eccofonic

"Side a" is now on the atarimania ftp in the same spot as the "side b" file

There's a nice improvement on the ending part. The first part you can still hear the data tones when the music is high pitched or dynamic. Makes me wonder if Synapse tried to write a music loader for Dimension X, then gave up and put the music they were going to use on tape instead. It'd be interesting if someone could recreate that first musical part on a real Atari... with a remix it'd make a near perfect Dimension X cassette.

I still have a wav file of side a. If Atarimania is still allowing uploads, I can put it there. Since it's been a while, I can't recall why I chose side b over side a.

Unfortunately, the data noise is part of the music track, that's the way Synapse recorded it. If anyone has a subtractive filter they want to try, I'm uploading the 16-bit 48khz tracks to atarimania's ftp (8-bit directory). The wav files are in zip files... and the one wav file was an aborted transfer...

I haven't messed around with cassettes for years, so I hope y'all don't mind if I geek out... There are two sides to the Dimension X cassette. On one side, the data part is louder by about 3 decibels. They probably did this in case one side didn't load properly. Also, on that side the music part is either equalized differently or more compressed. I felt the organ end part sounds better on that side. The other side isn't as bright. I thought about azimuth alignment for a second, but decided I didn't want to mess around with that. I used two different cassette decks: a Nakamichi and a Revox. The Nakamichi is belt driven, whereas the Revox isn't. And the Nak is slightly faster as a whole by one second. When listening to the organ end part with headphones, I thought the Revox sounded maybe just a bit smoother. The mp3 I uploaded above was from the Nak. So here's the Revox below (it's 48khz). Being lossy, it's probably hard to tell any difference... Anyway, both recordings processed fine using a8cas-convert... and loaded ok in Altirra. I also attached a cas file below. The part I don't know how to do is add in the music track. I haven't loaded this game from cassette since I was a kid, and forgot that there was a black screen for about a minute after the first stage. Also, the game is loaded using 2KB blocks! I have both 24-bit 96khz (probably overkill) & 16-bit 48khz versions of the wav files. They're both cropped, so no "dead air". Which one should I upload to atarimania? The 16 bit version is 59mb, so too large for atariage... dim x end part revox side b 16-48.mp3 dimension x side b cas.zip

Here's the "hallelujah! loading is almost done" moment at the end of the tape. Funny enough, you never got to hear the last notes because the tape would stop. The data noise bleeds through to the music side. Any place I could upload the recording of the entire tape? Atarimania maybe? dimension x cassette end part.mp3

Should add that there should always be a master config window with all features/settings that can be accessed even if using a limited profile. And when limited, if the user changes something in the master config, the program asks... would you like this to be part of your profile? With Yes/No and checkboxes for "don't ask me for the rest of session" and "don't ask forever". Basically hiding config-zilla and menu-zilla at the same time. Again, thanks for your consideration...

Thought of two things today... First, how about a user customizable "switch" menu. You can either add a checkmark on/off for something like "Drive Sounds" or add a "seperator bar" like in a bookmark menu, and have the ability to pick one of two or more related items, like Artifacting (None/Standard/High). I also thought about the profiles... how about an Atari 8-bit Construction Set? You drag and drop the features you want for your computer from one list to another. And then once you're done, you have a customized config window. The "switch" menu manager could also be drag and drop...

Ok... the menu items from 3.0 and older I use alot from the System menu are: Hardware, Firmware, Memory Config and Video. And sometimes if I don't want to listen to cassette or disk images load in real time, the Cassette and Disk menus. Alot of it has to do with software compatibility. And in the case of video, whether the program is using artifacting or not, or NTSC/PAL. Granted, you have put a "Profile" menu item in, and you can add to it. But there's probably a over a hundred different combinations of Hardware, Firmware, Memory Config and Video that I would have to add just to make up for the lack of those menu items still being there. I think configuration windows are better for more complicated tasks, like browsing for a disk image to load. For just throwing a switch or two, I'd rather have the menu items back. Thanks for your consideration...

Speed. It's alot quicker accessing menus than a big window box that pops up every time I want to configure the emulator. Try it yourself. I'm not trying to be a jerk.

It's also in 2.50 & 2.81, older versions I keep around. ? FRE(0) in BASIC always yields 13326 if set to 24,32 or 40K Any chance you could patch one of the older versions? I actually prefer menu-itis to the config window.

If craigslist is having a near death experience, what has replaced it?

Demo worked fine in my NTSC 4 switch Woody using both an original Harmony cart and a Harmony Encore. The RPG demo from the other thread really looks fantastic on a CRT.

Got "Making Games For The Atari 2600" today. It has a description of what is going on in xmacro in Chapter 12, but no listing as in my post above. And although the javascript-based IDE is nice... looks like you have to be online to use it. Too bad there's no offline version...

Do you have a mouse hooked up to the ADB port? I had a problem with my IIgs where the newer style Apple ADB mouse (rounded off style) would, for lack of a better term, "interrupt" the CPU causing pauses, crashes, slowdowns, etc. I connected the older squarish style ADB mouse and the problem went away!