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Nathan Strum

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Blog Comments posted by Nathan Strum

    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    I completely blame Unvision for everything messed up with the blogs.

     

    By default, it does two stupid things (at least) when you edit an existing post now, that it didn't used to:

    • It publishes it, even if it was a draft before. You have to uncheck Publish EVERY time if you want to keep it a draft.
    • It ALWAYS changes the publishing date to "immediately" unless you manually enter a different date, and it NEVER remembers the original date (or time) of the post. So before editing anything, you have to make a note of the original post's date so you can manually re-enter it. The time is apparently lost forever (which is annoying, since blogs are effectively snapshots of time, and I happen to like to know when I posted something originally).

    I replaced a few Artie episodes today to correct something I hadn't caught before, but editing posts now is like walking on eggs. If I was disinclined to use the blogs after the last "update", I'm even more so now. But sometimes, ya' just gotta make fun of Atari.

    • Like 1
    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    Updates:

    • Like 2
    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    On 3/12/2022 at 12:06 PM, carlsson said:

    I charged up my PSP a while ago to see if it still worked, and played a little bit of Burnout Legends. Fortunately the battery hasn't yet swollen like it does on many other PSP units, but probably I should replace it if I want any longer use of the device.

    I suppose I should check mine...

     

    I wonder where it is?

     

    I should see if my GBA-SP works, too. I always intended to buy the reissued one with the better screen, but never got around to it.

     

    Maybe I should just do this instead:

     

    There's a nice how-to article here. Apart from carving up the case, it looks pretty straightforward.

     

    I really like how my Lynx turned out with its new screen. Could make for a good project. (Even though I still have a few Atari consoles that need fixing. :ponder: )

    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    Incidentally, for those interested - after playing it for a few days, I find Gran Turismo 7 to be a really fun, solid return to what made the series great in the first place.

     

    If you like Gran Turismo, that is. It's not everyone's cup of tea being more "realistic" than an arcade racer. I like both kinds of driving games, but it's taking me awhile to readjust my driving style from "keeping the accelerator flat on the floor and running everyone else off the road" to "wait... I have to brake before a corner?!" ;) 

     

    I find myself obsessively doing things like re-running license tests trying to shave off hundredths of seconds to get Gold, and enjoying it. This is definitely going to chew up a bunch of free time. But they've made a proper entry in the series again, and it looks and plays great on a PS4 (a non-Pro at that). I'm sure the PS5 may very well look better, but frankly I can't imagine it being that dramatic. There are no pop-up or frame rate issues here.

    • Like 1
    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    1 hour ago, EricBall said:

    I have GT5 but haven't played it since the wheel controller died.  I did love bombing around the 'Ring.

    I bought a cheap wheel once for one of the GT iterations, but it was so terrible I returned it. Apparently you need to pay for the expensive ones to get something usable. But I'm so used to the Dualshock, I just stick with that.

    1 hour ago, EricBall said:

    Lots of games, only so much time to play, so I tend to focus on one game until it's not fun anymore.

    That's basically what I do. I got into GT7 a little last night and won a few races, and it looks like it's going to be a pretty-big time suck. So that's good. I need to turn the driving assists off though - the auto-braking is annoying. Seriously... braking? In a racing game? That's what the other cars are there for. :D 

    1 hour ago, EricBall said:

    And I know what you mean about watching DVDs & Blu-Rays.  I've got a Roku & Disney+ so I'm set for content as long as I pay the subscription (which is cheap for the amount of content I'm getting IMHO).  I've actually been watching the Disney catalog in chronological order.  Just finished off the original 101 Dalmatians and now I'm watching The Absent Minded Professor (flubber).

    I admire your tenacity! I've gone back and watched a few things from my childhood (Strongest Man in the World, the Herbie movies), some "later" movies (Black Hole, Midnight Madness, Tron) and a bunch of the documentaries about the history of the company and theme park attractions. Hopefully they'll bring more of the Laserdisc and DVD extras from their movies over too. There's a bunch of behind the scenes stuff from Tron that isn't on Disney+ yet (and likely others).

     

    There's an absolute ton of content on there though, and much of the new stuff they're making is excellent (WandaVision, Hawkeye, etc). The Netflix Marvel stuff will be there soon too, which is good since I didn't watch them at the time (and canceled Netflix shortly thereafter). I enjoyed the Mandalorian quite a bit, although I thought the Book of Boba Fett was pretty boring. The best part of it? Since I already subscribe, it didn't cost me anything. :D 

    1 hour ago, EricBall said:

    I still like having physical discs for movies I want to "own", but those are few and far between.

    Same here. I need to not pull the trigger so soon on Blu-rays though. When Monty Python came out on Blu-ray I jumped on the box set, because that seemed all that would be available. But now there's a disc-only version which is what I'd rather have. (And don't get me started on this thing.) The more movies or TV series that become available for streaming, the less physical media I'll buy. It's becoming rarer all the time for me, and I'm fine with that.


    CDs however - that's a different thing. I'll always want to own physical copies of my music.

    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    Finally! After all of the updates, I could actually load the game and... uh...

     

    ready-set-what.jpg

     

    Wait... what is this? I can't actually get to Gran Turismo until I play something called Music Rally? What the stink is this?!

     

    maybe-i-dont-want-to-now.jpg

     

    Okay... that was kind-of pointless. It's a "race" where you don't actually race anyone. You just drive around the track as far as you can before the music runs out.

     

    For some reason.

     

    Anyway, after doing that once, it actually let me into Gran Turismo - the actual game.

     

    So far, I've bought a used Mazda.

     

    Yep.

     

    25 years later, it's still Gran Turismo.

     

    Can't wait until I can afford a used Toyota!  :thumbsup:

    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    So... many... updates:

    *code name

    • Like 4
    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    The competition has been notably closer over the last two seasons (except for Ford). I haven't watched any of the highlights from Monte yet, but whenever they change specs for the cars it levels the playing field for awhile until the bugs get worked out. So I think it's all good.

     

    I'll miss having Ogier around though - I really think his dominance forced the other drivers (and teams) to work to a higher standard.

     

    I think Neuville is due for a championship run. A lot of his time with Hyundai has just been plagued by bad luck. Tanak is incredibly fast, but I think he's too close to the edge much of the time, and that costs him. If he can temper his speed with patience (or maturity) he'll be a force to be reckoned with again.

     

    I think Breen has a really good shot at being a spoiler in the championship run. Maybe not dominating, but finishing high enough consistently to be near the top. Plus, I'm rooting for Ford to climb back into being competitive. The more manufacturers that are consistently in the running, the better.

     

    I'm glad Adamo left Hyundai. Even though he mellowed some of the past season, he was still pretty angry a lot of the time. That can't be fun to drive for.

     

    It's great to see Jari-Matti running Toyota and doing a great job with it. He's a perfect fit there, and it's so well deserved.

     

    Now if we can just get a fourth manufacturer in there and get full-time seats for Andreas Mickkelsen and Mad Ostberg in the WRC class again, we can really have some fun!

     

    (I still need to catch up on Dakar. I've been too busy to watch it.)

    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    Once the other artwork is revealed, I can explain a bit more. But basically it has to do with the amount of detail in each illustration, the amount of shading (ie. not just flat colors), and the software I use to create the final artwork with.

     

    In the case of all of the above games, they started out with a digital (bitmap) sketch on my iPad using Procreate. This is great for roughing out ideas, but I don't use it for finished work, because I don't feel that I have enough control over the final image. So from there they went over to Adobe Photoshop to weed out errant layers and get converted to CMYK colorspace (required for printing). After that, they went into Adobe Illustrator for the finished illustration.

     

    I've typically used Illustrator for the line artwork, because Illustrator is a vector drawing program - not bitmap. So the artwork is infinitely scalable (and malleable) in a way bitmaps aren't. I can get super-clean lines and change characteristics of them in ways I can't do with bitmaps. Then I'd often take the line art back over to Photoshop for "painting" since it's well suited for shading, textures, gradients, etc. For artwork that doesn't have much shading (Zoo Keeper, Aardvark) I just used Illustrator for most of the artwork since flat colors are very easy to do (and again, very easy to change). Zoo Keeper has a bitmap for the brick background. Aardvark's background is fully vector.

     

    This time, I did nearly all of the final artwork in Illustrator (except for the backgrounds in UniWar S and Galaxian, which are bitmapped "paintings"). For Lady Bug Arcade, the shading was minimal, so it wasn't difficult to do. In Photoshop, you can just grab a big ol' brush and swipe it across an area to add shading. But to get complex shading in Illustrator (where it follows a shape, or you have a highlight and shading in the same area), then it requires more work to set up because you're not "painting" as such, but assigning values and parameters to objects. So with Lady Bug Arcade I started experimenting more with that, which required using multiple layers of different gradients with transparency, or setting up (what Adobe calls) Freeform Gradients. Freeform Gradients are relatively new and a bit twitchy (and not always predictable) to work with. But they're very powerful since you can create gradients of (almost) any shape and color combination. And again, you can edit them without "repainting" them as you would using bitmaps. You just change values and parameters. It's like sculpting, but on a flat plane.

     

    Once I'd gone through a learning curve on Lady Bug Arcade (which is part of the reason it's a "6", but also because I completely re-drew the entire label after the original version was well underway :roll: ), I decided to try applying those techniques in Illustrator to both Galaxian and UniWar S, which are both more "painterly" in appearance, and are the kind of labels I would have historically done in Photoshop instead. That's where the difficulty went way, way up, because I was trying to replicate the appearance of what I would have traditionally done pretty quickly in Photoshop, using a completely different method in Illustrator. There was a lot of trial and error in the process, but I was able to achieve the end results that I wanted. Perhaps even better than what I could have done in Photoshop. Certainly, there are some tools that vector graphics have (such as easily replicating and scaling objects) that makes repetitive tasks much, much easier to do.

     

    At the other end of the difficulty spectrum, Pac-Man Collection is pretty straightforward. Mostly flat colors and minimal shading. So the technical challenge of executing it was the easiest of the bunch.

     

    Pretty sure I'm not going to work on so many labels at the same time again though. ;) Although it did help in the sense of having something else to switch to when I got frustrated or stuck.

     

    38178823_LadyBugArcadeBoxfront4K.thumb.jpg.4a33f1c442e4ee44ba68988bd7aed247.jpg

    • Like 3
    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    Oh... and in case anyone was wondering:

    On 8/3/2021 at 12:58 AM, Nathan Strum said:

    Next, I have to actually execute the final illustrations. On a difficulty scale of 1-10 (1 being super easy, barely an inconvenience, 10 being insane), I'd give them:

    Gorf Arcade: 4

    Lady Bug Arcade: 6

    Galaxian 7800: 10

    Pac-Man Collection XM 7800: 5

    UniWarS 7800: 8

     

    I'm probably going to be wrong on all of those.

    Apart from Gorf Arcade (which will be completed later in the year), I guessed pretty well on these. I'd probably give Lady Bug Arcade a difficulty of 7 though.

    • Like 1
    Nathan Strum

    Posted

    Updates:

    • 12-29-21: Final box/label/manual artwork in progress for Pac-Man Collection 40th Anniversary Edition (7800). (Note: updated name, same game as Pac-Man Collection XM.)
    • 12-29-21: Final box/label/manual artwork in progress for Galaxian (7800).
    • 12-31-21: Final box/label/manual artwork in progress for UniWarS (7800).
    • 12-31-21: Lady Bug Arcade now available in the AtariAge Store. Project moved to Completed Homebrews.
    • 12-31-21: RobotWar:2684 now available in the AtariAge Store. Project moved to Completed Homebrews.
    • Like 2
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