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82-T/A

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Posts posted by 82-T/A

  3. Posted

    Dude super jealous! My KayBee didn't have any of the good ones. I still got Wolfenstein 3D but it was a few years after the Jag was gone at a used game store for $15 CIB. That's one of the games I'll never get rid of.

     

     

    Hah, I know... it was crazy. I spent maybe $175 bucks, and got like 14 games, and 2 systems. I bought CD games even though I didn't have the drive. They still wanted an absurd amount for the CD Drive (they were asking like over $100 for it), so I ended up getting one later on from GO ATARI.

  5. Posted

    My Kay bee toys had them for a long time. I think they even hooked up a kiosk to generate interest in their piles of stuff years after the Jaguar was dead. I didn't buy any of it at the time, too busy with playstation.

     

    Yeah, I bought the vast majority of my "rare" original purchases of Atari stuff from Kay Bee when they were blowing them out. I paid $25 per system, boxed, new. CD games were $7 bucks, cartridge games were $5 bucks. So like... Wolf 3D was $5, and yes... Primal Rage was $7...

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    I actually got all three to coexist. The MIDI didn't present much of a conflict. It was the Adlib that was a big hurdle. The SB and most GUS models monitor 288h memory location, which is where the Adlib interface is. The GUS won't play Adlib natively, but it still monitors that address (it needs it's crazy and buggy TSR program called SBOS to be running, which makes it emulate a Sound Blaster... And also an Adlib, but I never use SBOS because there's already an real SB on the motherboard).

     

    Anyway, if I had two cards monitoring that address, neither of them would play Adlib music, which is used in a lot of early DOS games. That's why I love the ACE... It has a jumper on it to disable the Adlib monitoring on it.

     

    Turned out all I really needed was a motherboard BIOs update and that fixed the Adlib thing, and the SB could play it fine. By the time I figured that out tho, I had already tried every model of GUS in my machine (except the Extreme, which is really rare).

     

    The reason I'm telling you all of this is because I had to figure all this out myself. I spent hours researching this online when I was getting it set up and there was almost no information at the time. Maybe this will help you or someone else in the future.

     

    The ACE is also cool because it's as simple as you can get for adding Ultrasound functionality (unless you count DosBox... Heh). There's no recording DMA or IRQ to set up (why would you want to, right?), And no crazy CD-rom interface or anything like that. Also demos, Dos and games like it better then the GUS plug and play, long story short. Also you can upgrade it to 1mb by finding another memory chip on an old graphics card and chopping it off with a razor blade and plucking it into the slot. This is another thing I figured out myself, but I doubt revealing it will set the world on fire.

     

    There were two other things I wanted to respond on with your post...

     

    Oh, the sound blaster AWE64 cards are great and the ones I recommend. Even tho they are plug-and-play, which was a Win95 thing, they still work great in DOS since Creative made a pretty good utility that lets you modify the settings, at least reasonably well. A lot of people like the SB16 since that's truly DOS native and has a better OPL (Adlib) chip, but the lack of onboard MIDI and the AWE features (which some games take advantage of and sound great and awesomely 90s cheesy) make the AWE my fav.

     

    The budget AWE64 was mass produced and a lot easier to find then the AWE32... And it works almost the same way. Also it's a MUCH simpler board so it's less likely to break. The AWE64 Gold is a lot harder to find. It had more memory on it, but the only way to use it (unless you are a musician, as opposed to a retro gamer) is to load a different "sound-font" on it if you want to use it to play MIDI files. It's a nice novelty, but hard to justify unless you just want to show it off or geek out to MIDI music.

     

    Oh Star Control 2.

     

    My fav game.

     

    That was the HARDEST game to get to work on the GUS in my system. I finally figured it out, so here's that exclusive bit of info...

     

    You have to zero out your BLASTER= variable.

     

    It took forever to discover this, but yeah... That magically worked. 95% of games work seamlessly sound-wise in my system with multiple sound cards (I even had a Diamond Monster pci sound card in it also at one point) just by picking the one you want in the game's setup and obviously the correct IRQs and such... but Star Control 2 would NOT run on the GUS.

     

    ... Until I erased the BLASTER environment variable. Then... voila!

     

    So yeah... Oh, and here's my system IRQ/DMA/etc sound settings in case they are useful...

     

    SB AWE 64

    Base 220

    Irq 5

    Dma 1

    High dma 5

    Midi 300

    AWE32 620

     

    Roland Scc-1

    Midi 330

    Irq 3

     

    Gus ACE

    Base 260

    Irq 7

    Dma 6

     

     

    That is a feat... for lack of a better word... I can remember just having to figure out how to get everything to sit comfortably together with multiple COMM ports and Parallel ports all conflicting with my Sound Blaster and whatever else I had in there... let alone having to deal with ~7 or whatever sound cards.

     

    Yeah, I'm kind of wishing I had never gotten rid of my Gravis Ultrasound ACE. I liked the normal GUS that I had... and at the time I bought it, it allowed me to support General MIDI games without spending tons of money. Later on after I upgraded a few times, I ended up getting the ACE, and after a while, I found myself never using it so I sold it. It was a great card though!

    • Like 1

  10. Posted

    Just throwing out the information. Metallica has 10 albums. Cliff played on Kill'em All, Ride the Lightning, and Master of Puppets, he died on the tour of Puppets. Jason played on Justice

     

    Damn! You're right! I always thought Jason Newstead was what helped define the difference in style after Ride the Lightning. I had no idea that Cliff Burton was also on Master of Puppets.

     

    Man, this is an old conversation for me... I can't even remember the last time I listened to Metallica. I listen to talk radio all the time, and on the occasion that I do turn on the radio, it's because my daughter is in the car, and I put on some bebop channel that has all the new weird songs.

     

    Oh, and not true. Metallica only has 5 albums... those other 5 you speak of are garbage and not worthy of being called Metallica... haha.

     

    I stopped listening to Metallica after Load. I know they had Re-Load, but I have no idea what it sounds like. Hard to imagine there were THREE MORE after that. They must have been so totally unimpressive that no one ever talks about them.

     

     

    Last best concert with them was Lollapalooza 1996.

  12. Posted

    if you had done it including Cliff, it would have been fine. Jason, not so much.

     

    I mean no disrespect to Cliff Burton, but out of the 4-5 real Metallica albums, I like "Master of Puppets" and "...And Justice For All" much more than I do "Kill 'Em All" or "Ride the Lightning." I kind of feel like Jason Newstead made those albums what they were, being that everything else was the same.

     

    The Album with the Don't Tread On Me that everyone calls "black," I like that one a lot too... of course, everyone does. I have no idea what comes after that. When I bought Load back in 1996... I was basically done, and never really bought another Metallica album after that.

     

    Slayer was awesome back then too, and so was Pantera… but they were a bit more shouty. I was more into Nirvana / the grunge type music, but I couldn't deny some of the really heavy stuff was good. Never got into Manson or anything like that.

  13. Posted

     

    And Justice For All for me

     

    True story... when I was 16, I seriously considered getting the heads of all four Metallica guys tattooed on my shoulder.

     

    SOOOOOO glad I didn't do that. Nothing against people with tattoos (I have none), but that would have been suuuuuuuuuuuuuch a bad decision. It really just proves that when you're young, you're a total f**king dumbass.

     

    I'm totally amazed at kids who make it to ~20 without having done something insanely idiotic. And I have REALLY good, hard-working, intelligent parents, who provided me with lots of opportunities, and lots of encouragement. Hahah... so God only knows what the fuck.

     

    But I made it out of adolescence without dying, or doing something too stupid.

  15. Posted · Edited by 82-T/A

    The GUS is totally necessary if one is going to explore the MS-Dos demoscene, with native hardware anyway.

     

    Again, "going native", the GUS is great fun in the dark world of DOS... Lots of games support it, and they often sound better then the SB. They at least sound different... Which makes it interesting

     

     

    The GUS was very popular in the demoscene because it's essentially a programmable music microcontroller... In a way. It offloads all the sound processing, MIDI wavetable and music (tracking style at least) to a card so the game can take total use of the CPU and memory.

     

    My favorite thing about the GUS tho is a little TSR program called CAPAMOD. It runs mod file in the background in DOS while you can do pretty much anything.

     

    I used it to build a menu system GUI, and it plays music from a folder full of mod files, picked by a random number at bootup. Between that, batch scripts, and jpeg viewers I built my own little custom game menu system. The SB plays sound effects while the GUS handles the music.

     

    So, yeah... Love the GUS. I wish someone would make a run of ACEs for us retro rig dudes.

     

    My fav combo...

    Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold

    GUS Ace

    Roland Scc-1

     

     

    Yeah... if anyone here HAS a GUS.. check out Star Control 2. The "mod" files (remember those?) it plays throughout the game are done instead using native capability, rather than through the normal Sound Blaster.

     

    I'm curious how you have three General Midi - compatible cards in your computer? If I'm not mistaken, there are only two address spaces that are typically reserved for General MIDI... it's like 300 or 330 or something?

     

    I've got the Sound Blaster 16 ASP because it requires no drivers at all.... just the "SET BLASTER" comments in the AutoExec… I assume the AWE32 requires all the stuff to be loaded? How is the General MIDI on that card? (Guess I'll go to Vogons and listen to BoxPressed's recordings).

     

     

    EDIT: wow... this is nuts... this guy was able to do it! hahah...

     

    https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=37996

    • Like 2

  16. Posted

    I just checked and the "shop" I bought it from seems to have toned down all of his Jag repros .... he seems to have jumped all in into CD repros instead for other consoles mostly.

     

    Yup! Just found it... someone sent me a link. Thrilled to get a copy. I'm not paying $1,000 bucks for Battleshphere. I've bought literally every other game... no sadness here by me!

     

    Thanks!

  17. Posted

    Thanks! I recorded directly from the game or from setup programs that allow you to test your sound card. It was the former for Gods, so no MIDI file. I used a Sound Blaster Pro BITD with Gods, and when I acquired an MT-32 several years ago I finally realized what all the fuss was about!

     

    Yes! I totally agree, that was amazing!!! That's a LOT of work!!!!

     

     

    I guess you're right about the Ultrasound. I'm just amazed at the prices.

    • Like 1

  18. Posted

    No problem. I've been off and on trackballs probably for 15+ years now. I tend to find them in random places, the first was a sale somewhere on an old MS one with the red ball and it lasted a few years until some button failed on it. After that it has all been second hand in the last near decade so when I do luck into one I just buy it and store it as they don't come up but rarely. The one I have now has lasted the longest and been of the best quality which is why I kind of gushed over it. I actually did put that mouse up and pulled the thing back out and I'm using it again. It's just more comfortable once you get over just learning the flow of using the thumb to move the pointer around it's second nature and really easier than lift/drag with the mouse. It's a true life saver on a lap/couch limited space situation too.

     

    Fair argument there catpix put up for the DPI/tracking, it's true. I used to meddle with Photoshop years ago (suck at it again now from forgetting) and I'd get better click, pull, motion type precision creeping the ball around than the mouse which would feel (as it was lower DPI and all) to be popping around and before lasers even more obvious with a dirty/rougher mouse ball.

     

    Just got it! It was a refurb for $22, and it's immaculate, new as far as I can tell. It works awesome... thanks for the rec again!

  19. Posted

    Back in the day... and I'm meaning the mid 1990s. I worked at CompUSA during the Summer and bought a bunch of cards.

     

    I'd spend money on computer parts, and was always trying to improve my computer by upgrading to a better sound card. At one point I had a Gravis UltraSound MAX. It was a pretty neat card, played stuff in General Midi... and it also supported OPL2 / Yamaha and Sound Blaster stuff.

     

    It was a pain in the ass, required a lot of drivers, and really... aside from the General Midi... the Sound Blaster side of it just totally sucked.

     

    So I sold it and upgraded to a Sound Blaster 16, and then eventually bought a Roland SCC-1 (for $32 bucks from my friend who ended up majoring in music and didn't want it anymore).

     

     

    I still liked some aspects of the Gravis Ultrasound, so I bought a Gravis Ultrasound ACE. The ACE was nice because I could still load patches, but it didn't try to do Sound Blaster emulation. This made it a great companion to the Sound Blaster 16. For a while, I had the Sound Blaster 16 ASP, a Roland SCC-1, and a Gravis UltraSound ACE.

     

    I got tired of having literally three sound cards, so I got rid of the ACE.

     

     

     

    Occasionally when I'm bored, I go looking on eBay, and the Gravis UltraSound cards always sell for INSANE prices... I mean totally insane. The crappiest one usually goes for $300 bucks... like... no one would ever even want it. There's a MAX for sale right now that's over $900 bucks.

     

    The ACE, the last one I had, is probably so insanely rare that if it popped up on eBay, it would be over $1,000 bucks.

     

     

    Other than Star Control 2, there was never a single game that I could find that ever used the Gravis Ultrasound natively. For those who have ever played Star Control 2, it's crystal clear with the Gravis Ultrasound, where as you get a constant fuzz from the Sound Blaster and every other card.

     

     

    So aside from Star Control 2... what is the huge demand for that card? What am I missing that I'm not understanding? Why are they commanding such high prices?

     

    • Like 1

  22. Posted

    well I tell you dont start modding / repairing stuff, I finally cleaned the shop 100% out, less than a month later I have a effin laserdisc player and 4 playstations

     

     

    Hahah... yeah. I do still keep some stuff. And occasionally I do buy some older stuff to fix, but I do so with the understanding that it WILL be sold off once I'm done with it. But... I really want to be a minimalist. I try to only keep thing that have special importance to me... everything else... I really just try to get rid of. I have a Laserdisc player too... but I really should just unload it.

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

    That monitor is bananas. Enjoy!

     

    Have you read Blake Patterson's stuff about his No Man's Sky obsession?

    https://www.bytecellar.com/category/no-mans-sky/

     

     

    I kind of get weird when I read stuff like that...

     

     

     

    All my life I have dreamed of exactly this in gaming — an interesting, alternate universe, massive in scale, in which I can freely wander and explore at my own pace. There is a lovely feeling of solitude to the whole experience of discovering a world, leaving your mark on it, and moving on to the next.
    ... two years later, I feel no differently and have had the pleasure of seeing that dream realized every time I return to this other universe of mine.

     

     

    Those comments strike me as someone who is very intelligent, and wasting their brain and time on this planet. I'm being a bit dramatic here, so I apologize in advance. But, I see the level of exponential development and design that's gone on over the past 100 years, and it seems like we've stopped thinking big. Since I graduated high school in 1996... what's really changed? We had cell phones back then, sure they were analog, but we still had them. We had computers, we also had the internet. The only thing I can conceivably see that's really all that different is the speed and size of computers. They are much faster, and much smaller... and we've integrated them into a lot more things... IE: my oven has a Linux busybox.

     

    But... the leaps and bounds innovation, I'm just not seeing it.

     

    Haha... sure, people should play games... but that's what's caused me to stay away from big immersive games. The last online multiplayer game I played was Ultima Online. I was addicted for two weeks straight... that's all I did. I was doing shit like making clothes, building a house, and then it hit me... I'm an idiot... why am I not doing this shit in real life?

  24. Posted

    When my parents bought the 5200, I don't remember the NES even being a thing at the time... though, I lived in that house for 4-5 years, so it it was at best, 1-2 years away. Never the less, I already said the joystick was why my parents returned it. It's not that it wasn't self centering, it just didn't flat-out work. Both of them were broken. I was so upset, I wanted my parents to keep it. What kind of horrible QA/QC did Atari have back then?

     

    I'm just shocked that they wouldn't have done some kind of testing.

     

    At the time the 5200 came out, the graphics, to me... were noticeably better than what I was used to playing on the 2600. It SOUNDED better, the graphics seemed better... just all-around, seemed better.

     

    We'd had the atari 2600 for at least 4-5 years prior.

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