Well, I can be found at twitch.tv/kynikossdragonn but I can only stream around midnight Central Time because my parents must be asleep and everything but this PC must be the only things online on the network, otherwise I just drop 90% frames.

I had just finished a entire run of Gunmetal (1998) which I had streamed way back in 2014 when I first got the game. Though, this had to be done through Wine with a partially hex-edited GunDX which solves only part of the timing problems, I need someone to further reverse engineer and debug the game to come up with a further hex edit patch that fixes all the timing problems entirely.

I guess I'll resurrect this thread instead of spamming the other one. I'm gonna try to do a semi regular streaming thing for the next little while. I don't have a 100% set schedule yet, but it'll be starting around 12PM PDT tomorrow (maybe a little later depending on how long it takes me to get set up - will announce here again just before the stream starts.) If this time works I'll keep it up every couple days, otherwise I can change the time slot.

Expect lots of indie games & homebrew (DOS, Win9x, consoles, "modern") including some stuff the internet has never seen before, from hardware via VGA capture if I can get my stupid capture card working. I have controller cams too. There will be absolutely no streaming of indentured servitude to urban trash bear simulators, in case you were wondering about that. 😜

As always, I'm found on https://twitch.tv/oldskooljay . Feel free to follow if you want Twitch notifications, but no obligation. Hope to see you there!

Going live in ~15 min. 😀 Today we're playing a (sort of) forgotten DOS super metroid clone.

Unfortunately my capture card is giving me no end of issues, so we're emulating it. Should be a good time anyway.

I think you'll get a real kick out of Sinaria when you see it, especially the sprites it uses... If you thought Vigilance on Talos V was a blatant ripoff, Sinaria is worse.

That was fun! Thanks for stopping in. Sorry about all the plosives coming from the mic, I must have adjusted the 'boom' without thinking & didn't realize it was picking them up. I'll have it positioned better next time.

DracoNihil wrote on 2020-03-31, 21:19:

I think you'll get a real kick out of Sinaria when you see it, especially the sprites it uses... If you thought Vigilance on Talos V was a blatant ripoff, Sinaria is worse.

Nice, definitely putting it on the list to check out. Talos V was good fun even if I got kinda mad at the level design at the end. 😜 Honestly, if it had save-anywhere I probably would have gotten a lot farther in.

Next stream will most likely be edit: on Friday, around the same time (starting around 1:00 PDT). I'll announce it here.

Edit: thursday stream delayed to friday, on account of me having to do something that absolutely, non-negotiably involves leaving the apartment & going outside. See you guys tomorrow. 😜

Stream will start in 1 hour, at 3:00 PDT. Today we're playing a staple of every BBS download section ever, and a very early example of what today would be described as a 'ROM hack' ... on the wrong platform. Also, we have maps, cheats, and savestates now. 😜 See you there.

https://twitch.tv/oldskooljay

Special bonus stream today: DracoNihil & I are playing an RPG mod to a '90s cult classic that I've never played before. Should be good fun! Tune in at the link above. 😀

Please forgive how massively WIP the mod is in it's current state. It's going to be a long process to really flesh it all out and fix all the outstanding problems.

If you're curious to see the current generation of JeremyIron's RPG mod though, install the "Tribes RePack" from phantom's website at http://tribesrpg.org and try his server out. It's way more advanced and feature rich over RMRPG in it's current state. It also is based on JeremyIron's mod rather than a completely different offshoot.

what would it take for such a thing to be semi watchable on a medium speed 286? live of course

^^ You'd need a modern PC that connects to the stream host (twitch/youtube/etc.), grabs the video feed, transcodes it on the fly into a streamable variant of Trixter's XDC "codec", and sends it on over the network in a packet form your 286 can decode & execute locally. I'd think a decent 10mbit ISA NIC would have enough bandwidth to handle XDC (given it's designed to run off a glacially slow 8088-era MFM HDD), but the transcoder PC running in the middle would be doing a lot of processing on the fly.

XDC is open source, so if you wanna write the transcoder & network protocol, I'd love to see it.

it says there, if i got this right, that executing specialized code per frame is faster than just transferring a set of ascii characters and ascii character changes(for more accurate shapes)? a screen is 1k chars, changes may be some additional 100chars per frame max (it can be done without character changes too, there is ascii video player somewhere on the nets i believe); that times 30 + sound should be harder than executing extra code?

Who's up for an early '90s space strategy game for which the only footage on youtube is done wrong? Today we're playing Stelcon 2469 multiplayer with a guest. Should be a good time!

Online in 20 mins or so. Tune in at https://twitch.tv/oldskooljay 😀

Edit: that was fun! Haven't played that properly multiplayer in about 15 years. Surprisingly less broken than I thought it'd be, but there are definitely balance issues & the AI cheats like a nutsack. What oldschool strategy game doesn't have those 'features' though? The second playthrough we did in " 'sploit mode" was still suspiciously difficult. As usual, the recorded stream is online for posterity (well, the next couple weeks)

Incidentally, yeah I'm back at it. I took a little break to learn some of the games I'm planning to cover instead of just YOLO-ing them, so hopefully the gameplay will be tighter for the next bunch of streams.

I've decided to make Tuesday & Thursday @ 1 PM~ish PDT my regular streaming time, at least while I'm still freelancing from home & don't have a day job. 😜 There might be some gaps where I can't make it on during those periods, but it's a good time to check in. I might go on other times too. As always, I'll announce here.

I was really hoping for some more of you guys to jump in - I'd love to get a little side-community of streamers going here. If you've been looking to try it out for yourself, now is an excellent time to throw your hat in the ring! We're all sitting at home anyway. You don't need any fancy setup or even a webcam - just pick a game & start.

Tomorrow at 1 PDT, I've got a trio of top-down indie games lined up from pretty early in the indie era. In keeping with the current theme, two are space games and one is a very space-y game. Should be a good time!

Twitch link is all over this thread & in my sig now too. 😀

Welp, that was fun. Today's stream turned out pretty much how I wanted these to go when I started the series, in terms of tighter gameplay (not going in completely blind), spending the right amount of time on each game, and ironing out the technical details beforehand. We played Strange Adventures in Infinite Space (which is an absolute gem!), Plasmaworm, and Starscape. All of those are worth checking out! Would've loved a few more people hanging out in the chat, but a couple IRL friends of mine stopped in so that was cool.

As usual, you can watch the archived broadcast for the next 14 days if you missed the fun, although I'll probably end up clipping most of it as a highlight so it stays "forever." Not sure how long I can keep doing that before they start making me take some of them down. Definitely shoot me some feedback if you like or dislike the format!

Incidentally, I made a mistake when I mentioned the composer for Starscape - it was Nick Tidy aka Ethnicrobot. He sadly passed away in 2004 but his website is still there to check out. Unfortunately this makes getting our hands on a high-quality OST for the game even more difficult, since the dev studio seems to have shutdown too. God only knows who's getting the cash from Steam purchases these days...

Thursday @ 1 PDT we'll be continuing this little exploration into forgotten space games, but I think it'll be a selection of 1st person flight style ones. One of them I want to cover was in development for almost 18 years. 😉

Ironed out the lineup a bit more. 😀 Today we're exploring a couple abandoned universes that had a ton of work put into them over the years, including one which was only ever really meant to be played by the creator himself. Honestly with the current theme of isolation and remoteness, it's almost topical. If that sounds a bit too melancholy I'll try to switch it up with a run of Everspace, which is decidedly not empty, depending on time.

I'm also going to revisit Plasmaworm ever-so-briefly for something really cool that I didn't even know about until yesterday. Otherwise I definitely would've shown it off on Tuesday.

Going live at 1 PDT! (EDIT: in ~15 mins!)

Geez. Catching up on that RPG stream makes me miss the old 3.x days of 2000. There were way less vortigaunt noises and more splats and ughs and you didn't get stuck in conversation as well as some fun weight exploits IIRC

leileilol wrote on 2020-04-18, 01:56:

Geez. Catching up on that RPG stream makes me miss the old 3.x days of 2000. There were way less vortigaunt noises and more splats and ughs and you didn't get stuck in conversation as well as some fun weight exploits IIRC

The conversation system in RMRPG is really jank custom GUI code written specifically for RMRPG's fork. I don't understand DarkStar's GUI system to know how to properly fix this up. I'm pretty sure a lot of the problems happening on xjas's end are due to packet loss, because we're both using identical scripts. (Except the installer he used for the game seemed to have packed in Presto pack and that started conflicting with everything)

JeremyIrons RPG mod didn't have any custom GUI's assosciated with it, and yeah I do miss the old version of RPG that had just "grunt1" / "grunt2"/ "grunt3" and "swordhit1" sounds for literally everything.

@leilei - thanks for checking it out! It was super interesting to explore even if the mod isn't the most polished thing in the world. I didn't have any experience with Tribes or its modding scene going in, so that was something completely new to me, which I love doing. (I actually highlighted the whole thing before it fell off the page, so it's still there.) BTW I think I FINALLY have the issues with my capture card sorted out so (a) I can stream from real hardware now, and (b) I can finally get you those Dreamcast screenshots I promised like a month ago. Sorry for the delay!

@DracoNihil - would love to have you back on for another game. 😀 Most of the stuff I have in the queue is single-player for now, but I'm always open to ideas.

So... I really wasn't happy with the quality of last Thursday's episode. I messed with the audio settings just before going live (notably the gain & noise gate on the mic) which caused it to be really choppy and lose some of my voice when I wasn't loud enough. But I also think "full motion" games like Everspace with a ton of stuff going on are a little too much for my upload pipe and the video quality suffered too. It's kind of a shame, since Parsec & Crystal Pixels were both ones I wanted to cover since I started the series, but is what it is. Maybe I can revisit them in the future. Anyway if that stream was a little hard to watch, I'm working to do better.

I think "tomorrow's" (today's) stream might be delayed seeing as it's 5AM and I haven't gone to bed yet, and I'm not quite ready to take on the "big" game I was intending to do. I might just do a super casual episode with some indie games that amuse me, at least one of which has long fallen off the internet. Should be a good time if you're into that!

Do you guys prefer I announce the games ahead of time or would you rather just jump in & be surprised? I don't usually pick what I'm gonna play more than a day beforehand.