It's weird how people think they can add to a debate with experts while being absolute non-experts themselves.
Well I think it's weird how one group of experts (man causes global warming) will label another group of experts (global warming is natural) as "idiots" and "deniers" and other childish retorts. The first group doesn't even allow the second group to publish papers. How... tyrannical and immature.
I also think it's weird that the planet has grown 1/2 a degree cooler since the mid-90s, and somehow this is used to justify warming. (Or else simply ignored and the data fictionalized into an upward slope, as the Penn State researcher did.) What kind of "expertism" is that? Seems to me the word "expert" should be replaced with "biased", and therefore not to be trusted.
And finally, I think it's weird that average people are not allowed to have an opinion (according to you). Has our society devolved into Feudalism again, where only the Nobility are allowed to form an opinion & set policy, while the educated Commoners/middle class is ignored as "too stupid to understand"? Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that We the People cannot be trusted to decide our own future?
I was talking about a Microsoft PC running Windows 98. Yeah you could use other OSes like Linux or Warp but let's face it, neither of them were the standard of the time (or even now). AmigaOS was the standard installed on that machine, and it had been preemptive multitasking from the very start (1985).
I was talking about Windows 98. Yeah you could us other OSes like Linux or Warp, but let's face it, neither of them were the standard of the time (or even now).
>>>The reason we thought our Amiga games was so superior was to some extent because TVs blurred the image
Speak for yourself. In America there's no way to hook-up an Amiga, so we all owned special monitors with analog RGB input, very similar to how analog VGA operates. There was television blur on the screen, and yet we STILL thought the Amiga graphics were amazing. Especially when viewing those 4000-color nudie pics.;-) IBM only had 16 or 256 color... not at all adequate.
>>>Are you saying that the Amiga looked better because many people used it with a TV, rather than a monitor as a PC would have?
Yeah doesn't make much sense does it? In Europe people could use the SCART connector for Amigas, but in America we used special monitors with analog RGB input, very similar to how analog VGA operated. There was television blur on the screen.
Amiga had 32 colors, which was superior to the 16-color EGA of the period. Few people could afford the VGA except professionals, so games were targeted to EGA well into the 90s. Amiga also had the 4000 color mode which was perfect for still images, like the nudie pics.;-)
Anonymous Coward wrote: Not to be the finger pointing guy but you did infact upgrade from a Commodore (64) to a Commodore (Amiga), it was made by the same company.
No shit Sherlock. The Commodore logo emblazoned on the front of my Amiga gave it away!
Still: Common shorthand is to say "Amiga" just as someone might say, "I upgraded from Apple to Macintosh."
Once again an old 1985 sound chip beats the latest (1992) PC technology. Jay Miner was a genius. He designed the original Atari console, the 8-bit Atari computers, and the Amiga - all with advanced sound and graphics 5-10 years ahead of their time.
I wonder how this game sounds on a Mac? (Never mind; doesn't exist.)
On one of my previous jobs my contract was terminated because I was watching FOX News while eating my lunchtime sandwich.
Yeah I know - FOX. But I don't think watching MS-NBC would have made any difference - they were cutting contractors and costs. They also told me "You are eating too much food at the lunch buffet." I only weigh 140 pounds - I don't eat much.:-| - Anyway.... DON'T give your a-hole boss an excuse to do the same to you! Turn down the Pac-Man sound
You're not missing much. This is a poor clone of the game. It LOOKS good but plays horrible (compared to the arcade original). The ghosts are stupid (run in circles instead of after you), the maze has tunnels that don't match up creating dead ends, and the ghosts stay blue forever. I didn't think it possible but it appears somebody programmed a worse game than Atari Pac-Man (which looks crap but is fun to play):
"Marketing pressed Programmer Tod Frye to produce the game on a very strict timetable. Atari engineering would demand Frye complete the game in the standard 4K ROM, despite his repeated requests that 8K of ROM be allocated. Confined by time and available memory, Frye proposed the unthinkable. He approached Atari CEO Ray Kassar, and suggested a royalty agreement. Frye threatened to quit Atari and join Activision, leaving Pac-Man unfinished and Atari without its benchmark title." Also Frye said he hated Pac-Man and thought it was a dumb game.
reclaiming chunks of spectrum previously allocated to other uses (analog TV being just one example).
Say what?. I'm going to assume you're in North America. The analog TV spectrum can not be reclaimed. Why? Because it's currently being used by the *digital* TV spectrum. Only channels 52 to 69 were released for other purposes - mostly police and ambulance emergency radios. Channels 2 to 51 are still allocated.
Then new, more robust and efficient data encodings are created
Yes but the Nyquist Theorem(?) shows that these encodings have (mostly) reached the maximum data packing possible. It's the same reason why Telephone modems never moved past 56k - they already hit the theoretical maximum for a 4 kilohertz wide line. Likewise the current space assigned to phones/wireless is already full or very close to full.
operators also split the network in ever-shrinking cells, esp. in crowded areas.
But the cells will never shrink as small as a fiber optic, where you could literally run give each home a full 0 to ~10,000 gigahertz spectrum, and no need to share it. Cells will never reach the point of one cell/antenna per home - it wouldn't be cost effective
Or you could emulate the original Amiga 500 and just download the Xenon2 ROM for free. (Of course emulation works best on an actual Amiga OS 3 or 4 system.)
R-Type on the Paula sound chip (1985). Is it any wonder why I immediately upgraded from a Commodore to an Amiga? "You should buy an IBM," my friends would say. Yeah. NOT!
The graphics for the time (1987) were amazing. It was the first time programmers used "rotoscoping" to create multilayer graphics and give the illusion of 3D. No other computer or console (NES/SMS) could do the same.
I agree completely, but for some reason I've yet to fully understand, the teeming masses all bought DOS machines... and now here we are.
According to Ars Technica, the top-selling computers purchased by "the masses" were the TRS-80, Commodore 64, and Amiga 500. The reason IBM PC/DOS/Windows came to dominate is because (1) Radio Shack and Commodore failed to innovate and upgrade the hardware, (2) cheap cloning of the IBM PC put them literally everywhere, and (3) businesses bought nothing but PCs.
1994-95 was the watershed year. Atari went bankrupt, Commodore went bankrupt, and Apple almost went bankrupt as well. Apple was saved by its dominance in the schools (first Apple IIs, then Macs), otherwise it too would probably be history.
>>>I saw a system with VGA graphics and a Soundblaster - and I was still on my Commodore 128. Ooof.
You should have upgraded to a Commodore Amiga 500 or 3000. The first had 4000 colors and the second had ~250,000 colors, plus near-CD-quality sound, plus preemptive multitasking (something not on PCs until 98). No IBM PC could keep-up with what an Amiga was doing in 1985, or 1990, respectively.
The same was true with my 1985 Amiga. It had the ability to record near-CD quality sound from any source, but the 256 kilobytes of RAM simply wasn't enough to record more than a few seconds. So the music of the day mostly consisted of on-the-fly music punctuated with voice samples from the original artist.
As time went-on the programmers learned to use compression, and thereby squeeze the soundtrack (and video) of Dragon's Lair on 3 floppies, but it was still very limited. Limited storage was the problem, not the sound chip which could have handled the load easily.
The Ataris, Commodores, and Amigas not only had better sound/graphics, but also had the advantage of being much cheaper to buy ($500 or less), and you didn't have the headache of non-functional software drivers. They were as easy to use as consoles - just plug'n'play. They were the computers of choice for 80s/early 90s gamers.
That's pretty much my "nostalgia" when it relates to 1980s and early 90s PC Audio. "Ugh". Or "ick". Or "I'm glad I bought a multimedia computer".
I remember debating online with IBM PC fans, and how they kept insisting that the PC had better sound (and graphics) than an Atari 800, Commodore 64, or Amiga/ST. Well I guess they were "invested" and had to defend their PCs, but it wasn't even a close race. Check it out for yourself. A lot of these PC sound effects don't sound much better than my old 1977 Atari console:
>>>it was the republican majority the pushed through the bill.
What bill? There was no bill. It was simply a mandate issued by the Executive Branch that banks must hand-out loans to low-income persons, or face prosecution.
The Republicans circa 2004 (six years later) tried to stop the obvious price inflation happening in the housing market, but the Democrats refused to cooperate. There are numerous youtube videos (i.e. proof) which show these congressional debates, and the Democrats saying, "The housing market is fine - there's no problem."
I'd hate it. I have better things to do with my limited ~80 year lifespan than waste an hour every day on shopping. Besides it's burns a LOT less fuel to visit the store once a month or half-month, than visit it every day.
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It's weird how people think they can add to a debate with experts while being absolute non-experts themselves.
Well I think it's weird how one group of experts (man causes global warming) will label another group of experts (global warming is natural) as "idiots" and "deniers" and other childish retorts. The first group doesn't even allow the second group to publish papers. How... tyrannical and immature.
I also think it's weird that the planet has grown 1/2 a degree cooler since the mid-90s, and somehow this is used to justify warming. (Or else simply ignored and the data fictionalized into an upward slope, as the Penn State researcher did.) What kind of "expertism" is that? Seems to me the word "expert" should be replaced with "biased", and therefore not to be trusted.
And finally, I think it's weird that average people are not allowed to have an opinion (according to you). Has our society devolved into Feudalism again, where only the Nobility are allowed to form an opinion & set policy, while the educated Commoners/middle class is ignored as "too stupid to understand"? Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that We the People cannot be trusted to decide our own future?
Hope that is not so.
I was talking about a Microsoft PC running Windows 98. Yeah you could use other OSes like Linux or Warp but let's face it, neither of them were the standard of the time (or even now). AmigaOS was the standard installed on that machine, and it had been preemptive multitasking from the very start (1985).
I was talking about Windows 98. Yeah you could us other OSes like Linux or Warp, but let's face it, neither of them were the standard of the time (or even now).
>>>The reason we thought our Amiga games was so superior was to some extent because TVs blurred the image
Speak for yourself. In America there's no way to hook-up an Amiga, so we all owned special monitors with analog RGB input, very similar to how analog VGA operates. There was television blur on the screen, and yet we STILL thought the Amiga graphics were amazing. Especially when viewing those 4000-color nudie pics. ;-) IBM only had 16 or 256 color... not at all adequate.
>>>Are you saying that the Amiga looked better because many people used it with a TV, rather than a monitor as a PC would have?
Yeah doesn't make much sense does it? In Europe people could use the SCART connector for Amigas, but in America we used special monitors with analog RGB input, very similar to how analog VGA operated. There was television blur on the screen.
Amiga had 32 colors, which was superior to the 16-color EGA of the period. Few people could afford the VGA except professionals, so games were targeted to EGA well into the 90s. Amiga also had the 4000 color mode which was perfect for still images, like the nudie pics. ;-)
Anonymous Coward wrote:
Not to be the finger pointing guy but you did infact upgrade from a Commodore (64) to a Commodore (Amiga), it was made by the same company.
No shit Sherlock. The Commodore logo emblazoned on the front of my Amiga gave it away!
Still: Common shorthand is to say "Amiga" just as someone might say, "I upgraded from Apple to Macintosh."
Sorry but I still think the Amiga version sounds better
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsWIYQfMpPw
Once again an old 1985 sound chip beats the latest (1992) PC technology. Jay Miner was a genius. He designed the original Atari console, the 8-bit Atari computers, and the Amiga - all with advanced sound and graphics 5-10 years ahead of their time.
I wonder how this game sounds on a Mac? (Never mind; doesn't exist.)
On one of my previous jobs my contract was terminated because I was watching FOX News while eating my lunchtime sandwich.
Yeah I know - FOX. But I don't think watching MS-NBC would have made any difference - they were cutting contractors and costs. They also told me "You are eating too much food at the lunch buffet." I only weigh 140 pounds - I don't eat much. :-| - Anyway.... DON'T give your a-hole boss an excuse to do the same to you! Turn down the Pac-Man sound
You're not missing much. This is a poor clone of the game. It LOOKS good but plays horrible (compared to the arcade original). The ghosts are stupid (run in circles instead of after you), the maze has tunnels that don't match up creating dead ends, and the ghosts stay blue forever. I didn't think it possible but it appears somebody programmed a worse game than Atari Pac-Man (which looks crap but is fun to play):
Atari 2600 (1977) - http://reparent.blog.uvm.edu/images/Atari%20Pacman.gif
"Marketing pressed Programmer Tod Frye to produce the game on a very strict timetable. Atari engineering would demand Frye complete the game in the standard 4K ROM, despite his repeated requests that 8K of ROM be allocated. Confined by time and available memory, Frye proposed the unthinkable. He approached Atari CEO Ray Kassar, and suggested a royalty agreement. Frye threatened to quit Atari and join Activision, leaving Pac-Man unfinished and Atari without its benchmark title." Also Frye said he hated Pac-Man and thought it was a dumb game.
Later variants were better:
Ms. PacMan - http://www.atariage.com/screenshot_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=320
Jr. PacMan - http://www.atariage.com/screenshot_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=254
PacMan Arcade http://www.atariage.com/2600/hacks/screenshots/s_MrPacMan_Hack_1.png
reclaiming chunks of spectrum previously allocated to other uses (analog TV being just one example).
Say what?. I'm going to assume you're in North America. The analog TV spectrum can not be reclaimed. Why? Because it's currently being used by the *digital* TV spectrum. Only channels 52 to 69 were released for other purposes - mostly police and ambulance emergency radios. Channels 2 to 51 are still allocated.
Then new, more robust and efficient data encodings are created
Yes but the Nyquist Theorem(?) shows that these encodings have (mostly) reached the maximum data packing possible. It's the same reason why Telephone modems never moved past 56k - they already hit the theoretical maximum for a 4 kilohertz wide line. Likewise the current space assigned to phones/wireless is already full or very close to full.
operators also split the network in ever-shrinking cells, esp. in crowded areas.
But the cells will never shrink as small as a fiber optic, where you could literally run give each home a full 0 to ~10,000 gigahertz spectrum, and no need to share it. Cells will never reach the point of one cell/antenna per home - it wouldn't be cost effective
Or you could emulate the original Amiga 500 and just download the Xenon2 ROM for free. (Of course emulation works best on an actual Amiga OS 3 or 4 system.)
R-Type on the Paula sound chip (1985). Is it any wonder why I immediately upgraded from a Commodore to an Amiga? "You should buy an IBM," my friends would say. Yeah. NOT!
intro + all the stages - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmEhC91k3MI
And here's the SID chip (released 1982). Not bad eh? Certainly beats anything IBM PC or Apple could do in 1982:
Here's Monkey Island on the Paula sound chip (released 1985). Again..... beats anything IBM PC or Apple could do in 1985 or even 1990:
SID - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXizZ7kx_VE
Paula - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DL6HYGwEwM
Shadow of the Beast Music - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUdXYiiHZQY#t=3m45s
And the sequel - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWGRAsjU9Pk
The graphics for the time (1987) were amazing. It was the first time programmers used "rotoscoping" to create multilayer graphics and give the illusion of 3D. No other computer or console (NES/SMS) could do the same.
I agree completely, but for some reason I've yet to fully understand, the teeming masses all bought DOS machines... and now here we are.
According to Ars Technica, the top-selling computers purchased by "the masses" were the TRS-80, Commodore 64, and Amiga 500. The reason IBM PC/DOS/Windows came to dominate is because (1) Radio Shack and Commodore failed to innovate and upgrade the hardware, (2) cheap cloning of the IBM PC put them literally everywhere, and (3) businesses bought nothing but PCs.
1994-95 was the watershed year. Atari went bankrupt, Commodore went bankrupt, and Apple almost went bankrupt as well. Apple was saved by its dominance in the schools (first Apple IIs, then Macs), otherwise it too would probably be history.
Monkey Island was made in 1990. It's possible the program gains No benefit from using later cards.
>>>I saw a system with VGA graphics and a Soundblaster - and I was still on my Commodore 128. Ooof.
You should have upgraded to a Commodore Amiga 500 or 3000. The first had 4000 colors and the second had ~250,000 colors, plus near-CD-quality sound, plus preemptive multitasking (something not on PCs until 98). No IBM PC could keep-up with what an Amiga was doing in 1985, or 1990, respectively.
Xenon 2 Original - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3n6BRUVAl0
Remix - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFkP6xzzTeI
Not bad for a computer from 1985, eh? Notice the near-CD-quality sampling. And here's an overall compilation of Amiga music from the 80s and 90s:
Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTz5iwmtkrs
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5Eoc8VsV_M
Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuXVy6qXyuI
Part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l6_mS_cnwQ
Music Archive - http://www.paula8364.com/
The same was true with my 1985 Amiga. It had the ability to record near-CD quality sound from any source, but the 256 kilobytes of RAM simply wasn't enough to record more than a few seconds. So the music of the day mostly consisted of on-the-fly music punctuated with voice samples from the original artist.
As time went-on the programmers learned to use compression, and thereby squeeze the soundtrack (and video) of Dragon's Lair on 3 floppies, but it was still very limited. Limited storage was the problem, not the sound chip which could have handled the load easily.
So 50 hertz versus a 1 million hertz Commodore or Atari == 20,000 times slower. Damn.
P.S.
The Ataris, Commodores, and Amigas not only had better sound/graphics, but also had the advantage of being much cheaper to buy ($500 or less), and you didn't have the headache of non-functional software drivers. They were as easy to use as consoles - just plug'n'play. They were the computers of choice for 80s/early 90s gamers.
That's pretty much my "nostalgia" when it relates to 1980s and early 90s PC Audio. "Ugh". Or "ick". Or "I'm glad I bought a multimedia computer".
I remember debating online with IBM PC fans, and how they kept insisting that the PC had better sound (and graphics) than an Atari 800, Commodore 64, or Amiga/ST. Well I guess they were "invested" and had to defend their PCs, but it wasn't even a close race. Check it out for yourself. A lot of these PC sound effects don't sound much better than my old 1977 Atari console:
Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cETl8PhUy_E
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e4uwzNkUVE
>>>it was the republican majority the pushed through the bill.
What bill? There was no bill. It was simply a mandate issued by the Executive Branch that banks must hand-out loans to low-income persons, or face prosecution.
The Republicans circa 2004 (six years later) tried to stop the obvious price inflation happening in the housing market, but the Democrats refused to cooperate. There are numerous youtube videos (i.e. proof) which show these congressional debates, and the Democrats saying, "The housing market is fine - there's no problem."
The screen is 2 inches smaller, but otherwise it has identical functionality, plus it includes Windows for free and a $111 rebate.
>>>If you shopped every day or every other day
I'd hate it. I have better things to do with my limited ~80 year lifespan than waste an hour every day on shopping. Besides it's burns a LOT less fuel to visit the store once a month or half-month, than visit it every day.