wierd_w
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Posts posted by wierd_w
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I could not get into 6.
Tried many times, but never could.
MOOII is better to just jump into, imo.
Play on tutor with 1 opponent to start with, until you learn the ropes.
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I beat master of orion II on that 90s laptop earlier last week.
About halfway through wizardry 7 rn.
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I just had a horrible idea for a new game.
"Swimming with sharks: Tropical theme park"
Premise: You are a resort hotel owner living in an island economy tropical country (aka, a banana republic). You are exploiting the extremely lax laws of your country, (and battling against graft and corruption to stay in business) to run a novel tourist destination where tourists pay to swim with sharks.
Since fish cost lots of money, in order to stay in business you must:
1) decide which tourists to feed to the sharks to keep them healthy and happy.
2) balance the perceived risk tourists have over being eaten against their risk taking impulses
3) maintain a hotel at sufficiently luxurious levels to keep tourists happy without going broke.
4) sustain a large enough school of sharks for tourists to be satisfied
5) deal with the logistics if tourist body size, shark consumption needs/ability, risk of survival and lawsuit/liability, and general sassyness of different kinds of tourist relative to their income
6) bribe the officials to stay in operation.
I am not sure I want to dust off my programming abilities to make it, but the idea was too fun not to share.
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... I *think* older versions of the DOS format command can do that.
Is it FAT?
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I think I found the compiler.
http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/lang/lang.htm
You want 'bascom', and 'link-80'.
When generating machine code, use the /z argument to generate z80 opcodes.
This, plus the very large number of games written in suitable flavors of basic, should get you more titles than you know what to do with.
The osborne 1 does not have bitmap mode graphics. However, it does have character mode graphics.
https://archive.org/details/PortableCompanion19820809/page/n52/mode/1up?q=draw+cards&view=theater
Gives a vintage example program.
Some very simple games could be written/ported this way.
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I dont have a kyroflux, just a late 90s pentium system.
Do you know which controller chip is amenable? NEC or WD? I have never tried to write a cp/m disk.
As for games, again, I would look into what featureset the osborne offers via msbasic, and hunt down the compiler. That would open a treasuretrove of options up.
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If a PC can write the disks from image files, I can easily make them. I have an old legacy system and drives. I would need to order media though.
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this may be useful for you.
https://ardent-tool.com/docs/pdf/ps2-hmm.pdf
It contains information about the PSU, and how to test it. (starting at page 138)
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How long did you wait for the isopropyl to dry?
Let it fully and completely dry out before doing any further power ons. Remove the battery completely as well.
You should also inspect to make sure the battery did not leak. It might not be readily apparent, but it's always important to check. The lithium batteries used in PS/2 systems can have that kind of failure, and it is not pretty.
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I have seen similar.
There is a variety of PVC that is for high temperature that is purposefully a different diameter (despite what it says on the box) to prevent the parts from being used together. I have also seen galvanized pipe used... Inappropriately... many times.
My own bathroom has the latter problem; I have replaced most of it, but not the vertical to the shower. Replacing it would require knocking out the whole goddamn wall in the kitchen, because it was installed by an insane contractor. (To even get to the tub fittings, I had to personally install a plumbing access on said wall. Because said insane contractor just boarded up the wall after installing galvanized pipe, connected to brass tub fittings. "Like a Pro!". Said wall is.. Let's just say it has entirely too much material to mess with. It's about 2 inches thick of plywood underneath drywall, before you even get to the plumbing. There is just the normal plumbing gap space in there to work with for said vertical, and a footing board underneath to prevent just snaking it out to replace it from the crawlspace below. "Very Professional." At some point I will get sufficiently fed up that I will go in there with small rotary tools, and hack the vertical into manageable bits, and remove it piece wise, then replace it with steel braided-mesh reinforced flexible water tubing. That at least will be manageable in the future.)
anyhow, I hope you get that all sorted out.
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Since a thread like this is no fun without pictures:
You can see an annoying defect in the passive matrix display in the last few images, but for the most part, it does not show in games, or at the dos prompt.
All in all, it is a perfectly functional little amusement now.
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I see.
In other news, in case somebody else hits this problem:
The built in defragmenter for win98se cannot handle extra enormous huge disks. It throws a 'system has insufficient memory' error, but it has nothing to do with the installed memory compliment. It simply does not know how to handle very large fat32 volumes. MS has an old KB article on it even.
There is a solution to this though.
winworld has the full version of disk keeper 6.0, which can defragment huge fat volumes.
https://winworldpc.com/product/diskeeper/60
Yes, it does work on win98se.
(Defragmenting 12+gb of data at PIO4 speeds, on a pentium 120, however, is a laboriously slow process that sees the CPU pegged at 100% for several hours. Given the terrible transfer rates with this controller, reducing iops to the minimum via low fragmentation is a must. I am considering getting a 32mb edo sodimm to slap in this thing, just to allocate all of it to smartdrv caching. On the plus side though, since it does not do bus mastered io, it does NOT need double buffering. That claws back 3k of low memory. Even with disk manager sitting like a fat hen on the bottom of low memory, i have 618k free, and a good chunk of UMB left over. That's not shabby at all. It does have a kind of kludgy map though. The video bios sits at C000-C9FF, and is roughly 40k in size. UMBPCI does not want to enable the fraction of 16k there as UMB, So I enabled CC00-DFFF with umbpci, then enabled the small chunk at CA00-CBFF with emm386. EMS pageframe is at E000-EFFF. HIMEM.SYS is loaded high using hiram.exe. doskey and smartdrv are fully resident in upper memory.
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For speech, you might be better served just getting "middle C" versions of the base phonemes, all by themselves, out of vocaloid. Those should be amenable to being pitch modulated (either before being turned into LPC samples, or inside the speech synth, depending on octave reachability) after the fact.
eg,
"wa.wav"
"shi.wav"etc.
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cant say I have. Neat idea, but how did they get legal distro rights to that many titles?
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The Aironet 350 arrived today.
Cisco are a bunch of tools, and make it harder than it needs to be to get the drivers out of their support site, but it is fully working now.
Pulling the massive dos game archive will take awhile to complete though, since it is an 11mbit 802.1B card. That's fine. It **DOES** do WPA2, and is playing just peachy with the Odyssey client.
I have noted something that makes me a bit miffed though. Some games seem hit and miss on if they will work right. Wizardry 7, for instance, has distorted soundblaster digitized sound playback, but only "sometimes". The audio chip is initialized by a bios routine, so it is not a problem with the ESS1878 chip being uninitialized. Games that have support for ESS chips work great. (Descent, et al)-- Most games that want a soundblaster / SB Pro, work just peachy too. But a few of them have this hit and miss "Sometimes sounds all stretched out" audio distortion.
On a less important (since it will basically always live in DOS mode once set up anyway) but amusing note-- the video chip is PCI, but the hard disk controller is straight up ISA. (It has no PCI-ID!!) I was curious if UNIATA would work on it, since the best it seems to be able to do is multiword 32bit transfers in PIO4 mode (and that involves the CPU, making heavy disk access really hit the system hard between the legs, and not let up) but decided against, since you kinda sorta, **NEED** the PCI bridges to do busmastered IO. The baked in IDE controller is straight up ISA, and will never do bus mastering.
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producing a 'clean' sound source to work with, is the whole reason I am fiddling with this MIDI and about 4gb of soundfonts right now.
Tursi was asking for one, so he could run it through his encoder, since he is/was dissatisfied with the original audio. (I can't say I blame him, looking at it in an editor, the whole envelope is clipped.)
Speaking of fiddling with that midi...
Improved percussion intensity, no "Oompas" in the lead in, with a clean attack.
Added an XM background render.
Added Rock Guitar overlay.
This is not meant to sound like the original. Its obvs a remix.
Its real easy to cut the rock guitar, or subdue it, since I rendered it as a stand alone track that is easily messed with in audacity.
I cannot use that guitar sound for all the guitar notes in the file, because the riff speed is too high, and it just becomes a nasty mess. For the "Slow Strum" sections, it really shines though.
If this last take is considered satisfactory, I will go to sleep, then wake up and see about hammering on vocaloid.
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Reading online, Vocaloid has an "import midi" feature.
So, I guess I could do the voice track too? Pare down the source midi to JUST the false voice track, import it, and then put in the appropriate phonemes from the online lyrics.
I have Monday and Tuesday off. I will try to work on this then.
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The old media was just too janky. Too many bad sectors to correct.
New old stock zip 100s arrived though. Successfully copied over the IE6 update, msi update, WMP 9, the Odyssey client, an old version of daemon tools, and a handful of games.
New disks work just fine, but the parallel port zip drive is so painfully slow.
When the aironet 350 decides to show up, I can pull the 10+GB dosgame archive, and other useful stuff over.
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I think I can improve the percussion track more, and clean up the initial attack portion a bit as well.
I also found a neat rock guitar font that, with some note pruning, would make a good layering effect.
Still need cleanly rendered vocal track.
(Results like this could be had 'live' out of the tipi. It's why I keep mentioning it. Midi is a very simple format, but the pi could be a very versatile synthesizer module. 2 wires and a UDP listener/router, with instances of fluidsynth and mt32d, and you could have 5 diff synth stacks, all reachable at once, from the TI. More if you route external modules slapped on the pi via usb)
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Working with the midi file, I have cooked this potential "No vocals" track using about 5 different sound fonts, and muxing the results in audacity.
From what I can tell, it is not clipping the envelope. it does not sound quite like the original, but I dont have access to the original sound samples, so you get what you pay for.
The percussion channel is all kinds of... strange... in that midi. Rendering it out correctly has been.. DIfficult.
So, that just leaves nomico's vocaloid lyric track. Somebody familiar with vocaloid can do that one.
In theory, you can get the note and time data from the midi, out of track #8, and get the lyrics online.
(I suppose you could always... TRY... to use the speech synth instead... Vocaloid is basically just its grown up big sister.)
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Some days ago, I bought a 90s laptop. A Fujitsu Lifebook 420D, sporting 16mb of RAM, a neomagic 128 1mb video chip, with an ESS1876 sound chip.
Sadly, as a late 90s laptop, it has a passive matrix display, but that just adds to its charm.
It came without hard drive, battery or charging brick.
Over the past 2 weeks or so, I have been having trials and travail of getting it working. It predates USB, has no optical drive, and suffers the 8gb CHS limit.
To top it off, the diskette drive's rubber drive belt gave up the ghost.
I have so far:
Cobbled together a working kludge for the broken drive belt,after carefully slicing a PET water bottle, then VERY CAREFULLY stretching the resulting plastic ring until it was the correct diameter. I ordered some rubber drive belts, but none of them were a fit. The plastic ring is thin, but very tough, and already at basically maximum stretch. It is "sufficient" to drive the spindle, and allow the drive to operate, even if it is not proper. I looked up the actual diskette drive itself, and found that factory refurbished models are available for 35$ from Newegg. It's not important at this point though, as the ghetto kludged diskette drive is sufficiently functioning for me to have installed a 320gb hard drive I had laying around, install Ontrack DiskManager's DDO, and get a functional win98SE deployment loaded.
I dug around in my antique collection, and rounded up my old LPT based Iomega ZIP 100 drive. Sadly, the media is very old, and full of bad sectors. Surprisingly you can get NOS cheap on amazon, so I ordered some.
It has PCCIC PCMCIA card slots, so I hunted, and learned that a cisco aironet 350 is not only legit PCMCIA (and not cardbus! This unit predates cardbus, so bonafide PCMCIA is a must!), but can also do WPA. I will use the zip100 to get drivers for it, and the odyssey client installed, as well as shuttle over some other useful stuff prior to getting the wifi card installed.
I did test out a small handful of "fits on a floppy" dos games. Audio works like a champ.
The damaged media has been running dos scandisk for several hours, and should be "Ready" (ahem) to attempt data transfers as soon as I go home, while I wait for the NOS media to arrive tomorrow. The Aironet 350 is in shipping limbo at a postal processing center in indianna. Who knows when I will get it.
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That's what I use the whisker menu for. You manage/edit it with something like alacarte. (or, just use the start menu on windows)
No need to clutter the desktop. No need for a front end; you have an application launcher already.
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*shrug*
I kinda like the manual flexibility of essentially being able to define custom autoexec.bat right on the invocation line. It's not like I am having to type it every time. I also like not having a bunch of things installed that do the same things.To me, I can have a single DosBox deployment, (eg, a single folder containing all my DOS games), and a minimum number of .conf files to contend with. This is not the case, with say-- WINE containers, which each have their own baked in registry, dependencies, et al, and thus have a bonafide NEED for a manager, like Lutris.
I have just a handful of .conf files that establish keymaps for joysticks, and set up the midi device chain for GM synth to be properly routed (to MUNT for MT32 games, and to FluidSynth for GM games, for example), and the rest is all handled by the -c syntax entries. Processor clock with the cycles=XXX syntax, et al.
This has all the earmarks of a sysvinit vs systemd spat, but I personally prefer the manual method. I find it to be the most flexible, with the minimum install overhead.
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(mutters that you can just create shortcuts in windows / linux, which include the -c "foo" syntax. There is precisely zero need for any front end at all.)
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Games Beaten In 2022 (classic computing edition)
in Classic Computing Discussion
Posted
While not a classic dos game, I have beat the pants off Cultist Simulator about 3 times in the past week.