Okay, my Power Glove memories... As far as I know, the Power Glove wasn't imported in Finland, except unofficially (no idea why anyone would bother) and the local Official Nintendo Mag had a contest with one as the prize. Fortunately, whatever desire to get one everyone had was probably squished by reviews from those people who had actually played with it...
It was just odd to see one this year. A local children's TV program had a theme day - spacefaring, of course. The "spaceship" had futuristic widgets, but I noted that the control deck was a Mattel Intellivision (okay, so I didn't know it first, I had to cheat and look it up. =)...
...and the host's space suit had a Power Glove!
No idea how they got one for the show =) The show host's faithful sidekick was a fox, so at least there was a strong Nintendo space game connection =)
Jabber is nice also without the transports. I like Jabber's nature, the protocol is based on interesting concepts, and the clients are very good.
Back in the day, the transports at jabber.com worked flawlessly, and later they started sucking mud (apparently jabber.com was blocked by ICQ...), and I thought, okay, most of that was spam anyway, let's go Jabber only. Notified people that I was not using my ICQ account anymore and IMs should come through Jabber. The most strong-hearted of the people who actually cared *did* switch too. =)
I personally don't think the multi-system clients are that good. They always seem to take compromises on what features to support or how...
You use Line numbers? Phfff, at least QBasic could drop them. Me, I coded stuff in Commodore BASIC. Yes, line numbers. No subroutine parameters. No local variables, and the global variables don't have 15-letter name limit, they have two-letter name limit.
I totally agree the new languages are easier to learn and far more convenient to use, but QBasic was almost tolerable (in its time, not as tolerable as Turbo Pascal, though). I'm glad there's a C cross compiler for Commodore 64 now =)
Well, the equivalence as I said isn't exact and definitely won't work with a closer examination - I meant the "Commodore scale" less seriously, but apparently the packet with a smiley was inadvertedly tagged with the Evil Bit and NSA's new router blocked it (or something). They're not comparable raw power, of course - More like what I felt I could do with them...
Honestly, In my opinion, the only reason, in the end, why I liked Windows 3.0 (on the 386SX) over GEOS (on C64) was that the PC had a hard drive and a sharper display (not to even mention the fact that Win3 had scandinavic characters). The usability otherwise was about the same. But would Win3.0, theoretically, compile and run on C64? Of course not. Would it be possible to make a C64/SCPU web browser that would be as nice as Mozilla on PC? Probably.
Real? I'm a Commodore fan, you expect me to be realistic to any degree? Sheesh, some people. =)
(Hrm, is it time for my annual "GEOS still beats the crap out of Windows" post? =)
Oh, and like I said, I'm not familiar with exact details of Amiga, much less with development. My insistence on asm/hw was based solely on experiences with C64: "If you aren't doing it in raw hex, you aren't doing it Heroically." =)
<digress>...just last week I coded something in C64 BASIC, the most evil, wretched, soul-eating thing Microsoft has ever released. I live, but only just that. This may, in part, explain why I have weird ideas... still trying to recover from the shock... </digress>
Would Moz even be able to run on an 8 mhz Amiga 500.
Unexpanded A500? Heck no. Needs more memory. That's all. =)
I guess, of course, that theoretically the Gecko part might be able to run (verrryyy slowly) as is with gobs of extra memory. The tricky part would probably consist of Assembly Optimization, including full hardware support. (Mmm, blitter...)
I don't think they'll be able to get the UI part itself ported properly. XUL stuff takes ungodly amounts of processor even on x86 hardware. They'll probably do what everyone else's doing and put a native GUI around Gecko.
No, aside of those things, I know very little of Amiga, I'm a C64 guy... =) I'm guessing a lot here.
However, I know that in Commodore scale, 1 MHz of MOS6510 with 64k of memory is about 16MHz of 386SX with 1 meg of memory in the PC world, so logically, a 8 MHz m68k with 512 kb of memory would be 128MHz with 8 megs of memory in PC world. Or something.
XviD is MPEG-4, which is, as usual, a patent minefield. The code may be open, but use is still restricted by the patents.
VP3 (on which Theora is based on) is likewise patented, but AFAIK they've gotten an unrevocable royalty-free license to the patents, or something equally non-threatening.
Theres little stopping anyone from putting AAC in an Ogg stream.
There's difference between "Ogg supporting AAC" (as you said) and "AAC supporting Ogg" (what the earlier poster said).
Take a look at Theora: Yes, at the moment it's possible to encode an.avi with the On2 VP3 video codec, encode Vorbis audio stream, and oggmux them together. So, in a way, Ogg supports VP3 and Vorbis. But the important part is that the Theora project is adapting VP3 to make it work "idiomatically" with the Ogg container format - which allows more flexibility for the encoder, than the AVI container currently used by VP3. So, the idea is to make VP3 support Ogg.
So in order to AAC to support Ogg (and not the other way around), AAC should take full advantage of the Ogg bitstream format. I'm not sure if the current Ogg AAC implementations use this unholy marriage to its full potential...
Interesting. I've had Palm m100 for a couple of years and it hasn't so far had much impact on my handwriting - except that my 8's and 9's do look different now. =)
Interestingly, I used to write the number 9 "wrong" - that is, started from the middle and spun around. Palm made me to write it correctly according to the cursive writing I learned in school (start from the top, draw the loop and end at the top, draw the hook).
But Palm has made me to dislike handwriting in general and made me secretly wish I had a laptop. =)
2 seconds of Googling and I found an interesting PDF about handwriting in Scandinavia. Most of the text is in Finnish, but in pages 10-12, there's examples of print writing, cursive writing and calligraphic writing in Denmark/Norway/Greenland, Finland/Sweden and Iceland.
I myself learned two forms of cursive in school - the old cursive was far more elaborate, the new form is far cleaner. My cursive writing was completely messed up later when I learned to write Russian (the letters that looked same creeped up to the Latin alphabet...) and nowadays I write print anyway. But I can do both forms of cursive if I concentrate =)
Old news - well, PCGen at least used to have PHB data and do the character generation in Java (making the difficult process far more difficult, at least in 4.x =), not sure if they do now since I heard they're going to charge for data files...
And yes, looks like they are going for XML file formats! Woohoo.
...the current Linux version is still at 1.3, still only supports bungie.net, and needs SDL 1.1 (thank God Loki shipped it with static SDL too or it would be unplayable on my quite fresh system)...
Anyways, 1.4 looks excellent on paper, I hope Linux port will follow soon. Playing it on Windows sounds so... dirty... =)
I'd also be hoping that this mysterious overhaul of Myth III would also produce a Linux port - a nice game too, and excellently pretty, but likewise needs Windows...
I've kept the habit of downloading 3DMark benchmarks only for their demo modes! I don't really care about the benchmark scores, but the game benchmarks look better than real games, and the demo modes have that right Scene Spirit[tm]. =)
...which was one of the reasons I disliked 3DMark2003. The demo mode refused to run on my GF2MX and performance disappeared somewhere below the floor. I now have a GF4Ti4200, maybe it will actually run the next time I try it...
Oooh, wow. Batmud has a new web site, and uses user accounts straight from the MUD itself. Very cool. This is how you're supposed to implement single logon =)
And they haven't deleted my character either. Time to go rat-hunting...
You miss Nasty rat.
Nasty rat misses you.
I've clearly been reading too much Slashdot if I find that amusing. Got to play BadMUD more often. =)
Where are the congratulations for these cheat coders?
Well, people were going to congratulate the cheat coders, but noticed the cheat was distributed to people...
I think coding the cheats may be cool, or something. Takes skill, I suppose. Using the cheats when it's not agreed upon, especially by people who didn't write the hacks (vast majority of the cheaters), is not good. Dishonorable. The problem isn't that the cheats are made, it's that they're used to ruin the game for non-cheaters.
Why does Gator have Debian? Are they going to try to get into open source browsing?
www.gator.com runs Apache 1.3.26 on Debian (and according to Netcraft, they've run Apache+Debian as far as they have records for). When you're going to spew your foistware to millions of unsuspecting users, you need to get a real operating system and a good web server software - IIS will surely blow up in minutes =)
Interesting. I've had experiences from quite a few movie theaters. For a long time I was in a very small town and the moviegoers for most part definitely knew how to behave and the theater was kept very nice and clean. I now live in a far larger city and I go to two theaters regularly (one independent, one part of the Finnkino chain) and both have more or less excellent housekeeping and more or less well-behaving moviegoers.
I guess I'm just lucky to have been in civilized places... I've noted smaller theaters here are really good.
I've heard some bad stories from far larger cities like Helsinki, so I suppose it's again explained with the tired explanations like "too many morons". =)
I have plenty of experience with RPG. I finished Final Fantasy...
...but not Ultima? And you haven't even finished Nethack? Sorry, every work place that is hiring RPG experts has looong queues of people far more competent than you... =)
- W4, still working furiously on that Nethack thing
His point was that we don't see problems like this with proprietary hardware. When was the last time someone crashed their Super Nintendo?
SNES is a standardized (but not openly standardized, of course) platform. No hardware variations, and if there are, they're all documented in the big Book the Developers are supposed to read. Or something.
But even standardized platform can't save you from bugs...
Back in the day, I had a Commodore 64 with a 1541 disk drive. Wholly standard piece of junk I loved to no end. In terms of hardware, it was just as standardized as SNES. Well documented, too.
Yet, some games had bugs. My copy of TMNT had strange "blackout" bug and IIRC it also did odd stuff when I hit Restore key (when I was supposed ot hit Return). Okay, so the game was obviously quickly produced mass market piece of crap to get money from stupid teens. Social and budget issues made those bugs happen, not technical issues.
Once I found some old document that I had written back in the BBS / Fido-style network days. I read it a couple of times and then realized I had "invented" (as in "wouldn't this be cool") a particularly clumsy form of E-mail attachments and then forgot about it. Luckily. =)
I also "predicted" graphical MUDs (that is, MMORPGs) as soon as I first played the textual MUDs. I don't feel anything special about that because probably everyone else thought so and people were obviously already working on them or even operating something like that. Year or so later I found AlphaWorld and some other graphical multi-user environments, even later saw the rise of Ultima Online, and then I got back playing Ultima VII. Or something like that. =)
Game Pad. On an USB. Adequate results with the Linux version of VICE, with both Microsoft and Logitech pads. =) Still not as good as 64 digital sticks in some cases though.
One day I'm hoping they'll make an Atari to USB adapter so I can plug in a real TAC-2 =)
Needless to say the game became every kind of a cesspool you can imagine. There wasn't just one level of cheating but multiple levels of cheating and betrayal.
Oh! Me! Me! Let me tell you how it continued 5 years later. When the Inner Sphere fell into strife and tyranny, in 3050, a huge invader army, sons of exiles actually, came from an unknown direction. Calling themselves the Clans and proving their amazing skills of warfare, they caused great damage to the unprepared Spheroids with their disciplined battle tactics and advanced technology.
I play CS, I play FPSs, etc...and the simple and reliable solution that works for things like/dogmode (read godmode), etc. is ADD THEM to the game.
I love the way this is done in Neverwinter Nights. You have the Toolset, with which it's trivial to create mods that have powerful custom items and modules for levelling up the character. This is a cheater's heaven. There are also tools to change character stats, which obviously pleases the "cheaters" even more. But then again, it's possible, on server, to restrict item levels and enforce legal characters. Or even ban local characters completely and use server vault.
This way it's as easy to run a honest server where everyone plays fair, and just as easy to run a "Diablo II is for wussies" server for a rousing game of 20 level char PvP with swords that do 1d(1e26) damage. =) And you can probably find both from GameSpy. Especially the latter type. =)
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, my Power Glove memories... As far as I know, the Power Glove wasn't imported in Finland, except unofficially (no idea why anyone would bother) and the local Official Nintendo Mag had a contest with one as the prize. Fortunately, whatever desire to get one everyone had was probably squished by reviews from those people who had actually played with it...
It was just odd to see one this year. A local children's TV program had a theme day - spacefaring, of course. The "spaceship" had futuristic widgets, but I noted that the control deck was a Mattel Intellivision (okay, so I didn't know it first, I had to cheat and look it up. =) ...
...and the host's space suit had a Power Glove!
No idea how they got one for the show =) The show host's faithful sidekick was a fox, so at least there was a strong Nintendo space game connection =)
Got to be the longest trip then.
I thought these were the real crack smokers...
Back in the day, the transports at jabber.com worked flawlessly, and later they started sucking mud (apparently jabber.com was blocked by ICQ...), and I thought, okay, most of that was spam anyway, let's go Jabber only. Notified people that I was not using my ICQ account anymore and IMs should come through Jabber. The most strong-hearted of the people who actually cared *did* switch too. =)
I personally don't think the multi-system clients are that good. They always seem to take compromises on what features to support or how...
You use Line numbers? Phfff, at least QBasic could drop them. Me, I coded stuff in Commodore BASIC. Yes, line numbers. No subroutine parameters. No local variables, and the global variables don't have 15-letter name limit, they have two-letter name limit.
I totally agree the new languages are easier to learn and far more convenient to use, but QBasic was almost tolerable (in its time, not as tolerable as Turbo Pascal, though). I'm glad there's a C cross compiler for Commodore 64 now =)
Well, the equivalence as I said isn't exact and definitely won't work with a closer examination - I meant the "Commodore scale" less seriously, but apparently the packet with a smiley was inadvertedly tagged with the Evil Bit and NSA's new router blocked it (or something). They're not comparable raw power, of course - More like what I felt I could do with them...
Honestly, In my opinion, the only reason, in the end, why I liked Windows 3.0 (on the 386SX) over GEOS (on C64) was that the PC had a hard drive and a sharper display (not to even mention the fact that Win3 had scandinavic characters). The usability otherwise was about the same. But would Win3.0, theoretically, compile and run on C64? Of course not. Would it be possible to make a C64/SCPU web browser that would be as nice as Mozilla on PC? Probably.
Real? I'm a Commodore fan, you expect me to be realistic to any degree? Sheesh, some people. =)
(Hrm, is it time for my annual "GEOS still beats the crap out of Windows" post? =)
Oh, and like I said, I'm not familiar with exact details of Amiga, much less with development. My insistence on asm/hw was based solely on experiences with C64: "If you aren't doing it in raw hex, you aren't doing it Heroically." =)
<digress> ...just last week I coded something in C64 BASIC, the most evil, wretched, soul-eating thing Microsoft has ever released. I live, but only just that. This may, in part, explain why I have weird ideas ... still trying to recover from the shock... </digress>
Unexpanded A500? Heck no. Needs more memory. That's all. =)
I guess, of course, that theoretically the Gecko part might be able to run (verrryyy slowly) as is with gobs of extra memory. The tricky part would probably consist of Assembly Optimization, including full hardware support. (Mmm, blitter...)
I don't think they'll be able to get the UI part itself ported properly. XUL stuff takes ungodly amounts of processor even on x86 hardware. They'll probably do what everyone else's doing and put a native GUI around Gecko.
No, aside of those things, I know very little of Amiga, I'm a C64 guy... =) I'm guessing a lot here.
However, I know that in Commodore scale, 1 MHz of MOS6510 with 64k of memory is about 16MHz of 386SX with 1 meg of memory in the PC world, so logically, a 8 MHz m68k with 512 kb of memory would be 128MHz with 8 megs of memory in PC world. Or something.
XviD is MPEG-4, which is, as usual, a patent minefield. The code may be open, but use is still restricted by the patents.
VP3 (on which Theora is based on) is likewise patented, but AFAIK they've gotten an unrevocable royalty-free license to the patents, or something equally non-threatening.
There's difference between "Ogg supporting AAC" (as you said) and "AAC supporting Ogg" (what the earlier poster said).
Take a look at Theora: Yes, at the moment it's possible to encode an .avi with the On2 VP3 video codec, encode Vorbis audio stream, and oggmux them together. So, in a way, Ogg supports VP3 and Vorbis. But the important part is that the Theora project is adapting VP3 to make it work "idiomatically" with the Ogg container format - which allows more flexibility for the encoder, than the AVI container currently used by VP3. So, the idea is to make VP3 support Ogg.
So in order to AAC to support Ogg (and not the other way around), AAC should take full advantage of the Ogg bitstream format. I'm not sure if the current Ogg AAC implementations use this unholy marriage to its full potential...
Interesting. I've had Palm m100 for a couple of years and it hasn't so far had much impact on my handwriting - except that my 8's and 9's do look different now. =)
Interestingly, I used to write the number 9 "wrong" - that is, started from the middle and spun around. Palm made me to write it correctly according to the cursive writing I learned in school (start from the top, draw the loop and end at the top, draw the hook).
But Palm has made me to dislike handwriting in general and made me secretly wish I had a laptop. =)
I myself learned two forms of cursive in school - the old cursive was far more elaborate, the new form is far cleaner. My cursive writing was completely messed up later when I learned to write Russian (the letters that looked same creeped up to the Latin alphabet...) and nowadays I write print anyway. But I can do both forms of cursive if I concentrate =)
Old news - well, PCGen at least used to have PHB data and do the character generation in Java (making the difficult process far more difficult, at least in 4.x =), not sure if they do now since I heard they're going to charge for data files...
And yes, looks like they are going for XML file formats! Woohoo.
(Disengaging "almost-geekier-than-thou" mode =)
Anyways, 1.4 looks excellent on paper, I hope Linux port will follow soon. Playing it on Windows sounds so... dirty... =)
I'd also be hoping that this mysterious overhaul of Myth III would also produce a Linux port - a nice game too, and excellently pretty, but likewise needs Windows...
I've kept the habit of downloading 3DMark benchmarks only for their demo modes! I don't really care about the benchmark scores, but the game benchmarks look better than real games, and the demo modes have that right Scene Spirit[tm]. =)
...which was one of the reasons I disliked 3DMark2003. The demo mode refused to run on my GF2MX and performance disappeared somewhere below the floor. I now have a GF4Ti4200, maybe it will actually run the next time I try it...
Oooh, wow. Batmud has a new web site, and uses user accounts straight from the MUD itself. Very cool. This is how you're supposed to implement single logon =)
And they haven't deleted my character either. Time to go rat-hunting...
You miss Nasty rat.
Nasty rat misses you.
I've clearly been reading too much Slashdot if I find that amusing. Got to play BadMUD more often. =)
Well, people were going to congratulate the cheat coders, but noticed the cheat was distributed to people...
I think coding the cheats may be cool, or something. Takes skill, I suppose. Using the cheats when it's not agreed upon, especially by people who didn't write the hacks (vast majority of the cheaters), is not good. Dishonorable. The problem isn't that the cheats are made, it's that they're used to ruin the game for non-cheaters.
www.gator.com runs Apache 1.3.26 on Debian (and according to Netcraft, they've run Apache+Debian as far as they have records for). When you're going to spew your foistware to millions of unsuspecting users, you need to get a real operating system and a good web server software - IIS will surely blow up in minutes =)
::morning pre-coffee grogginess, not bothering to do anything to check::
JPEG artifacts. Next.
::yaaaawn::
Interesting. I've had experiences from quite a few movie theaters. For a long time I was in a very small town and the moviegoers for most part definitely knew how to behave and the theater was kept very nice and clean. I now live in a far larger city and I go to two theaters regularly (one independent, one part of the Finnkino chain) and both have more or less excellent housekeeping and more or less well-behaving moviegoers.
I guess I'm just lucky to have been in civilized places... I've noted smaller theaters here are really good.
I've heard some bad stories from far larger cities like Helsinki, so I suppose it's again explained with the tired explanations like "too many morons". =)
...but not Ultima? And you haven't even finished Nethack? Sorry, every work place that is hiring RPG experts has looong queues of people far more competent than you... =)
- W4, still working furiously on that Nethack thing
SNES is a standardized (but not openly standardized, of course) platform. No hardware variations, and if there are, they're all documented in the big Book the Developers are supposed to read. Or something.
But even standardized platform can't save you from bugs...
Back in the day, I had a Commodore 64 with a 1541 disk drive. Wholly standard piece of junk I loved to no end. In terms of hardware, it was just as standardized as SNES. Well documented, too.
Yet, some games had bugs. My copy of TMNT had strange "blackout" bug and IIRC it also did odd stuff when I hit Restore key (when I was supposed ot hit Return). Okay, so the game was obviously quickly produced mass market piece of crap to get money from stupid teens. Social and budget issues made those bugs happen, not technical issues.
Once I found some old document that I had written back in the BBS / Fido-style network days. I read it a couple of times and then realized I had "invented" (as in "wouldn't this be cool") a particularly clumsy form of E-mail attachments and then forgot about it. Luckily. =)
I also "predicted" graphical MUDs (that is, MMORPGs) as soon as I first played the textual MUDs. I don't feel anything special about that because probably everyone else thought so and people were obviously already working on them or even operating something like that. Year or so later I found AlphaWorld and some other graphical multi-user environments, even later saw the rise of Ultima Online, and then I got back playing Ultima VII. Or something like that. =)
Game Pad. On an USB. Adequate results with the Linux version of VICE, with both Microsoft and Logitech pads. =) Still not as good as 64 digital sticks in some cases though.
One day I'm hoping they'll make an Atari to USB adapter so I can plug in a real TAC-2 =)
Oh! Me! Me! Let me tell you how it continued 5 years later. When the Inner Sphere fell into strife and tyranny, in 3050, a huge invader army, sons of exiles actually, came from an unknown direction. Calling themselves the Clans and proving their amazing skills of warfare, they caused great damage to the unprepared Spheroids with their disciplined battle tactics and advanced technology.
Need I go on? =)
I love the way this is done in Neverwinter Nights. You have the Toolset, with which it's trivial to create mods that have powerful custom items and modules for levelling up the character. This is a cheater's heaven. There are also tools to change character stats, which obviously pleases the "cheaters" even more. But then again, it's possible, on server, to restrict item levels and enforce legal characters. Or even ban local characters completely and use server vault.
This way it's as easy to run a honest server where everyone plays fair, and just as easy to run a "Diablo II is for wussies" server for a rousing game of 20 level char PvP with swords that do 1d(1e26) damage. =) And you can probably find both from GameSpy. Especially the latter type. =)