More alive than ever before!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmoVn2ItwxQ
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Sep 27, 2021 21:19
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JnnyThndrs posted:The other is a P2 400 which uses a drive-bay switchbox(Romtek Trios) to physically swap between a DOS/311 drive, a WinNT4.0 drive and a 98SE drive. You can’t accidentally switch disks while the machine is in use, and it works like a charm because you literally only have one HD hooked to the mobo at any given time. However, the switchboxes are expensive/hard to find and you need three old PATA drives to rig a system up that way. OH WOAH. Physical Boot drive selector.I did not know these things existed. No partition magic, no wondering if an OS installer will format everything. My early linux days were kind of like, "Windows Game wants 5 cds installed on HDD? I haven't touched linux in a month, blow it away." "..... game is okay, I wanna tinker with some linux ...... let's reinstall ... poo poo there goes windows." e: ok yeah that's literally what it says on the box. Use your Game PC for Work? Download a trojan'd key generator* and have to  ?https://www.ebay.com/itm/254690266092?hash=item3b4cb90bec:g:2kQAAOSwfuVfOabp * ask me why I don't warez anymore "Yes. Please. My time is worthless." Coffee Jones fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Dec 8, 2021 |
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Dec 8, 2021 17:48
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a few apple games used I J K M but, yeah, C64 was single button joystick first, function keys for secondary buttons
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Feb 24, 2022 02:58
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Thinking about getting a mister for old PC stuff. Likely the single 128MB ram config should be ok. I’d missed the 16 bit era so the Amiga is like jumping into the deep end of a complicated and utterly foreign ecosystem of hardware and software. It’s like the people who started out with the Apple II when it was new, watched it grow into a set of ‘OSes’ various capabilities from later models like enhanced IIe / IIgs. Still, you can’t get by without a PDF manual on the side because you won’t get too much help in the system. And non PC keyboards are a bit of a learning curve, lots of extra functions on Sinclair keys. ExcessBLarg! posted:
It worked… swapped like a motherfucker on startup, enough to audibly lag the map01 music … but it worked. Under DOS, on the same machine, Doom started up in a few seconds! I can see why Game devs were “Run under windows? Naw, that’s MY RAM, MY CPU!” and it wasn’t until the pentium II era where it seemed like dos games were the holdouts.
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May 22, 2023 10:51
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8 bit PC keyboards are significantly different from the IBM PS/2 that we all see today. Thing is, most games are going to start straight from boot. So, if you’re emulating, you have a game pad plugged into your PC, and you’re almost never going to touch the keyboard. The second you get into non game software, you’re required to use the keyboard and if you’re emulating you’re always going to be mapping between your IBM and that original keyboard.That’s definitely a lot of points in favor of actual hardware. The C64 and spectrum keys are covered with little glyphs and function overrides that don’t have PC equivalents. Personally I don’t have space for old PCs so the next best thing is installing the OSes and poking around the productivity software or interacting with the shell. Re: Demos Right - they’re not interactive, functionally they’re videos. There’s no sense of “This is being generated live in front of you. Commercial games only scratched the surface of what was possible” If I had the time, I’d like to have a table at a retro game con like Portland or Milwaukee with an Everdrive full of Genesis or SNES demos. Most demos on YouTube only have a few thousand views and the general public doesn’t know or actively seek these out.
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Jun 28, 2023 13:44
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I think it’s a successor to the ZX81 keyboard I suppose there’s a certain logic in including every keyword in their flavor of BASIC as a dedicated alternate key combo. It looks like they intended coding in BASIC to be the primary purpose of the system, just like how a Symbolics LISP machine (see space cadet keyboard) is dedicated to coding in LISP along with a few system functions. Who among us hasn’t wished for a dedicated Arc Tangent button? Apple //e had a cleaner board that more closely resembles what we have today, and typing into an apple II emulator is more likely than not going to produce the characters you want, but there’s still weirdness.  : “I’ve swapped floppies and I want to reboot without power cycling - how do I do that?” “Open Apple - Control - Reset”: “Uh…”In other news - The Insert Credit Podcast (with Frank Cifaldi, The Red Eye on here with the Alice and Ape III avatar ) has a few words on old game archives for various systems. And they had a few words on the learning curve of getting old systems running and how much you need to interact with this or that thirty-years-dead computer ecosystem … (sometimes in Japanese) in order to get your games running. https://insertcredit.com/show/293/ I spent a little bit of time trying to get digital sound effects running in Dune 2 (voice effects “Harkonnen Forces Approaching!”) on my MISTer, but gave up. Sometimes digital sounds get patched out by warez crews so it could fit on fewer floppies when downloaded from leet warez BBS at 9600 baud.
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Jun 28, 2023 17:25
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In the 80’s there was the product category of the ‘home computer’. Usually it’s an 8 bit micro that your kid can type BASIC into that plugs into a TV. There was definitely a glut of companies (even Nintendo) chasing a craze that died down by the mid 80’s  Hey hey 16k lives rent free in my head https://youtu.be/IagZIM9MtLo
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Jun 29, 2023 15:24
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Ok ok, let’s amend that, lol - My Americentric rear end quote:There was definitely a glut of companies (even Nintendo) chasing a craze that died down * by the mid 80s Re: crash - If one company owns 90% of the market and that company is mismanaged then, yeah… There’s no smoking gun for the crash, there’s definitely decisions that were made that could have pulled them out of a slump, and not taken it from Bad to Worse. I can recommend a podcast that puts a business focus on the gaming industry. https://www.theycreateworlds.com/listen Nerdy as poo poo and very much not for the general public, but if you want an understanding of the Why and How - C.R.E.A.M. US arcades had a boom and a bust in the early 80’s too. Too many people buying cabinets on credit, there’s an aversion to just selling boards for new games instead of the full cabinet. By 1983-ish too many cabinets, not enough quarters. Operators default, distributors default, and the industry consolidates.
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Jun 29, 2023 18:22
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I guess the ability to play back tracker (scream tracker, impulse tracker) software was too cpu intensive? Always wondered why PC games tended not to use those, and why they were so prevalent on Amiga. Tracker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8EDdeB_EKA Midi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEk8y5-G8QQ Thought it would have more likely sounded like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCM1-LIHlKg I guess, by the time they could have trackers in game, cpus were at the point where they could play back mp3s and mix spatial audio and not affect framerate E: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG-aMojWl_Q And now I’m nostalgic for 1996. There was a whole Usenet scene for recreating game music in trackers that got blown away when mp3 came into prevalence. Then again, mp3 playback would visibly slow down web page rendering on even a pentium 3. Minidust posted:I'm mainly in this thread for Amiga stuff. I tend to consider "PC" a single platform, often wondering why one would bother keeping, say, an old 486 with Windows 3.1 around. Now looking at this computer chronicles video on ‘plug and play’ - once windows 95 and especially XP came on, yeah, you’re left with a lot more homogeneity - it’s just “the windows pc” especially when motherboard manufacturers just started integrating everything, and slots are only for GPUs and almost nothing else https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj3JQDLZ3Z0 Coffee Jones fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Jul 1, 2023 |
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Jul 1, 2023 11:04
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Dr. Quarex posted:Yeah your Final Fantasy VI .S3M hit me with a blast of immediate nostalgia for the days I would check and see if anyone had made a tracked version of some game tune I had loved in the past (almost never, given I was primarily a PC gamer from the beginning, though there were often people cranking out Ultima V/VI remixes). Some of these still exist in the archives of RPGamer - formerly Andrew Vestal’s “The Unofficial Squaresoft Homepage” - VLC can play these. https://archive.rpgamer.com/games/games.html https://archive.rpgamer.com/games/ff/ff6/ff6dm.html https://archive.rpgamer.com/games/ff/ff7/ff7dm.html Impulse tracker rendition of FF7’s One Winged Angel had samples of the spooky latin chanting chorus. I’d first heard it from within Cubic Player, which is remarkably responsive for something that runs on a 486. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iIieRcDeYs I wish Retro Ahoy video mentioned Defle Mask, a tracker for building chiptunes according to the hardware of certain consoles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTY4fopHxtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSqKoe265QI ExcessBLarg! posted:The Paula could hardware mix four 8-bit PCM channels which is what tracker formats typically targeted. The functionality was also available in all Amiga models so there was no reason not to use it. Conversely, the Amiga didn't have any hardware FM-synth support. D’oh. Of course. The whole tracker scene is native to Amiga, because it had dedicated sound hardware while late 80’s PC games abused their chassis speakers.
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Jul 2, 2023 13:34
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Shadow Hog posted:Creative baselessly sues Aureal to run them into bankruptcy and ends up with a monopoly on the 3D sound market. What’s the story behind this? I guess I missed the whole ‘modern windows audio’ changeover, and all the work that took windows out of the 9x/XP era into Vista/7 and the bits that were created for Xbox 360 that found their way to Windows (Xinput, Xaudio2, etc) From a hardware sales perspective sound cards and Ethernet are the first things to be widely integrated into motherboards. Hardware-wise… yup the PC is pretty much boring now. Apparently windows sound was a real cluster. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Audio_Architecture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAudio2 Other rabbit holes - some of the original middleware on PC. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Sound_System John Miles was like THE PC audio guy of the 90’s, and the original designer of Direct Sound. The who’s who of topics like 80’s nintendo are done to death, but a fair amount of things don’t fall into today’s retro game journalist’s radar. (Though I admit, reading reading the Direct Sound -> Xaudio2 change over is a “what’s your appetite for reading about windows drivers?”- sorta thing. ) If we want to taxonomize the history of the PC, Vista / 7 is definitely another line.
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Jul 4, 2023 13:27
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TIL there is a Genesis / Mega Drive port of Snake Rattle and Roll https://youtu.be/Eg9vYOXxh0k Thing is, Snake has always felt like Rare’s attempts to evolve the old school Knight Lore / Solstice style isometric platformer. As much as I want to like them, they all seem to play like 90% the same. What comes off as extremely innovative for its time seemed to be tapped out when consoles took over for home PCs Is there a YouTube video that covers the evolution of these games does an in depth analysis on their design?
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Oct 30, 2023 12:46
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There's a point in the early 90's where the MegaDrive saw NES sequels / ports of British designs - Micromachines, RC Pro Am, and now Snake. And it's like "Oh, you loved this game as kid? Here's a better version you've never seen before that was only released a few years after the NES original." Head Over Heels* was also my first isometric platformer. Friend of mine had a C64 and I kinda pissed him off only wanting to play games, lol.. Anyway - you see games like Knightlore from RARE/Ultimate and compare it to HOH's design. There are two independent characters that can combine like Mario and Yoshi. There are puzzles where you're required to combine them. Puzzles where they're required to split apart, all this over multiple worlds on a sprawling map**. Knightlore is a 1984 game and HOH is 1987 and clearly there's clearly several rounds of evolution that have occurred across all fronts. I'm going to have to play Landstalker - the move off of 8 bit micros let them do scrolling and more sword slashy combat . The same designer and artist worked on a game for the gameboy called Monster Max in 1994 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4EVqKSPrcs And earlier there was 'Altered Space' on GB from the developers of Solstice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x8ewelaOEU But after Monster Max this type of game (AFAIK) has fallen off the face of the earth. 3d isometric blocks are used everywhere in games like Tactics Ogre, but that's about it. I'm guessing the move to polygons the fact that this type of game was already ancient had already killed it off. * https://gamesfromtheblackhole.wordpress.com/2021/11/07/head-over-heels/ ** https://maps.speccy.cz/map.php?id=HeadoverHeels Head Over Heels also had a remake (available on steam! or Archive.org  ) in the 2000's where people have redrawn the sprites and added music and sound effects, but largely playing the same (Spectrum / C64 chugging with too many sprites on screen notwithstanding.)E: I put this conversation under PC because 3d platformer is very much an 8bit micro style of game Coffee Jones fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 19:38
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Random Stranger posted:It's the greatest case design in computer history aesthetically and the most nightmarish case design technically. Are you talking about this from an electrical engineering perspective? I’m thinking about how Louis Rossman bitches about Apple’s blunders in PCB design in his repair streams; minor defects lead to fried boards. I’m looking around for details on this and I only see stuff from the software perspective. Speaking of which - x68000 sounds like it was built BY an FOR game developers of the time so the homebrew/doujin scene was insane. Except … I’m thinking about about a comment Jason Scott of Archive.org made about people preserving Apple II stuff. An old guard maintaining archives like Apple Asimov had the attitude of “Yeah we got the Apple II covered. You can play choplifter and Oregon Trail” and preservationists like 4am announce new poo poo on a weekly basis, even in tyool 2024* Which leads me to think that the doujin output on the x68000 is much higher given its workstation nature but also reliant on the same sort of 5.25 floppies and sneakernet but also an ocean of undumped media. * https://mastodon.social/@a2_4am/111942582289828420 https://archive.org/details/TotalReplay Seems like Total Replay is doing for the Apple II what Mega AGS did for the Amiga - gigantic browsable hard disk image archive
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Feb 23, 2024 03:58
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Seat Safety Switch posted:Brother's Takeru service made an enormous difference to the viability of the X68000. They are basically a proto-Steam, which allowed computer stores to stock small-batch and rare-platform games without having to waste shelf space on them if they didn't sell. Thanks for the write up! Re: Takeru from Brother Nintendo must have been inspired by this when they made the Famicom Disk System and built their own kiosks. https://minahito.wordpress.com/2016/08/04/soft-vendor-takeru-the-worlds-first-app-store/ It must have been wild being a PC otaku in the 80’s and being in a super densely populated area like Tokyo where it’s not hard to find hundreds of IRL enthusiasts and clubs. So if you’re - say - working on an image editor, you can prototype it to your buds and sell it via takeru. Make it successful enough and it’s a fine side-hustle.
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Feb 26, 2024 12:12
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Oh wow - a video on Takeru software vending machine (see earlier in this thread) was just published https://youtu.be/E1_JBKNcw1M?feature=shared
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Mar 23, 2024 02:57
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Revision Demoparty 2024 was this easter weekend in Saarbrücken, Germany - and it seems they're better about putting video coverage online https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNqQO7lFY6dms3bvrmG6AqJ-wkfE5Tinr Since this is the retro computer thread - Here's "Oldskool Demo" - 8 and 16 bit systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad_qRmlFafA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad_qRmlFafA&t=647s - here's an NES demo. If I was blindfolded I don't think I could tell the difference between C64 SID music and NES music 80% of the time. Since Amiga is so popular as a demo platform - it is its own category https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhe5aZeIXSY 256 byte demo - vga graphics with DOSbox as the spec platform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p5HCTUNgfU Oldskool 4K Intro - showing the scenes w4r3z roots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AX9yKOrdPA
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Apr 1, 2024 17:12
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quote:Hopefully there will be a writeup explaining some of how it's done like there is Somebody REALLY knows their fractals, You Am I posted:Commodore Plus/4 I had to look at the Plus/4 was about - looks like a cut down "Business Oriented" C64 without hardware sprites but increased color depth. Looking at a few demos, they make a lot of use out of palette animation, playing to the hardware's strengths. Always wild to have demos that have effects on hardware that have no business doing what they do. Like this commodore PET demo providing "3d animations" by manipulating petscii - guess swapping out characters on a screen is very fast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cznyKsOl3po I guess that's the same thing happening here in this C64 demo - petscii animation simulating voxels. Commercial games of the time never come close to the sheer style these demos have https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8onlB0F1_A&t=311s I keep forgetting how truly limited the apple II series was in the graphics department.
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Apr 4, 2024 15:41
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