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Vogons Video Announcement Thread

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Reply 240 of 390, by DracoNihil

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root42 wrote on 2020-07-31, 20:08:

So you want a Gravis Ultrasound?

https://youtu.be/c4S71ONxpOk

I'm curious, could you test this clone card with some of Unreal's soundtrack running inside of the last official release of Impulse Tracker? You might need a lot of RAM available on the card though.

There's also "Tyra" from Operation: Na Pali, which is 32 channels.

“I am the dragon without a name…”
― Κυνικός Δράκων

Reply 241 of 390, by xjas

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Coming up is a stream I've wanted to do for a LONG time: today we're digging into a long-lost collection of Dreamcast homebrew, ON REAL HARDWARE, via direct VGA capture! There's gonna be jank, there's gonna be glitches, there's gonna be stuff that straight up crashes - in other words, it'll be everything my stream is about all rolled into one thing! Tune in at https://twitch.tv/oldskooljay to join the fun! 😀 Going live in 15 minutes (7 PM PDT.)

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 242 of 390, by DracoNihil

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xjas wrote on 2020-08-05, 01:42:

digging into a long-lost collection of Dreamcast homebrew, ON REAL HARDWARE

I was too depressed and tired to have noticed the stream, I don't suppose you ever tried running Paranoia on your Dreamcast have you?

It's not as advanced as running on PC due to the PC using a custom OpenGL32.dll file to hook in shader support, but I think it's still the entire thing nonetheless.

“I am the dragon without a name…”
― Κυνικός Δράκων

Reply 243 of 390, by xjas

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DracoNihil wrote on 2020-08-05, 16:53:
xjas wrote on 2020-08-05, 01:42:

digging into a long-lost collection of Dreamcast homebrew, ON REAL HARDWARE

I was too depressed and tired to have noticed the stream, I don't suppose you ever tried running Paranoia on your Dreamcast have you?

It's not as advanced as running on PC due to the PC using a custom OpenGL32.dll file to hook in shader support, but I think it's still the entire thing nonetheless.

Ooh, thanks for the heads up! I think I might give this a try since I have the DC capture rig already set up. I ran across Paranoia when I was looking for Half-life mods a while ago, but somehow missed that it had a Dreamcast port - looks pretty cool. I haven't played it at all yet.

Let's see if I can get DiscJuggler to run nice on my Win7 rig - my XP box I burned the homebrew disc on is elsewhere at the moment.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 244 of 390, by DracoNihil

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xjas wrote on 2020-08-06, 18:55:

I ran across Paranoia when I was looking for Half-life mods a while ago, but somehow missed that it had a Dreamcast port - looks pretty cool. I haven't played it at all yet.

A word of caution, it's a very difficult mod that doesn't play completely identical to Half-Life's gameplay. There's a particular mechanic you NEED to pay maximum attention towards, which is the "Ballistic Face Plate". If you don't immediately flip it on when you encounter enemies with guns you will be dead in under three seconds.

Ammo is also scarce, your fall back knife might end up being the only thing to attack the monsters that show up.

“I am the dragon without a name…”
― Κυνικός Δράκων

Reply 245 of 390, by xjas

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Noted, thanks! Looks like my burn was good - nice to know I can do that on a "modern" PC. 😀 I'm messing around with the training level now, actually impressed with how well it seems to run.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 246 of 390, by DracoNihil

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xjas wrote on 2020-08-06, 19:20:

I'm messing around with the training level now, actually impressed with how well it seems to run.

I also hope you can read the subtitles good enough, the entire mod is Russian with English strings and on most videos the subtitles and text uses a very small font that looks as if it was made for 640x480 resolutions nominally. Though I imagine that's perfectly fine on the Dreamcast, it's not like you can run a Dreamcast at 1280x1024 or something.

“I am the dragon without a name…”
― Κυνικός Δράκων

Reply 247 of 390, by Godlike

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DracoNihil wrote on 2020-08-06, 19:14:
xjas wrote on 2020-08-06, 18:55:

I ran across Paranoia when I was looking for Half-life mods a while ago, but somehow missed that it had a Dreamcast port - looks pretty cool. I haven't played it at all yet.

A word of caution, it's a very difficult mod that doesn't play completely identical to Half-Life's gameplay. There's a particular mechanic you NEED to pay maximum attention towards, which is the "Ballistic Face Plate". If you don't immediately flip it on when you encounter enemies with guns you will be dead in under three seconds.

Ammo is also scarce, your fall back knife might end up being the only thing to attack the monsters that show up.

i finished Paranioa again yesterday. What a great mod! I had not enough because mod is too short or I got feelink like developers created such immersive world and all this custom assets scream for full size standalone expansion pack. Just like the Gunman Chronicles HL spin off. And also Dreamcast port looks different. there will be always some cool differences between old consoles and pc ported games. Thanks

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Reply 248 of 390, by DracoNihil

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Godlike wrote on 2020-08-06, 20:18:

What a great mod! I had not enough because mod is too short

Yeah it is a pretty short campaign, but "Quality over Quantity" rules the day here. Considering how the mod itself ends, it does leave room for a sequel but I'm not the devs (or a HL1 modder for that matter) so I'm not quite sure how that'd work out in the long run.

“I am the dragon without a name…”
― Κυνικός Δράκων

Reply 249 of 390, by xjas

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Welp, since this is the video announcement thread, it's happening tonight @ 7 PM PDT. 😈 https://twitch.tv/oldskooljay

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twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 250 of 390, by leileilol

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Also mind that most "mods" for DC HL are naive asset replacements under the guise of a "yeah!!! DC finally has <game>!!!" delusion. Let's hope Paranoia isn't one of those cases...

(also I checked the vod of the Inducer stream. A lot of the common "synthesizer"-sounding sounds come right out of The Games Factory (most likely the demo version that was available in 2000). Some of those cropped games might be using 320x240 (rare on DC, but some games, mainly some 2D fighters and a couple Capcom ports that refuse VGA out for this reason) and expecting composite only.

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Reply 251 of 390, by xjas

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Cool, thanks for checking out the last one! Don't worry, my expectations are in check. 😀

Going live now! Is it jank or is it good? Tune in to find out! https://twitch.tv/oldskooljay

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 252 of 390, by xjas

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leileilol wrote on 2020-08-07, 01:14:

Also mind that most "mods" for DC HL are naive asset replacements under the guise of a "yeah!!! DC finally has <game>!!!" delusion. Let's hope Paranoia isn't one of those cases...

So it turns out it's definitely mostly that. Apparently so much was cut from the PC version, it's really more of a de-make than a "port." None of the scripting was there, which makes sense as I don't think the modders had source-level access on the Dreamcast, and a lot of what was included didn't seem to work right. To top it off, it was buggy as shit, regularly corrupting its own savegames and at one point nearly hosing the laser on my poor console, god knows how. It straight up crashed with memory protection faults a bunch of times, and the frequent long loads weren't much fun either.

TO BE FAIR, the Dreamcast Half-life port was a leaked unreleased beta, and is known for having bugs & memory issues itself... I suspect the port was pushing the hardware just a little too hard & wouldn't have been release-able without a TON of further optimizations. They cancelled it for a reason after all. If the DC had ANY kind of capacity for virtual memory or a data cache, it might have helped a lot. I don't know how much of Paranoia's issues were due to HL itself being unfinished, but at least some of them were. The modders had to work with what they had.

That in mind, I'm genuinely impressed with how much they managed to get in - the custom models and environments are a lot more detailed than HL1, albeit making for shorter maps and way more of those long loading boundaries. Despite conversion to low-res textures, what's there looked pretty good. But I wouldn't call it "playable" all the way through in this state. The saving grace is the fact that the console is enabled and sv_cheats=1 was on by default, which means you can god-mode and noclip your way out of softlocks, or through most of the game, for that matter.

Seriously, though, that was absolutely my kind of jank - well recommended. 😜 It looked like a really cool conversion, but go check it out on PC rather than Dreamcast, unless you have a thing for broken glitchy homebrew like I do.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 253 of 390, by root42

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Let’s Code MS DOS 0x16: Fire Exclamation Mark!

It’s summer and it’s hot. And what better to code than another classic demo scene effect: the ubiquitous fire. But we will do it with a twist. The naive implementation is slow, very slow. Especially on older 286-486 computers. We will optimize the actual algorithm a bit and utilize a hidden VGA function that gives us scaling in the X-direction by a factor of 4 for free.

https://youtu.be/Hn-3_Q30lqs

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Reply 254 of 390, by root42

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Upgrading The VGA RAMDAC

The VGA cards for historic PCs have an analog video output that is being driven by a so called RAMDAC. This is an IC that converts the digital framebuffer information into analog VGA signals. Modern PCs don’t need this anymore since they use digital output (like HDMI and DisplayPort) and digital displays. But our old retro machines use this to drive either an LCD or a traditional CRT. There are good RAMDACs out there and bad ones. One problem some RAMDACs have is noise when the VGA palette registers are written. This happens in games and demos for example when the screen is fading in or out. I found a supplier of new old stock INMOS RAMDACs, and I hope that replacing the cheap ADV RAMDAC on my Tseng ET4000 will remove the noise that I am seeing.

https://youtu.be/9gROqRlejwA

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Reply 255 of 390, by root42

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Retro Burner: Refurbishing and Retrobriting the Galep III

I got an old Galep-III universal EPROM programmer from a friend. He couldn’t get the device to work under Windows 10, since it is quite old and uses the parallel port. This device is perfect for my 486! And since I just finished assembling an XT CF Lite card, I needed something to write its EEPROM with.
The device looks a bit aged, due to dirt and severe yellowing, so we will clean it and retrobrite it, to make it look like new. This is only my second attempt (after an experiment with my serial mouse), so let’s hope for the best!

https://youtu.be/EvXWxodLW8k

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Reply 256 of 390, by alsgeeklab

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Top ten games of 1990, video is here!
These were the top 10 DOS games of the year 1990. Watch with me as I review them all and tell you why they are awesome!
1990 was a year of two halves to me. 256 Colour VGA was in, EGA, CGA and MDA felt like a thing of the past, almost overnight. FM Synth in Adlib was the norm and slicker gameplay, with the introduction of many 3D games was welcoming in the new decade.

https://youtu.be/jBaZHJpD9NE

Al's Geeek Lab - The YouTube channel for retro reviews, tech topics, informative infosec and other geeky goodness!
https://www.youtube.com/alsgeeklab
Social Media: https://linktr.ee/alsgeeklab

Reply 257 of 390, by root42

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Let's Code MS DOS 0x17: Come On Let's Twist

One ubiquitous demo effect that can be seen on a wide variety of demos and intros is the twister or the twister bar. There are numerous examples in productions for the Amiga, Atari ST and 2600 that I know of (and even at least one on the Sega Master System). And probably a lot more that I don’t know. However I have never seen this effect in any of the old PC demos, except maybe in Future Crew’s PANIC, where something very similar was used for the vertical scrolling greetings. But it was not quite the same still. So today we will code a variant of the twister using Turbo C for MS DOS!

https://youtu.be/yQe4heKm-Rg

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Reply 258 of 390, by root42

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Let's Solder: XT CF Lite v4

Tomorrow at 18:30 UTC (20:30 CEST) I will live stream soldering of the XT CF Lite card, a popular expansion for XT (and AT) class machines, to get support for large CF disks.

https://youtu.be/9rHEI5Rp5fQ

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80486DX@33 MHz, 16 MiB RAM, Tseng ET4000 1 MiB, SnarkBarker & GUSar Lite, PC MIDI Card+X2+SC55+MT32, OSSC

Reply 259 of 390, by Whiskey

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Just posted some Highlights from my 'Retro Game Wednesday' stream where I play what I fancy or draw from a pool of recommendations.
I stream DOS / 98 / XP games every Wednesday 12pm to 6pm GMT (It's just for fun!) - twitch.tv/whiskey_juliet

Gameplay Highlights on Youtube - Most Recent

RECOIL 1999 (Glide)
Future Cop LAPD 1998 (Glide)
Final Fantasy VII (D3D) 1998

Some older Highlights

Discworld (DOS) 1995 ACT I - ACT II
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (D3D) 2002
Wing Commander Prophecy (OpenGL) 1997
System Shock (DOS) 1994
Bandits: Phoenix Rising (D3D) 2003
Lemmings (DOS) 1991

Last edited by Whiskey on 2020-09-24, 20:41. Edited 1 time in total.

I stream retro games every wednesday here & I dump the recordings here