wonderful_christmas_time.mid

Paul McCartney - Wonderful Christmastime

paul mccartney has earned $15 million from this song and gets $400k every single year from it. some kooky sound effects popping in and out on this one

The idea of changing colors faster than the video mode is designed to handle is a very common (if difficult) trick within the demoscene. Certain platforms, like the Amiga's HAM mode, had this capability documented early on. With other platforms, it took years for a hacker to figure it out.

The CGA graphics from the IBM PC, for example, is best known for its "ugly" pink and cyan color palette, because CGA was only capable of displaying 4 out of 16 total colors. If you hooked the computer up to a composite (TV) monitor, you could make the computer display all 16 colors at once. Smart coders used dithering to create the appearance of more than 16 colors because of the nature of composite video, and recently someone figured out how to display 1024 colors using a graphics card that, again, was only designed to produce 16 colors.

Similar techniques have been used on nearly all 8-bit machines. Like the article mentions, this technique is really only good for displaying static images, because of how complex it is. The processor can't work fast enough to make an actual game run this way.

So, is that really what Sega meant by Blast Processing? I truly doubt it. Officially, BP referred to the fact that Sega's VDP processor was capable of fast and powerful graphics processing in general, and this technique is just a product of Blast Processing, not the concept itself.

CASTLEVANIA 3, NES KING’S QUEST V, NES KING’S QUEST V, NES HYDLIDE III, NES MAGIC WAND, WIN/LIN/MAC HARMONY HARDPACK TAPE, HTML RAINBOW ISLANDS, ZX SPECTRUM SCENE FROM JIMBO #2 - GARY PANTER INSULA DULCAMARA - PAUL KLEE

a particular type of pixel art that appeals to me and which to some extents feels like a road not fully developed on is that with some level of uncertain back and forth between colour and line; dense, scratchy prints layered on top of uninterrupted swathes of colour, or which are slightly out of sync with the underlying colour pattern (as in the colour bleeding of old Spectrum games). i think the emphasis within contemporary pixel art is firmly on the mark-making side of this dynamic, where every part of the screen comes across as written and inscribed upon, chipped away at, and where even the simple outlines of more abstract or retro styles the emphasis is on the precision of their outlines and on seeing how each pixel is placed to build up the whole. the result is a kind of richly solid plane, whereas hybrid forms like the NES port of King’s Quest V give the impression of at least two forms of perception being superimposed, in a way maybe reminiscent of Paul Klee paintings where fields of colour identified with the “cosmic” are constantly marked and shaped by more earthly, creaturely scratches and imprinting shapes. or at least (as well as) things like game-&-watch carts or early arcade games which really did use multiple layers with a mix of static and computerised digital components (the arcade game Golly! Ghost! actually had a physical dollhouse inside the cabinet, with videogame characters projected onto the seperating screen…!).

One of the development versions of Macintosh System 7 had a well-hidden, lengthy easter egg. A circus parade would appear on the screen, play When the Saints Go Marching In, and list off a very long credits list like a carnival barker. It was cut from future versions and replaced with a much simpler easter egg: “Parade called on account of rain.”

30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

(from CERN)

Please don’t confuse WWW with the Internet, they aren’t the same! Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf show this fairly eloquently:

More:

History of the World Wide Web

A new unreleased Dreamcast game has been dumped and released for your enjoyment! Internet Game Pack, developed by Visual Concepts (the studio behind the 2K games) created this as a pack in for the Official Dreamcast Magazine but was canceled. Enjoy! 

The Earth Simulator (ES) (地球シミュレータ Chikyū Shimyurēta), developed by the Japanese government’s initiative “Earth Simulator Project”, was a highly parallel vector supercomputer system for running global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics. The system was developed for Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, and Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC) in 1997. Construction started in October 1999, and the site officially opened on 11 March 2002. The project cost 60 billion yen.

Built by NEC, ES was based on their SX-6 architecture. It consisted of 640 nodes with eight vector processors and 16 gigabytes of computer memory at each node, for a total of 5120 processors and 10 terabytes of memory. Two nodes were installed per 1 metre × 1.4 metre × 2 metre cabinet. Each cabinet consumed 20 kW of power. The system had 700 terabytes of disk storage (450 for the system and 250 for the users) and 1.6 petabytes of mass storage in tape drives. It was able to run holistic simulations of global climate in both the atmosphere and the oceans down to a resolution of 10 km. Its performance on the LINPACK benchmark was 35.86 TFLOPS, which was almost five times faster than the previous fastest supercomputer, ASCI White.

ES was the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004. Its capacity was surpassed by IBM’s Blue Gene/L prototype on 29 September 2004.

Yes, Virginia, you can use a 1980s daisywheel printer – or a daisywheel typewriter that has a Centronics parallel interface for use as a printer – with a modern computer and Windows 7. It’s not that difficult when you know how.

I probably burned through half a ribbon figuring it all out but I’ve had entirely too much Mountain Dew Baja Blast today and it’s 11:39pm so this is how I end my day… proving the people who say it won’t work wrong. :-D

C64 Graphic - Fairy King by Hokuto Force, released at BCC Party #13

Generally, use VMWare Workstation Player

Use PCem for games with difficult compatibility, 3D graphics, CD audio, etc. (this program can be very resource-intensive)

VirtualBox setup for Windows 98 is too complicated, but it may be useful in unusual cases that are speed-dependent

DxWnd may work for some later Windows 9x or XP-era games that run DirectX

There’s more detail in the guide, though I haven’t had a chance to fully flesh it out yet. In general though, I was floored by how well VMWare Workstation Player handles Windows 98. I had previously used VirtualBox, but VMWare is unbelievably smooth. (Surprisingly, that can actually be a problem for games that are CPU-dependent, like Star Wars DroidWorks.)

I’m close to caving in and trying to buy a secondary old PC to install Windows 98 on, but I think it’s really important that we understand what we can do with emulators and support their development, especially in terms of accessibility. Owning an old PC can be expensive and take up a lot of physical space compared to running a virtual machine (though the lengthy setup process for a virtual machine poses its own barriers). And for most cases, it seems that something like VMWare will do the trick.

So… first post… what is this?

This is where I will be keeping myself and anyone who is interested up to date with the latest on my development of CALIBAN: The File System Survival Game.

Every so often, I will post a public download of the latest and greatest version for anyone to try and give feedback on. I do not plan to ship, sell or make myself famous with this project, I am only driven by the desire to see it done (as I do not know of any prior attempts by anybody).

So… What is a “file system survival game”? Great question… I’m not really sure either. Let’s find out together! But I do know this much:

A vast desert of folders will be created at run-time on your machine.

You must explore this desert while limited by either a timer, or a certain number of clicks, or any combination of similarly restrictive mechanics.

Multiple pieces of supporting software will be involved, all running in their own windows/processes and will communicate with each other via TCP sockets.

The main core will be written in C# with supporting softwares written in C++ and C.

Any treasures you find along the way may be placed in your inventory folder and brought back to the market to sell and hopefully earn enough to buy some better folder navigation equipment to venture deeper into the file system desert.

Some treasures will persist outside of the game as desktop trophies and music boxes and other permanent one-of-a-kind artdisks.

Any attempt to cheat, hack or otherwise break the game will be severely punished (nothing actually destructive, probably the deletion of all progress).

There will be a real-time combat system (I’ll explain my combat system in future posts).

The game will be complete-able.

There will be mystery, betrayal, intrigue and devastation.

It will be cross-platform (I’ll finally make something for Mac users!)

In the coming days, I will give a preview into the systems I have written so far and some code snippets, and will post the very first demo at the end of the week.

Sound fun? Great.

My next post will be my inspirations and a kind of mood-board for looks, mechanics, themes and features.

Thanks for tuning in.