[EDIT] Well.... Some <expletive> seems to have changed the language either on this machine, or this browser, to default to Japanese. And, because it's in Japanese, I of course can't figure out how to change it back to English. I'm mildly perturbed.... If I were to guess, I have an idea of who it could be. There's a kid who, almost every time I've been to the library, is on this computer, playing some online game. He *more* than perturbs me, as he seems to have figured out how to disable the timer on the computers, so he spends hours and hours (I've been here 5+ hours, and he was here the entire time, on the same computer) without ever being booted off because there's people waiting in line to get on the computers. Bah.....[/EDIT]
Is it a device that allows you to "upload" a SPC to a SNES soundboard? Or is it something else? It certainly looks interesting, and although I certainly can't afford it, I'd like to know more about it. Mouser X over and out.
edited 5:14 PM EST February 11, 2013
I had forgotten about the people who made Touhou music on an SNES. Um, let's see...they had a site where you could download SPCs...oh, hello.
http://picopicose.com/
http://picopicose.com/c80.html
http://picopicose.com/software.html
Because it's Touhou, you can of course find a thousand places to download the actual album.
See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YCuNTD_pk4
Or: http://gimic.jp/index.php?Getting%20Started%20with%20GIMIC
Now how does of any of this work? I don't know! Ahaha....well, you guys don't need me to explain things you understand better than I do.
It reminds me of how I have to investigate those Romancing SaGa 3 hacks which add music via MML:
-Written Invitation to Death
-Wicked Melody
-Divine Battle (DS version)
-Some Touhou
-Some more Touhou
-Still more Touhou
-Yes, it's Touhou
etc.
edited 6:37 PM EST February 11, 2013
Line editor
Transformation matrix
Geometry
I got a high score on the Battlezone cabinet at the Museum of the Moving Image one day during Indiecade East, not that it's much but it's the best I've done (both of the top scores are me).
---
"Another vital action is to design video tools that not only shed light on what learners are doing, but also on what learning researchers are doing when using video. That is, researchers need to reflect on the reflections of their framing in a reflexive and, if possible, a critical manner." ARGHBLE
edited 8:28 PM EST March 2, 2013
edited 12:11 AM EDT March 14, 2013
In detail: It is a site with games and apps that run in-browser and invite you to edit them in-browser. And lets you develop extensions to the editor in-browser. Whee!
I'll just leave this here
edited 11:34 PM EDT March 27, 2013
Lest I forget to ask, are you okay with bandwidth usage from pmh so far? Do you foresee any problems with both NDS/PSP sets (~20/70 GB) and eventual cmh start (~100 GB for all systems)?
//EDIT
Of course those values above are system totals. 4 new sets added daily will not get larger than... 1 GB in the worst case scenario.
edited 8:08 AM EDT March 29, 2013
Super-basic raytracer in JavaScript, using web workers for multithreading. (blah)
edited 4:57 PM EDT April 14, 2013
Noisechan & Nugget: Adventures in Chiptunes
we put together this album for Child's Play Charity. it's made over $1,000 so far! though it's pay what you want, so you can have it for free too! has some great artists on it - virt, coda, Fear of Dark, hally, others you may or may not know, and yours truly ;3
My latest mess: A realtime-ish JS raytracer with noise
Don't look too closely or you'll see
a) supersampling artifacts (esp. in the clouds)
b) jaggies to hell and back due to no antialiasing
But it runs pretty nice on Chrome and FF.
edit: thanks for the purchase Knurek ;>
edited 8:57 AM EDT June 7, 2013
Thanks to SubDrag's N64SoundListTool I have pretty much the sounds needed to get started with the whole thing, and right now I'm wondering if I should replace the UT99 hud with GoldenEye64's hud...
no, I have no money, I sell my body cheap though an eye, a liver...heh.
From what I've heard of the first disc it's great!
According to Google, no one else has a problem.
Price to replace this is about $30~...
I'm contemplating when I get my replacement harddrive in the mail should I continue using Windows 7, or move back into Linux where 99% of the things I use work flawlessly.
I'm spending my time now reuploading N64 stuff since then...
It was one of da best N64 communities there you know :'-(
...bah whatever, somebody wants SM64 hacks?
Computer just shuts down after a few seconds, booted once into Windows, so at least I can hope that the HDDs are not fried.
Let's see if I can manage to bring the machine into working order soon. :\
ADX Player
I just don't like messing with emulators unless I absolutely have to if I can help it, I'm weird like that. I remember grabbing a bunch of N64 ROMs trying to extract the MIDIs with another tool, but most of them haven't been supported yet.
Fez (picked up in the last Humble Indie Bundle):
Pretty much what I'd expected, a 2D platformer where the 2D perspective can be rotated around your character in a 3D world. I had dreamed about something like this, of the games I've seen a similar idea (e.g. Super Paper Mario) this feels like it's closest to what I had in mind. Mostly the pixelization (I was thinking voxels though I didn't know the term) and the intro w/ village & old man who hints at the beyond (though I guess it plays on cliches) and the exploration flavor. Looking forward to playing the game of my dreams, I'm sure there will be pleasant surprises.
I'm also thinking of it as a lower-dimensional projection of Miegakure, which I eagerly await.
Frog Fractions:
I didn't know what to expect from this, besides "don't judge by how it starts" and many claims of brilliance. I feel that I was greatly rewarded, it's clever and funny and wacky and hyper-game-literate. Heartily recommended, if you missed it last year give it a shot.
And also one that's a bit older (Shockwave!):
Arcadia, in this you play four randomly selected Atari-ish games simultaneously (in split screen) until you lose all your lives in one of them. The interface is all via mouse so there is no switching between them, you just click in the appropriate subscreen to issue a command to that game. I'd heard about this one over the years but just got to try it today. Fun, and more playable than it might seem at first.
Apparently there is also an Arcadia REMIX that I haven't played.
---
I also ran across a bit of news, apparently the music for the FF7 PC port has been updated in response to complaints.
---
I ran across the above because I was trying to find an endless runner (I think? It was at least a platformer) with a split screen that I vaguely remember. Didn't find it yet, and I hadn't played it, it was new not too long ago, I probably just saw a screenshot and caption. It isn't one of the ones where you can flip between worlds, more that there are two near-parallel worlds and you control a character in each simultaneously. I feel like there have been several of these but I can't locate them.
The reason I'm thinking about this (and why I looked up Arcadia) is that I am giving some thought to similar games where several things are going on that you have to switch between, monitor, and selectively ignore, as part of some research involving executive function.
Importantly I am not looking at multitasking behavior with rapid switching between several tasks that need attention now. I'm looking at something that feels a little more like Super Hexagon (though less twitchy) in that there are recognizable patterns that require different amounts of effort to traverse, and once you've recognized it you can go on autopilot. In Super Hexagon you need to be able to master this in order to pay attention to the next pattern. In Hypothetical EF Game there would be several channels like this, you'd need to focus on one at a time, and knowing which don't require care for a few beats lets you concentrate on tasks that do need finesse. It may even be necessary to ignore something for a higher priority, while remembering that you will therefore need to do some cleanup on the lower priority thing when you have the time. But in general the game will always make it possible to focus one place at a time, it is the cost and reliability of the switch that is interesting.
Gonna have some mighty weird dreams tonight.
Where can I get their nightly that has it?
A Fistful of Nickels (Shadow) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PbAebwc2zE
Not usually into vocals in tracks but this made me reconsider voice in music.
Ending suite (ending theme)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgB-GyWJeXM
15 minutes of gold.
Yep completely finished with absolutely perfect loops but my computer malfunctioned and I lost all my saved loop points lol you better believe I was pissed but luckily as I said before I wrote down some of the loop points for each sample I was able to loop and I got back most of what I lost and put together what I had, It was rushed but I'd say roughly about 30% of the samples are moderately to perfectly looped and 30% of the samples are there with some missing. I'm not going to zip file the folder because I'm going to be updating it with some of those missing samples throughout the week.
So here it is for now https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sd18lzr2tlt5uad/1I1m4EB4zz just the looped wavs, I'm too lazy to rename them :P haha if this doesn't increase my popularity here I don't know what will and this is how I spent my time. εїз
edited 7:17 AM EST December 1, 2013
Oddly enough I see someone mentioned the FF6 Balance and Ruin album. Good to see some OCR love here!
I realize that few people (probably no one, really) actually care, but I really wanted to post on the forums from my new WiiU. So, this is how I spent my time today. Once I'm done here, I'll be playing LEGO Marvel Superheroes. Mouser X over and out.
YOU BELONG!
YOU BELONG!
YOU BELONG!
TO THE MERRY MARVEL MARCHING SOCIETY!
I envy people with HDMI capture cards. The Wii U has no copy protection when it outputs so you should be able to record the 5.1 PCM output losslessly with a capture card able to record 5.1. Most don't but I found at least one that does. $200 isn't really worth it to me though just to record a few games probably with unavoidable sound effects.
In other news, I wanna say I just got Super Mario 3D World. I'm not gonna say it's more fun than the original Mario World necessarily, but it is highly creative and inventive. Lots of new enemies, new abilities, level play styles, etc. I'm on world 6 and surprised at how it keeps presenting me with new things. It makes me think of even more ways it could be bigger and better, so I'm excited about what could be done in a sequel.
SMT IV is a nice challenge. Gravity Rush is pretty cool too. Damn, we need a way to rip 3DS and PS Vita music.
from LBA 34871 on SCPS 10037
<small>
0200 : DC FF 11 FF 0D EF 02 F0 DB 20 13 00 22 31 04 20
0210 : 22 72 11 00 47 73 FA 10 25 25 24 24 25 25 24 24
0220 : 01 10 01 16 01 10 01 16 17 34 0F 88 34 32 0F 10
0230 : 30 0F 0F C0 0F FF 0F 00 DC BB FF 00 BB DD 0F 00
0240 : D1 CF 0F 00 F0 EF 0E 00 DC 11 C7 00 ED 21 07 00
0250 : F0 02 57 00 EF 22 00 00 FD 23 00 00 10 21 80 08
0260 : F3 01 70 00 13 EE 00 00 F5 FF 30 00 F0 D0 31 18
0270 : 0F F1 27 F0 20 F0 07 00 32 FE A0 00 32 0D 00 00
0280 : FE FE 00 00 1F 0D 00 00 31 03 00 00 01 34 00 00
0290 : 22 F1 07 00 53 FE 08 00 0C 0C 0C 0C 0C 0C 0C 0C
02A0 : 12 02 24 24 12 02 24 24 00 00 00 D1 00 00 00 20
02B0 : 00 00 00 34 00 00 00 54 00 00 00 34 00 00 00 62
02C0 : 00 00 00 FF 00 00 00 BB 00 00 00 AB 00 00 00 DD
02D0 : 00 00 00 BE 00 00 00 F0 00 00 00 53 00 00 00 23
02E0 : 00 00 00 32 00 00 00 10 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 23
02F0 : 00 00 00 F0 00 00 00 EF 00 00 00 F0 00 00 00 00
0300 : 00 00 00 FF 00 00 00 F2 00 00 CC 10 00 00 D0 1F
0310 : 00 00 D0 11 00 00 EF 0F 25 25 24 25 25 25 24 25
0320 : 24 24 24 25 24 24 24 25 D0 F1 0F 21 01 11 FF 14
0330 : 56 FF 12 F1 26 12 43 13 CD 32 31 FF 9C 53 2F D1
</small>
Bolded stuff is mostly junk. There seem to be weird header bytes along with the weird sample nibbles, so this seems to be from before CD-XA ADPCM encoding.
Grumble.
--
Oh, and hi Level99, great work for OCR (Coiled Copper Wire comes to mind immediately).
edited 10:23 PM EST December 27, 2013
2: I do not want a potato.
1: Very well. Hello sir, I would like to take from you any potatoes that may be causing you distress.
2: ...
1: You see, I serve both functions, adding and removing potatoes so that all can be potato-optimal.
Also I'm in the process of writing a company website, for my boyfriend and I...
Why the hell do people rely on flash and javascript so damn much when using CSS is just as good?
--------------
My wife and I started fostering a new dog at the beginning of this year. She and our current dog are getting along pretty well except for a few strange things. One, the foster tries to mount our other dog quite often (they are both females, both have been fixed, so maybe its dominance?). Two, they clean each other in very gross ways. Three, they sometimes lick each other's faces so it looks like they're making out.
I think my pets might be dogsbians.
Also writing my second movie soundtrack, first one I've done in full and am getting paid for. Definitely a so-cheesy-its-bad thing going on, going to be a lot of fun to pump this thing out.
Yes! My new UX16 finally came in the mail today :) can't wait to test out this keyboard lol freaking badass!!!
edited 2:11 PM EDT March 10, 2014
On the CD-R I have, which I bought at blipfest 2006, Never Enough (track 9) is 3:26, it's a bit differently timed than the 3:00 one released elsewhere. I guess it was an earlier revision?
For your amusement: Tugboat - Never Enough flac (22 MB), ogg vorbis (3 MB).
For comparison, the other version on YouTube and all of Man of the Year.
... also apparently the search function has stopped working? Wonder how long that's been broke. Probably since I upgraded to PHP 5.3, blah.
edited 11:54 PM EDT April 9, 2014
Search should be ok now.
edited 11:52 PM EDT April 10, 2014
I don't think the site needs a huge chunk of search options, but would it be easy to add a feature that reverses the chronological order of results? Or just a general way to navigate faster than ten pages at time from past to future?
I hadn't realized that he also did the soundtrack for F-1 World Grand Prix, cool to note. Also seems like he was a real professional audio tech guy, just what they needed to get sound into a launch title. There's a funny story in there about the Birdman song.
I got a Java Ring (tiny smartcard-ish computer with a Java Card VM) off eBay and I've been trying to interface with it, so far done a bit with a Bus Pirate I got around the same time and owfs over a 1-Wire USB adapter.
My goal is to be able to read the RTC, it isn't far from there to loading and running applets, but it is under quite a few levels of protocol. So far I'm just able to read some interface registers and I can write the 128-byte Intermediate Product Register which is the main bulk communication channel.
----
Today I was trying to remove the irritating "not recommended for new designs" watermark from the datasheet for the DS1954 iButton that's the heart of the Java Ring. The method I ended up with is:
1. extract each page with pdfseparate (from poppler)
2. convert each page to svg with inkscape
3. strip out any figures with the style used in the watermark (which seems to be unique)
4. convert back to pdf with inkscape
5. put back together with pdfunify (also poppler)
I have also added a 6th step which goes something like "drive yourself crazy trying to compress the resulting PDF with ghostscript". After step 5 it ends up about 2x the size of the original, I think this is mostly due to the fonts being embedded on each page. Ghostscript is great but there is some weird combination of fonts and glyphs that is causing it to lose apostrophes, treating them as having negative width.
---
I just today learned about radare, which does a whole lot of reverse engineering stuff (binary manipulation, disassembly, limited emulation). I had somehow managed to never hear about it (or I forgot), it may not be the answer to everything I have ever needed but it is a darn sight better than the limited hex editors I've been using.
---
I picked up a HP Chromebook 11 with Verizon Wireless mobile internet and I've been messing around with it a lot, including taking it apart to disable the firmware write protect.
Arch Linux ARM runs fantastic on it, at least with a lot of tweaking.
---
I am expecting in the mail today some old technical reports by Robert Fano, a colleague of Claude Shannon. These are his account of information theory, "The Transmission of Information", which includes his publication of Shannon-Fano coding. For whatever reason this is explicitly not included in the DSpace archive where they belong, tech reports 65 and 149 are skipped in the numbering. Nor is it available online anywhere else as far as I can tell. I intend to fix that.
edited 8:46 AM EDT June 30, 2014
There's numerous fan-theories out there, and the majority of them say that the time machine generates its own wormhole. It occurred to me, that if it's generating a wormhole, and has to travel through said wormhole, then there must be a time frame in which that wormhole exists (and therefore must remain in existence). Perhaps Dr. Brown couldn't keep the wormhole open very long (1.21 jigawatts is a lot of power...), so he calculated a "happy medium" between speed (how fast do I need to be moving, to get the entire DeLorean through the wormhole before it collapses?) and power (I can generate 1.21 Gw... barely).
It should be noted, that the stock DeLorean engine was replaced in BttF 2 and 3 with a porsche engine, because they had a hard time getting it up to 88 mph.... So it seems reasonable that 88 was the "best" number Dr. Brown could come up with to get his car up to speed.
In case you're wondering, I've been listening to the BttF game's music recently. As such, I was reminded of this conclusion I reached a few months ago, and this conversation I had a few years ago. I just thought it was an interesting, and "realistic" reason for the 88mph speed requirement. Mouser X over and out.
I just got a gaming PC (nothing to brag about, but serviceable) and I've been suffering trying to get it to work right with my TV over HDMI in Ubuntu.
So I'm running Ubuntu 15.10, with the proprietary Nvidia drivers, and I installed gnome-flashback (which gets rid of the irritating Unity interface in favor of a traditional GNOME 3 setup). There is an issue wherein the TV cuts off something like 50 pixels on the border of the screen when the resolution is set to the full 1920x1080, so I've bumped it down to a lower resolution that actually fills the screen (1360x768 if you must know).
The problem is that every time I restart and/or log in, the resolution resets to the best the monitor supports, 1920x1080. I've tried setting this in the settings ( unity-control-center, Applications -> System Tools -> System Settings ) as well as in the NVIDIA X Server Settings ( nvidia-settings, Applications -> System Tools -> Administration -> NVIDIA X Server Settings ), thus writing it to /etc/X11/Xorg.conf, but neither worked.
I saw a piece of advice that advised me to copy my ~/.config/monitors.xml (which had the correct resolution) to /var/lib/lightdm/.config/; this fixed the resolution on the login screen (which is the lightdm greeter). But the other advice in that thread, which involved explicitly running xrandr to fix the resolution, struck me as just papering over the problem. (It didn't work straight away, either; the /usr/share/lightdmxrandr.sh script worked great when I ran it but I had to add it as a Startup Application ( Applications -> System Tools -> Preferences -> Startup Applications ) to get it to fix my session. I abandoned this in favor of the fix I describe below.)
The problem manifested in the Xorg log ( /var/log/Xorg.0.log ) as the following line appearing:
(II) NVIDIA(0): Setting mode "HDMI-0: nvidia-auto-select @1920x1080 +0+0 {ViewPortIn=1920x1080, ViewPortOut=1920x1080+0+0}"
I didn't want this, and I couldn't tell where it was coming from.
Eventually, after blundering around in dconf-editor for an hour (dconf-editor comes from the dconf-tools package which isn't installed by default), I found the answer: There is a setting org.gnome.gnome-flashback.display-config which defaults to true. "If set to true, then GNOME Flashback application will be used to provide the display configuration."
Now I have no idea where GNOME Flashback is supposed to get the display configuration from, but it evidently isn't the same place as where unity/gnome-control-center does. I don't know where that is anyway; there's a lovely little thing called org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xrandr which seems like it is involved in the initial resolution setup, as toggling the active flag off then on will set the resolution, but the default-configuration-file points at a nonexistant path. I'm assuming that this plugin gets run before GNOME Flashback gets its chance, And then GNOME Flashback reads no particular setting and thus defaults to auto-selecting the mode.
So by setting org.gnome.gnome-flashback.display-config to false I prevent things getting screwed up on login, much better than papering over the problem. Why this is set by default when there is no apparent way to actually configure flashback's display config is a mystery to me.
Glad that's over. I should probably post this on the Ubuntu forums somewhere, but I just wanted to get it online at all, so here it is.
[edit]
Hm, here's a possible clue: I was looking into why the sound indicator applet's "Sound Settings..." doesn't work, looking at the log (which is in ~/.cache/upstart/indicator-sound.log) it turns out that it is trying to run gnome-control-center:
indicator-sound-WARNING **: service.vala:231: unable to launch sound settings: Failed to execute child process "gnome-control-center" (No such file or directory)
instead of the unity-control-center which is actually installed. This is a little odd as indicator-sound doesn't require *-control-center, it recommends either unity-control-center or gnome-control-center, but clearly it doesn't know to look for unity-control-center.
This makes me wonder if gnome-flashback is actually looking to be configured by gnome-control-center, and thus why it has the trouble it does with the display configuration. gnome-flashback in general is I guess not very well supported.
edited 4:54 AM EST January 3, 2016
Anyway I fixed it with "sudo ln -s /usr/bin/unity-control-center /usr/bin/gnome-control-center". I wonder what terrors await.
edited 4:56 AM EST January 3, 2016
As of late I've been getting back into Namco's franchises (especially their older arcade games), and what struck out to me was just how good the Namco WSG sounds. I'm surprised that so few people have set out to emulate its sound, although part of it might have to do with the difficulty of doing so.
I've been using Chipsounds' Wave channel (sourced from the DMG) and using the Audacity N163/FDS plugin myself, but a big problem is finding rips to work with. Mostly I've been using songs that either have a section where only one note plays, or has a conversion to vgm format (Namco WSG games are not compatible, alas) that sounds reasonably accurate (ie: Namco Classic Collection and PC-Engine games), but I've recently read that Hoot can play Namco WSG games. I've been trying to get it working, as a result, but I just can't quite figure out how to open files in it. Any help would be very much appreciated.
On the specific matter of loading files, you generally need to make sure that the necessary sound data is in the appropriate folder. In this case, you'd probably want the MAME-compatible ROMS for the games (or just their relevant sound data) still in zip format, and they should go in a folder called "roms". After that, you should run the program and hit Ctrl-R to have Hoot scan for new files. After that, it should appear as something you can select in the bottom listing, using the up/down keys and Enter.
Actually, it looks like that curated version of Hoot is compatible with the CUS15 sets available at the JoshW Hoot archive if you stick them in the "Data - Other" folder. CUS30 sets don't seem to be working, though. And you'll have to exit and re-enter set playlists to reset the tempo, it seems. That, or Hoot is just acting particularly weird, which it is very good at doing in any configuration. Whatever the case, you'll want a more conventional installation to hear other stuff.
I'd been using a convoluted mash between this version's executables, and the xmls on the JoshW archive - I guess it's no wonder why it didn't quite work. Since my primary reason for using Hoot is for isolating individual channels of Namco songs, this version you've showed should more than do, though!
Using the latest version of the executable. It's a combination of the official XMLs, WIP XMLs from kurohane, the JoshW XMLs (with fixes) and various other XML entries from 2chan, the Hoot arcade wiki and a Japanese BBS.
edited 2:34 PM EST January 22, 2016
I'd prefer if you start a thread, in general.
Threads are cheap!
---
Myself, I've been plugging away at finishing TIS-100. I first played it back in July when it came out, but I left a few puzzles at the end unsolved. Finally finished the last of the main series today, the sorting puzzle, after banging on it for a few days as it was really tricky for me to fit into the level. There's a whole 'nother set of contributed puzzles from the community, but I don't know if I'm going to dig into them again...
---
...mostly because The Witness is coming out in a few days (Jan 26)! Been looking forward to this since 2010, it's pretty much my religion at this point. I'm expecting it to not just have clever puzzles, but puzzles with a point to teach.
---
I also worked through Human Resource Machine recently. It's another assembly game, sort of like TIS-100 but with a more standard, single-thread architecture and a lot more user-friendliness (it's entirely mouse-driven, by the World of Goo guys and it has a similar drag'n'drop feel). It is similar to World of Goo with optional optimization goals, I felt compelled to get those and finally did a little while ago. (in Spacechem/Infinifactory/TIS-100 there's a histogram to give some background to how you're doing, but no particular performance goal, besides getting the solution to fit in the level, which can be pretty hard)
I didn't really find HRM particularly interesting, for some reason. Maybe someone never exposed to these ideas before would find it interesting, it does seem to go quite out of the way to be friendly. I'd like to see how non-programmers play it. Anyway I felt like I had to beat it and understand it, given that I'm always thinking about programming games, but I think it may have revealed to me that an "intro to programming" game isn't really what I'm after.
---
Another game I played recently and enjoyed a lot is Toki Tori 2+. I felt like it contained incredibly clever puzzles and did a brilliant job helping you to figure them out without saying anything. The minimalism of the controls explodes into a huge variety of possibilities.
My favorite thing about TT2+ is that you're only limited by what you (as a player) know how to do. You gain power by learning ways to manipulate various combinations of enemies and environment. The game gives you a power not by something you collect, but with a puzzle where some new combination of mechanics is the obvious (more or less) solution. Then you learn it and it is a part of you, the player.
Part of the magic of it for me was that I hadn't read anything about it before I played it (I ran across it in this Game Maker's Toolkit video and grabbed it on the strength of the recommendation), so a lot of the specific UI touches caught me by pleasant surprise, such as tweeting songs. There is almost no text in game, yet a lot of things are very successfully communicated nonverbally. I have to admit, though, that I had the main goal of the game backwards: I thought I was working to somehow repair the crystal, not destroy it, so the end sequence caught me by surprise!
---
Anyway, yay for video games. Here's me on Steam.
---
I've also been reading through The Digital Antiquarian in Ebook form, a blog dealing in the history of interactive fiction (considered pretty broadly). This isn't a genre I've ever cared much for playing, but Jimmy Maher is a good writer and it is a pretty interesting story to follow.
Other recent reads I've been bouncing between:
Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography
I'm not sure how I got to Leibniz but I feel like I ought to know more, in part because of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, maybe also because of Kurt Gödel's interest in him. Speaking of whom:
Incompleteness: the proof and paradox of Kurt Gödel
I don't know nearly enough about the man, and I understand this is a well-written biography, but I haven't gotten past the introduction yet (which got me distracted with Einstein).
Two Jack Copeland histories I'm trying to get into:
Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine
I've read a few things (mostly the misleadingly-titled Turing's Cathedral) around the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study computer, von Neumann's dream machine, but I'm interested in what kind of computer Turing wanted to build once he got the chance.
Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Code-Breaking Computers
There's quite a lot in here about code-breaking which isn't keeping my interest, unfortunately.
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
I'm thinking of this as something to mine for game design, it involves a lot of treatment of specific issues that come up in understanding and refactoring legacy code. My first real job involved a fairly large module I was given ownership of, which I struggled to get my head around and debug, so I'm also hoping to get some useful techniques. So far he can't say enough how unit tests are what separate maintainable code from unmaintainable.
Against a Dark Background
Sci fi set against a planet with a long, long history of lost technology and knowledge. I've enjoyed Iain M. Banks' "Culture" books and The Algebraist, though this one isn't really grabbing me irresistibly yet.
Some stuff from The Teachable Agents Group
This is kind of in line with an idea I'd had where a player tries to teach an AI how to do things. This could be a different approach to a programming game, and also touches on "learning by teaching".
edited 4:04 AM EST January 23, 2016
edited 5:46 AM EST January 23, 2016
He still hasn't learned how to write an ending, he always just seems to run out of pages in his works. This time at least he wrote a 300 page epilogue, that doesn't really have anything in common with the main book.
Still recommended.
I wish he'd do another historical fiction like The Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon or pseudo-historical like Anathem.
Stuck on the shipwreck, which I really just don't even know how to approach. This is the last puzzle I know about besides one which I think will only unlock when everything else is complete.
Then again I may be overlooking something...
[edit]
Yep, definitely missed something.
edited 7:34 AM EST January 29, 2016
Vampire diaries has been just disappointing thus far since the salvatore brothers died and had their souls trapped inside the phoenix stone, whether it was real or fake they actually had damon kill everyone he loved when he escaped the stone lol the series is going down hill, it was better when nina dobrev was still on the show. Hopefully she returns to undo the mess thats befallen mystic falls.
I wrote the IDA plugin, but I don't have a setup anymore where I can compile IDA plugins. I think the source is online, but it didn't do much anyway besides load the RAM and start auto-analysis at the current PC (iirc).
Triforce Quartet's New Album: Ultima Phantasia
Video Games Live: Level 5
Played The Talos Principle a week or so ago, nice puzzles and some interesting ideas. It seemed very unfocused and busy with careless detail to me, after coming from The Witness. I can see why some people like Talos more, the story is more coherent and the subtext more explicit, but I didn't really find the story all that interesting or the shallow tie-in between the philosophy and the game very compelling.
I think the explicit stuff in The Witness is just there to give you something to think about, if you want, while doing puzzles and exploring, but Talos seems to feel like it is telling you what the game is *about*, though it seems largely disconnected from what you actually do.
For instance, a lot of the stuff you do for the extra bonus stars is a subversion of the implicit contract with the game, but this isn't actually tied in with the whole "disobedience" plot at all, which seems like a wasted opportunity. There is a throughline through the game's plot which seems to involve a lot more choices and gives you credit for going your own way, but it is obviously the thing that you actually should do. The stuff that actually requires you to figure out how to "break" some things, breaking out of the apparent puzzle structure, is just treated as sanctioned bonus content. I think this is because they want people to play through the linear plot, so there can't be plot in stuff which is supposed to be hard and hidden, since people may not find it.
Also dug out Infinifactory again, played that a bit with my brother giving advice.
edited 2:49 AM EST February 21, 2016
It's only available for sale, unlike SoM, I think the minimum is $20, but it's properly licensed (supposedly) and proceeds go to charity.
edited 8:27 PM EDT April 5, 2016
Major improvements in the sequel: Add Man 2: This Time It's Arithmetical
edited 6:09 PM EDT April 6, 2016
I also just finished finished the story mode of Glitchspace, which I found to be a pretty boring tutorial of a visual programming system, with a handful of good puzzles stretched thin in a lot of empty space, wouldn't recommend. Maybe some fan-made levels will improve it.
I've been making slow progress through Stephen's Sausage Roll, a very tough 3D puzzle game. It shows a lot of restraint in puzzle design, though, so things don't really get tedious, just hard. (Or so it seems so far, I haven't nearly finished it, maybe halfway)
Just ran across a pretty neat PuzzleScript game called Newton's Crates, which adds Newton's cradle mechanics to Sokoban. Interesting but tough levels, I haven't beaten it yet.
It's not available for free afaik, but they say it's worth the 99 cents.
Final Fantasy X (Thunder Plains, Jecht's Theme)
Final Fantasy XII (Stupid mixing and reverb hell. Give it to me dry.)
Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories (CDs not terrible, but I recently noticed mastering differences that make the CD perceived as louder/edgier than the ADPCM)
Ys: The Ark of Napishtim (CDs not terrible, but I recently noticed mastering differences that make the CD perceived as louder/edgier than the ADPCM)
Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Loud/edgy mastering. The game already had CD-quality sequences, but they are practically ruined by bass that appeals to the lowest common denominator, TV-only audio system owners by compensating. Spyro the Dragon is another example of bass compensation.)
I hope one day nintendo actually cares enough to add more DLC tracks because that would be so dope, I'm tired of everyone picking that cheeseland remake course. :P
Using an Action Replay code to disable the bloom lighting. Makes the game much more enjoyable.
Mario Kart 8 needs bloom lighting turned off the most. It looks washed out most of the time (and drops to 59 FPS).
This is the era of enhancing your games to make them play how they should have played in the first place.
edited 10:06 PM EDT May 28, 2016
and a door:
That's all that remains until I can recover a Zip disk that has most of my older stuff.
I don't think this could have been later than 1996, though the date in the backup is 1997.
edited 7:54 PM EDT June 8, 2016
It's possible that this is from a later attempt to remake the site, too, I know I made that pyramid in Paint more than once.
edited 4:13 PM EDT June 9, 2016
Here they are.
edited 12:20 AM EDT June 11, 2016
Last night I achieved the desired highscore VR points online on Mario Kart 7 as well and finally put the game back in the case and will never look at it again in relief, felt like I had really accomplished something in general lol even though it really doesn't seem like it.
I can't wait until the 4th of july, family should be coming over and they'll have a cookout for us so maybe we'll do something fun. Hope everyone else has a good summer here too and stay safe fellow hcs64 users.
The Wii U's upscaling is over-sharpened and the colors are extremely vivid. Awful. Color banding, too. But it's the only way I can see all 480 lines, because my TV doesn't overscan a 1080p signal.
The Wii U's upscaling also results in a shrunken image (black borders around the entire thing, even when using all 720x480 pixels). Probably a stupid decision made by Nintendo to defend (defensive programming === evil) against overscanning for people with crappy TVs who don't know any better. Wonderful.
edited 9:09 PM EDT July 13, 2016
I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm looking forward to the Okami track. There's also Chrono Cross, Zelda, Ico, Metroid... fun times.
edited 3:31 AM EDT August 5, 2016
I just wanted to know that your bfbs tool doesn't work with the Xbox version of the game.
edited 8:58 PM EDT August 6, 2016
http://www.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html#toc_1ch
http://www.magnepan.com/
Good thing they came with a set of spares!
Moral of the story: Slap a 48 kHz downsampler on your digital output so that stuff that shouldn't be audible doesn't blow your junk up. Or buy a smart DAC.
edited 3:39 PM EST December 1, 2016
edited 5:24 AM EST December 4, 2016
edited 10:08 PM EST December 10, 2016
Been working on some other stuff too, the EXE packer is nearing completion, I am rewriting with a proper PE parser to allow for x64 exes and to not make assumptions about the PE format.
I've also rejiggered my Windows tower way too many times in the past few months. I bought a Basic license for unRAID before realizing why it was considered LinusTechTips' Go To Storage Solution: Probably corporate sponsorship. I'm now running the same Windows VM with minimal changes to the XML definition on Ubuntu 16.04.1. And now I may still have a few Docker containers around, but that only simplified setup of a few daemons. I'm mostly using the Ubuntu desktop over NoMachine, as it runs on the tower's Intel integrated graphics, to control any GUI apps, rather than using the unRAID solution of a freaking full desktop and noVNC remote for each GUI app.
Oh, and I also set up ZFS for the storage on that machine, including the root filesystem, following a handy guide from the ZFS on Linux project. So far, so good.