Yeah, Ultima's trinkets were definitely a good idea of how to make owning the original a cool thing.
It's also a great example of how EA screwed things up later on. I have perfectly legit copies of U1-U8, UUW1 and SE, but none of the budget/collection releases had any of the trinket (and the U1-6 Series CD from Encore was a travesty - no printed manual, extremely crappy electronic manuals, without even the U6 copy protection questions!!!) I wish they'll some day get a clue...
Well, with so many goths around these days, I think I'll one day go to one of their stores and get myself an Ankh =)
Most Linux games I have played do not require the CD. NWN and UT2k3 come to mind. You install, patch, then enter your CD-KEY. From that point on, the CD can stay in the box.
I have also never ever seen a Linux game with any kind of CD copy protection, at least not one that I could notice. At least the Loki games were easily backed up with dd and cdrecord...
I think NWN has been the most generous game so far - you don't even need the CDs to install, just the CDkeys and game data...
You can assign arbitrary key shortcut to any GTK+ menu item. (Can't remember exactly how, and wingimp keeps crashing at the moment - IIRC hover mouse over the option and press the shortcut keys... Handy because I've always preferred '+' over '=' as the zoom in key.)
It's not exactly a technical problem. StarOffice and old versions of OpenOffice.org used to do that. Of course, I believe these things were "faked"; they were not properly X11-managed windows, but rather, the application drew them as widgets inside the window with their own windows-like title bars.
In X11 applications can themselves be in "one cohesive group" already. I hit Alt+H in GIMP (or select Hide from window bar menu) and the whole app gets hidden. I can give the GIMP a whole desktop for itself if I want using virtual desktops.
Also, I can move individual GIMP windows wherever I want on the window, or even to different virtual desktops. Would be extremely cool if I had a dual-head (Xinerama) setup, too... One monitor for toolbars and alternate views, one for the picture itself.
Just a few of the things I could think of off-hand.
Actually, a lot of what was originally found in GNOME 1.x libgnomeui has been moved to GTK+ side in GNOME 2 / GTK+ 2. This includes stuff like stock dialogs and stock icons. You get most of the cool UI stuff even if you're not using full-blown GNOME apps. =) GNOME's significance these days lies in the other libraries besides the UI (gnome app support, gconf, bonobo, etc).
And I expect the locations to be user-configurable, as that would be very sensible. I've been silently (and not-so-silently) begging and begging for "bookmark" support in all file dialogs; this stuff certainly helps.
Arrrgh! And I was just thinking that putting top 40 crap on the games was a particularly modern phenomenon.
Just remembered that there have been a lot of pop tune covers all along... but back in the day, they somehow ended up being better than the originals =)
Of course, a game's total value isn't depending on music, but nor is it really depending on other chrome factors - the gameplay is what really matters.
However, it'd be ridiculous to single out music as the part that doesn't matter - or that sets the mood. The mood is often set by all of the elements together - but if we consider the most defining factor in creating the mood, it's often the music. Sometimes it's something else. (In many RPGs I like to play, it's often created by music and text - dialogue or narration. Text is what makes it interesting, music is what gives it color.)
It's difficult to debate when the chrome things stop being chrome and become integral part of the game itself. Let's just not. I need coffee.
::hits Submit before this rambling continues again::
I don't know - for me, there's really no correlation between graphics and music. I think what you're seeing is the thing that these days, the game makers just focus less on the music. Yet, it's still nice to see that these people do sometimes care enough to make a memorable soundtrack.
I can think of several soundtracks that I found interesting in recent times. Operation Flashpoint, Deus Ex, Neverwinter Nights, Warcraft and Starcraft series, Myth III... and just day before yesterday I was shaken by one of the tunes in Starfox Adventures =)
I have Win98SE. The machine isn't that old - a PIII-600 from three summers ago.
It could run WinXP just fine, but I haven't had the need to upgrade: I use Linux as my primary operating system, Win98SE runs all games I need and the couple of "serious" apps I need (VirtualDub and TMPGEnc, to record stuff off TV...), and I'm a Poor Student for whom the XP upgrade would be a mighty investment. I'll consider getting XP when I next upgrade the system...
Uh, unless you use pixmaps to texture things, you can override the theme engine's default colors in GTK+. At least that was how it was in GTK+ 1.x, probably so also in 2.x as well...
I used to use a slate blue NeXT theme, until I acknowledged that Gray is the Only True NeXT color =)
Ha! Every real FurryMUCKer (or any MU* user, anyway) knows that tinysex is only the second most popular activity. The most popular activity is Idling, and I can do that with no hands! This should then be the perfect online activity for people with only one hand.
This "Idling" thing has apparently been extremely successful in IRC as well! And it's spreading to instant messaging as well, but no one calls it that!
Nintendo's page doesn't have much information - apparently there's a GBC version of GTA already out there (Tarantula/Rockstar - released in November 1999!), and GTA3 has been announced for GBA, with no details, other than that it's being made by Destination Software (???? what the...?).
Haven't seen the GBC version, but considering the limited capabilities of the hardware and the ESRB Teen rating, it's probablty not exactly a gory ride... =)
Take2games.com doesn't have any hints about the GBA version, but I did note they're making a GBA version of Max Payne, isometric graphics and all. That ought to be... uh, interesting???
Um, I didn't know video game music was such an disreputable field that artists were hurried to "move on" from it. The game music is probably just as interesting to do as movie music, and probably just as challenging and artistically rewarding.
Nobuo Uematsu is probably more than competent if he can create music that's memorable enough on a freaking NES. That box didn't exactly have the capacity to distract people with kewl soundz and composers needed to get the melody right. Horror.
And back in the NES days, we had more competent trolls too... =)
Yeah, same here. I really love soundtrack music, especially game music and game music remixes (RKO and OCRemix being my favorite music sites), and it's 90% of the music I listen to. And I've always thought that adding "external" music is nice, but the focus on the soundtracks should always be on the original score, not on these hit singles or whatever's on the radio. Recognizable tunes have their time and place, but that place isn't All Over The Thing.
Personally I wish that there would be a Big Music Hit sleeping in some game music composer's mind. An original song featured in a game that would become popular. I mean, I hear songs originally featured in movies all the time, where are the popular songs that originated in games? *sigh* I wish the Masses had loved Ultima games as much as the geeks, or even get themselves computers at that time...
I know the codec guys were trying to be cute when they picked that name, but the fact that people still need to clarify which Divx it is shows that they were really stupid in picking it.
Yup... except that these days, it doesn't matter much. The rental-DVD thing is dead, the codec is doing well, and unless someone comes up with some other thing called "DivX", there won't be any confusion unless we're discussion Matters of Historical Interest. I do remember how confusing it was at first...
But very few video codecs have good names anyway. "XviD" wasn't much better than DivX, for example (My first thought was "yeah, nice to have an X version, but does it run on Windows too?")... I have liked "MPEG" though, it sounds technical =)
Because it was never marketed in the West and as such stayed mostly an Eastern phenomenon (South Korean, specifically, and you know how crazy Koreans get about gaming). It is now open for business for English-speaking markets, though.
Some small bits of background why the western release is a bit interesting: Lineage's maker, NCSoft of South Korea, has US headquarters in Austin, Texas. Formerly, for a brief time, it was called Destination Games, and was run by Richard and Robert Garriott and Starr Long - who previously did this little unconsequential game called Ultima Online.
Yeah, Mozilla should have a "try again by file extension" feature (or plug-in) for those times when MIME types are wrong.
Actually, it should have a "fire up E-mail client with webmaster@domain and pre-composed request to Do Something About Those Messed-Up MIME Types" button.
I sometimes send E-mail, and if they're using Apache, I even send them some ideas on how to fix the thing. So far, most admins have been pretty receptive.
Just because the server admins have misconfigured the thing it doesn't mean the browser should misbehave as well... MSIE may violate RFCs, but it doesn't mean that since it does that, everyone else also has to.
Personally, there's one thing that I like MT-32 for: The game support. Every game from early 90s had music "the way it was meant to be played" on MT-32.
And now... Take a look at Exult's OggVorbis version of the soundtrack, which is directly recorded off a real MT-32. It may sound cool at the first try, but try picking the MIDIs for Ultima VII and playing them through any decent modern sound card or synth. I use a SBLive, and even with the crappy default soundfont, it sounds magnificent compared to the MT-32 performance. Some replacement soundfonts, and tadah! great stuff.
Right now Debian has Exult 1.0, which uses a "cheapass TiMidity forking synth", that is, software synth with a bunch of carefully picked GUS patches. And it sounds great. But 1.1, which hopefully comes soon, will also have the option to use the MT-32 version... dunno, I think it's a waste of time to even try that. If someone did a chamber orchestra recordings of all these pieces, maybe then I'd try the vorbis support, but MT-32 versions are just lame =)
Customer: "What's the fastest way to move 500 megabytes of data daily from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles?" Tech Support: "Fed Ex."
...and for what it's worth, University of Oulu computer museum has a box of punched cards on display, with a Finnair tag on its side, and a note that it did have higher bandwidth than modems.
Finnish is a crazy language. Apparently in Finnish "Ha ha ha" translates into "No remorse."
The subtitler still has yet to master this complex art of SubstationAlpha-Fu, and probably made the subtitle fire a good second earlier than it should. "Ei armoa" was supposed to be "No remorse." The "ha ha ha", on the other hand, translates roughly to "Fry the honorless scum! Fry them like the cowards they are!"
Also apparent is the fact that there are no black people in Finland or something, because all the black characters are just white people painted black...poorly.
Are you kidding me? He's supposed to be a Plingon! Plingon warriors never wash!
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Yeah, Ultima's trinkets were definitely a good idea of how to make owning the original a cool thing.
It's also a great example of how EA screwed things up later on. I have perfectly legit copies of U1-U8, UUW1 and SE, but none of the budget/collection releases had any of the trinket (and the U1-6 Series CD from Encore was a travesty - no printed manual, extremely crappy electronic manuals, without even the U6 copy protection questions!!!) I wish they'll some day get a clue...
Well, with so many goths around these days, I think I'll one day go to one of their stores and get myself an Ankh =)
I have also never ever seen a Linux game with any kind of CD copy protection, at least not one that I could notice. At least the Loki games were easily backed up with dd and cdrecord...
I think NWN has been the most generous game so far - you don't even need the CDs to install, just the CDkeys and game data...
You can assign arbitrary key shortcut to any GTK+ menu item. (Can't remember exactly how, and wingimp keeps crashing at the moment - IIRC hover mouse over the option and press the shortcut keys... Handy because I've always preferred '+' over '=' as the zoom in key.)
It's not exactly a technical problem. StarOffice and old versions of OpenOffice.org used to do that. Of course, I believe these things were "faked"; they were not properly X11-managed windows, but rather, the application drew them as widgets inside the window with their own windows-like title bars.
In X11 applications can themselves be in "one cohesive group" already. I hit Alt+H in GIMP (or select Hide from window bar menu) and the whole app gets hidden. I can give the GIMP a whole desktop for itself if I want using virtual desktops.
Also, I can move individual GIMP windows wherever I want on the window, or even to different virtual desktops. Would be extremely cool if I had a dual-head (Xinerama) setup, too... One monitor for toolbars and alternate views, one for the picture itself.
Just a few of the things I could think of off-hand.
Actually, a lot of what was originally found in GNOME 1.x libgnomeui has been moved to GTK+ side in GNOME 2 / GTK+ 2. This includes stuff like stock dialogs and stock icons. You get most of the cool UI stuff even if you're not using full-blown GNOME apps. =) GNOME's significance these days lies in the other libraries besides the UI (gnome app support, gconf, bonobo, etc).
And I expect the locations to be user-configurable, as that would be very sensible. I've been silently (and not-so-silently) begging and begging for "bookmark" support in all file dialogs; this stuff certainly helps.
Arrrgh! And I was just thinking that putting top 40 crap on the games was a particularly modern phenomenon.
Just remembered that there have been a lot of pop tune covers all along... but back in the day, they somehow ended up being better than the originals =)
I do care about music in games. Definitely.
Of course, a game's total value isn't depending on music, but nor is it really depending on other chrome factors - the gameplay is what really matters.
However, it'd be ridiculous to single out music as the part that doesn't matter - or that sets the mood. The mood is often set by all of the elements together - but if we consider the most defining factor in creating the mood, it's often the music. Sometimes it's something else. (In many RPGs I like to play, it's often created by music and text - dialogue or narration. Text is what makes it interesting, music is what gives it color.)
It's difficult to debate when the chrome things stop being chrome and become integral part of the game itself. Let's just not. I need coffee.
::hits Submit before this rambling continues again::
I don't know - for me, there's really no correlation between graphics and music. I think what you're seeing is the thing that these days, the game makers just focus less on the music. Yet, it's still nice to see that these people do sometimes care enough to make a memorable soundtrack.
I can think of several soundtracks that I found interesting in recent times. Operation Flashpoint, Deus Ex, Neverwinter Nights, Warcraft and Starcraft series, Myth III... and just day before yesterday I was shaken by one of the tunes in Starfox Adventures =)
I have Win98SE. The machine isn't that old - a PIII-600 from three summers ago.
It could run WinXP just fine, but I haven't had the need to upgrade: I use Linux as my primary operating system, Win98SE runs all games I need and the couple of "serious" apps I need (VirtualDub and TMPGEnc, to record stuff off TV...), and I'm a Poor Student for whom the XP upgrade would be a mighty investment. I'll consider getting XP when I next upgrade the system...
I'm not that sad to see Win98 go, though.
Yup, just edit ~/.gtkrc (or file included from it) by hand...
Uh, unless you use pixmaps to texture things, you can override the theme engine's default colors in GTK+. At least that was how it was in GTK+ 1.x, probably so also in 2.x as well...
I used to use a slate blue NeXT theme, until I acknowledged that Gray is the Only True NeXT color =)
Yup, here's the article: Fantastic Feats by Power Playing Feet.
Ha! Every real FurryMUCKer (or any MU* user, anyway) knows that tinysex is only the second most popular activity. The most popular activity is Idling, and I can do that with no hands! This should then be the perfect online activity for people with only one hand.
This "Idling" thing has apparently been extremely successful in IRC as well! And it's spreading to instant messaging as well, but no one calls it that!
Nintendo's page doesn't have much information - apparently there's a GBC version of GTA already out there (Tarantula/Rockstar - released in November 1999!), and GTA3 has been announced for GBA, with no details, other than that it's being made by Destination Software (???? what the...?).
Haven't seen the GBC version, but considering the limited capabilities of the hardware and the ESRB Teen rating, it's probablty not exactly a gory ride... =)
Take2games.com doesn't have any hints about the GBA version, but I did note they're making a GBA version of Max Payne, isometric graphics and all. That ought to be... uh, interesting???
Um, I didn't know video game music was such an disreputable field that artists were hurried to "move on" from it. The game music is probably just as interesting to do as movie music, and probably just as challenging and artistically rewarding.
Nobuo Uematsu is probably more than competent if he can create music that's memorable enough on a freaking NES. That box didn't exactly have the capacity to distract people with kewl soundz and composers needed to get the melody right. Horror.
And back in the NES days, we had more competent trolls too... =)
Yeah, same here. I really love soundtrack music, especially game music and game music remixes (RKO and OCRemix being my favorite music sites), and it's 90% of the music I listen to. And I've always thought that adding "external" music is nice, but the focus on the soundtracks should always be on the original score, not on these hit singles or whatever's on the radio. Recognizable tunes have their time and place, but that place isn't All Over The Thing.
Personally I wish that there would be a Big Music Hit sleeping in some game music composer's mind. An original song featured in a game that would become popular. I mean, I hear songs originally featured in movies all the time, where are the popular songs that originated in games? *sigh* I wish the Masses had loved Ultima games as much as the geeks, or even get themselves computers at that time...
Yup... except that these days, it doesn't matter much. The rental-DVD thing is dead, the codec is doing well, and unless someone comes up with some other thing called "DivX", there won't be any confusion unless we're discussion Matters of Historical Interest. I do remember how confusing it was at first...
But very few video codecs have good names anyway. "XviD" wasn't much better than DivX, for example (My first thought was "yeah, nice to have an X version, but does it run on Windows too?")... I have liked "MPEG" though, it sounds technical =)
Because it was never marketed in the West and as such stayed mostly an Eastern phenomenon (South Korean, specifically, and you know how crazy Koreans get about gaming). It is now open for business for English-speaking markets, though.
Some small bits of background why the western release is a bit interesting: Lineage's maker, NCSoft of South Korea, has US headquarters in Austin, Texas. Formerly, for a brief time, it was called Destination Games, and was run by Richard and Robert Garriott and Starr Long - who previously did this little unconsequential game called Ultima Online.
Lineage's web page his here. Seems fairly interesting.
Actually, it should have a "fire up E-mail client with webmaster@domain and pre-composed request to Do Something About Those Messed-Up MIME Types" button.
I sometimes send E-mail, and if they're using Apache, I even send them some ideas on how to fix the thing. So far, most admins have been pretty receptive.
Just because the server admins have misconfigured the thing it doesn't mean the browser should misbehave as well... MSIE may violate RFCs, but it doesn't mean that since it does that, everyone else also has to.
Heh.
Personally, there's one thing that I like MT-32 for: The game support. Every game from early 90s had music "the way it was meant to be played" on MT-32.
And now... Take a look at Exult's OggVorbis version of the soundtrack, which is directly recorded off a real MT-32. It may sound cool at the first try, but try picking the MIDIs for Ultima VII and playing them through any decent modern sound card or synth. I use a SBLive, and even with the crappy default soundfont, it sounds magnificent compared to the MT-32 performance. Some replacement soundfonts, and tadah! great stuff.
Right now Debian has Exult 1.0, which uses a "cheapass TiMidity forking synth", that is, software synth with a bunch of carefully picked GUS patches. And it sounds great. But 1.1, which hopefully comes soon, will also have the option to use the MT-32 version... dunno, I think it's a waste of time to even try that. If someone did a chamber orchestra recordings of all these pieces, maybe then I'd try the vorbis support, but MT-32 versions are just lame =)
Some additions to this impressive list:
Also, on Computer Stupidities:
...and for what it's worth, University of Oulu computer museum has a box of punched cards on display, with a Finnair tag on its side, and a note that it did have higher bandwidth than modems.
Nope, the real 3D apps use the Teapot. The monkey is a more complex shape than that. But yeah, a dragon would rule. =)
The subtitler still has yet to master this complex art of SubstationAlpha-Fu, and probably made the subtitle fire a good second earlier than it should. "Ei armoa" was supposed to be "No remorse." The "ha ha ha", on the other hand, translates roughly to "Fry the honorless scum! Fry them like the cowards they are!"
Are you kidding me? He's supposed to be a Plingon! Plingon warriors never wash!
I have had some success playing DivX 5 clips using XviD. Binary builds here.
If that doesn't work, I recommend getting the free version of DivX 5. So far haven't needed it though...
That would be Star Wreck 7, then... In The Pirkinning is the sixth movie (seventh, if you count the prequel).
The parts so far are (in chronological order)
I think the third and fifth are the greatest Star Trek parodies ever made =)