VileRancour wrote:

Ooh, looks (and sounds) top notch especially for its specs. Any info on this anywhere? Didn't quite 'get' the intro, for obvious reasons. 😀

I don't think there's much info about it on the net at all. I've seen tiny ads for it around 96 & 97 in Russian pc magazines lopped together with other Doka products.
Alexei Silaev made a bunch of games for Doka in the early to mid-90s before disappearing off the face of the planet. I think Doka put up one of his early games - a quirky adventure platformer Mick on their website as freeware years ago, but that page is long gone.
Anyway, Black Zone seems to be a spiritual successor to that. The gimmick here is that you need to program the machinery around you in order to progress. The exploration aspect of the game is no doubt inspired by the adventure platformers from the 8-bit computer era, probably the ones released on ZX Spectrum, which was a popular platform in Russia due to the abundance of 100% compatible Soviet knock-offs.
I actually have the game. Not the original release, but a later compilation of Doka games from the late 90s. The CD release has a 20 meg file full of audio samples that randomly play throughout the game and are extremely annoying. I doubt the original release of it, be it floppy or CD, survived.

EDIT:
I didn't show off the English translation because it's pretty awful

heh, somehow "inspired by 8-bit" sounds less phony when it's a mid-'90s title, as opposed to something current. And yeah, I was wondering about those random toilet-flush noises... no way to replace that stuff with silence, I assume?

This looks to be just the sort of 'endangered' game that's in urgent need of liberation/preservation. Too bad that publishers often seem to have zero interest in that (and sometimes the authors themselves, too).

Not DOS, but I recently posted a full playthrough (with commentary) of a rare English version of the 1997 Russian FMV adventure game GAG: The Impotent Mystery.
http://youtu.be/Jwd82QCrCZg

BUMP to announce a new episode of the DOS Nostalgia Podcast:
In this episode Jim "Trixter" Leonard takes us back in time to the early days of IBM PC. We discuss the birth of PC, its clones and notable games of the first decade of pc gaming. Jump into your Flux Capacitor equipped DeLorians!
http://www.dosnostalgia.com/?p=329

Anatoly wrote:

BUMP to announce a new episode of the DOS Nostalgia Podcast:
In this episode Jim "Trixter" Leonard takes us back in time to the early days of IBM PC. We discuss the birth of PC, its clones and notable games of the first decade of pc gaming. Jump into your Flux Capacitor equipped DeLorians!
http://www.dosnostalgia.com/?p=329

Nice! I'm getting it on youtube, but FYI dosnostalgia.com isn't working for me (keeps throwing "the connection to the server was reset while the page was loading").

I have recently participated in an episode of The Space Quest Historian, where I talk about Russian versions of adventure games from the 90s and rather unique circumstanced under which they appeared:
http://youtu.be/VBf_FAIKksY

Well, I finally decided to experiment with my video capturing and such. Here's some Wolf3D in 4:3. Please tell me if you guys have any issues with this video:
http://youtu.be/kL4jm5_2wvI

Anatoly wrote:

Well, I finally decided to experiment with my video capturing and such. Here's some Wolf3D in 4:3. Please tell me if you guys have any issues with this video:
http://youtu.be/kL4jm5_2wvI

Very nice!

What capture devices do you use and what software?

Looks good, though it appears that the vertical stretching is uneven (some scanlines are thicker than others). Not much of a problem with a game like wolf3d, but it would probably be more apparent with something else.
Here it's most apparent in areas such as this:

Oh is this just a DOSBox capture?

If so you can use OPENGL as output to avoid the uneven pixels. OPENGLNB will give you a sharper images, but some pixels will be stretched to fill two or four.

Oh, just saw the youtube reply. 😀 The native DOSBox recording function only saves the original resolution, so the output method (opengl/openglnb) won't matter.

Those unevenly stretched scanlines are due to the target dimensions when resizing -- "neighbor+full_chroma_inp" works best with pure integer multipliers. The source is 320x200, so I'd use 1280x800 (a simple factor of 4) instead of 1280x720.

(That may sound counter-intuitive, since youtube displays at 720p; but since you're forcing the aspect ratio, you're gonna get some slight blur/interpolation anyway -- sticking to an integer factor will just minimize the distortion.)

VileRancour wrote:

The source is 320x200, so I'd use 1280x800 (a simple factor of 4) instead of 1280x720.

Oh crap, you're right! I'll try doing that for the next video. Just a shame that youtube recompresses things so much. Awful artifacting, especially noticeable on the first screen with all the red in it.

But 1280 x 800 is widescreen again...

All you need to do is get your video editor to resize the video to a 4:3 aspect ratio and NOT use a nearest pixel algorithm.

I'm doing 4:3 in 1280 x 800. I want my pixels nice & chunky, so that's why.

I don't follow. 1280 x 800 IS a 16:10 aspect ratio and not 4:3. But maybe I misunderstand what's going on here 😀

I force the encoder to set a 4:3 ratio, thus generating a pillar boxed video.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I don't follow. 1280 x 800 IS a 16:10 aspect ratio and not 4:3. But maybe I misunderstand what's going on here 😀

That's the advantage of setting a custom "display aspect ratio" (-aspect 4:3 in ffmpeg) - the video stream can have a 16:10 resolution, but the container file tells the player to scale it to 4:3 during playback. So aspect correction is up to the player, instead of being a part of the lossy encoding process - the underlying pixel data is still nice and crisp.

Youtube will always mess around with things when it does its re-encoding, but I've had good results with this method. (sample: http://youtu.be/z3o1pTdsXr0)
For more info see the very last example at the bottom of this article: http://ingomar.wesp.name/2011/04/dosbox-gamep … eo-capture.html

I always have trouble with things that use different pixel-aspect ratios other than 1:1, so when I record footage for ADG, I upscale it myself to 640x480 when necessary, first from 320x200 to 640x400 without any filtering, then from 640x400 to 640x480 using filtering to give crisp-looking pixels... well, as far as 640x480 is concerned when stretched to fill someone's 1920x1080 monitor. :B

A new episode of the podcast is here!
A pixel art maestro extraordinaire Ben Chandler returns to discuss one of the most important, successful and amazing PC games of all time – the mighty DOOM (and also other games made with its revolutionary engine.)
http://www.dosnostalgia.com/?p=343

Only hours before this year's over, I managed to finish the 1st part of my showcase of games from 1993.
There are 27 games in this one, with 33 more coming withing the next couple of days.
Enjoy: http://youtu.be/qUnKBRkPvGg