[taneq]

"Withered" is a really weird word to use here since all of these old-and-cheap parts are cheap only because they're massively widely used. I think a better translation would be "commodity parts".

In fact later in the article it says "This was a poor translation of the original, which was much closer in spirit to ‘weathered.’" It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait. :/

That said, I always love seeing the ways that Nintendo manages to think outside the box and do genuinely new, fun things with far less.

[polm23]

The original word is 枯れる, which really is normally translated as "withered", or, contextually, "dead" or "dried up". Translating it as "commodity parts" loses the implication that common sense says the technology is "used up" in some way. It's not a word you'd normally use to praise something.

Here's a bunch of sentences with English translations that use the word:

https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B%20%23se...

There is also a sense that means "matured" or "tested by time", but I've honestly never seen it outside a dictionary, and in fact for many dictionaries the example usage of that sense is just 枯れた技術, Gunpei Yokoi's term. Example:

https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B-468424

[eska]

I think withered is a mistranslation (I speak Japanese).

E.g. my dictionary mentions 枯れた演技 for "well-seasoned acting". That sounds appropriately positive to describe such technology: old but reliable.

[fenomas]

Yeah I think the article was off-base there - "withered" isn't a mistranslation at all. I'd probably have gone with "dried-up", but to translate it as "weathered" changes the meaning considerably.

[gwbas1c]

I disagree, weathered often implies broken in, established, mature.

[thedudeabides5]

Probably a concept that would be helpful to adopt in the west.

Like, tech can be so concerned with the new new, we sometimes forget there's a bunch of old stuff that works pretty reliably, and can be applied in new and creative directions, with a little 'lateral' thinking.

[gauravjain13]

Some pedantry is in order – withered and weathered are different words.

[emeraldd]

This seems like it might be a situation where the connotations do not translate very well rather than a question of direct meaning.

[njwi332]

A monolingual dictionary gives 7 definitions. https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8...

I think the one that best applies here is 4 - 技術や製品などが、その登場から十分な時間が経ち、すでに問題点が出尽くし、解決も済んでいる。最先端のものではないが、不測の事態が発生しにくく、安定して動作することを意味する。

This definition is roughly "Enough time has passed since a technology, product, etc, debuted that its flaws are well known, and development has settled. It means it is not cutting edge, unexpected situations (usages) rarely occur/are difficult to create, and the usage is well understood/stabilised."

I tend to see much richer and more precise definitions from a Japanese-Japanese dictionary than from Jisho.

[news_to_me]

Jisho is my go-to for Japanese:

https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B

[lubonay]

FWIW I really didn't feel clickbaited - the article more or less aligned with my expectations based on the title.

[cannam]

> It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait

I think this (mis)translation was fairly widely recognised before this article was written, so it's probably just using the familiar version in the heading in preparation for clarifying it in the article. Reasonable enough I think.

[bottled_poe]

The article is a case of rose-coloured glassed. It helps that FLOPS per core has essentially flatlined since 2006. I’m sure Nintendo realise that’s the main reason for the hardware choices.

https://www.quora.com/What-makes-CPU-models-increasingly-fas...

[uncletaco]

They've followed this philosophy since at lea st the first Gameboy though. How do FLOPS essentially flatlining since 2006 account for that?

[mattl]

Before that even, with the Game and Watch handhelds.

[mwcampbell]

I wonder if the use of the 65C816 processor in the SNES (released in 1991, at least in America) also qualifies.