Megapixel displays. Just getting Display Postscript running on that was a bear. Alas, Adobe demanded too much in royalties, so the entire project, including the incredible factory, had to be scrapped.
They were interred right next to the surplus stacks of 88110 based NeXT RISC workstations.
@NanoRaptor Now I want to mod mine..
@NanoRaptor
Didn’t SEGA buy up all of NeXT gaming assets, which they eventually released as Game Cube?
@NanoRaptor
...I saw an image of an optical 'laser card' on my feed, and thought it was one of yours - then went on eBay and found a LaserCard reader for sale:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/304522370232
... But it has SCSI harmonica plugs and _a USB-A female_ plug on the back
@NanoRaptor I actually ran WindowMaker back in the day. What a blast from the past.
Another brilliant business decision by our genius tech CEOs.
@NanoRaptor still happily using WindowMaker, and wishing there were a port to Wayland.
@NanoRaptor we had a school camp near there and a dingo had dug up some old bits of NeXT hardware and they had that eery green glow you’ve probably read about. Most of the kids were too shit scared to touch any of it but Warren just straight up grabbed a chunk of RAM and stuck it in the pocket of his Ruggers. His mum says he still can’t eat solid foods.
@NanoRaptor is this the same chess as in macOS?
@NanoRaptor Deception hits again. I genuinely thought this was a DS Lite running a homebrew version of OpenStep.
@NanoRaptor
amazing. All my life I thought they were landfilled next to those Atarii ET cartridges.
@NanoRaptor NeXT ported NeXTstep to ARM specifically for this project. This later became the core of iOS.
@NanoRaptor its basically a Nintendo DS presumably before the DS. That would have been excellent
@NanoRaptor it was Doomed anyway because because its control scheme made it NeXT to impossible to play the one game that would have made it a huge seller.
@NanoRaptor So cool.
Of course, the battery life was measured in minutes.
@NanoRaptor love how 2 Sound Boxes have been integrated!
@NanoRaptor Had me wondering for a sec! Then: Dubbo. Ahhh, I see.
@NanoRaptor yet again, I actually believed this post was true until I saw this was posted by you. Sometimes your made-up stories (like the part about being scrapped and sent to landfill 2 weeks before release) sound so very plausible and similar to events that have actually.
@NanoRaptor I need this to be a legitimate shell for the DS.
@NanoRaptor @viticci this must be the NeXT Portable Console I’ve been hearing about
a grime against the earth, and worse, gaming
Nice way to erase ~16 years between the NeXT Cube and the Nintendo DS :)
@NanoRaptor it was also killed by the team's refusal to compromise on screen resolution. The rumored cost to manufacture was in the thousands per unit.
@NanoRaptor the absurdly high screen rez gave it away
@NanoRaptor would. The handheld obviously.
@NanoRaptor We keep looking for them, but the landfill site wasn't well documented.
@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social it’s an incredible story. They actually bought NeXT for NeXTlevel, to replace Pippin! And then canceled BOTH to focus on OS X!
The best thing to ever happen in Dubbo...
@NanoRaptor Lol, you can't fool me that's a Nintendo DS Lite.
@NanoRaptor Fortunately, some of its key innovations resurfaced years later in iOS (multitouch, stylus air drawing), macOS (Freeform), and iPadOS (WarioWare)
@NanoRaptor Oh, good LORD, I wish to god high in nerd heaven! Someone needs to make this real!!!! PLEASE!!!!!
@NanoRaptor Two Mousecursors even, revolutionary!
@NanoRaptor I heard it had a huge proprietary connector in the back that ran the length of the device..
@NanoRaptor I bet that welcome email from Steve Jobs that every new account got sounded REALLY bad on that thing.
@NanoRaptor heh I remember trying to port Donley Kong to one of those.
@NanoRaptor should've gone with N/E/X/T for the buttons :D
@NanoRaptor In my own obviously biased opinion, I'm a switched on, intelligent guy who isn't credulous and is very difficult to dupe.
So why the fuck do I read so may of your posts and go "Woah! Wait... FUCK."
The NeXTlevel was NeXT Software's first handheld device, eagerly awaited but canned just two weeks from release when Apple purchased NeXT and chose not to pursue gaming. All 250,000 release devices were pulled from channels and unceremoniously rolled into landfill out northwest of Dubbo.