Re: [SWCollect] Technology never ceases to amaze
Dan Chisarick wrote: So two questions: Can you think of any technical innovation in games in the past few years that really jumped out and made you say gee whiz? I was pretty impressed with the pixel shading used in games like Morrowind, that gave a realistic feeling of flowing water. Does that count as technical innovation? -- Pedro R. Quaresma Salvador Caetano IMVT Div. Sistemas de Informação / Systems and Information Division Administração e Desenvolvimento Lotus Notes / Lotus Notes Administration and Development [EMAIL PROTECTED] // +351 22 7867000 (ext. 3492) Toyota Prius '01, Aqua Ice Opalescent, 37K km., Esperanza ToyotaShopping - A sua Loja Toyota Online http://www.toyota.pt
Re: [SWCollect] Technology never ceases to amaze (long)
Dan Chisarick wrote: When I was done w/this batch (61 disk images) and waiting for the lot to transfer over the serial AppleTalk network (think 10.5MB over a 115KB/s These are Apple II images or Mac images? Protected or not? If protected, what program are you using? In addition to all the wonderful things that vintage games had going for them, many of them had that wow, how'd they do that sort of feeling. Even Mode 0x13 for the PC (320x200 256 colors, and I think it was a linear frame buffer too instead of interlaced), even though it was more or less just poorly documented, was a big thing. MCGA didn't need to be documented, it was brainless to program for. 64000 bytes of video RAM at 0xA000 that you could linearly address; no paging or funny business, and each byte was exactly one pixel. Talk about simple! The neato modes were the tweaked ones, like unchaining video memory on a VGA card so that you could not only tweak to get 320x240 (square pixel aspect ratio) but also three video pages. John R. can attest to the advantages of triple buffering :) More on this later. Now some of the advances you've seen in years past: deformable surfaces, colored lighting, inverse kinematics, more colors, more polygons, better frame rates, full-screen anti-aliasing, hi-res textures, etc. while visually impressive, don't seem to have the same impact. Agreed. This is because they aren't exceeding the design parameters of the hardware. The truly cool stuff of yesteryear was produced by clever programming and/or hardware exploitation that accomplished things the hardware was *never intended to do*. All the stuff you mentioned above -- full-screen AA, compressed textures, pixel shaders, etc. -- are *supposed* to be used; they are in the design specs of the hardware and software. But when you produce digitized sound out of a computer with NO SOUND HARDWARE, or produce realtively fluid 3D graphics on a machine with no mathco or dedicated graphics displays running at sub-MHz speeds, or coax six voices out of a four-voice sound chip... that's impressive! I am with you 110% on this. It is the same reason I got involved with the demoscene, which, for a very brief period around 1990-1995, almost always exceeded game companies in the ability of pushing hardware past its specified limits. Not to toot my own horn, but if you haven't heard of the demoscene, you should buy a copy of MindCandy (www.mindcandydvd.com) and watch the oldskool side and the featurette on the new side for 2+ hours of this kind of nostalgia :) So two questions: Can you think of any technical innovation in games in the past few years that really jumped out and made you say gee whiz? Yes, actually I can (with links to screenshots): Outcast: The entire game was software-rendered in an era where 3D hardware was taking over the industry, but it was done so entirely with voxels. It was designed for 500MHz machines, but if you have a 2GHz or faster machine, you can run it with every single option turned on at a high resolution and it looks stunning. Smoothly-sloped mountains, uneven ground, true reflections... very impressive. ( http://www.mobygames.com/game/shots/p,3/gameId,358/ ) Tron 2.0: The glow effect (every lightsource has a hazy glow) was perfectly recreated from the movie. It is not a hard effect to do (depending on implementation it doesn't even need pixel shaders) but it was extremely effective. I love that game. ( http://www.mobygames.com/game/shots/p,3/gameId,10153/ ) Any classic favorites whose technology at the time was just awe-inspiring? Well, unfortunately for anyone who doesn't want to read this, you have touched on the very nerve that has drawn me to computers since I was a boy. I am not saying that to be melodramatic -- it's the honest truth. So here's some stuff off the top of my head that truly impressed me by either being clever with existing hardware or exceeding the hardware's design limits: C64 SID tunes: There are a few tunes that exploit very distinct behaviors of the C64 SID that produce sound that theoretically should not be possible given the waveforms and operators you had available. It is said that the designer of the SID is continually amazed at what has been produced with the chip, stuff that he never intended -- sounds that should not even be possible. C64 SID music with digitized sound: A good (but not the best) example of this is the title theme to Turbo Outrun. Getting digitized sound out of a C64 is amazing enough, but at the same time all three channels are maxed out playing music?!? One of these days I'll figure out how it was done... Digitized sound on any machine without dedicated sound hardware: Apple II, IBM PC, C64, and many (if not most) 8-bit computers did not have dedicated hardware to produce digitized sound (music and/or sound effects, yes, but not dedicated sampled sound like a Sound Blaster). So any title that *did* do
Re: [SWCollect] Technology never ceases to amaze (long)
Good god. Ok, tell me you just rattled all that off your head... Apple or Mac? Both. Actually Apple II, IIgs and Mac. Nearly all the IIgs and Mac titles can be fast copied or at most have one protected track (which I'll skip). I use Apple's built-in disk imager for the Mac and Asimov (http://www.ninjaforce.com/html/products.html) for the IIgs. I'll just sector-edit out the protection call on the image. Due to time constraints I'll skip format-protected titles for either (there aren't many I've seen). For the Apple II at least 50% aren't format-protected, so same strategy (Asimov images 5.25 or 3.5). I'll use Super IOB (ftp.apple.asimov.net) to normalize everything else, many times w/the swap controller (capture the program's DOS and use it to read the protected disks). Dos 3.3-based stuff is far more reliable to get a solid image out of than 3.2. Might be better error checking, might also be that 3.2 is so old the media is WAY past its shelf life. For those oh god I will not be complete without this titles, I will dissect (boot trace, disassemble, etc.) the loader for however long as need be (and no I don't have a cookbook from Computist for these) until I have decoded data in normalized form. These would be stuff like Caverns of Callisto, Sherwood Forest, Elite... All of these have stories that would go for pages :) And last there are titles that are so heavily protected I just don't try (almost anything Broderbund and definitely anything Sirius). They have been beaten 15+ years ago by The Disk Jockey and the Apple Bandit, and because the formats are so far out there, I see no value in repeating these feats to only get the identical results (yes real men rewrite loaders, if you have 2 months to work 1 title). Oh yeah, SST will make nibble copy IMAGES of many protected titles (as long as there is no nibble count). I've used this as a last resort, but because its so hard to tell if a sector was misread using this tool, I try to avoid it where possible. Stuff I have in this form includes: Choplifter, Russki Duck, Wings of Fury and the original CP Ultima I. I wish I knew more, I wish I had more time, but I do what I can with what I have (and I would give my right eye to have the read routines from Copy II+ as a callable library... those things are just so good). And Copy II+ 9.1 to do the 'refresh' copy (make a copy first, THEN normalize from a fresh copy greatly enhances reliability). Pushing hardware beyond its limits is so cool: Hit the nail on the head. I pity the people who had to PORT titles like that :) Unlikely we'll ever see that pushing again for that reason (portability, diverse hardware platforms). Wonder if we'll see 2Ghz PC emulators in cell phones someday (we never expected to see 2600, Nintendo and Intellivisions run in such small packages, who knows). Sid tunes: I have SidPlay2 on my Mac and the HVSC library in it. I've listened to it for hours and burned a non-trivial number of CD's from it. Of course I also bought the Mac version of all the Doom II episodes to get all the music files (they're in QuickTime MIDI format... iTunes burns them straight to CD :) I wish I could make a site w/the 'minimal crack' images I've made (along w/the original bytes if you have a better way) and not get sued from here to hell. I just *know* I've got images of stuff no one else has, and clean copies of stuff (like Rescue Raiders) that's been covered in 'graffiti' everywhere else, mods to images to make them work w/the real hardware AND emulators, etc. I think in 2004 I'm going to start scanning in all my issues of Computist (much like the Andover project) into PDF files. Tedious but its at least a known quantity of work (probably 1 hour per issue to assemble). I thought I had them all. I'm shy about 9 (mostly the really, really early ones.) Oops. I have (no kidding) at least 10 copies of 'Omega', probably more. I still can't bring myself to destroy just *one* copy of the massive manual to scan it :) On Dec 29, 2003, at 5:57 PM, Jim Leonard wrote: Dan Chisarick wrote: When I was done w/this batch (61 disk images) and waiting for the lot to transfer over the serial AppleTalk network (think 10.5MB over a 115KB/s These are Apple II images or Mac images? Protected or not? If protected, what program are you using? In addition to all the wonderful things that vintage games had going for them, many of them had that wow, how'd they do that sort of feeling. Even Mode 0x13 for the PC (320x200 256 colors, and I think it was a linear frame buffer too instead of interlaced), even though it was more or less just poorly documented, was a big thing. MCGA didn't need to be documented, it was brainless to program for. 64000 bytes of video RAM at 0xA000 that you could linearly address; no paging or funny business, and each byte was exactly one pixel. Talk about simple! The neato modes were the tweaked ones, like
Re: [SWCollect] Technology never ceases to amaze (long)
Jim Leonard stated: Digitized sound on any machine without dedicated sound hardware: Digitized sound on the IBM PC that did *not* halt the computer and had *no* distortion: This brings to mind an old game called Star Trek: The Nth Iteration. It used ANSI graphics, but played actual clips from the original show over the PC's speaker. I was amazed at the time. It was the early '90s and I had only had a IBM PC-compatible for a year or two. I've just discovered it's still available on the web from the author: http://www.idcomm.com/personal/lorenblaney/. Source code is even included, although it turns out it's written in XPL0, a language I was not previously aware of. The sound routines are written in assembly. -- Lee K. Seitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
Re: [SWCollect] Technology never ceases to amaze
Lee K. Seitz wrote: Dan Chisarick stated: So two questions: Can you think of any technical innovation in games in the past few years that really jumped out and made you say gee whiz? Any classic favorites whose technology at the time was just awe-inspiring? I'm *still* wondering how they did the speech in Castle Wolfenstein. 8) It was digitized, not synthesis. If you want more details, they differ by platform, so name the platform :) -- Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED])http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ -- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
[SWCollect] Technology never ceases to amaze
While I was visiting my parents for xmas I did another marathon archiving session (Floppy - disk image - CD). I've lost track of how many times I've said this is the last time. The sessions get further and further apart, but each time I flip the switch(es) the machines keep coming back for more. Not bad for 17+ year old boxen. When I was done w/this batch (61 disk images) and waiting for the lot to transfer over the serial AppleTalk network (think 10.5MB over a 115KB/s connection), I was leafing through the stack I just did wondering where things have gone. Aside from the usual gripes (the manuals use to be awesome, the attention to detail was great, story lines were more involving, etc.) I'd have to say technology breakthroughs aren't as exciting. Remember HAMming mode on the Amiga? Getting 16+ sprites on a C=64 through multiplexing? Rainbow backgrounds on an Atari 2600 (I think by shifting the color pallet on the VBI signal)? The 'speech' in Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple? Elite? :) In addition to all the wonderful things that vintage games had going for them, many of them had that wow, how'd they do that sort of feeling. Even Mode 0x13 for the PC (320x200 256 colors, and I think it was a linear frame buffer too instead of interlaced), even though it was more or less just poorly documented, was a big thing. Now some of the advances you've seen in years past: deformable surfaces, colored lighting, inverse kinematics, more colors, more polygons, better frame rates, full-screen anti-aliasing, hi-res textures, etc. while visually impressive, don't seem to have the same impact. There was an article I read a few months back how James Bond films don't get quite the draw they used to. One of the reasons is that 30+ years ago, the technology in the films was futuristic and fascinating. Now it all seems so plausible, as if its only bleeding edge, or even just new. So two questions: Can you think of any technical innovation in games in the past few years that really jumped out and made you say gee whiz? Any classic favorites whose technology at the time was just awe-inspiring? geek Merry Xmas from the gang: http://homepage.mac.com/chisarickd/FamilyPhoto.jpg Ed (IIgs, back left), Eep (PowerMac 6100, back right), The Apple, bottom front left, Eep2 top front left. They all still work (especially Eep2). /geek No comments on the background items, ok? Its a storage room now. -- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
