Ancient DOS Games Episode 139 - Rise of the Triad is online!

Funny thing: I'm not really a big fan of this game. I find it's a decent game I just always have trouble really getting into it for whatever reason and I've never been able to quite figure out why. Could be the difficulty coupled with the downright evil level designs, but I'm not sure that's entirely it. :P

Actually, while getting this episode put together I noticed that there's no cooperative multiplayer support... Very unusual for a multiplayer-capable first-person game of the time. :o

...also crashed the game twice thanks to god mode powerups, though I wasn't able to reproduce the crashes following so I'm wondering what even triggered them. *shrugs*

11 players in multiplayer mode is a reference to This is Spinal Tap.

Calvero wrote:

11 players in multiplayer mode is a reference to This is Spinal Tap.

I was inclined to believe that at first, but the manual does make mention to memory limitations, plus there's no co-op gameplay for likely similar reasons, so I'm not 100% certain... unless you can provide a link to one of the devs specifically stating that this was a reference to Spinal Tap. :P

The Apogee Legacy #20 - Joe Siegler:

6) Is there any story/incident that stands out as interesting during your time associated with Apogee?
...
the story of losing to an inanimate object in ROTT deathmatch comes to mind. Back then, ROTT had a record for allowing 11 people to play at once in a deathmatch game. Doom was the king of deathmatch, but it was limited with the number of players. With all due respect to Spinal Tap, Rott "Went to 11", and when we were testing deathmatch we didn't always have that many people to play. So we'd fire up ROTT on other computers, and stick down the fire button, so that player would at least be doing something, if not actually "playing". The sad part of this is that we used coffee cups on a lot of the computer keyboards to wedge down the fire button. More than once, one of the coffee cups managed to win the game. I've been accused of not being very good at deathmatch games, but losing to a friggin coffee cup is rather embarrassing.

...neeeeeh... that proves they knew of Spinal Tap and their volume ramping to 11, but the way that's worded still doesn't prove they intentionally set their multiplayer limit to pay tribute in that way. (Though I wouldn't put it past them considering everything else about Rise of the Triad.)

I guess I should add SOMETHING to the additional information section for the video all the same. :B

One thing I remember about this game, is that the FM music sounds completely different between versions 1.2 and 1.3 - For some reason they changed the FM timbres between releases.

I remember this because I originally had the shareware version 1.2 and later I bought the boxed registered version, in a pack with Extreme ROTT, which was 1.3. I only had a sound blaster compatible at the time so I was playing with FM music. I don't believe the MIDI was affected.

One notable fact about Rise of the Triad is that it's one of the first FPSs to feature rocket jumping, as well as dual-weilded pistols. Coincidentally, the shareware version of ROTT was released the same day as Marathon, which also featured rocket jumping and dual-weilded pistols. I don't know which game was the first to have those features incorporated during development, though.

Another interesting factoid, the shareware version actually features a completely different set of levels than the full version. The full version still includes the shareware levels, but as a seperate map pack.

Calvero wrote:

The Apogee Legacy #20 - Joe Siegler:

Your post made me discover those amazing interviews I wasn't aware of until now, thanks! 😀

Ancient DOS Games Episode 140 - Castle Master is online!

Wow... 10 more episodes to go to reach 150... It's crazy to think I've been doing this for four years now...

Musings of moving on to other things are way passed though. With the amount of support so many of you have been showing me lately I have no reason to leave ADG behind for anything else. Sure, it'll probably never be as super-popular as something like AVGN, especially since I'm not going the comedy route, but then that's why I have other projects on the side and why I only do three videos a month.

I actually recently had an eMail from someone trying to put their own video review together having been inspired by my videos and the last thing they said in the eMail was that it was a lot harder to do than it looked. The funny thing is, having done it for years now it doesn't feel hard anymore, even though I know experience is what's helping me through any difficulties I encounter. A great example of this was with today's episode, actually. I had to lay in a voice track I recorded along with a certain portion of gameplay, but when I went to sync the gameplay and voicetrack together I discovered that they were incredibly out of sync. Rather than lay in a completely new voice or gameplay track, I simply stretched some of the video timing where there was silence in the gameplay. Since the framerate in the game was already bad in that section it's extremely hard (nearly impossible) to notice I did this. :)

Practice makes perfect. If you compare my latest ADG episodes to my earliest ones, it's no contest which are superior in quality! ;)

Blip just doesn't seem to wanna play for me anymore on chrome in windows even when enabling all cookies and without blockers and what not. Seems to play on android though

Harekiet wrote:

Blip just doesn't seem to wanna play for me anymore on chrome in windows even when enabling all cookies and without blockers and what not. Seems to play on android though

Do the videos play back fine from http://blip.tv/adg ?

If not, what about with other browsers like IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.?

It could simply be there's some kind of bug with Chrome playback at the moment that needs to be fixed, in which case it'd be good to let the guys at Blip know something's up and the more info about the issue we can figure out the easier and faster it'll be for them to solve it. :B

It plays in firefox after I installed the regular flash plugin, chrome still won't work then.

Greetings, new member here, although i was a lurker for some time. Also, love your videos, keep it up 😀

Anyway, about Castle Master, i'd like to say that although i do like all these old 3D solid color/low poly graphics, my major issue with them is the v-sync issues. I have some other games with similar graphics running on Dos Box and i don't remember any of them not having awful screen tearing issues. I wonder if thats how they looked on their original hardware or its just a Dos Box issue. Because, frankly, i don't have problem with the graphics/aesthetics but the screen tearing is unbearable for me. And Castle Master's screen tearing seems to be the worst i have ever seen so far, judging from the video at least.

Imgema wrote:

Greetings, new member here, although i was a lurker for some time. Also, love your videos, keep it up :happy:

Anyway, about Castle Master, i'd like to say that although i do like all these old 3D solid color/low poly graphics, my major issue with them is the v-sync issues. I have some other games with similar graphics running on Dos Box and i don't remember any of them not having awful screen tearing issues. I wonder if thats how they looked on their original hardware or its just a Dos Box issue. Because, frankly, i don't have problem with the graphics/aesthetics but the screen tearing is unbearable for me. And Castle Master's screen tearing seems to be the worst i have ever seen so far, judging from the video at least.

It's an issue on the real hardware too, though made slightly less noticeable by the slower response times of old CRTs... which thus increases the amount of ghosting on them compared to modern displays. :P

Many old 3D games on the PC (actually, many old PC games in general) don't do any vertical retrace syncing. In some cases the hardware simply couldn't support it, while in other cases choosing to vsync would've cut the framerate down even further than it already was due to the amount of data being pushed for rendering. Memory and CPU time were often at a premium so many developers took shortcuts to improve draw time and framerate. This often meant bypassing syncing and drawing directly to the screen surface as opposed to buffering everything and copying the buffer to the screen in a single memory operation. The advent of VGA made possible the storage of video data directly in video memory as well as "scrolling" the screen coordinates across this virtual screen space, and thus page flipping was born.

Anything pre-VGA though with 3D graphics is pretty much guaranteed to have flicker of some kind, some games worse than others. :P

Gemini000 wrote:

The advent of VGA made possible the storage of video data directly in video memory as well as "scrolling" the screen coordinates across this virtual screen space, and thus page flipping was born.

Anything pre-VGA though with 3D graphics is pretty much guaranteed to have flicker of some kind, some games worse than others. 😜

Actually, even a basic EGA with 64 kB of video memory could do at least two pages at 320×200 with 16 colours and allowed hardware scrolling with pixel precision, and 256 kB quickly became the standard.

For a good demonstration of what you can do with this, consider Carmack's Adaptive tile refresh technique as used in e.g. the Commander Keen series.

Novus wrote:

Actually, even a basic EGA with 64 kB of video memory could do at least two pages at 320×200 with 16 colours and allowed hardware scrolling with pixel precision, and 256 kB quickly became the standard.

Oh yeah... duh, I've even done this in my own games! XD

So... what the heck was I thinking about then? I was sure there was something VGA could do that EGA couldn't beyond palette customization and video timing programming and for some reason I thought the video paging was it until you refreshed my memory Novus... *shrugs*

Glad that you enjoyed Castle Master! It'll be interesting to see your opinion of the third game I sent.

I'm quite fond of CM's low-polygon graphics, though it's funny to think that Under a Killing Moon came out just four years later. I'm impressed that some versions of the game could be loaded from just a cassette tape.

Perhaps for a filler episode, sometime, you could cover a good Atari 2600 game. The aforementioned Solaris is a good recommendation, if you have it. 😀

RadioPoultry wrote:

Perhaps for a filler episode, sometime, you could cover a good Atari 2600 game. The aforementioned Solaris is a good recommendation, if you have it.

If I ever cover good Atari 2600 games in a filler it would obviously have to be my favourites first, and Solaris is not one of them. (Which isn't to say it's bad as it's definitely one of the more elaborate 2600 titles. :B )

Most of my favourites are actually Activision titles, such as Pressure Cooker and Megamania. ;)

Ancient DOS Games Filler #39 - Windows 3.1 Games is online... though the quality is poor at the moment due to a lack of an HD conversion. Apparently the Blip system doesn't properly detect resolutions above 640x480 yet below 1280x720. I've asked them to force an HD conversion and to take stuff like this into account automatically in the future, though it may be a couple days before they actually do it. The drawback to releasing videos right at the start of Saturday is that if I run into technical problems they typically don't get sorted out until Monday. :P

But yeah, Windows 3.1 games! Really, the title speaks for itself and I'm dead tired right now so I'm just gonna leave it at that. Feel free to watch it now with the blurry down-conversion to 640x480, or wait until late Monday by which point this should be sorted out. :B

Softkey shovelware should be a filler, especially that very multilingual multi-voiced one.