Oct 13, 2026, 1:56 PMthe youngsters these days will call a nintendo gameboy analog. or a CD. they think a Z80 or 16-bit PCM is analog, perhaps? you can say that this is incorrect. but i'm not a prescriptivist. the details aren't the point. the point is that the word analog is bouba and the word digital is kiki. saying "digital" sounds uptight and specific and fragile and chattery and annoying. "analog" sounds round, peaceful, robust, earthy even. even has the word 'anal' in it
@jk Kinda dig the idea of the pre-HDMI consoles being called "analog" just cause of analog video alone being soft
@jk yes, many games are being sold "digital only" now, unlike those older formats like CDs, DVDs, floppy disks or cartridges that stored only analog data
Oct 13, 2026, 2:55 PM@fraggle i was gonna say optical media have the pits/lands like little smooth bumps, floppies and hard drives have variations in magnetic flux which are modulated (frequency? phase?) and necessarily band-limited with nonzero output slew rate, and flash memory seems to be just using semiconductors to trap a variable number of electrons as if they are pretending to be capacitors or inductors. so the actual digital formats are mask roms, and punched cards/tape. what about hanging chads though
@jk I did some research a few months back and as best I can tell there hasn't been a true analog video game since 1958 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two
@jk I prefer the term "acoustic", personally. A playstation is an electric console, a gameboy is acoustic. Just like with the acoustic bicycles.
@jk the game boy has analogue input (audio pin in the cartridge header that was literally never used) and analogue output (speaker and headphone jack), so yes, an argument could be made that it's an analogue console.
a terrible argument, but an argument nonetheless.
Oct 13, 2026, 8:44 PM@jk “analogue” as in the pre-HDMI video outputs for analogue CRT TVs sort of makes sense, especially as nobody expects video games based on analogue circuits. (One could probably make one; it’d be something like a modular synthesiser that plays a wonky version of Pong on an oscilloscope or something, which sounds a lot less fun than Super Mario Bros.)
Oct 14, 2026, 2:57 PM@Haijo7 Analogue (as in using continuous voltages to present bat/ball positions and detect collisions), or just using discrete logic (digital counters and logic gates) but no CPU and no stored program? I thought it was the latter.
Oct 14, 2026, 3:20 PM@Haijo7 I recall reading it being discrete digital: registers for bat/ball positions and arithmetic comparators for collision detection, much like a digital calculator or wristwatch of the era. Though perhaps that was the mass-manufactured version on a chip.
@jk hey don't take the zilog's name in vain