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I think this could be an interesting discussion to have here, really. In some ways the carnival-atmosphere-self-promotion some independent developers do now is similar to the way that people like Lord British and Brian Fargo got started--make a game and then basically do con artist bullshit in every way you could think of in order to actually find a way to get people to sell it for you, haha. Granted, "how can I make my game widely available for purchase?" is not exactly a difficult problem anymore.
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May 15, 2015 02:19
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Quarex posted:Granted, "how can I make my game widely available for purchase?" is not exactly a difficult problem anymore. I bought the D&D anthology as well as the NWN complete collection from Atari in 2012 digitally. Found out I lost my installers, tried to grab them last night only to find they "expired" after 30 days but I could pay $5 to download them again! Never felt justified pirating anything up until then. Amiga Forever does a similar deal but they're very nice about fixing an expired download.
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May 15, 2015 02:33
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flyboi posted:I bought the D&D anthology as well as the NWN complete collection from Atari in 2012 digitally. Found out I lost my installers, tried to grab them last night only to find they "expired" after 30 days but I could pay $5 to download them again! You really need to put the two TaskMaker games on your Mac, by the way.
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May 16, 2015 05:24
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Quarex posted:I think this could be an interesting discussion to have here, really. In some ways the carnival-atmosphere-self-promotion some independent developers do now is similar to the way that people like Lord British and Brian Fargo got started--make a game and then basically do con artist bullshit in every way you could think of in order to actually find a way to get people to sell it for you, haha. To be quite honest, I have no idea what these developers did back then, just that they eventually delivered something that wasn't a glorified tech demo as that would have been the end of their career. (delivering a steady stream of program updates reliably of course was impossible, people also wouldn't have accepted it) I honestly did not really have any insight in the gaming market back then (I really still don't behind the scenes). Hell, I only knew a fraction of the videogames coming out in the 90s when it still was the 90s as compared to now. Of course basically everyone interested in video games knew all the big titles (Monkey Island etc.) but some hidden gems could totally be missed easily. Where would you get that information besides magazines really? Worth of mouth at best (online and offline) which wasn't really always all that reliable. Things were a lot more fractured. Today all it takes is a minute of googling. This makes a huge difference. I'm not sure the industry back then can be compared to the industry now, alone because of all the technological differences. Still, I do not think things have ever been easier as they are now and it's kind of a pity that there's so little done with todays possibilities. (at least, that's how it feels like) I might be very naive about this but I am not sure if you really need all that Marketing-peacocking if you make an legit interesting game (there are also no Distributors/Investors to impress if you do not want to). Of course, if you make Castlevania-like Platformer #8372 you probably do need it just in order to not get lost amongst all the others.
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May 16, 2015 21:44
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I'm trying to find this way old DOS PC game. I forget the name but it was a pseudo-3D shoot-em-up, it ran in CGA, but the most interesting part of it was that they used the PC speaker to play back voices. There was a lady's voice saying "Good luck" before you started playing a round for example.
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May 24, 2015 08:03
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Segmentation Fault posted:I'm trying to find this way old DOS PC game. I forget the name but it was a pseudo-3D shoot-em-up, it ran in CGA, but the most interesting part of it was that they used the PC speaker to play back voices. There was a lady's voice saying "Good luck" before you started playing a round for example. Silpheed maybe? http://www.mobygames.com/game/silpheed
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May 24, 2015 19:06
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flyboi posted:my 1GHz TiBook sup best powerbook ever buddy (ok tied with the pismo)  e: THE SEX AND THE POWER 
d0s fucked around with this message at 13:22 on May 25, 2015 |
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May 25, 2015 13:15
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I'm having mixed results in getting dosbox to actually output midi to my MT-32 or SC-55. Both synths are hooked up to a Roland UM-One USB adaptor, that adaptor is set as windows default MIDI device, and both DFend and the specific game profiles in DFend are configured to explicitly target the UM-One. In a game like Blood, where the Setup.exe allows me to set the MIDI to GM or Sound Canvas, there usually isn't a problem and my old Roland synths receive the signal. Other games, like Rise of the Dragon, which does have a MT-32 option, occasionally output the music to dosbox's MIDI emulation instead. Another game, Bio Menace, has a single Ad-Lib\Sound Blaster MIDI option, which should be GM right? This game never sends GM to my synths, and always uses emulation. Anybody know what might be going on or have advice to better manipulate dosbox or DFend to handle MIDI how I want?
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May 29, 2015 19:57
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What are you using to launch your games? Just straight up dosbox or something like Launch Box?
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May 30, 2015 04:12
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flyboi posted:What are you using to launch your games? Just straight up dosbox or something like Launch Box? D-Fend Reloaded. And I always specify to use the UM-One as the MIDI device is each game's profile. I was messing around with Rise of the Dragon again and found that if I ran the setup.exe and set the music to MT-32, then the midi would output to my UM-One. However, if I ran the setup.exe and set the midi to Ad-Lib or Sound Blaster, then Dosbox would use its MIDI emulation. Same with Blood. GM or Sound Canvas uses the UM-One. Ad-Lib or Sound Blaster uses emulation. Maybe I'm misinformed about what is or isn't General Midi and these old Ad-Lib and Sound Blaster modes aren't GM. Or maybe Dosbox is making a distinction for me and intercepting some MIDI because of the unlikelihood that I'd have a real Sound Blaster or whatever. Edit: yep, I was misinformed. have informed myself now Copper Vein fucked around with this message at 16:41 on May 31, 2015 |
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May 30, 2015 18:15
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A short Heads-up to Amiga people because this happened to me the second time in the last few months - When you have your .adf images from the TOSEC archive or wherever else, be always aware they could be infected with a virus. Some seem to have slipped under the radar here and then and the disks are not always necessarily marked with a [v]. There is VirusZ in Aminet which finds almost everything. They can really ruin your day under the right circumstances or cause odd problems you will blame on the old hardware. Doing a quick scan first never hurts, especially if you got a harddrive. An odd problem to have in 2015.
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Jun 3, 2015 03:52
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Police Automaton posted:Doing a quick scan first never hurts, especially if you got a harddrive. An odd problem to have in 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVQsxLfKPNI
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Jun 3, 2015 05:07
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Yes, well that sounds like an odd statement but really isn't considering that lots of Amigas don't even have a harddrive. I said it that way because I would assume that damage to some disk images would not really be that tragic because they would be easy to replace and the disks would be easy to rewrite (especially with the floppy emulators people use these days) so not really a loss in case some virus caused some damage. Thing is, it might be hard for some people to figure out the Problem is really a Virus and therefore a software one as opposed to some hardware or compatibility thing, so I think it might be a good thing to be aware of at least. People these days forget sometimes that there were malicious software programs that did other things than stealing your credit card data or encrypting your harddrive and prompting you to pay. Simpler times. As long as you keep the disks write protected a virus would have a very hard time spreading on an hardisk-less system anyways. (write protected, because of the nature of how the Amiga works, a properly written virus can and will survive a reset in RAM) As how the Amiga works and the Problem with RAM-retention some systems had, also RAM contents might actually be able to survive the System being turned off for a few seconds and might keep execbase from keeping rebuilt, so a Virus in RAM might survive this, too. (Hence so many game manuals stating "turn the System off for at least 30 seconds") But man, I would suppose that it is a rather rare thing, I personally never encountered it that excessively. I remember though that some additional Reset circuity was added to some Boards of some revision of the A2000 because the used DRAM there had it particularly bad. Btw. A nice little feature that is also possible with the Amiga are RAD-Disks here, a RAM-Disk that survives resets. But I digress. Well, a harddrive changes the whole thing a bit, especially when you handle disks that have a proper filesystem readable by the OS. File viruses could destroy some stuff you would have rather not destroyed and might not be simple to restore so thats why scanning everything you put on your Amiga might be worth the effort when you have a harddrive, and that is why I worded it that way. Also, in case anyone is curious, the way current WHDLoad works would cause a Virus to be "trapped" to that particular install. I wonder how the Virus market looks like with classic PCs these days. Can't imagine everything floating around on "abandonware" sites to be 100% clean. E: \/ Yeah, gently caress you too buddy \/ Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jun 3, 2015 |
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Jun 3, 2015 21:41
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Jun 3, 2015 21:51
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Nice shitpost. The talk about Amiga viruses brings back bad flashbacks. I used to be the only one in my little band of amiga friends that had a virus scanner and of course literally every disk i borrowed from someone had a virus. I thought id be nice and tell them....were they grateful? Nope,they blamed me and told everyone i put the virus on there. Good times.
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Jun 3, 2015 22:20
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Sorry his retrocomputer post was not detached and ironic enough for you bro
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Jun 4, 2015 23:54
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Actually, posting that earlier reminded me about the SCA Amiga Virus and the interaction I had with some people responsible for it. That particular virus was everywhere, while harmless. (it even could be deactivated by pressing a mouse button while booting) But it paved the way for more destructive viruses. Just as today, Virus writers would rip each other off all the time. The story told to me was it was made to screw with one particular notorious lamer and swapper, not taking into account that a swapper does what at a swapper does. ("lamer" and "swapper". Man that takes me back, I haven't heard these terms in forever) A swiss product. Swiss law was always not very clear about the whole pirating and copyright thing. It is in fact still perfectly legal there to download pirated software/music/movies for personal use. It's not even some loophole, the government states explicitly that it will remain legal. Look it up if you don't believe me. Not all countries are run by industry lobbyists I guess. Germany was not so lucky in that regard, we had a particular nasty lawyer here who was well known in the scene because of his cover name "Tanja". Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth. Sounds like the name of a Nazi Villain in an Indiana Jones movie doesn't it? He was an Abmahn-Lawyer, a particular ugliness of the german law system, and is said to pioneer that whole branch of legal industry here in germany. That guy sued everything and everyone. "Freiherr" is a german nobility title and was not this birthname, he changed it and yes in german language that name sounds really pompous. He even tried to sue an Internet forum over using his Birthname, Dörr, In discussions about him. That's some insight into someones psyche, isn't it? What he would do is post articles in the Classifieds of computer magazines under the cover name of Tanja, a pretty teenage girl (some Ads were even with a picture of what was supposed to be her, a picture of a professional model apparently) searching to swap disks (there was no such thing as downloading for the mere mortals in the early 90s) because buying games was just too expensive for her. These things were not uncommon here back then. You would then send lists of games you had and the other person would send you lists of games they had and you would then decide what to swap with each other. Of course these games were basically never originals. As you can guess, it was a trap of course. If you would so much as reply to this ad he would use that to sue you for breach of copyright law, maybe also report you to the police and when you were especially unlucky then the german police would show up one morning at your doorstep, search your house and take all your disks/computers with them. This did not always happen, piracy wasn't seen as that huge crime it is apparently now and some police departments just had better things to do, like catching actual criminals. As you can imagine, this could get really expensive and some teenage kids stuck their parents with large legal fees. He also had a particular relationship with a german cracking group and also would show up to scene parties. (he actually was invited!) It is not all he did, he did also lots of things outside of pirating-related stuff but he was very notable for that as everyone just somewhat into that scene had heard about him here. Guy was an absolute sleaze and a pitbull but strangely charismatic in his own, pedantic way. He ended up killing himself about five years ago after he was nailed for fraud and was supposed to go to jail for a year but didn't show up to his sentence. He wrote a pretty dramatic email to some of the more known people of the german scene, as a "last greeting to old friends" where he stated that he was going to shoot himself. People did alarm the police but as they arrived at his house, it was already too late. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Jun 6, 2015 |
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Jun 6, 2015 07:17
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That dude sounds like he would make a good subject for a movie. Rest in peace, kind-of-scary-German-guy.
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Jun 6, 2015 16:12
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Am I mistaken in thinking that I can hook up a Roland MT-32 / SC-55 to a Sound Blaster AWE / Live with a game port to MIDI cable to pass the MIDI from a game to the Roland? I have no clue how to configure this poo poo, but I did not think I needed a separate MPU-401 ISA card to do this.
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Jun 6, 2015 18:17
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Jun 6, 2015 22:20
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Copper Vein posted:Am I mistaken in thinking that I can hook up a Roland MT-32 / SC-55 to a Sound Blaster AWE / Live with a game port to MIDI cable to pass the MIDI from a game to the Roland? No you can do that, with most stuff this will work fine. Read up on information between Intelligent mode and UART mode in the differences this has. I think somebody implemented intelligent mode in software, but don't quote me on this. Some sound card implementations also have hardware bugs that cause stuff like hanging notes. There is a ton of information about this online. I came across a document today I have come across quite a few times. Some of you already probably saw it somewhere. It's about what Commodores software engineering department thought at the end of 1993 about future options. For some of you, it might be an interesting read. Sorry for the formatting quality, it's an pretty ad-hoc pdf conversion from some antique word processor format. https://de.scribd.com/doc/268037234/A-Software-Perspective?secret_password=oeAzVJEdE03W1X0WYEAO E: For people who have read it, isn't it funny how they recognized it could be a good idea to milk people for nostalgia points in the early '90s? Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 16:54
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I read and enjoy every single PA post
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Jun 8, 2015 18:32
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I found an old VOGONS post that set me on the right track with my Rolands and Blasters. I downloaded an AWE64 install disc from their archive and used that to get the AWE control panel working in Win98SE. I used the AWE control panel to turn of MPU-401 emulation on the Sound Blaster, then made the MPU-401 driver the default MIDI device in Windows. This way, all MIDI passes out of the AWE64's gameport unless it is explicitly AWE MIDI in which case the Blaster handles it. I piped the Roland's stereo out into the AWE's line in and away I went. I did find it interesting that running Heretic or whatever in DOS automatically bypassed the AWE and fed the Roland if a GM or GS mode was selected in that game's setup, regardless of how the MIDI was configured in Windows. However, I had to unmute the Blaster's line-in in Windows before it would mix in DOS. Two things are disappointing to me with this AWE64 gold I am currently running, though. First, if the AWE does handle the GM or GS MIDI itself, the music is much lower than it should be, being nearly inaudible in some cases. However, if the MIDI is configured to be native AWE, then it is played at the proper volume. Second, the digital sound effects through the AWE64 are really scratchy in some cases. Now it could be that this older hardware simply has much less fidelity than I am used to hearing come out of my modern GPU, or that all the extra analog cables, amps, and headphones are adding to the scratchiness. I have another AWE64 Gold that I am going to swap in to give a listen, and then I'm going to put a Live Gold back in.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:43
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Sound Blaster cards have a far too good reputation because they basically set a standard and had a very good marketing department. They are not the best sound cards, by far. Creative always followed the business strategy of "if we can make it 0.05$ cheaper, then gently caress the customer". Their drivers were always a mess. I would not even want an old Soundblaster card as a present. Try exploring some other options. Aztech was the biggest competitor to the Creative line, they have some good sound cards, early on with the excellent Crystal chips, later on highly integrated aztech one-chip solutions. These chips were made together in cooporation with Yamaha, so they have a genuine OPL3 implementation. Some of these Chips carry the trademarked OPL logo even, some do not because of some legalese thing but they have the implementation nonetheless. Yamaha themselves also had a cheap 1-chip solution, the YMF71x series. Usually excellent. If you can, disable any onboard amplifier on the sound card and feed their output directly into a proper amp. Board layout and questionable amplifier designs is where cheap sound cards usually fall flat. A bit of putting thought into the general wiring here can make a world of difference. The sound quality will be very good with "cheap-looking" cards, even without having that fancy gold backplate the AWE64 Gold has. As a rule of thumb you can say so around ~'96+ we could do proper, clear sound on the computer for the average customer in low-price consumer stuff. It was a conquered field. When something produced around that date doesn't sound adequate to your ear, then somebody screwed up or something is broken. Go for some cheap non-creative 1-chip OEM card for a buck on eBay. They don't look as impressive as an AWE32 or 64 but you really cannot go wrong. I realize this is not an exciting recommendation because it means you can't go hunting for some @rare@ card on eBay but really. I only named Yamaha and Aztech, but there were many more. Also, basically all of them did the Midi Port right, I've never heard of any problems here. Something that eluded Creative for a long time for whatever reason.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:16
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The MIDI port didn't elude Creative, their target market was the vast amount of people who saw no point in purchasing an external MIDI device. And having a game controller supported was way more important to those same people.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:31
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It was just cheap and half-assed, just like everything else creative did. Like the inability of later sound blasters to actually do stereo in SB Pro mode, or the lack of a proper Midi port for the Emu Chip on the AWE32 for benefit of weird custom stuff having to directly bang registers to get function out of it. God only knows what actually caused their Midi implementation at the gameport to be so notoriously buggy for such a long time, but knowing Creative it probably was not even a big problem. The AWE32 wavetable connector also was not fully general midi compatible just because creative deemed it necessary to save $ on a DAC which had the theoretical Wavetable card sacrifice voices in order to have the OPL3 implementation routed through the EMU chip. (which had the funny side effect that you could apply effects like reverb and chorus to the OPL3 sound, if that's a bad or a good feature I am not sure - it certainly is a cheap design choice though) Yes I agree, most of these things did not really matter as people did not have the hardware to make these things apparent anyways. What bothered me though was the inability for the AWE32 to be actually usable for so much DOS stuff without specific patches/direct support and then there was only the 1 MB ROM patch which sounded a lot dodgier than other ROMs from older and cheaper cards which would do proper General Midi support for their ROMs in DOS on top. Not really nice for the price of the card, especially since just using it with games always in Windows sometimes just was not an option, if not for incompatibility then for performance reasons. The competition could usually do it, and all without a problem. This was for me always a very defining thing of many non-creative cards. They just did their thing without being such a goddamn software/hardware mess about it. Of course there were also some very bad other manufacturers, but still. Well. I am not a big fan of creative.
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Jun 10, 2015 14:07
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Yo, Police, I was foolin' around with the MT-32 and Rise of the Dragon, and I was absolutely enamored with the way the game loads sounds into the MT-32 as needed and you can see when this happens via the MIDI messages. So when the elevator door opens, for example, you see "loading elevdoor" or something on the MT-32 screen as the sound plays. I love that. What I'm curious about is that I noticed that there were some sounds that were not governed by the MT-32's volume control. In Rise of the Dragon, you don't set up Sound FX and MIDI individually; you choose one device to do both. So when running in MT-32 mode, if I turn down the volume on the synthesizer, most sound effects like the sliding doors and your ID card being ejected will be inaudible. However, other sounds, like running the faucet in your apartment play at an unchanged volume. I even tested this by yanking the cord to the Line In on my sound card and all sound stopped. Since you prone to pontificatin bout sound devices, I hoped you might know what the difference was between some of these sound effects the MT-32 is doing and why they are treated different. I had previously viewed the MT-32 as a MIDI synth like the SC-55, but with some extra tricks and less advanced samples. Now it is looking to me like it is an entire sound device in and of itself, and not a MIDI supplement like the SC-55. So I assume that RotD is handling some sounds effects with MIDI samples, but others are pure digital recordings and that the volume knob only affects the MIDI side of the device. That about right?
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Jun 11, 2015 16:55
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Funny that you mention the SC-55. I wanted to buy one the other day just to fiddle around a little with it (I have an SC-88 [which I like very much] and a MT-32, but I figured I will get another part - also never personally owned an SC-55) and was thinking "man, how the prices developed lately and how popular these are, they're probably like a million bucks now on eBay" But, it's not so. I've looked at some auctions and no, the last ones here in my part of the world were between 40 and 50 bucks with as low as 30 bucks. I think that's even cheaper than when I checked a year ago. Very strange. It's important to make a distinction between the MT-32 and devices like the SC-55, as the MT-32 is a lot more versatile and programmable. They're not directly comparable, even though you could say they pretty much do the same thing for most people (= produce music). The MT-32 does have the ability to have samples uploaded into it, which has been used by lots of games for extra sound effects like you encountered but is less than the optimal solution because of the low quality. This is not possible to do with something like the SC-55, as it lacks the memory for being programmed that way completely (All it has is it's 4 MB [yes you read that right] ROM Library). So yes, that's about right. What now the direct difference between a sound module like the SC-55 and a synthesizer like the MT-32 is beats me to explain, as I am not a musician and never really was all that much interested in music to begin with. EDIT: That's also why the compatibility in between these devices usually is so lackluster, especially when games use the additional features of the MT-32 extensively. Games that basically just work with factory sounds on the MT-32 can in part sound a lot better on a later device tho Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Jun 16, 2015 |
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Jun 16, 2015 17:25
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Fun Fact: The setup.exe for Raptor:Call of the Shadows inexplicably allows for Sound Canvas or General Midi to chosen as a sound fx device, separate from and in addition to the MIDI device. Probably an oversight on their part. Anyway, if this is option is chosen, the game will not have any in-game sound effects, save for one farty blip that it plays for some menu options and in the store. You can see the display bar for channel 16 on the Roland rise when you click on the next\prev buttons in the weapon store, and you can adjust the volume level and reverb and hear the changes, but if you change the stereo panning or instrument for that channel, it will reset to Fretless Bass just left of center every time you click the button and the sound plays again. Neat! I went on 'nother ebay tear, and have some YMF724 PCI cards and a YMF719E ISA card on the way, as well as a second SC55 in case this one gets dirty. Suggest some FM Synth PC soundtracks for me to check out. I super dig the dirty guiter sounds of the Mega Drive, for instance. The YMF724 chip has a big XG logo, and I've seen mention that it is similar in capability to a MU50. I've been wanting to dip into the Yamaha synth line for a while, to hear the difference their samples lend to grabbag.mid for myself and say "heh." This MU2000EX vid in particular really interests me. Do you have any idea how close I might get to the XG sounds of a MU2000EX with a YMF724 card?
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Jun 17, 2015 05:59
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The YMF72x is interesting in the way that it is the only PCI sound chip I am aware of that also has proper OPL3 FM Synth. With SB/PCI-Link-supporting Pentium 3 Mainboards for example you can have a very-backwards compatible PCI-Soundcard for DOS which even supports digital out. I think the YMF724 is also the only non-creative Chip which supported that feature. The YMF71x (as I am aware there is the 715, 718 and 719 - but there don't seem to be any practical differences between them) is sometimes paired with a chip called YMF721 (and also called "OPL4" in Yamahas datasheets) that is a general midi compatible wavetable synthesizer chip with a mix of OPL3 FM Synthesis and a 1 MB ROM. It does not sound as good as for example an SC-55 but is surprisingly quite decent. You find that pair rarely on soundcards and more often in Notebooks and OEM-PCs and the like. I have a soundcard like this combined with the 486 Industrial card in my Amiga 2000 and it works nice. On that particular card, the amp was hardwired for some reason into the line out (they apparently intended to add a jumper there on the card but instead just soldered a wire in) and they even put a sticker over the silkscreen with the jumper settings. I ended up soldering a header in so I can disable the Amp via jumper. The YMF7xx store their settings in a small EEPROM onboard, and only need to be initialized via software, no drivers necessary under DOS. The SB-Pro emulation is 100% compatible and like many "clone" cards they also support Microsoft Sound System which gives you 16 bit sound up to 48 kHz for things that support it. MPXPLAY.EXE (an mp3/aac/whatever format player for DOS) is an example for this. I'd advice to disable all "3D sound" settings with the tool supplied with it as they are very bad. As far as I am aware, the YMF724 drivers for Win 9x allow playing samples back from System RAM and there are also customized sound banks for it floating around on the internet which have higher quality to what it comes with. I do have no idea though about the general quality compared to yamahas sound modules. I would generally wager a guess and even say it probably can sound pretty good. But accurate? No idea. The YMF724 soundcard you saw for very cheap a few years ago on eBay, but in recent auctions I saw it going for quite a few bucks, at least over here. What many people don't know is that the chinese still sell very cheap generic PCI soundcards with that particular Yamaha chip new, for a very low price. You have to shop around a bit. They miss most headers, but with a bit of quality soldering you can probably add any feature you want back to them. As to FM Synth tunes, your best bet is not looking into the direction of game soundtracks but rather looking into more recent "chiptunes" for them. It's a bit similar to the SID in that regard, games didn't really take advantage of the possibilities of it and the good and impressing sounding stuff came much later. PC gaming and FM Synth didn't really get along, and most developers preferred to make their music for solutions nobody owned. Earlier games usually only support Adlib music, but it does not always sound very well. The most popular example of a later game I can think about which had support for General Midi etc. but clearly was made with FM Synth in mind was System Shock. There are a few other games where the General Midi/MT-32 etc. solution was only half-assed compared to FM Synth. You have to dig around a bit. ( I also think the Sim City 2000 FM Synth music sounds nice) EDIT: Before anyone gets that particular idea, modern Windows versions might or might not have still support for the YMF724, I don't know (probably not), but I do know 100% that the OPL3 part is not supported anymore in the drivers since Windows 2000. You might actually have luck with Linux there, I never looked into linux support regarding this. But as PCI is also going the way of the Dodo and Skylake chipsets apparently drop the support for PCI completely there is no good way to keep FM Synth compatibility in hardware with a modern computer. PCI should be adaptable to PCIe without having to get too creative and there are adapters like that for not too much money but I doubt many if any mainboards will offer this as an inbuilt solution. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 12:43 on Jun 17, 2015 |
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Jun 17, 2015 11:57
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Police Automaton posted:Funny that you mention the SC-55. I wanted to buy one the other day just to fiddle around a little with it (I have an SC-88 [which I like very much] and a MT-32, but I figured I will get another part - also never personally owned an SC-55) and was thinking "man, how the prices developed lately and how popular these are, they're probably like a million bucks now on eBay" But, it's not so. I've looked at some auctions and no, the last ones here in my part of the world were between 40 and 50 bucks with as low as 30 bucks. I think that's even cheaper than when I checked a year ago. Very strange. I lucked out getting my SC-55 from Japan in that it came with the volume knob busted out likely from being dropped from poor packaging. The seller gave me 50% back as a refund and I found some metal epoxy to reattach the knob. I think with shipping it came out to just under $40.
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Jun 17, 2015 13:36
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So what about the SC55 Mk II? I have one of those lying about taking up space.
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Jun 17, 2015 17:21
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RadicalR posted:So what about the SC55 Mk II? I have one of those lying about taking up space. My understanding is that it was an incrementally better synth than the 55 with increased polyphony and a deeper instrument bank, but I can't imagine any of that would make a difference or be at all advantageous to game soundtracks as they barely used the GS set anyway. And also that you should send it to me because you don't need that clutter in your life; it lowers you.
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Jun 17, 2015 18:14
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Copper Vein posted:My understanding is that it was an incrementally better synth than the 55 with increased polyphony and a deeper instrument bank, but I can't imagine any of that would make a difference or be at all advantageous to game soundtracks as they barely used the GS set anyway. Make me an offer. I'll say that it's missing the power cord, but I know it's working when I got it (I plugged it in.)
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Jun 17, 2015 18:21
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Do you want to Commander Keen in modern OSes with modern control options? Higher framerates and maybe even seeing more of the world at once? Its called Commander Genius. You are all welcome. Even being able to just turn a shoulder button into a pogo stick is a big improvement. http://clonekeenplus.sourceforge.net/ I am not entirely sure of high quality audio though. And going 640 resolution while it shows you more it makes navigating secret areas a lot trickier as you don't have the screen scrolling to help. But give it a shot and see if you like it!
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Jun 18, 2015 08:19
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And to bring more retro computer stuff into something remotely modern: http://www.smspower.org/Homebrew/BruceLee-SMS The Atari 8 bit classic BRUCE FUCKIN LEE now in SMS form! If you don't want the PC fan remake or the PC fan sequel or the sequel demade for the Commodore 64 you can now play Bruce Lee on a good console. (Comedy option would be on the Genesis with a Power Base Convertor. The same CPUs in the Amiga, ST, Macintosh, X68000, plus the CPU daddy of cheap micros everywhere, the Z80 working as a team! http://kollektivet.nu/brucelee2/ (And if you want Bruce Lee 2.) The only thing is now I need to see if I can't find that fan made expanded version of Fort Apocalypse on the C64 with like three times the level size total. I've only seen some map on a german website someplace and that's it.
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Jul 8, 2015 09:01
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Captain Rufus posted:And to bring more retro computer stuff into something remotely modern: Holy poo poo I've played so much of this as a kid. So grabbing it. Pierzak fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 20:09
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Ok those SMS games are awesome and that's drat creative. Thanks!
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Jul 8, 2015 20:20
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Here's a fascinating look at the anthology of 3D Realms games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQsIhIoIur0 Full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-36gm0W-VKk5FJBNGU8kyhz4ssjR2Ucg
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Jul 19, 2015 04:06
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| # ? May 15, 2024 13:23 |
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Just wanted to give a heads up for anyone in this thread who lives in Austin: the Goodwill Computer Works is selling some of the items that were part of their Computer Museum collection. A good chunk of it went to eBay but I stopped by the store today and found: Four TI99/4As in box (they looked to be complete including the packing materials) Two TRS-80 Model 3s (one with a dust cover) A Commodore Colt I forget how much the TIs were going for but the 80s were $100 and the Colt was $50. I don't collect anymore but I figured someone in this thread might be interested in them. ReverendHammer fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Jul 19, 2015 |
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Jul 19, 2015 17:10
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