Almost two decades ago a I had a Thinkgeek C++ round bumper sticker on my car because I thought the language was the bees' knees. Today I'm finding myself holding my tongue in watching videos from C++Con which quickly go from 1 to 10 in terms of complexity; where only the smartest of developers can remember all of the rules and the exceptions to leverage modern day C++. I feel as if the movers and shakers of the C++ language spec have an inner social circle and have lost touch with the wider developer audience.
Having used C#, Actionscript, LUA, Python and dabbled just enough in Swift and Rust, I believe that C++ either needs to have a fundamental change to break the axiom of backwards compatibility or it will be replaced by Rust, Go, or some other (LLVM) language that has been inspired by C/C++ but has a simpler, consistent syntax made for modern day computing.
My prediction: when underlying, low-level OS components are replaced with non-C, non-C++ counterparts, that will be the beginning of a global acceptance for a new language standard. Until then there will always be a place for C/C++. I really hope this change happens in the next ten years; I'm not holding my breath though.
I first learned to program on an Apple ][e at school; was ecstatic when we got one at home. Technically this was after being taught Apple Logo, but I don't consider that my first language.
In Middle school I still remember learning IF PEEK(-16384)>127 THEN a key was pressed; the most important statement in moving from prompt based games to action based games. (Another good one POKE(49200) for a "click" through the speaker).
In High school I learned about Beagle Bros. and their BASIC compiler; running some of my games 10 times after... really allowing me to make something fun. http://beagle.applearchives.co...
Eventually that gave way to Turbo Pascal, which gave way to C++.
"While Civilization might have better graphics/sounds, that doesn't add much to the "educational" value."
When I was a director of a summer "Computer Camp" in the 1990s, we allowed our campers to play Civilization II. Within it was a plethora of information on historical figures, places, etc... to which the campers were actively seeking out in the "Civilopedia" as they played. Seeing this engagement across genders and ages, was a key reason why I sought out employment at Microprose after college. (Disclaimer: I'm currently employed by Firaxis; opinions stated here are my own.)
Civ5 has built on Civ; each version has pushed the level of graphics and sound which a few have argued do add educational value as it makes the content more compelling; I agree.
The last few versions of Civilization have offered a great deal of MODability. You too can change game rules, UI, etc... by modifying XML and the supplied LUA. As for the depth of what you can do, check out this awesome WIKI fans made of the MOD system: http://modiki.civfanatics.com/...
There is a great article by Jeff Atwood on building a system: http://blog.codinghorror.com/t... If you aren't familiar, he's developer that has been blogging for about a decade and is read by a number of developers.
In this article, he references a series of articles wrote back in 2007, when he was building his previous development machine. It includes a section on Overclocking: http://blog.codinghorror.com/b...
The take-away: there is a risk of stability, but it's considered low enough in the the cost/performance ratio that he advocates overclocking his development box.
Also a +1 for Fastmail. I was using Spamcop for over a decade until they spun down services a little over a year ago. I asked them what they recommended and pointed me to Fastmail ( https://www.fastmail.com/ ). Great service for native mail clients, a good online interface, and an informative blog ( http://blog.fastmail.com/ ). Worth the $10 to $40 a year IMHO.
"Else just take a simple cheap webcam and do it yourself. A webcam, a rPi and a bit of coding ought to get you what you need easily." This is the exact question I'm asking.... a good quality, (cheap if possible), webcam that can quickly be setup for this task of sending images to a server for a web-page to display. So far it doesn't look to exist.
Making it easy for the common user to send something to dropbox is fine, I just agree with Mobydisk that there should be some support for more advanced standards, if a user decides to tread there (WebDAV, SFTP, etc...). And as for FTP, it seems the cameras that support it (e.g., Foscam, Hikvision, etc...) don't support SFTP or FTP-S, the all only support vanilla, insecure, FTP....but that's a different issue.
I went into this thinking it could all be setup in no more than a few hours one afternoon; many of these solutions will take many days. (e.g., rPi is an interesting avenue, and may be something I'll jump into, as I've wanted an excuse to play with one, but it won't be "quick")
The ice-cream shop is small, "mom and pop" shop; the owner is the manager. Your inference is off, they are not crazy and most definitely not lazy; in fact the opposite which is why they are pursuing this endeavor.
That is a good question... It doesn't have to be trigger by motion; that is just a likely scenario when the menu board is updated. It could also upload a new photo every so many minutes/hours... the trick would be to pick an interval that is frequent enough to be up-to-date but not so frequent that they much through their allocated bandwidth for the month from the frequent uploads.
An interesting approach but it has some issues for this situation: 1) The potential web camera is on a LAN with an IP that isn't web visible 2) The idea is not to have to dedicate any other computers to get the image up 3) The shop does not have a static IP address
All of these are addressable, but if the camera can push the image out, rather than someone reach in to pull it from the camera, it seems to be a much easier task. (Or it would be if the Hikvision FTP was working as claimed in the manual.)
The end goal is to have a web-page that displays the image; FTP is just a way of getting the image to the page. The Foscam they tried did have FTP build in but image quality wasn't up to snuff.
Thank you for mentioning the Zoneminder wiki/forums; that seems to be a good source of information from people having utilized the equipment they talk about.
Know Nutter: Thanks for the link. Anon: Thanks for the notice on the resolution... there may be a DLink solution; the one KN mentioned is a bit low (640x480) but I see there are some at 720p which may do the trick if they go in this direction.
Thank you. May not work as the existing camera mounts are from the ceiling; not easily accessible... still worth checking out; perhaps there is a hack.
Immerman: If you know of an App, please pass on the word. The key is that it needs to be triggered if there is motion (when the board is updated).
koan: I thought of a iPhone or Android that could do the trick but would need to find a piece of software that can activate with motion, and FTP the image up to a site. Webcams are essentially build for this, with both video and images. The problem is, the older ones have horrible resolution. The newer webcams look great (720p, 1080p, good sensors, etc...) but are all working on a model where you have to pay to access the feed from their "private cloud". So I hear you say "webcam" is the problem... great I agree... but what do you offer as a solution?
You're right, it's not too difficult to take a photo and upload it everyday. What's easier than that? Having to take no photo or upload at all because it's all happening automatically.
First of all, why not simply upload a PDF with the new menu every day?...
...another task is the exact situation they want to avoid and see technology as a solution.
For those comments about defacing; it's not a small menu off to the side, or in front of the shop, it's a 6 foot tall menu board in the main area (it's an ice-cream shop) which is already updated daily (or a few times a day if they run out of a flavor and cross over to their next batch, etc...) Once a camera is in place, showing the menu online is something they just don't have to worry about any more - updating the menu board updates its on the web.
The IDE with the name "Flash" (or "Flash CC" in it's current version) is by far the best 2d animation tool in the industry. That said, despite an ever increasing IDE set of feature, it's horrendous for coding and debugging. The OpenSource project "Flash Develop" ( http://flashdevelop.org/ ) made AS3 usable by the many hobbyists writing games, as well as the AAA's doing UI work via Scaleform's Flash player.
For those not on the Flash/AS3 scene: there was the meme "Flash is Dead" that started about 3-5 years ago. It's not dead, as-in not at 0% usage, but for about two years it hasn't been a viable tech for most indies to use. (Flash via Adobe's AIR technology does work great on mobile but for some reason, perhaps due to the need of "Flash Builder", this doesn't have as great as a traction amongst indie game devs.) Most indie/AAA devs who really did a stellar job leveraging the low-level bits of Flash, ended up going to HTML5/Javascript or C#/Unity ( http://jacksondunstan.com/ ) . A few did jump over to HaXe ( http://haxe.org/ ), and the award winning "Papers Please" game showed HaXe is viable for indie commercial projects... but it's unproven for larger scale projects and the smaller size of the dev team working on HaXe, has some companies hesitant to explore it.
So it's great Adobe is adding these hooks to allow OpenFL / HaXe to become more accessible, and thereby help out both the Flash community and their own communities.... but what about "Flash Builder"? The other Flash IDE, built upon Eclipse that is so broken that if you delete a local project through the Finder, it prevents the whole IDE from even starting up? Is Adobe dropping it? Are they adding the functionality to it? Are they going to make it as friendly to use as FlashDevelop? (I'd love to not have to boot Parallels, just to use a Windows-only IDE.)
Half of the (former-)Flash blogs I follow, sound as-if Adobe is transitioning away from Flash, putting resources into HTML/Javascript tools instead. And then occasionally, I hear about some new (usually game industry-related) features Adobe is installing in their Flash tools. But even when 100's of indie developers were making a full-time living, selling Flash games, there wasn't a single year at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) that Adobe had a Flash presence and talked about games with their technology (with the exception of one year showing off "Adobe Director".)
Depending on if/how the sale of Unity goes to Google, or Microsoft, or whoever... this may be the one opportunity where Adobe can enamor game programmers with a Flash-based development environment (maybe other business sectors as well.)
We do this too; we have a "producer" (akin to a manager in the non-game software development) in the stand up. If someone takes an inordinate amount of time or goes off topic, the producer snaps the stand-up back on track. If a pattern of this occurs, they'll talk to the individual after the meeting to work out a solution.
I agree with those who talk about FDD being a cultural problem as the arrangement outlined above could transpire poorly if the standup meetings repeatedly derail and/or the manager has horrible soft skills when requesting a developer to be more succinct.
Thank you for taking the time to write up a list... I've been looking for a good weather App. Also a second for Waze, a great use of crowd-sourcing for live traffic information.
If, by any chance, you know of a good calculator App (w/ dec, hex, and binary support) , I'd love to hear your recommendation.
History disagrees with the sentiment that it was easier to "make money" as an indie in the 1980s, or 1990s than today....
In the 1980s the distribution channels were being established which meant either you scored a deal with a bricks and mortar retail store, such as Sears, Babbages or Toy's R Us, or you ziplock bagged your PC game and tried to sell them at swap meets and computer stores.
In the 1990s there were more direct retailers and amalgamations of bricks and mortar stores occurred. The shareware model emerged and ziplock bagging disappeared. If anything, the 1990's were a bit of a dark ages for indies as either you had a publisher to get into a store or shareware.
From the 2000s onward we have an increased number of target platforms, and increased demographic of game players (from kiddos to those who grew up playing games for 30+ years... see: http://dmitriwilliams.com/will... (warning: Word doc)) , and increased number of channels (e.g., bricks and mortar persists (barely), online services like Steam, bundles, etc...)
If you (have aspirations to) develop indie games, it may seem likely everyone is creating them and the market is saturated but it's the same mentality as a musician at a "Guitar Center" thinking everyone in the world is now in a band; no, it's just the community they choose to surround themselves in. The signal to noise ratio is such that indies can succeed if they spend time build a great game and heed the lessons of other indies in how to market it through these channels. (GDC Vault has many free videos on this topic, such as: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1... )
I even have a personal example of a AAA dev who use to work with me, but left years ago to start his own 1-man shop. He was a graphic programmer who taught himself to become a better artist and has been making a living, creating games, for a few years now. Check out his studio: http://www.epacegames.com/ And can also site Discord games ( http://discordgames.com/ ); larger than a 1-man group but by making an awesome game and marketing it appropriately, have an opportunity to sell Chasm to eager players, an opportunity that would not have existed 20 years ago.
tl;dr: Accessibility has always been a concern and, there is more innovation happening today than 30 years ago.
I also miss the (video game) days of my youth; learning about games from friends, or by going to an arcade and seeing what new machine was front and center...later making ANSII ads for BBS's so I could obtain a high enough credentials to get access to their warez section and learn about the latest games.
That said, I chock my emotions of those days as nostalgia and recognize an indie in the 80's/90's had a much more limited set of options than today. From middle school to college my options went from Applesoft Basic with the Beagle Bros compiler to Turbo Pascal/C++ with the XMODE library. That's it. Innovation in game design, and mechanics was regulated to a task that could be accomplished only after you figured out how to get a framebuffer up, sounds playing, and all the other nit picky things required to build a game.
Don't mistake accessibility with complexity. I make games for a living and some of my co-workers have been doing this for 30+ years; accessibility has always been at the front of the games developers build. When 4k of memory was a lot, the best games could do was have paddles, a ball, and text written on an arcade cabinet to describe how to play. Later on we introduced demo mode and how-to-play screens, which worked particularly well with most games as they didn't scroll and limited play modes and/or mechanics to demonstrate.
And when games became more complex (powerups, scrolling screens, etc...), the games people played were the ones that continued to innovate on how they were accessible. A great example that codifies this early push for accessibility by design is in "Sequelitis - Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If games haven't always found a way to be accessible, demos, tutorials, etc... they wouldn't be played because only a handful of us die-hard geeks are willing to read through the manual. So as awesome as it was making games in 320x240 with 256 colors with my own game engine, I know what I was able to produce then pales in comparison to what an eager indie can create today.
To see this innovation just poke around Newgrounds or go to any global game jam site or just look at the entries from one of the quarterly Ludam Dare's ( http://ludumdare.com/ ). At the Game Developer's Conference this year there was a whole section of alternative input games ( http://www.gdconf.com/news/gdc... ). And there are plenty of other sources showing innovation game play mechanics, some fun, some not, but plenty of experimentation.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost two decades ago a I had a Thinkgeek C++ round bumper sticker on my car because I thought the language was the bees' knees. Today I'm finding myself holding my tongue in watching videos from C++Con which quickly go from 1 to 10 in terms of complexity; where only the smartest of developers can remember all of the rules and the exceptions to leverage modern day C++. I feel as if the movers and shakers of the C++ language spec have an inner social circle and have lost touch with the wider developer audience.
Having used C#, Actionscript, LUA, Python and dabbled just enough in Swift and Rust, I believe that C++ either needs to have a fundamental change to break the axiom of backwards compatibility or it will be replaced by Rust, Go, or some other (LLVM) language that has been inspired by C/C++ but has a simpler, consistent syntax made for modern day computing.
My prediction: when underlying, low-level OS components are replaced with non-C, non-C++ counterparts, that will be the beginning of a global acceptance for a new language standard. Until then there will always be a place for C/C++. I really hope this change happens in the next ten years; I'm not holding my breath though.
I first learned to program on an Apple ][e at school; was ecstatic when we got one at home. Technically this was after being taught Apple Logo, but I don't consider that my first language.
In Middle school I still remember learning IF PEEK(-16384)>127 THEN a key was pressed; the most important statement in moving from prompt based games to action based games. (Another good one POKE(49200) for a "click" through the speaker).
In High school I learned about Beagle Bros. and their BASIC compiler; running some of my games 10 times after... really allowing me to make something fun.
http://beagle.applearchives.co...
Eventually that gave way to Turbo Pascal, which gave way to C++.
"While Civilization might have better graphics/sounds, that doesn't add much to the "educational" value."
When I was a director of a summer "Computer Camp" in the 1990s, we allowed our campers to play Civilization II. Within it was a plethora of information on historical figures, places, etc... to which the campers were actively seeking out in the "Civilopedia" as they played. Seeing this engagement across genders and ages, was a key reason why I sought out employment at Microprose after college. (Disclaimer: I'm currently employed by Firaxis; opinions stated here are my own.)
Civ5 has built on Civ; each version has pushed the level of graphics and sound which a few have argued do add educational value as it makes the content more compelling; I agree.
The last few versions of Civilization have offered a great deal of MODability. You too can change game rules, UI, etc... by modifying XML and the supplied LUA. As for the depth of what you can do, check out this awesome WIKI fans made of the MOD system: http://modiki.civfanatics.com/...
There is a great article by Jeff Atwood on building a system: http://blog.codinghorror.com/t... If you aren't familiar, he's developer that has been blogging for about a decade and is read by a number of developers.
In this article, he references a series of articles wrote back in 2007, when he was building his previous development machine. It includes a section on Overclocking: http://blog.codinghorror.com/b...
The take-away: there is a risk of stability, but it's considered low enough in the the cost/performance ratio that he advocates overclocking his development box.
Also a +1 for Fastmail. I was using Spamcop for over a decade until they spun down services a little over a year ago. I asked them what they recommended and pointed me to Fastmail ( https://www.fastmail.com/ ). Great service for native mail clients, a good online interface, and an informative blog ( http://blog.fastmail.com/ ). Worth the $10 to $40 a year IMHO.
"Else just take a simple cheap webcam and do it yourself. A webcam, a rPi and a bit of coding ought to get you what you need easily."
This is the exact question I'm asking.... a good quality, (cheap if possible), webcam that can quickly be setup for this task of sending images to a server for a web-page to display. So far it doesn't look to exist.
Making it easy for the common user to send something to dropbox is fine, I just agree with Mobydisk that there should be some support for more advanced standards, if a user decides to tread there (WebDAV, SFTP, etc...). And as for FTP, it seems the cameras that support it (e.g., Foscam, Hikvision, etc...) don't support SFTP or FTP-S, the all only support vanilla, insecure, FTP....but that's a different issue.
I went into this thinking it could all be setup in no more than a few hours one afternoon; many of these solutions will take many days. (e.g., rPi is an interesting avenue, and may be something I'll jump into, as I've wanted an excuse to play with one, but it won't be "quick")
The ice-cream shop is small, "mom and pop" shop; the owner is the manager.
Your inference is off, they are not crazy and most definitely not lazy; in fact the opposite which is why they are pursuing this endeavor.
This is a good idea; they actually do this already. They want to take it to the next level... hence a Slashdot question. 8)
I recall there being an open-source project to replace the firmware in webcams. What happened to it?
Would love to know if anyone has follow up on this.
That is a good question... ... the trick would be to pick an interval that is frequent enough to be up-to-date but not so frequent that they much through their allocated bandwidth for the month from the frequent uploads.
It doesn't have to be trigger by motion; that is just a likely scenario when the menu board is updated. It could also upload a new photo every so many minutes/hours
Thank you; had not heard of this brand before.
The TV-IP562WI may do the trick.
An interesting approach but it has some issues for this situation:
1) The potential web camera is on a LAN with an IP that isn't web visible
2) The idea is not to have to dedicate any other computers to get the image up
3) The shop does not have a static IP address
All of these are addressable, but if the camera can push the image out, rather than someone reach in to pull it from the camera, it seems to be a much easier task.
(Or it would be if the Hikvision FTP was working as claimed in the manual.)
The end goal is to have a web-page that displays the image; FTP is just a way of getting the image to the page.
The Foscam they tried did have FTP build in but image quality wasn't up to snuff.
Thank you for mentioning the Zoneminder wiki/forums; that seems to be a good source of information from people having utilized the equipment they talk about.
Know Nutter: Thanks for the link.
Anon: Thanks for the notice on the resolution... there may be a DLink solution; the one KN mentioned is a bit low (640x480) but I see there are some at 720p which may do the trick if they go in this direction.
Thank you, this is definitely an option.
Thank you. May not work as the existing camera mounts are from the ceiling; not easily accessible... still worth checking out; perhaps there is a hack.
This is fantastic; hadn't come across Mobotix or Axis.
Will check them out. Thank you.
Immerman: If you know of an App, please pass on the word. The key is that it needs to be triggered if there is motion (when the board is updated).
koan: I thought of a iPhone or Android that could do the trick but would need to find a piece of software that can activate with motion, and FTP the image up to a site. Webcams are essentially build for this, with both video and images. The problem is, the older ones have horrible resolution. The newer webcams look great (720p, 1080p, good sensors, etc...) but are all working on a model where you have to pay to access the feed from their "private cloud". So I hear you say "webcam" is the problem... great I agree... but what do you offer as a solution?
You're right, it's not too difficult to take a photo and upload it everyday.
What's easier than that? Having to take no photo or upload at all because it's all happening automatically.
First of all, why not simply upload a PDF with the new menu every day?...
...another task is the exact situation they want to avoid and see technology as a solution.
For those comments about defacing; it's not a small menu off to the side, or in front of the shop, it's a 6 foot tall menu board in the main area (it's an ice-cream shop) which is already updated daily (or a few times a day if they run out of a flavor and cross over to their next batch, etc...) Once a camera is in place, showing the menu online is something they just don't have to worry about any more - updating the menu board updates its on the web.
The IDE with the name "Flash" (or "Flash CC" in it's current version) is by far the best 2d animation tool in the industry. That said, despite an ever increasing IDE set of feature, it's horrendous for coding and debugging. The OpenSource project "Flash Develop" ( http://flashdevelop.org/ ) made AS3 usable by the many hobbyists writing games, as well as the AAA's doing UI work via Scaleform's Flash player.
For those not on the Flash/AS3 scene: there was the meme "Flash is Dead" that started about 3-5 years ago. It's not dead, as-in not at 0% usage, but for about two years it hasn't been a viable tech for most indies to use. (Flash via Adobe's AIR technology does work great on mobile but for some reason, perhaps due to the need of "Flash Builder", this doesn't have as great as a traction amongst indie game devs.) Most indie/AAA devs who really did a stellar job leveraging the low-level bits of Flash, ended up going to HTML5/Javascript or C#/Unity ( http://jacksondunstan.com/ ) . A few did jump over to HaXe ( http://haxe.org/ ), and the award winning "Papers Please" game showed HaXe is viable for indie commercial projects... but it's unproven for larger scale projects and the smaller size of the dev team working on HaXe, has some companies hesitant to explore it.
So it's great Adobe is adding these hooks to allow OpenFL / HaXe to become more accessible, and thereby help out both the Flash community and their own communities. ... but what about "Flash Builder"? The other Flash IDE, built upon Eclipse that is so broken that if you delete a local project through the Finder, it prevents the whole IDE from even starting up? Is Adobe dropping it? Are they adding the functionality to it? Are they going to make it as friendly to use as FlashDevelop? (I'd love to not have to boot Parallels, just to use a Windows-only IDE.)
Half of the (former-)Flash blogs I follow, sound as-if Adobe is transitioning away from Flash, putting resources into HTML/Javascript tools instead. And then occasionally, I hear about some new (usually game industry-related) features Adobe is installing in their Flash tools. But even when 100's of indie developers were making a full-time living, selling Flash games, there wasn't a single year at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) that Adobe had a Flash presence and talked about games with their technology (with the exception of one year showing off "Adobe Director".)
Depending on if/how the sale of Unity goes to Google, or Microsoft, or whoever... this may be the one opportunity where Adobe can enamor game programmers with a Flash-based development environment (maybe other business sectors as well.)
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
We do this too; we have a "producer" (akin to a manager in the non-game software development) in the stand up. If someone takes an inordinate amount of time or goes off topic, the producer snaps the stand-up back on track. If a pattern of this occurs, they'll talk to the individual after the meeting to work out a solution.
I agree with those who talk about FDD being a cultural problem as the arrangement outlined above could transpire poorly if the standup meetings repeatedly derail and/or the manager has horrible soft skills when requesting a developer to be more succinct.
Thank you for taking the time to write up a list... I've been looking for a good weather App.
Also a second for Waze, a great use of crowd-sourcing for live traffic information.
If, by any chance, you know of a good calculator App (w/ dec, hex, and binary support) , I'd love to hear your recommendation.
History disagrees with the sentiment that it was easier to "make money" as an indie in the 1980s, or 1990s than today....
In the 1980s the distribution channels were being established which meant either you scored a deal with a bricks and mortar retail store, such as Sears, Babbages or Toy's R Us, or you ziplock bagged your PC game and tried to sell them at swap meets and computer stores.
In the 1990s there were more direct retailers and amalgamations of bricks and mortar stores occurred. The shareware model emerged and ziplock bagging disappeared. If anything, the 1990's were a bit of a dark ages for indies as either you had a publisher to get into a store or shareware.
From the 2000s onward we have an increased number of target platforms, and increased demographic of game players (from kiddos to those who grew up playing games for 30+ years... see: http://dmitriwilliams.com/will... (warning: Word doc)) , and increased number of channels (e.g., bricks and mortar persists (barely), online services like Steam, bundles, etc...)
If you (have aspirations to) develop indie games, it may seem likely everyone is creating them and the market is saturated but it's the same mentality as a musician at a "Guitar Center" thinking everyone in the world is now in a band; no, it's just the community they choose to surround themselves in. The signal to noise ratio is such that indies can succeed if they spend time build a great game and heed the lessons of other indies in how to market it through these channels. (GDC Vault has many free videos on this topic, such as: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1... )
I even have a personal example of a AAA dev who use to work with me, but left years ago to start his own 1-man shop. He was a graphic programmer who taught himself to become a better artist and has been making a living, creating games, for a few years now. Check out his studio: http://www.epacegames.com/ And can also site Discord games ( http://discordgames.com/ ); larger than a 1-man group but by making an awesome game and marketing it appropriately, have an opportunity to sell Chasm to eager players, an opportunity that would not have existed 20 years ago.
tl;dr: Accessibility has always been a concern and, there is more innovation happening today than 30 years ago.
I also miss the (video game) days of my youth; learning about games from friends, or by going to an arcade and seeing what new machine was front and center...later making ANSII ads for BBS's so I could obtain a high enough credentials to get access to their warez section and learn about the latest games.
That said, I chock my emotions of those days as nostalgia and recognize an indie in the 80's/90's had a much more limited set of options than today. From middle school to college my options went from Applesoft Basic with the Beagle Bros compiler to Turbo Pascal/C++ with the XMODE library. That's it. Innovation in game design, and mechanics was regulated to a task that could be accomplished only after you figured out how to get a framebuffer up, sounds playing, and all the other nit picky things required to build a game.
Don't mistake accessibility with complexity. I make games for a living and some of my co-workers have been doing this for 30+ years; accessibility has always been at the front of the games developers build. When 4k of memory was a lot, the best games could do was have paddles, a ball, and text written on an arcade cabinet to describe how to play. Later on we introduced demo mode and how-to-play screens, which worked particularly well with most games as they didn't scroll and limited play modes and/or mechanics to demonstrate.
And when games became more complex (powerups, scrolling screens, etc...), the games people played were the ones that continued to innovate on how they were accessible. A great example that codifies this early push for accessibility by design is in "Sequelitis - Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If games haven't always found a way to be accessible, demos, tutorials, etc... they wouldn't be played because only a handful of us die-hard geeks are willing to read through the manual. So as awesome as it was making games in 320x240 with 256 colors with my own game engine, I know what I was able to produce then pales in comparison to what an eager indie can create today.
To see this innovation just poke around Newgrounds or go to any global game jam site or just look at the entries from one of the quarterly Ludam Dare's ( http://ludumdare.com/ ). At the Game Developer's Conference this year there was a whole section of alternative input games ( http://www.gdconf.com/news/gdc... ). And there are plenty of other sources showing innovation game play mechanics, some fun, some not, but plenty of experimentation.