Gemini000: great music, I have had a thing for tracker music for quite a while, so thank you so much for giving quite a few people the pleasure of enjoying your music 😀 And I actually know a guy who calls himself (as an artist) dubqnd (pronounced dubdub). And he started out on fasttracker 2, which is cool 😀

Gemini000 wrote:

The Gecko wrote:

LAME doesn't work for you?

It works perfectly fine... so long as I'm making any other kind of file EXCEPT MP3s. >_>;;;

... ?
LAME is an MP3 library. All it does is encode MP3 files. If you're encoding any other kind of file, you're not using LAME.

Gemini000 wrote:

Or to be more specific, every program I have that can access LAME either won't for stupid reasons, or lacks MP3 export support.

http://lame.sourceforge.net/links.php

Foobar2000 (which I can't praise enough) will do this as well.

Gemini000 wrote:

I haven't used Winamp in awhile since I noticed discrepancies in its module playback, but that was ages ago, plus, playing back […]
Show full quote

I haven't used Winamp in awhile since I noticed discrepancies in its module playback, but that was ages ago, plus, playing back WAV files through it should sound perfectly fine...

...so... I have an idea:

1. Get Winamp.
2. Record my music as WAV the way I currently do.
3. Convert to MP3 using Winamp.

*shrugs* Worth a shot.

That should work perfectly fine. If the problem is in the Winamp's .IT decoder, then this method bypasses that decoder entirely. Since I haven't used winamp in forever, I can't say if it bypasses the DSP, equaliser, etc. - if you want to be absolutely, completely sure you're encoding an unadulterated copy of the WAV file, I'd still stick to a proper encoder.

on the Amulets front, I found a clean v1.0 demo archive and have uploaded it. Dates to October 1996. You might be interested in that since there's a few graphical changes, store changes and the character saving is a bit different (now you HAVE to rest in the inn)

leileilol wrote:

on the Amulets front, I found a clean v1.0 demo archive and have uploaded it.

Little known fact: When I did my A&A shareware review on ADG, I had actually gotten all the footage in an older v1.0 copy with MIDI music. Then, late on my scriptwriting day, I decided to take a quick look at v1.2, figuring there wouldn't be many changes... >_>;;;;;;;;;;;;;

I only played for about 5 minutes before realizing I really should be looking at that version... so I stayed up past when I wanted to go to bed capturing all new footage. :P

Ancient DOS Games Filler #26 - Season 3 Update is online!

VERY quick filler video this week just to let everyone know how Season 3 is going to work and to provide a hint for Episode 101, debuting Saturday, January 5th...

...provided the world doesn't end within the next four hours. ;D

Incidentally, there've been no correct guesses for the 101st episode of ADG yet, so here's an additional Super Secret Special New Years Hint for all you VOGONSers to go with the first hint I gave in my filler last weekend:

"Lasers"

Remember to send in guesses to my ADG eMail address if you want a chance to make the credits.

Happy New Years, everyone! :D

Season 3 of Ancient DOS Games has begun! :D

To kick things off, the newest episode is online: Episode 101 - Descent II

I fiddled with the format a little to divy things up better between my descriptions of everything and to cut down on awkward transitions. Plus, the most common complaint I ever had about the first couple seasons was the ticker bar, so now it disappears after the first few sentences, leaving nothing but a faded watermark behind for most of the episode, and returns at the very end to help bookend everything. :)

The new special effects for all the on-screen stuff happen very quickly so if your framerate is terrible they'll just look like white flashes. *shrugs* Ah well.

Also, one piece of REALLY good news: Blip FINALLY has an app available for Android users! Android support with Blip has been historically iffy, but now that they have an official solution to those problems should finally be gone for good. :)

Great one Gemini!

To be "that guy", GOG doesn't use the name "Good Old Games" any more. It's just "gog".

Also, have you considered mentioning what 3D accelerators various games officially support? Descent 2 supports S3, Rendition, and 3Dfx using official patches from Parallax.

To be "that guy", GOG doesn't use the name "Good Old Games" any more. It's just "gog".

It's still an acronym for "Good Old Games", just like KFC is still an acronym for "Kentucky Fried Chicken". ;)

Also, have you considered mentioning what 3D accelerators various games officially support? Descent 2 supports S3, Rendition, and 3Dfx using official patches from Parallax.

It was hard to find detailed information about the hardware accelerated versions, other than their existence, which is why I didn't mention them. It's not like the game needs hardware acceleration though. As per the thread going on right now for well optimized games in the Milliways, Descent II is one of the most optimized games ever released for DOS! ;)

Great video and I'm amazed that you keep pumping these out so fast but still maintain such a polished and high standard.

The accelerated versions do make the game a bit nicer, particularly in the lighting department. The new source ports do all that stuff now, but the accelerated versions did it "back in the day", which is cool.

I can't possibly agree more about the nerfed music tracks in later re-releases of the game. The Skinny Puppy and Type O Negative tracks were the absolute bomb. The instrumental version of "Haunted" is just marvellous.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I'm amazed that you keep pumping these out so fast but still maintain such a polished and high standard.

A big part of that is previous video editing experience while I was in high school. I actually still have, sitting at the bottom of my bookshelf beside me right now, a VHS tape I made with a 23-minute-long fractal presentation that resulted from that experience, rendered frame by frame from a 100 MHz system. ;)

Mind you, it has no sound and music so it's a bit boring, plus my "facts" were mostly made-up. XD

Believe it or not, it only took 3 hours to edit together Episode 101 once I had all the elements made. It took about 3 hours to make the image elements since I had yet to really decide on how I wanted to do the Season 3 stuff, audio editing was about 1 hour, audio recording was a half hour, the new sound effects took two hours...

Gameplay, script writing, rendering, and codec conversions take up the vast majority of the time needed to produce an episode.

SquallStrife wrote:

I can't possibly agree more about the nerfed music tracks in later re-releases of the game. The Skinny Puppy and Type O Negative tracks were the absolute bomb. The instrumental version of "Haunted" is just marvellous.

I'm actually not a big fan of either of the Skinny Puppy tracks. I can tolerate #4 "Glut" but I can't stand #7 "Ratzez", it's just too random for me and I don't like it when my game music has lyrics in it. x_x;

My favourite Descent 2 music track is, believe it or not, #6 "Cold Reality", closely followed by both #8 "Crush" and #11 "Are You Descent?" ;)

EDIT: ...waitaminute... *checks something*

...there's supposed to be an extended remix of "Cold Reality" with the Infinite Abyss version of Descent II, which is what the GOG release is supposedly based on, but it's MISSING from the GOG release! D:

Yeah! Cold Reality is made of awesome!

Edit: You deleted your extra stuff, so this post didn't make sense any more.

SquallStrife wrote:

Edit: You deleted your extra stuff, so this post didn't make sense any more.

VOGONS lacks strikeout support. (At least, AFAIK.)

I realized that the missing space between tracks 1 and 2 was just directory/file information. :P

I recall a few times when the Thief-Bot stole a key then escaped into the area it unlocks. I had to guard the door waiting for the thief to open it again.

SKARDAVNELNATE wrote:

I recall a few times when the Thief-Bot stole a key then escaped into the area it unlocks. I had to guard the door waiting for the the thief to open it again.

Thats actually pretty awesome. 🤣 🤣

Shame they cant do that in today's games. You forget how spoiled by the easy games of today until you load up one from the 90's.

Gemini000 wrote:

it's just too random for me and I don't like it when my game music has lyrics in it. x_x;

especially if the lyrics states "you're fucking retarded". what's that doing in a planetary mining simulation

I'd think X-MEN Ravages of Apocalypse has a much bigger music dissonance.

luckybob wrote:

Shame they cant do that in today's games. You forget how spoiled by the easy games of today until you load up one from the 90's.

Actually, the main reason enemies in Descent II can navigate around so easily is because of the way the levels are designed.

Every level in Descent and Descent II is made up of cubes! :O

Mind you, 95% of the time the cubes have been distorted into other shapes like trapezoids and whatnot, but what it comes down to is that every area is made up of interconnected, 6-sided shapes. As a result, to determine how to get to something from where you are, you just need to iterrate through the cubes from one to another. The rendering engine works much the same way and is why it can handle drawing as much as it does on relatively low-powered systems. ;)