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Gernot

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About Gernot

  • Birthday 12/18/1966

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Switzerland
  • Interests
    Arts, music, vintage games, 3D modelling.
  • Currently Playing
    Intellivision
  • Playing Next
    took a little longer as expected

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  1. Lathe26 "no deep meaning implied" neither. I watched the clip after i unblocked it, thx. I'm always curious when you post a clip it is always something weird like "killer caterpillars" or similar. This was weirdness of it's own, somehow i remembered it but it wasn't my music in the '80s at this time as it is easy to recognize i was a greaser but there was no getting around MTV not even for me. And Jürgen my close Friend back then with whom i held countless sessions on my Inty had no TV at home (his parents was new evangelistic) watched every shit that was running because he lacked of. From today's perspective the song is somewhat cool, cheap as hell but refreshing genuine. Right when i unblocked it i wondered what the blocking caused? I mean it's not the only clip which is infringing copyrights why to all the hell it is blocked exactly in Switzerland? Of course i know i was myself off YT for about half a year because i uploaded an unreleased song by Bob Marley which was bought by a - well i have no name for this it still up-rages me, they claimed it's by "i forgot this artificial name" and even as author was stated "i forgot this artificial name" but who doesn't know that "Songs of Freedom" is by Bob Marley? Yes it could have been Lee Perry he published a couple of Marley songs under his pseudonyms, most are known to me and i even asked the web but none fitted to what was stated, there was absolutely zero information to find about this artificial character. Thus i was so eager to refute the copyright claim which has brought me the fining. It still up-rages me because that's just bullshit. I really would like to share this hardly known electric version including the Wailers of "Songs of Freedom" but i can't. And it had to be "Songs of Freedom" isn't that significant? This is from my pov exactly what Nina pointed on with her sequel to "Copying is no theft" - "Credit is due", they can take a work rebrand it and sell it under their own name without to respect this due, that is exactly as when Eunice takes Beethovens composition and claims it's his work which makes Beethoven a little angry (more angry looking as he looks anyway). Shall they sell it but "credits are due where credits are due". So here it is "credit is due" (dammit!) I can't get enough of her, it's just brilliant.
  2. 20'650 for today i'm satisfied. I still like this fast game even if i'm not good in it.
  3. It seems my batteries are low this week i can hardly concentrate and i'm exhausted soon, must be the sign of autumn i assume it depresses me a little. Summer was to short this year in Switzerland, it is anyway but this year was really a bad year, already at start of July i said that i'm lucky to have a sunburn "at least i have a memory of the summer which have should been". I assumed such a weather, never ask me why these are predictions i made based on the color of my pee... Nah, some in a close valley to Glarus (Muotatal) say they ask the ants (and sit bare ass in an anthill) i don't but i watch all over the year the birds and i predict such because of this. This year i have seen a Stork in a very uncommon time in a very uncommon place (if that would have been in autumn or winter i wouldn't have wondered but not in summer), usually they don't fly into the valley they rest outside the valley close to a swamp, when they fly into the valley to search for food something is uncommon for sure. The early presence of "Alpendohlen" (Jackdaw) in the valley in summer also tells that something is wrong usually they are all over the summer high in the mountains and in September or October they will return, if i see them in July down in the valley it's obvious they leak of food. I even watched a pair of buzzard hunting in the the town this is even very uncommon they don't like high density areas, even if that looks amazing to see a buzzard hunting between buildings he isn't the bird who is built for such an energy intense way of hunting his manner is to lure in the sky as a typical predator. Based on all this i knew very soon that this summer will be rainy, cold and very short. But ants i never ask, what you can is to predict a storm if they start to get very busy and nervous pretty much a storm will raise up but for the all over weather situation birds will tell you far more. "Moutataler Wetterschmöcker" correct "Glarner Wetterschmöcker", lol.
  4. I haven't tried NOP yet but thought about yes, what i did yesterday is to pass all by similar to your hack with branch unconditional, but i didn't succeeded. However, that was great hint (not the NOP but the whole thing) because i peeped right now into Joe's CP1600 summary (just for the proper meaning of "branch unconditional", i knew what it does but not what the single "B" stands for) and well it tells me a lot more as it did a couple of weeks ago, as i pointed it already out working with it made a lot of things clearer to me as when i have read it before it was all cryptic to me, step by step i understand the purposes. When i look now at this sheet it really clarifies some things i didn't understood before. But i guess i have to play "nova blast" today, i promised a score even if it will be low.
  5. It just doesn't shows up, but i didn't played it emulated and dunno maybe it's caused by the PAL hardware? I.e. the "screen color issue" respectively the wrong background color (even if that is caused by something very different and i still have no explanation for this behave, means why in all the world the position of the routine in the titlecode makes a difference to my PAL hardware? in general i assumed the routine on top after clearing the screen it is used often in this manner, then i moved it at the end all fine for the emulator just my hardware doesn't likes both of it, it expects the routine in a quite tight space around 100 decles after the date similar as when i use the sears exec in the emulator, often MAME itself shows the same issue no matter which exec i use, nonetheless if that works for MAME and for sears in jzIntv this is still no warranty that it will work on my hardware, i always need to check all three possibilities and for some i had to forgo sears if the issue stays, while unfortunately i can't tell how truthful this is the sears exec does not act the same in MAME and jzIntv). Vectron is a game you can hardly play with anything else as the disc, a joystick won't suit to aim and fire. However this would have been my next try to play it emulated and to see if there is a difference, sure i assume that it worked for you. First assumed of course that i made an error but even if i use it standalone (means just this hack and nothing else) it won't work on my console. Btw, it isn't important it just makes me curious, very curious. There would be still the possibility to splatter the sentence on the screen disregarding the conditions using an own addition.
  6. That the clip isn't available (to me) only makes me more curious.... What do you mean by "no deep meaning implied" the lyrics have true depth...
  7. Who isn't here? Thanks a lot, You know Bump 'n Jump is the game i sacrificed a console for (i smashed it on the wall after three days of continuous playing bump 'n jump).
  8. Could it be possible that someone doesn't knows what dog fighting means? Robert Norris did the great job to make it possible to use Pioneer's engine for an online dogfight, he never released it or put this into the game which i don't understand, of course it would have been outside of gameplay for Pioneer, nonetheless Geraldine and me would have loved it (Pioneer like FE2 doesn't suits for multiplayer since you can accelerate the time and this wouldn't be to synchronize, if you can't you would have to wait the three days for a run to Mars i.e., Elite4 solved the problem with hyperspacing into the orbit of a Planet instead to a point at the rim of the system, we debated about this as well but i never liked the idea to me the spaceflight itself is an essential part of this game). Before all this happened and fairly before Robert moved in i had the idea that we could use the blackboard of the game and leave a message like "interested in a fight? join me tomorrow at nn:nn" and that it should be outside of gameplay just for the fun aspect of it. Yes it's jousting, but regarding newtonian physics it will have to turn into jousting, it is how it is.
  9. Online casino games, a thing my young friend plays often if that is part of a game like for GTA i can see a value.
  10. Imho i would have dropped the idea of a virtual slot machine right at start, to flip a coin is exactly as fascinating as this it equals to NIL to me. I guess craps and slots won't use much extra space in general it is the same a spinning wheel of numbers with a "random" stop. The poor graphics of slots show this well and it is a sort of game which you could have realized for the outraking "Unisonic Champion 2711", a single button controller will suit for it (pardon me) and a pure dice rolling game won't need a lot of graphics at all - just six dots per dice. Roulette offers at least a little bit of gameplay because the betting strategies vary, pure dice rolling or a slot machine offers nothing of this. Further virtual slot machines won't cover what they are for real, a virtual slot machine will be balanced while in reality they are cheated to generate profit. Dammit i have a young friend who is recently addicted to lots (is that proper told?) like far to many and i don't understand what they get out of this extremely short fascination not to know what the result will be (flip a coin), i always like to convince him that no one would start such a lottery if the gain was on side of the players, likewise for slot machines you shouldn't play it, in a long run you only will lose. He's on the other hand a cool dude and can play first person shooters very well, last year he played Doom on my machine for the very first time and it was a sort of walkthrough to him. A little randomness is the salt in a game but to consume only salt is not wise. He's really a funny dude, he told me about a maths prof who claimed that you can have a row of over 30 times heads if you flip a coin, he liked to demonstrate to me that it won't work and reached twelve - sorry my fellow it is possible in an endless stream you demonstrated it with a contrary mind setting (perhaps exactly because of his contrary mind setting? Fortuna is still a not to control goddess and does whatever pleases her, "Ha, i will show you...", but however never depend on her she is very willful) . To stay with real randomness, it is what we maybe don't understand to well about chance, as low as a chance will be as long as this chance does not equal to zero it is in fact a chance of 1:1, it will happen or not. "if it is in the range of possibilities it either has already happened, will happen right now or happens in future" (a reply i received once from Dr. Mitchell to the topic extraterrestrial visitors, personally i'm very conservative to this topic but he's right "as long as it is not zero...").
  11. Short add on to the Planets i created, one is a sort of artificial moon it consists only of base plates which likewise lava has no value only a ring of mountains is from what you can profit, to settle such a world will cost you half of the settlers until you have built your first greenhouse, it is seen from the point of material a rather lucrative one but it needs an extra amount of time to be settled since you lose half of your your colonists, starting then out with half costs some extra turns, the contrary to this are extremely fertile worlds with a very short amount of material resources, fast settled and fast growth but to less material to be rated as good, imho such extremes make the game more interesting as balanced worlds to settle. Ah yes since the game i offered you is the full version and not what circulated mostly (and still is) you will have a planet editor with which you can add own planets, but since i played this game for a very long time as free published release i edited my planets with a hex editor at hand. There is one planet in the game created by the author which looks like Switzerland, a nice addition which reminds you where the game comes from, it is as i guess a rare example since not many games was made in Switzerland in the early '90s (in fact it is the single one i know). "Zardoz" (which was in WWII the secret name for Switzerland) is a balanced world of which you shouldn't use to many they are to easy to be settled. Peep into it, it is a good example which elements are useful and which elements of the game can be neglected. Further, but i guess i don't have to point at this, it won't matter if you settle planets or continents as well as it won't matter if space or ocean which departs the to settle ground and requires a sort of transportation. The settling in space just adds some nice possibilities like stargates to shorten the travel time much, a pendant to this would be a difference from windjammers to motor crafts and later airlplanes.
  12. Pardon me for putting this on top of the stake but this sounds interesting even if i only peeped into Utopia (since it is a little boring to play it alone). Personally i wouldn't implement to much varying things like different sorts of industries, i loved (not only liked) simulation games mainly in the period 1990 to 2000, what i experienced is that when the games grow in to much microsimulations the gameplay gets lost, though the original SimCity is still the best of all and the original Settlers as well the games are fluid to play and do not take to long you don't have to care to much about each aspect of the game and can let it run, to play them you won't need to read a manual or dive into explanations it is all self explaining. What i do still like and is ranked top by me is Populous (as well the initial one) it is such a cool game to play, another i still rank high but is little played by me now is Ecolopoly which is rather an educational game as a strategic simulation. What is also worth to take as paragon is "Kaiser" (dunno if that is known to you all respectively how it was entitled in english) which was a ground breaking game for the C64 (imho). Sidenote; in Sid's Simgolf Sid likes "round based strategy". One i like very very much is "Colonial Conquest" (for the Amiga designed by a biology student from the ETH) which is a sort of civilisation in space, what i like about this game is exactly the fluid play, you can produce units, you have to take care for food to grow fast, schools and discoveries bring you technology points - that's it. Another round based strategy i played to the excess is "Lords of the Realm" but this game leaks already of what i good game shouldn't it is far to long to play, played single you need more as a day (session time), two players won't finish it and it isn't to imagine how this would end up for four players. Let's take a closer look at "Colonial Conquest" and why i like it so much, instead of a landmass you settle space each game you start is setup new from a list of planets which exceeds the planets used in the game by many (personally i even exceeded this table of planets and designed some own hard to settle and fast growing), like i said it is self explaining, the symbols used are easy to understand and you don't have to many different things to care for in fact already a little to much. As example you have three different ways to earn crops, do that with a settler which can only feed himself and produce one extra unit on fertile ground or in the sea by fishing, use a robot to double the amount on grass and in steppe or or the thing you will use for sure greenhouses they will give you most crops on any ground fertile, desert, ice, lava no matter (they will produce one unit extra on fertile ground since the for maintenance needed settler can add one unit). Personally i would leave away the robots since no one will use them, you produce food with a settler when you start out but as soon as you have material enough you will only build greenhouses, in fact you will do it right at start with the amount of reserve you have. Similar for material units, robots produce extra units so this will be the thing apart from greenhouses en masse at first. You will need some buildings for you settlers, housing if your settlement should grow over a certain population and medical centers for the next step of amount of settlers, schools to gain tech points which are finally the most important thing for this game, the tech points allow you step by step to build weapons, at start only weak things like transporters and each advance needs the doubled amount of tech points (NOTE!). You have a quite large list of things in which you advance but in my opinion you will only need half of them and having it played one or two times you will exactly know which makes use so this is a useless element in the game. No pubs, casinos or night clubs pardon me and if i would give you credits but lower your reputation for this, this is the standard for entertaining elements in such games and finally reputation is always what is more of need as material or credits. You don't have different industries you simply earn material from mines that is your "industry", much more of importance are medical bases and schools as well as at least one food storage for the overproduction which will be else lost, each certain amount of settlers needs a city (for this game each 6000) without them your growth will stop and this you like to keep at maximum Erm... keep it roundbased, sure real time strategy like settlers is somewhat cool but a split screen on the Inty i imagine simplified said as shit. A leakage of roundbased strategy is that you see what your opponent does (unlike for the AI which works hidden), this simply needs an agreement between the (usually two) players not to peep into the map of the opponent to make the game interesting (especially if you know the game well and your opponent is a beginner). A few thoughts to the "AI", which is rather a "AS" (artificial stupidity) for this old game, he solved the problem quite simple the AI can produce units of material twice as fast as you and won't need any food since it is a population of machines which can enslave your settlers when they occupy a planet from you, while he won't care for them and they will die very soon, as soon as he has produced the classic "tripods" he won't need the slaves. Planets are settled by the machines with a mothership which can easy travel the longest distances therefore the mothership is as stupid as the AI in the IntyBASIC "Battleship" game, it moves totally random in space. Randomness, without some random elements it wouldn't be half as good, for this game it is meteor impacts, you never know when your settlers will be hit by a meteor, at start this can be quite harmful later you won't care for 1000 settlers (depicted by a single one) more or less. You have a superintelligence watching you, which is the "centauri empire", they will buy from time to time your food reserves and you will be rewarded with material very useful at start but even this is quite random and it only happens if you have a certain amount of reserve. This superintelligence also rewards you for discoveries (the bio element in the game - if you like) as soon as you have tech points enough to build explorers, looking like the good old Enterprise you will send them out to search for lifeforms as higher their intelligence is as more tech points you will get as reward for it, this is even a rather random element and for some games you will find many with a high level in other runs only dumb sandworms, it depends on what planets are selected from the table, obviously lava, ice and pure rocky ones are hostile and house no indigenous lifeforms, so the list i made plays a strong role and with it you control a lot of the hardness of the game. What i liked to point out here is what i said already at beginning - keep it simple. For the offensive weapons you have space ships of various size and firepower, personally i do all just to get as fast as possible to the level where i can build Battlestars, their fire power is highest in the game and i don't care much for lower classes, while i lost games with this strategy to human opponents i never lost with this against the AI. A clever player noticing or knowing this will attack you with weak fighters even explorers and some troop transporters. What brings me to army you need to produce marines for this you need a base (and of course a spaceport) it costs quite a lot material to produce a single unit and you can only produce one unit per base and round, however if you have no army and concentrated only on growth and material reserves a single army can invade you without to battle. An element which i wouldn't have implemented (after the many games i played) are the "planet destroyers" it's a rude weapon and spoils somewhat the fun, sure there is a defense against this a powerful planetary shield which costs double of tech points as the "destroyer" (since you have grown til that quite large you reach the levels quite fast even if each needs twice of points). But it is really a rude weapon and if a t all i would fine a use of such systems with restriction in reputation or growth in tech points, it's just not funny even not against the AI to melt all to a piece of lava, when i played it single against the AI my goal was always to win by colonization and not by melting down all what belongs to my opponent. As little balance to when you win a game in this manner with "planet destroyers" you will be rewarded with a far lower score, you played a faulty game, the goal is to settle on as many of worlds as possible, assumed the "empire" is interested in growth and not in destruction, personally i would turn the result from "game won" to "game tie" in such a case. An important element is that buildings per planet are limited, in this game to 21 but how many ever this limitation causes you to plan a wisely what you will need, Assumed it would be a landmass one could limit the amount based on islands or based on the amount of sectors a landmass occupies. You win the game if you have occupied all planets (let's say sectors) of your opponent which can take some time and i imagine settled in a space (or a single world) with less planets (continents, islands) the game will be even more interesting to play. Let's pause here and i add only that i played this game many many times against a friend of mine, that is because of simplicity and the result is a rather fast game which won't take longer as an afternoon, a quite long afternoon from 12 to 12 but this is in the limit which i would say is playable, if it takes longer like "Lords" you will never finish a session. Guessed you (or the rest of kind readers) have access to a miggy (A500) here's a prepped spiced up HD image ready to use, since a play will tell you much more as thousand words can: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AhX1Ed1178sOgWJRt-yR2zBT7iX_?e=ygFV4L But all in all i just liked to say - keep it as simple as possible.
  13. "There isn't much of gameplay..." well as for all betting games. Nonetheless decle this is a great finding. ...me neither, in fact i dislike chance games mostly virtual chance games, for two reasons there is nothing to win which makes the rather boring experience even more boring and well "same number draws always the same number" which isn't chance at all. I remember well that my dad made in the seventies an electronic dice but as with all of them it leaked exactly of this it can't replace a dice roll, as usual the randomness was in milliseconds (difference of touching the contacts), the most interesting fact was that it was controlled by the back then "absolutely brand new" touch control you found a little later in the '80s on any TV set. I posted already to the "Backgammon" thread that i had in my youth a Backgammon computer it allowed to use real dice and enter the values, played in this manner the machine hardly won. I'm not a cards counter but i had a friend which "leaked" of this special talent, he easy could predict slot machines apart from playing video games for hours with a single coin "i can't understand you it's soooo easy"... This dude could predict cards from up to three decks - amazing! Playing Poker or Blackjack against him was a pure loss. We, which is him some friends from back then and little me designed a sort of Monopoly (not the one i posted once, this was made quite later) we played at Sundays in our Pub, SFr. 50.- stake, but even this was mostly won by him. And erm you do check your comments for grammatical errors? I thought only me is revising his comments over and over... Sometimes i miss you and your electronic toys daddy. Papi Wilhelm: "You need to have blisters on your fingers before you understand the matter".
  14. Cool game i guess i like it, thus it is approved by the Pioneer Space Pilots Guild A score will follow, as usual my first game was better as the ones which followed, means after i scored a little above 20k i thought "not that hard"... well harder as i thought, you like to reach a better score and you only get worse - as usual. I had no idea how to refuel or that i can temporary protect the cities, after reading the manual i knew all that but it didn't helped me. However definitely a game for commander Jameson and a better Defender as Defender itself. Here's the multilingual manual for it: Nova Blast (1983) (Imagic) [!] (eur).pdf To get the easter egg screen press [1] on both controllers and reset (you can't return from it to the game). "NEW NOVA" if that isn't a doubling... i wonder how the "old" would have been. Off Topic One little thing, i always wonder how spaceships will maneuver only with giant main thrusters... The worst i saw was a "windoze" space strategy game which name i recently can't remember (i tossed the game sure it is archived but i never played it), however the giant spaceships move like fish in the sea and when they turn their "head" the ship will follow in this direction, the (edit: dunno if it really was midi) soundtrack of the game is quite good (that's why i tried it at all) but the animations cause me nausea. Far Gate, i guess it is Far Gate, yes it was Far Gate, some seem to like it but no for the age of it it is a very bad made game in my opinion. The game is from 2001 but the models look worse as some 3D space games from '95. Now i know why my friendly supporter says that my Courier (made in the same time when i started to get interested in 3D modelling) is one of the best looking. first version from around 2001, it uses less polys as it looks like here they are just carefully arranged (by hand i made this first edition using CarCAD for NFS4) One thing that explains the weakness of Far Gate a little it was made by a rather small team of up to 10 ppl, this might explain the leaks, it wasn't made by a big game studio.
  15. Some new entries, "Vectron", "Thunder Castle" (fixed title screen to black background on all hardware), custom font for "Space Battle" (an an alternative "Battlestar" using the same font from Battlestar) for the sake of space i had to rename internally both versions to "Battlestar" (screen color issue, i couldn't find an in all cases working position for the screen color routine when i used "Space Battle" as internal title but if at all the idea is that it should work in all cases, proof i can only make it on my PAL Intellivision the rest is emulated in MAME or jzIntv). "Tag-Along Todd" has now a nice sky blue title instead of the enervating magenta. For "Shark! Shark!" i even changed the screen color routine further i added translations in italian, french and german to this game, showing now "Les Requins!" "Squali! Squali!" or "Haie! Haie!" in the title, this in blood red magenta on an always cyan background (but no special font for this game so far). SW-ESB shows "STAR WARS" in fat yellow letters on a black background (ahhh... - in a future release i will add Vaders likeness - hopefully ? - OhKeh this is already present - my fault). Erm yes "Star Wars" I was sometimes criticized for the detail richness of my pilots which you never can see in a close-up in the running game, the above is an imperial pilot from X-Wing Alliance ('98) which you never can see in a close-up in the running game as well (yes it is low-poly as low-poly can be but as i said you will hardly see anything of all that in the game) and it is only a fraction of effort they put in "Han" and "Chewie" in the special edition Millfalcon there even the eye color of Harrison Ford is adequate but to see this you need to open the model in a modelviewer. This posted as a small credit to Tony Denton alias darksabre who officially made this add-on and influenced me much with his work. Back to topic... ...respectively scroll through the first entry of this blog to see what has changed meanwhile and what i added new. could it be more worse as this olive screen for "Shark! Shark!"?
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