[speakalator - compose phrases for AtariVox on unix platforms]

Never saw this till now -- thanks!

[That '70s Show in HD]

Man, I'm glad to not be that much of a purist. We just finished re-watching the entire series, movies, Crusade and all, starting on the 20th anniversary of the pilot broadcast, completely by accident, it was just when I'd finished ripping the first season to our Plex server. While there was a lot that hadn't aged well (mostly cheap costumes, props, some soap-opera-level acting and terrible fight choreography), I didn't think it looked any worse on our 46" screen than any other SD-only content. Certainly it's a hell of a lot better looking than my Star Blazers DVDs.

[Later YouTube]

I don't know what it's like on a Mac, but I'm able to choose DDG as my default search engine in Firefox or (with an extension) Chrome for Ubuntu, as well as on my Android devices using the DDG app/widget and third party browsers like Firefox and Dolphin. And I did just that when Google started throwing a hissy a few weeks back, saying that there was "unusual activity" coming from my machine and making me enter a CAPTCHA every single time I tried to search, most likely triggered by my constant refinements to my searches to get around their recent policy of always returning results even if they're not relevant and don't contain the specified keywords.

 

The announcement yesterday that they would soon begin showing my real name and Google Plus profile pic to any Android user who called or received a call from me may cause me to delete my Google Plus account altogether. They provide a way to opt out, but then, Facebook used to do the same regarding the use of your name in ads, and they no longer do.

 

Ever since Google Reader went away and we discovered TT-RSS on one of our old desktop machines provides a better experience anyway, we've been slowly swapping out other parts of the Google infrastructure. The various OpenStreetMap options are a lot better than they used to be for maps, though still not so good for navigation. (Waze is better, but Google recently bought them.) Our gmail addresses are all over the place in the wild and it's unlikely we'll be able to shut those down anytime soon, but Roundcube is an okay webmail we can run ourselves for our main accounts. Haven't found a good substitute for Google Docs yet, though (my girl and I use it all the time to share non-privileged info such as our ever-expanding cookbook project or xmas shopping lists). Owncloud may be an option, but I would need to hack rudimentary online spreadsheet editing support into it, unless someone has done so since I last played with it.

 

It was nice having a big corporation throw so much weight behind free/open source software projects over the last decade, but one only needs to look at the latest Android release and announcements like the one yesterday to see that those golden years are over, and the balance has shifted from providing no-BS web services with non-intrusive advertising (as they once did) to arrogant, monopolistic behavior. They're still less annoying than Microsoft was when I used to run Windows around the turn of the century, but there's no doubt that's where Google is headed.

 

May I ask what video sharing service you're switching to, if any?

[JFK's INTENDED SPEECH - Aliens Exist!]

There are so many conspiracy theories that have recently turned out to be true and actually have an impact on our day-to-day lives today that it hardly seems productive to resurrect a 50-year-old one with a dash of crazy.

[Rebooteroids video]

Looks pretty sweet... better than Atari's own reboots from the last 20 years, certainly. If you ever release it, it'll give me an excuse to try Virtual Jaguar.

 

Now that hi-def is standard, this video reminds me I've been wanting to try a vector game again, like Geometry Wars but more spare, probably something between Space Duel and what I see in the video above. Probably for Android. My very first non-text-based game was an attempt at Lunar Lander for the C64 in 1983, but 320x200 was just not enough to make it look good. Sure, there's Vectrex, but not many people have those and Vectrex emulation seems to have mostly fallen by the wayside in recent years.

[It's now or never]

Wow, you've covered two out of my five childhood video game systems now. (hope that works outside the forum...) The other ones (Colecovision, Vectrex, Odyssey 1) are either well-covered or too primitive to emulate or (in the case of Odyssey 1) do much homebrew for anyway.

[I Bought Planes]

At least here in the US, the DS lasted almost 9 years. I remember waiting in my car on an equally rainy Sunday morning in November 2004 for GameStop to open so I could claim my preorder (and then going back a few hours later when the one they gave me had a broken touch screen).

 

Sad to see it go, as I spent well over a grand on DS games, but I moved on about 4 years ago when I got my first smartphone. Never did spring for the DSi, XL, or either version of the 3DS.

[DVD Audio]

To change the sampling rate in Audacity you just choose Tracks, Resample from the menu, and enter a number. But don't do that unless it turns out you have to, because you'll lose quality if the new number is lower, or use more disk space for no better quality if it's higher.

 

Audacity will also convert mono to stereo (you can even add a little artificial separation to simulate real stereo) and overlay tracks. I can't say I've ever done a 14 hour project in it, so you may run into its limitations, whatever they may be, but I've done 2-3 hour projects with it and things were still smooth.

[DVD Audio]

At uncompressed CD quality which is 44.1KHz/16-bit stereo, 8.5gb (which would be a dual-layer DVD) is about 14 hours of PCM audio. If you use DVD-Audio lossless compression you should be able to increase that by 40-50%. If you're able to use AC3 compression (standard DVD-Video compression) at a decent 192kbps, you can get upward of 90 hours on there, though I don't know if you have to include a dummy video track which would eat some space.

 

I don't think either DVD format, video or audio, will handle 32-bit float audio data or 8KHz audio. That's some high-resolution sampling for rather low-quality audio (highest frequency that can be represented is 4KHz). You'll probably have to convert to a different format before making a DVD, regardless of which codec you use.

 

If you're using Audacity, I assume you're working in stereo or mono and not, say, 5.1 surround sound, which would take much more space.

 

(I used to make CDs with 20 hours of heavily compressed FM-quality music for my car stereo all the time, so I've thought a lot about this stuff.)

 

[Am I crazy?]

Yeah, this is the first I've heard of a Sound Forge requirement for PSX homebrew. I haven't done any PSX development myself, but I've done music projects with upward of 30 tracks using Audacity with no problem. It's the bread and butter of audio editing.

[Optimize data overlapping]

Sounds awesome! Doesn't run so well under wine. Any chance we'll see the sources?

[service has been cancelled]

Cord-cutting here in upstate New York means getting everything over the net... we have five broadcast stations. Hard to believe that Houston has a hundred. Unless you're talking "antenna" as in "wireless cable" over microwave, or something delivered via LTE.

 

Edit: Just found your spreadsheet. That's crazy, I had no idea subchannels had taken off like that. One of our stations had 24-hour loops of news and weather, but as far as I know they discontinued them a few years back. I should look into it again... not that we watch more than half an hour a week of broadcast television.

[Averett's Odyssey]

I downloaded it, but apparently the guy who was maintaining o2em for Ubuntu stopped some time ago. Looking forward to giving it a try when I have the free time to build o2em.

[50 sprites]

In Robotron the enemy converges on the player, meaning everything tends to go into the same vertical band. A worse case scenario of 50 overlapping sprites would have a flicker rate of 24, or 2.5 Hz.

 

Well, even in the arcade version of Robotron there are plenty of glitches when you have enemies overlapping each other, and their animation is pretty jerky. On the 2600, if they're overlapping and all roughly the same color it may not be a bad effect, and it may be possible to minimize that by having their "follow the player" routine favor the horizontal over the vertical. But I won't have time to test that anytime soon, unfortunately.

[50 sprites]

Screenshots look awesome! For me it throws an ARM error on start with Stella 3.4.1 with DPC+ selected in Game Properties. I see there's a newer Stella out there (even a .deb for my specific Ubuntu version) and will try that later.

 

When I see 50 sprites on the screen at once, what immediately comes to mind is a screen full of grunts in Robotron. One of your Frantic test builds reminded me a lot of that already, plus the walls. Don't know if it would be possible, but it seems more possible now than it did before you started doing all this work.

[Atari begins C&D to retro community]

Wonder how much time AtariAge has left... hope the estoppel defense works out for Andrew, assuming the doctrine of estoppel exists in Australia, and eventually for AtariAge.