I miss the days when most people had a vanilla looking computer. You wouldn't have felt out of place at the LAN party lugging in your dad's old Packard Bell tower that you used for your gaming rig.
We still appreciated visually stunning PCs. Not just for the works of art that they were, but also for the DIY skill and ethic you were actually required to demonstrate to build and mod them.
Nowadays, it's all just "RGB by default". By my angry old man standards, it looks gauche. Then again, I suppose it's the new vanilla?
I have absolutely no interest in RGB anything in my computer. Yet I've occasionally ended up with all these RGB parts -- RGB LED on my mouse, RGB RAM sticks, RGB GPU -- just because it's the best alternative right then and there, it's wild. It's at the point where you sometimes have to go with a worse price/performance option or otherwise suboptimal choice just to avoid the stupid useless little RGB LEDs.
That's when black PVC tape is your friend. Just used that earlier today because some cretin decided that putting a 10,000lm blue LED strip on a bedside phone charger is a good idea.
(It's actually a very nice charger, except for that --ing LED strip).
Yeah, if people were still doing LAN parties, I’d want to bring the equivalent of a sleeper car. Maybe empty out that beige AT case with the turbo button on it.
I’m also “old” (44) and feel that rainbow LEDs are gaudy.
Seems these days that they’re not optional for most things remotely gaming related (e.g. motherboards, graphics cards) , but fortunately can generally be disabled or if illumination is useful (e.g for a keyboard), they can be configured to be white only, which was useful for the Steel Series keyboard I purchased. (I wouldn’t recommend Steel Series keyboards though, has stupid design choices and reliability issues.)
Also did LAN gaming back in the day. Computers were so much more work to lug around when you had a CRT and HDDs. These days desktop computers are far easier to transport.
I wanted to go RGB free when I built my desktop, but ran into the exact issue you describe. I kinda just shrugged and accepted it, but maybe I should have looked more deeply into their configurability. Off or all white would be a much better look IMO
What drives me crazy is that recently I had to download three separate bloated Electron app packages just to turn off the RGB in my new mobo, RAM and GPU because in 2025/26 we still don’t have vendors using a common protocol to control RGB.
I once tore apart my laptop and ripped out all the blue leds and replaced them with green amber reds. If yoi hate it that much you can just mod it. Soldering iron and a magnifier if you're over 30.
The only reasons I bought a case with a tempered glass side panel were its overall rating and it was extremely cheap. A similar situation happened for the Core V71 case I used for a Supermicro H11DSi dual EPYC virtual server and NAS for my home lab. It's one of a few features I don't care about but are difficult to avoid without incurring limitations like additional cost.
Back in my day™, I remember full super tower cases made from steel when they had 8-10 5.25" HH front bays. They were boat anchors and they were generally terrible at managing heat and airflow.
I've been a watercooling "enthusiast" for about 20 years now and, while the DIY-ness of the old school builds was a lot of fun for young me, I'm also glad I can just buy some off-the-shelf (or at worst "small batch") components that let me get really effective and near silent performance by just slamming some stuff together.
No more scouring junk yards for a particular heater core from wrecked cars or modding aquarium pumps.
That being said, I also never really understood the "add colorful lights to your PC" aspect of some builds.
I always thought of the lit cases as an instance of "I could put a cool LED light in this space, but I also need the space for my computer ... oh, hey, I could do both".
I was putting together a new PC in 2024 after not having built one for ~7 years, and browsing for motherboards, I kept saying "just give me an ugly green one, damn it!"
I added a Intel Core i7 10700K (with a nice low-profile Noctua cooler/fan) with 32GB of memory and a 512GB SSD and I'm using onboard graphics which is just fine for a daily driver "office" type machine running Linux. Very happy with it.
Manufacturers have no incentive to offer barebone products anymore, BOM price difference is negligible. Its $0.5 of leds and "fancy" solder mask colors become free at scale.
The last time I built a PC was almost 25 years ago. The gaming card seemed expensive at the time at $250.
I don't understand what's happened to PC building since. It's like it's a sport now or something. What's with the RGB crap? I remember wanting my PC to be quiet and out of sight. The screen and speakers were what mattered.
Now everyone's wearing crappy headphones. Everything is about how it looks. :/
It's a gamer subculture, I think originally from showing off your build? The irony is that people in the Western culture are generally lonelier than ever, and definitely going to fewer LAN parties than in the past. And this showcase thing established itself mostly _after_ Internet making us physically lonelier.
I run with no RGB in my computer case, I got a very nice $250 case used for $40 with a broken tempered glass panel that looked like it had been dropped out of a second story apartment, but a $20 replacement panel and a little bit of hammering got it looking good as new.
On the other hand, I’m building my daughter a gaming PC for her birthday, and she loves the RGB, I set everything to a pastel blue that matches her Cinnamoroll Razer mouse, keyboard, mousepad, [0] with a Cinnamoroll desk mat I got shipped from China. She only knows about half of that (hard to hide an entire PC while I’m working on debloating windows), and is super excited.
I’ll admit I’m pushing 40 and bought a red mouse to go with my red backlit keyboard, but mostly because I like the aesthetic and to get the lowest latency from click and keypress to output on the display you’ll want 8K polling rate inputs and 240hz+ monitors. I was somewhat radicalized by reading this blog [1] on Hacker News years ago, and gaming peripherals are largely the way of achieving an extremely smooth desktop experience.
I love them too and I'm happy they come built-in by default (plus the fantastic OpenRGB project to sync them all) instead of having to make them myself... I remember when I was paying £100+ for a membrane keyboard because it was one of the first to have RGB. Now they all do.
My first two gaming PCs in high school had a side window and blue cold cathode light. My next build in my early 20s I decided that even this was too garish and went to a simple brushed black case. I understand that cheap tri-color LEDs mean fewer SKUs and infinite custom colors but in practice many people never turn off the "demo mode" color cycling and it just looks ridiculous.
Then again I'm typing this from a Thinkpad - maybe that says something about my aesthetic preferences for computers.
One is the "when everyone is special, no one is special" factor, but I think that's tempered a bit by PCs becoming a status item (alongside the rise of streaming that shows the streamer and their environment) so it's important the PC is conspicuous. Also for those that have invested significant time/money it has become a point of pride for them that they want to display, and get into flamewars on the internet to defend their team. The manufacturers probably don't mind that it lets them display their brand in lights too and not be hidden away as a sticker or PCB marking.
Also that there seems to be space in the market for 'PC as a pretty lightbox', RGB systems are sophisticated now alongside LCD systems getting attached to various components. The PC becomes a decoration as opposed to a tool that fades into the background like a lot of other devices which are pure display or have enthusiasts salivating about thinner bezels. The thing I find curious is that the lightbox is constrained in the form of a PC (even if they sometimes try hard to hide the machinery of it such as wires or putting components on PCBs hidden behind panels), there's not a lot of consumer products where you could assemble elaborate colored lighting displays.
Yep, there were people hand-building wooden PC cases, building a fish tank into their case, painting fancy colors and patterns on it, ... And there were colored LEDs too, but they didn't come with bloatware OS-dependent software, because they didn't need software
There’s the Silverstone FLP02 [0], for a mere $250 you can get a case that looks like it was built in 1996, complete with a turbo button that spins all your fans to max.
You can still get a handful of non-RGB cases. They're usually sold as the "Silent" version (i. e. Fractal Pop series, Gamemax Titan Silent series) since the non-glass side panels often have sound-deadening material glued in.
15 bucks of rattlecans will make any case beige. :)
I'm sort of waiting for a motherboard manufacturer to weigh in though. Even the "pro" ranges tend to be black PCBs with a lot of complex silkscreening. The boards that don't have any of that tend to be OEM-tier boards with skimpy features. Surely someone can make an X870E-VINTAGE board with a green or yellow-brown substrate, no nonsense silkscreening, and finned brass heatsinkage that looks like the sort of thing you saw permanently glued to your 486DX2/66 CPU?
I want the aesthetic, but that can still be implemented in the context of no-compromises modern hardware.
Yes, RGB is so common now that it's not popular, and retro stuff is coming back in. I think I saw even some landscape PC cases (laid flat) with fake HDD drive slots and a turbo button.
I think my computer is pretty. I have the black with brown wood panel case that is super popular and then all black components except for the RGB LED gpu manufacturer logo on the GPU. Looks pretty nice and sleek.
But I also had to look past the RGB nonsense. The GPU was basically an accident.
Built my first PC (for basement LAN parties) using the old family Packard Bell case. Cut my thumb on the poorly machined aluminum inside...I'll cherish that scar forever.
I still enjoy building my pc's, But I put them in 4u server chassis. they are built better and have sane airflow. I have not been 13 for a long time and it is tricky to find non rgb parts anymore. No windows on my case but it still looks like someone is holding a rave through the gaps. sigh.
For free. My main rant about desktop vs server grade motherboards. For a desktop system you really want a desktop grade motherboard. server grade is expensive, takes forever to post, the compute tends toward slow and wide vs desktop's fast and tall, and the parts(ram, cpu) compatability tends to be much more picky. My grip is why is the desktop mb airflow so bad. In a server board everything is aligned front to back. pcie, ram, cpu cooler are all aligned the same way. in a desktop board the pcie goes front to back, the ram goes top to bottom. and toss a coin for which way a cpu cooler will fit.
Beige was the only color case available until around 1992. And, sometimes, the floppy drive/s or HDDs didn't match the case at all. Off white cases were one of the first "innovations" before black, gray, and multi color cases arrived in the late 90's where I was. Then tempered glass and ARGB came in like an involuntary disco, a Ford Fiesta with ground effects, or a Trump apartment. All I wished was that Noctua and similar fan mfgrs offered standard monochrome black or white fans rather than brown turds or RGB fluorescent orange.
It's disappointing to see. It doesn't take much work to configure a MQTT server to require client certificates for all connections. It does require an extra step in provisioning to give each device a client certificate. But for a commercial product, it's inexcusably negligent.
Then there's hardening your peripheral and central device/app against the kinds of spoofing attacks that are described in this blog post.
If your peripheral and central device can securely [0] store key material, then (in addition to the standard security features that come with the Bluetooth protocol) one may implement mutual authentication between the central and peripheral devices and, optionally, encryption of the data that is transmitted across that connection.
Then, as long as your peripheral and central devices are programmed to only ever respond when presented with signatures that can be verified by a trusted public key, the spoofing and probing demonstrated here simply won't work (unless somebody reverse engineers the app running on the central device to change its behaviour after the signature verification has been performed).
To protect against that, you'd have to introduce server-mediated authorisation. On Android, that would require things like the Play Integrity API and app signatures. Then, if the server verifies that the instance of the app running on the central device is unmodified, it can issue a token that the central device can send to the peripheral for verification in addition to the signatures from the previous step.
Alternatively, you could also have the server generate the actual command frames that the central device sends to the peripheral. The server would provide the raw command frame and the command frame signed with its own key, which can be verified by the peripheral.
I guess I got a bit carried away here. Certainly, not every peripheral needs that level of security. But, into which category this device falls, I'm not sure. On the one hand, it's not a security device, like an electronic door lock. And on the other hand, it's a very personal peripheral with some unusual capabilities like the electrical muscle stimulation gizmo and the room occupancy sensor.
[0]: Like with the Android KeyStore and whichever HSMs are used in microcontrollers, so that keys can't be extracted by just dumping strings from a binary.
A lot of BLE peripherals are very easy to probe. And there are libraries available for most popular languages that allow you to connect to a peripheral and poke at any exposed internals with little effort.
As for the reverse engineering, the author claims that all it took was dumping the strings from the Dart binary to see what was being sent to the bluetooth device. It's plausible, and I would give them the benefit of the doubt here.
Controllers provide analogue controls (eg. thumbsticks and triggers) that most keyboards don't have.
If, as you suggest, the control schemes of video games are becoming less complex (Forward, down, forward, high punch) then surely the result would be more games that are playable with only a keyboard, not fewer?
Trying to play with 2 players on the same keyboard was a nightmare. On mine WASD seemed to cope better than the arrows, so there was always a rush to pick sides of the keyboard. Ah, good times.
The source is only partially available; they released the source code of the game logic, but the engine was not included in the source release. You'd need to reverse engineer & remake the engine to make any major improvements to the game, such as porting it to new platforms.
This sounds like how most moddable games of the era released their SDKs. You could make a mod that changed gameplay and/or assets, but you needed the needed the original game itself for the engine and original assets as a foundation/runtime. One step further would be a 'total conversion' that replaced all the assets but you still needed the engine, and then you get later releases like the id GPL releases of the engine so you could have engine+gameplay+content all by yourself. Even then you'd still need to abide by the license of the original game or the GPL engine, unless you went and signed a different license with them including if you wanted to sell anything derived from their work.
So you can't buy it, but you can play it, and the source is available. Is this really a problem? I know the article mentions this in passing, but preservation & the ability to actually play a 25 year old game is more important than its capitalization, IMO.
Well, no, you can't play it because the source code doesn't include assets like the 3d models and textures and levels and sound files. You need to acquire those some other way if you want to build a playable version of the game.
It's like GZDoom, you have to supply your own copy of DOOM.WAD
It's a different game. It may be technically compatible with other WADs and that's useful, but if the point is to actually play Doom, your idea is basically like when I once observed people around me downloading illegal video files and I wondered why they didn't just download Big Buck Bunny instead. (I was in middle school and not into movies)
Is not so different in the end. Also, the game data it's made in a way so PWADs and total conversion stay totally coherent with texturing and world building.
Playing for instance, Strain and such with FreeDoom.wad as the main IWADs yields the same experience. Ditto with Back To Saturn X.
That isn't at all what they are saying.
They are saying that you need to provide all the game assets. Exactly like you do if you want to play the original Doom with modern source ports.
Since the game is not available to buy, this means either pulling those assets from an original retail copy, or pirating them.
> preservation & the ability to actually play a 25 year old game is more important than its capitalization
> Even if you don't want to pirate it, there are lots of copies for multiple platforms available to buy just on eBay.
This feels like a contradictory position.
On the one hand the important thing is the preservation and availability of a work. On the other hand it's okay if the it is only available as 20+ year old used copies and pirated copies.
And any preservation or restoration project is under the shadow of 3 companies (Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox) which have all recently "complained that they may have rights to [NOLF] and may sue over it"
They like it when old games are unplayable because if gamers can't find or play the old games they'll have to pay (and pay more) for their newest games. Why compete with your own back catalog? Especially when your old game isn't full of bullshit like day one DLC, lootboxes, season passes, and microtransactions.
My first reaction to the steam machine was “you’ll own nothing and be happy about it” but yeah everyone seems happy about it… I like how old games were sold on physical cartridges or discs. Much more fun to know the experience can be relived. Kids growing up today will never have nostalgic experiences in their middle aged years since so many games are internet linked and drm locked.
> On the one hand the important thing is the preservation and availability of a work. On the other hand it's okay if the it is only available as 20+ year old used copies and pirated copies.
And any preservation or restoration project is under the shadow of 3 companies (Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox) which have all recently "complained that they may have rights to [NOLF] and may sue over it"
No, it’s not. Warner, Activision and 20th Century can collectively suck my balls and lick deez nuts. Literally no one benefits from this.
Let me quote the person I was replying to for you:
Exactly like you do if you want to play the original Doom with modern source ports. Since the game is not available to buy, this means either pulling those assets from an original retail copy, or pirating them.
They are clearly stating that Doom is also not available to buy, which is not true.
In the post you were replying to, perhaps inserting a paragraph break before "Since the game..." might help, more than selectively quoting from it. It might then be more clear that the phrase "the game" is referring to the same game both times it's used.
Seriously though, break a law that no one is interested in enforcing? What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
ETA: This aside from the fact that you can buy a used copy and play it...
> What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
What we're doing here is complaining about the bad law. And complaining about these companies, but it's bad they even have the ability to cause this deadlock.
I assume the community goal would be to find out who owns the rights and get them to either use them or give them up formally and bless the community project?
Used copies won't be around forever, it would be better to have a proper community version.
The background is that Night Dive tried to do this back when they formed, but it turned out to be intractable for a number of reasons including no one knew who actually owned it.
Something like what happened with UT99 and the original Unreal: the source was made available to a dedicated community group (who continue to push out patches for the games), and when the games were no longer commercially useful, they allowed them to be posted on the Internet Archive for free access.
The rights holder can give permission to use the assets and IP let the community basically own the game. Marathon and Project Aleph is a good example of this where Bungie gave it up, and so the open source version of the engine has fixes and things now.
Nothing from the article suggests that is on the table here, but rather Nightdive wants the rights so they can sell a remake of the game without the threat of getting sued.
> Seriously though, break a law that no one is interested in enforcing?
I wouldn't put it past any one of the companies who think they might maybe have some rights to the game to sic their hired copyright goons on gamers who aren't too careful about how they go about pirating the game, their ISPs, and anyone else they think they can threaten into a settlement offer for a few bucks.
The copyright enforcement regime has no morals and they're happy to make it your problem to prove in court that they don't actually have the rights the material they claim was infringed. When a bunch of record labels sued Cox for a $1 billion in damages Cox eventually found that the labels never had the rights to many of the songs they were successfully sued for.
They were willing to threaten Nightdive. I certainly wouldn't call them disinterested in enforcing the copyrights they may or may not have.
> What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
It may not bother you, but there are many people who would prefer it if they didn't have to break the law to play the game. Used copies won't be around forever, at which point those people will be SOL.
I'm in the speedrunning community[0] for NOLF and just want to chime in on the amazing work that haekb did (I believe the "community-driven project" is only them) for these games[1]. They made both NOLF and NOLF2 a lot more accessible to people casually picking up the game, as there was a lot of jank and configuration needed otherwise to get the games running in a good way on modern systems. In addition to fixing jank, they actually fixed tons of bugs and added other QoL and fun stuff like a jukebox in the menus to listen to the (great) soundtrack. Some stuff - like how if you have certain USB devices connected, the game will just flip out - still remains, but that's just a part of the _voodoo_ with old games like these.
Fixing bugs and stuff is nice, but a lot of the fun speedrunning tech we depend on was also fixed, and they were kind enough to create a separate "lithfix" that only made the games playable on modern systems and left the in-game bugs intact. Not only that, but they also added a dev console and fixed some of the old cheat codes, which made it so that we could finally noclip around to inspect the maps properly and toggle on hitboxes, etc.
It's incredible the impact a single individual can have. They never asked for anything back, and now their work is even included by default on the "unofficial" download page. Even though I don't speedrun anymore (maybe one day!) I'll always be grateful for that :)
The game holds up incredibly well - beautiful scenery, fun story, some of the best and most humorous dialogue in any game ever[2], and a really strong and well-written female main character. Would strongly recommend anyone to pick it up, just know that some parts struggle a bit with the "stealth", and expect (and embrace) "going loud" at times. But do try to stealth a lot, as you're nicely rewarded with brilliant dialogue! NOLF2 is fun too, but very different - definitely worth a play through though!
They're also very fun speedrun games, and the community is very helpful to anyone, even if you're just wanting to play it casually :)
Edit: Forgot to mention that they also fixed the multiplayer in NOLF2, and some people still play sometimes! More info on this page[3]
The OP delivered a drive-by contribution and proceeded to condescend one of the maintainers. They posted the interaction to HN (for the second time) out of spite for the maintainer, labelling it an instance of gatekeeping.
Having a polite and diplomatic conversation about a non-trivial contribution idea is a common prerequisite for it to be accepted into a project, like Hapi.js.
It's no surprise that project maintainers don't wish to work with recalcitrant individuals, regardless of the merit of their contributions.
Wrong, maintainer started conversations with complete rejection, and continued to coming up with new ideas why not to accept the PR. And maintainer started to drag politics into conversation, such as elitism.
We still appreciated visually stunning PCs. Not just for the works of art that they were, but also for the DIY skill and ethic you were actually required to demonstrate to build and mod them.
Nowadays, it's all just "RGB by default". By my angry old man standards, it looks gauche. Then again, I suppose it's the new vanilla?