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I think part of it was that subtractive synths are much easier to grasp and get decent sounds out of, whereas FM required experience and sometimes knowledge of the math involved. If you look at FM synths released in the 80s the most popular models were ones that shipped with hundreds of usable preset sounds. Lots and lots of FM soundtracked games sounded like poo poo, listen to some of the Megadrive catalogue.
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Jun 5, 2014 20:53
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Today's mail: This is the Apple II version, I managed to find this sealed for $15 from a dude in Venezuela. EA was actually pretty awesome back in the day, their "games as rock albums" thing was unique as hell. I do like the original BudgeCo PCS packaging more, but I think that version is impossible to find. One of it's demo tables is a complete rip of another great AII pinball game, David's Midnight Magic. It's called Minute Magic  EDIT: the wizards beard posted:I think part of it was that subtractive synths are much easier to grasp and get decent sounds out of, whereas FM required experience and sometimes knowledge of the math involved. If you look at FM synths released in the 80s the most popular models were ones that shipped with hundreds of usable preset sounds. Lots and lots of FM soundtracked games sounded like poo poo, listen to some of the Megadrive catalogue. Agreed, in the right hands FM can be awesome but a lot of times I find it grating and strange sounding, particularly on early Sound Blaster stuff. I totally get why people like it though and I have heard some amazing music on Genesis/X68K/etc also. d0s fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jun 5, 2014 |
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Jun 5, 2014 21:11
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So I've just done a fresh install of System 6 on this SE I've had for years but never really used much, using 6 because I have a 68k Performa for System 7 and 6 just feels more "right" on a b&w Mac to me. I know there's probably slim pickings but can anyone recommend good games to play on a b&w Mac? The only things I have for it are SimEarth and 1993 Holiday Lemmings. The Lemmings port is the worst I've seen, SimEarth is pretty good.
d0s fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Jun 7, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 04:58
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d0s posted:So I've just done a fresh install of System 6 on this SE I've had for years but never really used much, using 6 because I have a 68k Performa for System 7 and 6 just feels more "right" on a b&w Mac to me. I know there's probably slim pickings but can anyone recommend good games to play on a b&w Mac? The only things I have for it are SimEarth and 1993 Holiday Lemmings. The Lemmings port is the worst I've seen, SimEarth is pretty good. The Dark Castle games on B&W Mac are pretty classic. Might and Magic too, I suppose. Other than that...you'll probably have to find something that has both B&W and color ports. Sim City might (it was pretty good on the Mac) as might SimAnt. Gaming was really slim pickings on the Mac before its color days.
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Jun 7, 2014 01:17
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Genpei Turtle posted:The Dark Castle games on B&W Mac are pretty classic. Might and Magic too, I suppose. Other than that...you'll probably have to find something that has both B&W and color ports. Sim City might (it was pretty good on the Mac) as might SimAnt. Gaming was really slim pickings on the Mac before its color days. Yeah, figured as much. This thing has been fun to play around with but more as a historical curiosity than a game machine. There seem to be way more interesting b&w apps than there are games since there was a lot of experimentation during the early mac days.
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Jun 7, 2014 02:11
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Good Compact Mac games you should play: The original versions of Shadowgate, Deja Vu and Uninvited The Fool's Errand System's Twilight (the first game by Andrew Plotkin of IF fame) Alice / Through the Looking Glass (the only game Apple ever published) Glider Shufflepuck Cafe Dark Castle won't work on System 6 (needs System 3.2 or earlier I think) and I also don't think it works on any Mac with an internal hard drive.
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Jun 7, 2014 02:19
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Grapeshot posted:Shufflepuck Cafe This is one we played on the Classics and LCs constantly when I was in middle school, also Crystal Quest which is also color (and has a pretty great port on XBLA).
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Jun 7, 2014 03:34
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Pretty sure Prince of Persia works on it as well. The MacOS port is the best IMO
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Jun 7, 2014 04:16
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d0s posted:Today's mail: Oh, man. I think this was one of the first games Dad bought for our IIc. Fond memories of making awful, degenerate tables with the physics turned inside-out, and wondering how they wrote to a diskette with no write_OK notch. It didn't occur to me for decades that they'd have disk drives that ignored that sort of thing.
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Jun 7, 2014 04:36
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flyboi posted:Pretty sure Prince of Persia works on it as well. The MacOS port is the best IMO Prince of Persia on the Mac is amazing but it's really best done on a color Mac for the full effect. Personally I prefer the SNES version for all of its extra levels and expanded size (plus combat isn't piss-easy) but when it comes to the original non-fluffed-up version, then Mac is definitely the best. And Mac Prince of Persia 2 is definitely the best version of that game. And man how could I have forgotten about Fool's Errand? Some of those puzzles are brain-bustingly difficult though.
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Jun 7, 2014 15:53
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Thanks for all your suggestions guys, I've been having a great time checking all this stuff out! EDIT: My games folder so far  A lot of these games are really, really simple things that we used to pass around on virus ridden floppies in the school computer lab, like StuntCopter and Artillery. Racking my brain for the names of these things is almost as hard as finding good "big production" games for this platform! Test Drive 2 surprised me, I wasn't expecting that to translate well to the B&W mac at all, but it's great! If only they would have made a version of Stunts using that engine... EDIT2: The glaring lack of Prince of Persia is because I can't find a B&W version that doesn't crash horribly on my system. I have no idea what's causing it. Not a huge deal as it plays fine and in color on my Performa. d0s fucked around with this message at 11:51 on Jun 8, 2014 |
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Jun 8, 2014 00:08
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Seeing all of these pics of peoples collections/projects has forced me to post up some pics of my Apple II stash. This is my Rom 3 Apple IIGS with a 256Meg Compact Flash Hard Drive and 5 Meg of ram (1 Meg built in + 4 Meg expansion card)  On the right, my stack of Rom 1 Apple IIGS. The single system on the left is my other Rom 3 IIGS. I have a collection of Ram Expansion cards including my extra 4 Meg Expansion and spare 256 Meg Compact Flash Hard Drive. Not shown, my spare Apple IIGS Color Monitor + 3 3.5 Floppy Drives + 4 5.25 Floppy Drives.  My Poor Apple IIc collection. Both run fine but they need some restoration. Not shown are the 2 power supplies and 2 Apple IIc monitors (the ugly green screen monitors).  Some of my game originals. Star Saga: One, 2 copes of Oil Barons (great game), Flight Sim 2, Dungeon Master, Mines of Titan, Alien Mind, and a barely visible Revolution '76  Pretty obvious what these games are, what may not be obvious is the fact that Seven Cities of Gold is still in the original factory shrinkwrap and never opened.  You can see part of the original sticker on Seven Cities of Gold, plus a few more games.  Phantasie kind of hidden in the middle of the other games.  Some of my loose discs plus Questron II. Yes, I have a loose copy of Seven Cities of Gold so I don't have to open the original.
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Jun 11, 2014 00:53
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ShankyMcStabber posted:Seeing all of these pics of peoples collections/projects has forced me to post up some pics of my Apple II stash. You IIGShavers makin me jealous  One day I'll shell out for one, they're such awesome systems. Rad setup!
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Jun 11, 2014 05:16
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ShankyMcStabber posted:
I tried for hours to figure that damned game out, and all I did was wander around the overworld until I got killed. I was 12 then, but I wonder if it's worth going back now. Just reading the manual and seeing what I *could* encounter annoyed the crap out of me when all I ended up doing was dying constantly with seemingly no way to get off the first continent.
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Jun 11, 2014 21:29
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Quake is effectively old enough to vote guys. It went from this in 1996:   To this in 2014:    (These are screenshots and are uploaded to my Facebook so a bit of quality has gone away.) Still quite fun to play though. Just a little thing to think about how much more powerful computers have gotten yet honestly it doesn't feel like 18 years. (I am working on another smallish effort post. Here is a hint: 
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Jun 13, 2014 10:34
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I still remember playing the Quake demo for the first time. It was a mess of pixels on my Pentium 90, but walking down a hallway and seeing a guy come up in full 3D was just mind blowing. Just looking at the architecture of the levels was great fun.
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Jun 13, 2014 10:39
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I remember booting into DOS from Windows in order to free up an extra 5MB of available RAM. Made the game playable. I personally feel the jump from Doom when released to what modders have the engine doing now is far more impressive.
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Jun 13, 2014 10:53
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Captain Rufus posted:(I am working on another smallish effort post. Here is a hint:  I assume it's Skullkeep?
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Jun 13, 2014 11:06
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There was a Port for Quake to the Amiga but with 680x0 CPUs it's just not really doable anymore. You want either PPC or Pentium-power for that. Regarding old Shooters I just recently played Redneck Rampage, and it's more known big brother Duke3D on a Cyrix 5x86 with 100 Mhz. It ran ok, there was some stuttering though. I can't remember it stuttering that much on my 486 with 50 Mhz back then, but maybe I really misremember and nowadays we have other requirements of what's smooth and what's not. I really love these Cyrix 5x86s. Socket 3 CPUs, but they are not really 486s but in engineering have a lot more in common with Cyrix' later 6x86 (that CPU is a chapter for itself) and Pentiums etc.. Interesting about them is that you can set their multiplier in software, no jumpering needed. So you can lower a 100 Mhz 5x86 down to 33 Mhz on the fly with a DOS tool, incredibly handy for retrogaming. They also have some performance-enhancing flags you can toggle also via software which are disabled by default with most motherboards. Some make the CPU run hotter and can make things unstable. Incredibly short-lived chip, only were made for 6 months and were meant as an after-market upgrade for aging 486s, this was around 1995. Cyrix canned it so to not create an artificial competition to their 6x86. Still there's a metric fuckton of them (especially of the IBM-made version, as IBM kept making it till 1998) and most people don't really know anything about them and always go straight for the intel chips when building retro-PCs. As 3.45V Chips they also run pretty cool and are happy with their stock passive heatsink, also they even have automatic power management features built in. Pretty advanced for such a thing. I'm only aware of some special batches of intel 486s and of the Motorola 68060 doing some automatic power management and turning off stuff on the die when it was not in use. (even though considering it's age I guess it's more fair to throw the 68060 in with the Pentiums who did that too) More or less all other CPUs around that performance grade and lower ran 100% all of the time no matter what. blablabla.. sorry. I happen to love that CPU.    This is my 486. I think it came out of some hospital lab machine. Now that I think of it, it probably stuttered because I used an ISA-Graphics card, my 486 back then had VLB. Anyways, sorry for the derail (and trailing off) but I always think maybe these little tidbits are interesting for people wanting to get retro hardware. In conclusion - for old 3D games I really recommend something Pentium-grade with PCI. With everything else the mileage can and will vary. Regarding games, here in germany a very big thing were business sims. Games where you had to build a company, or manage something. They were incredibly popular here and there were many, most also made by german companies. This probably says a lot about my culture, but I also really liked such games. Where they popular in other countries at all? Do games like "Der Planer" "Der Patrizier" "Pizza Connection" "Ports of Call" "Oldtimer" "Mad TV" "1869" "Dyna Tech" or even the dirty, dirty "Biing!" ring any bell with anyone? I have the feeling they were never a thing elsewhere, but maybe I am wrong.
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Jun 13, 2014 12:17
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Police Automaton posted:Do games like "Der Planer" "Der Patrizier" "Pizza Connection" "Ports of Call" "Oldtimer" "Mad TV" "1869" "Dyna Tech" or even the dirty, dirty "Biing!" ring any bell with anyone? I have the feeling they were never a thing elsewhere, but maybe I am wrong.
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Jun 13, 2014 12:27
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I have definitely read about Mad TV (yes, I know it has no relation to the show) and Biing! but only as curiosities in the "hey everyone, look what weird-rear end games came out of Germany!" sense. But, well. A lot of times I feel like European sensibilities more broadly seem a lot more reasonable in terms of gaming. I mean, so many of the best CRPGs started coming out of Europe in the last decade. And in the 1980s there was some amazing creativity there too. 1990s, well ... no clue.
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Jun 13, 2014 17:42
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Quarex posted:A lot of times I feel like European sensibilities more broadly seem a lot more reasonable in terms of gaming. Can you expand on this? I've been playing a lot of awesome European games since getting into Amiga, but I don't really see a more "reasonable sensibility" there, like I've played just as many awesome Japanese games on the X68K or MSX2 or American games on the 90's PC... EDIT: Police Automaton posted:for old 3D games I really recommend something Pentium-grade with PCI. With everything else the mileage can and will vary. I notice that stuff that explicitly supports a 486 or above will do fine on my PII 400 DOS box (except for TurboPascal stuff, which needs a simple patch) while stuff that wants a 386 or below usually needs a slowdown app or a cache disable. I actaully have a 386 machine on the way to me for that very reason, lots of stuff (Wing Commander comes to mind) doesn't feel "right" even with slowdown apps. d0s fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jun 13, 2014 |
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Jun 13, 2014 21:20
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d0s posted:Can you expand on this? I've been playing a lot of awesome European games since getting into Amiga, but I don't really see a more "reasonable sensibility" there, like I've played just as many awesome Japanese games on the X68K or MSX2 or American games on the 90's PC... Can't speak for Quarex but IMHO it's European studios that are more frequently hitting it out of the park in terms of playability, at least recently. Like, old school games used to focus on really deep gameplay systems since computers didn't have the power to focus on other areas. As those limitations drop away and budgets are exploding US and Japanese games seem to be focusing more and more of their budgets on presentation/graphics and mass market appeal instead, and a lot less on the core gameplay. European games, while often being a bit janky, still have the depth of play that a lot of US/Japanese games seem to be lacking. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great games produced outside of Europe as well, but I've noticed too that recently the games that tend to really suck me in have been from European studios. X3, The Witcher, Gothic/Risen, the King's Bounty reboots, Patrician/Port Royale, etc. Dunno what it is, but they seem to tap into the old-school gaming sensibilities more than most other modern stuff, at least for me.
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Jun 13, 2014 21:56
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Genpei Turtle posted:Can't speak for Quarex but IMHO it's European studios that are more frequently hitting it out of the park in terms of playability, at least recently. Like, old school games used to focus on really deep gameplay systems since computers didn't have the power to focus on other areas. As those limitations drop away and budgets are exploding US and Japanese games seem to be focusing more and more of their budgets on presentation/graphics and mass market appeal instead, and a lot less on the core gameplay. European games, while often being a bit janky, still have the depth of play that a lot of US/Japanese games seem to be lacking. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great games produced outside of Europe as well, but I've noticed too that recently the games that tend to really suck me in have been from European studios. X3, The Witcher, Gothic/Risen, the King's Bounty reboots, Patrician/Port Royale, etc. Dunno what it is, but they seem to tap into the old-school gaming sensibilities more than most other modern stuff, at least for me. Oh, totally missed he was talking about modern stuff. I actually know next to nothing about what's going on today, it's good to hear there are still good games
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Jun 13, 2014 22:05
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Got Wages of War: The Business of Battle in yesterdays mail. The game wants to run in 256 color graphics mode. My Windows 95 system died(hard drive) as I was rebooting to 256 mode, so I've fallen back on WINE emulation under Linux Mint64bit VM while I try dig up a working hard drive. I am able to install Wages of War fine with WINE, but getting the same 256 color message. There's 4 different ways I can get 8bit graphics running under WINE, but have run into problems there too(vmware linux drivers might not support 8bit graphics mode). Also noticed a patch for the game at patches scrolls website, but am not optimistic that the patch will resolve the 256 color roadblock besides that, I was ebay bidding on a copy of Fountain of Dreams. It went for $53, about $22 over my budget. There's another copy on ebay going for $149.  Retrogaming is getting expensive for niche broken titles.
quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 02:21
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d0s posted:Oh, totally missed he was talking about modern stuff. I actually know next to nothing about what's going on today, it's good to hear there are still good games 1980s European retro games are also kind of awesome to me though because they are so much more likely to be surrealistic and super-experimental. I mean, not understanding the languages they are in may help, but that is definitely not all of it. tuluk posted:besides that, I was ebay bidding on a copy of Fountain of Dreams. It went for $53, about $22 over my budget. There's another copy on ebay going for $149.  It ... it is finally happeningI knew people would understand my lunacy someday!!! Now, to sell my copy of The Ancient Art Of War At Sea for $5,000. Dr. Quarex fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 02:22
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I need some guidance on VGA ISA video cards for DOS gaming. The system that's coming to me is a Tandy 2500 SX, with a 33mhz 386SX; it has onboard VGA graphics with (I think) 256k of memory. From what I understand the onboard graphics card is not like the earlier Tandy 1000s and is instead a bog-standard clone of IBM's VGA board. My question is just- do I really need anything more? Would adding a 1mb ET4000 or something have any real benefit for the 2/386 games I'm going to be using this thing for (I already have a system for "late" DOS gaming)? I'm under the impression that at this time most games weren't really designed to take advantage of beefier graphics hardware and kind of assumed the user had the exact board this system comes with, and all a better card is going to do is increase stuff like Windows performance(which I won't be using); am I wrong?
d0s fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 07:13
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d0s posted:I need some guidance on VGA ISA video cards for DOS gaming. The system that's coming to me is a Tandy 2500 SX, with a 33mhz 386SX; it has onboard VGA graphics with (I think) 256k of memory. From what I understand the onboard graphics card is not like the earlier Tandy 1000s and is instead a bog-standard clone of IBM's VGA board. My question is just- do I really need anything more? Would adding a 1mb ET4000 or something have any real benefit for the 2/386 games I'm going to be using this thing for (I already have a system for "late" DOS gaming)? I'm under the impression that at this time most games weren't really designed to take advantage of beefier graphics hardware and kind of assumed the user had the exact board this system comes with, and all a better card is going to do is increase stuff like Windows performance(which I won't be using); am I wrong? There's no such thing as beefy graphics hardware when you go back to that time and you are pretty much right. There were pretty much two things the graphics chip did, putting whatever the CPU rendered on the screen and maybe have some very primitive acceleration going on, which was mostly used in GUIs like windows or programs like DPaint with special drivers. (for example the blitter copying an opened window around inside the graphics card RAM so that the CPU didn't need to bother putting all that over the slow ISA Bus, or very primitive line, fill or text drawing acceleration etc.) All not that important in games, which usually didn't support it directly anyways. There's some difference in how much bandwidth is possible via the bus with some graphics chips and a lot of raving about that going on in the retro community, but quite honestly from experience I've found that it doesn't matter in reality. The point where that poo poo is going to matter, you're already hosed in other departments anyways. ISA is just a slow bus. One thing you want to concern yourself nowadays though with is the RAMDAC. It's a chip on old graphics cards that converts the digital RGB-Data from the graphics chip into an analog VGA signal. On stuff that generation usually it was an additional chip, only with Cirrus AFAIK it was directly integrated into the graphics card chip. The RAMDAC decides the maximum possible color depth with it's internal static RAM (most RAMDACs being maximum 256 colors, while more expensive ones being 24 bit true color, usually 256 color is enough for DOS gaming though) and also the maximum resolution/picture sharpness with it's speed of the RGB-D/A converters. Usually you want to go with a RAMDAC that's as fast as possible in the Mhz department, the faster, the better the picture quality will be. This is especially important for connecting old systems to somewhat newer screens directly, as very slow RAMDACs will look like poo poo or not even work at all. Also important is the layout of the graphics card itself, as we are talking about high frequency analog signals, a bad card layout can mean worse picture quality. Some very cheap cards are poo poo even if the used graphics chip is good, for these two reasons. Modern LCD screens that still have VGA support are VERY touchy regarding this, older CRTs usually are more forgiving. How important this is for you you have to know yourself. If it doesn't matter that much any old card with 512 kb RAM will do fine, it won't really realistically make a difference in the speed department. I would just discourage use of Oak Chipset graphics cards and similar rather low-end ones, as they have compatibility problems with some games. Trident often gets poo poo on for being slow but I actually found Trident chips often to be remarkably compatible. Often graphics cards chips of that era get poo poo on unfairly even though they are often not at fault for instablities. I've found with many older ISA-Mainboards the ISA-Bus termination and general signal quality was at fault. Some cards would work, some would not, but it was not the fault of the cards. Sadly such issues are often hard to fix and require some experimenting. Your Onboard circuity might actually even work best depending on what you want to do. Else shopping for a graphics card might be worth it. I have an ISA ATI Mach64 with 2 MB of RAM working together with that Industrial Board inside my Amiga 2000. It has a fast truecolor-RAMDAC with very nice picture quality and can go very high-res in Windows 3.11 courtesy of the nice RAMDAC and 2 MB of RAM but it's a *very* rare to find card (as ISA) and I had to screw around with the ISA Bus termination a lot, with the original setup by commodore it would not even work, the Industrial Card would simply not POST. Diamond Speedstar whatever cards are also very good but I would say kind of hard to find sometimes. If you can show a card I can possibly tell if it's good or not. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 07:39
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Police Automaton posted:If you can show a card I can possibly tell if it's good or not. Incredibly informative post, as usual! The onboard VGA chipset in the Tandy 2500 I'm getting is a WD90C00, these machines were extremely well documented, so I've found this file detailing what the onboard chip is capable of. It's cool that the memory is upgradeable to 512 KB (although the chips seem impossible to find  ). Do you know if there's anything I need to worry about with the WD90C00? All I plan to use it for is "period correct" games.EDIT: I plan to use it with a CRT EDIT2: Even though the docs say it's a WD90C00, a picture of the board of what I'm getting shows a Cirrus chip: 
d0s fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 08:16
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d0s posted:Incredibly informative post, as usual! The onboard VGA chipset in the Tandy 2500 I'm getting is a WD90C00, these machines were extremely well documented, so I've found this file detailing what the onboard chip is capable of. It's cool that the memory is upgradeable to 512 KB (although the chips seem impossible to find Ah yes, for people curious now, yes WD indeed stands for Western Digital, the guys that make hard drives. They made graphics chips once, funnily pretty unknown graphics chips but nonetheless very good ones. I would easily put them on par with offerings from Tseng and the like. Interesting about WD graphics chips was that they could have their refresh rate set externally by jumpers or dip-switches, refresh rates often not being easily set in old software. This makes them pretty nice for use with LCDs, as you can set them hard to 60 Hz, bypassing problems with non-60Hz rates on LCDs. That particular chip can go up to 1 MB without problem. (Just reloaded the thread and saw the picture, will leave the information for posterity anyways) A Cirrus GD5402. That's an old one. Also known as the AVGA2. It's a bit less capable than the WD chip, the WD chip being able to support up to 1 MB and having nice GUI acceleration functions. Good that you can insert four memory chips. (the two SMD chips under the socket are the ones with 256 kb) This graphics chip will perform a lot better with four chips installed. You should be able to go up to 800x600x256 max at any rate, if it will look nice I do not know. The RAMDAC is integrated, you said you want to use a CRT so you might be happy with the picture quality and performance, you should test it first at any rate. The GD5402 also can be run with an external RAMDAC and that quadratic chip next to it might actually be one, I can't really see it in this picture. I highly doubt that though. The RAM-Chips are not hard to find at all. They are bog standard 256x4 kb 70 ns DRAMs. You can use these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/MCM514256AP70-DIP-20-DRAM-4X256K-NEW-ORIGINAL-1-Pcs-/111280773276?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0 If you shop for another seller, pay close attention to the -70 at the end. -70 stands for 70 ns, and is the Speed of the RAM. It has to match the speed of the other RAM you already have or be faster. There's also -60 (hard to find) -80 (more common) and -10/-12. (this is not 10/12 ns, but indeed 100/120 ns, the slowest ones) They get inserted with the notch on the chip arranged to the notch on the socket. Insert them the other way around, and they will instantly break on the computer being turned on. I'd highly recommend upgrading the RAM, the chip kind of needs it to perform at it's best. If you feel insecure about picking RAM-Chips yourself, you can also PM me links. EDIT: fixed link EDIT2: Oh also to your question, no Cirrus usually is very compatible. If the picture quality will be fine for you and you upgrade the RAM, you will probably be able to play everything period-correct. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 10:05 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 09:14
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Police Automaton posted:The RAM-Chips are not hard to find at all. They are bog standard 256x4 kb 70 ns DRAMs. Correct me if I'm crazy, but that looks like a 256kb chip, where it seems like I need 2 128kb chips for this board to bring it to 512. Or does it not matter and I can just pop in one of these 256k chips in one socket, and leave the second empty?
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Jun 14, 2014 10:18
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d0s posted:Correct me if I'm crazy, but that looks like a 256kb chip, where it seems like I need 2 128kb chips for this board to bring it to 512. Or does it not matter and I can just pop in one of these 256k chips in one socket, and leave the second empty? You actually asked now a somewhat complicated question, probably without knowing it. No, that's not how it works, you need two. Pay close attention to how I wrote 256x4. The 4 Is also important. In case of this chip it means the memory is organized as 256,144 four (! not eight) bit words. With two of the chips, you actually get 8 bit words, which is the smallest bus width the graphics chip can handle. One chip handling the most significant bits, the other handling the least significant ones, both accessed in parallel. So if you would leave one chip out, 1/4 of the 16 bits wide bus would contain garbage from the perspective of the graphics chip. Now if you take four chips, you get 16 bit. The wider the bus, the more data can be moved at once. Now understand why the cirrus will be faster with four chips instead of two even if not all that memory is used? Right now, without the two additional chips the graphics chip is connected to it's memory 8-bit wide. For something that can be done in one access by the chip in 16 bit, it would need two in 8 bit. It logically follows that you could also take just one 256x16 chip, such chips exist and in fact this would also be cheaper (now). Would even work with the graphics chip. You simply can't though as the Mainboard is not laid out for it. This whole memory organization thing is a fundamental aspect of engineering of computer systems and I really only touched the necessary bits, it's a lot more complicated than that, I still hope it answered your question. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 11:14
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What's a good RTS from the past 20 years that I could play on Linux? Steam doesn't have much other than ultra casual tower defense games in this category.
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Jun 14, 2014 11:22
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Police Automaton posted:You actually asked now a somewhat complicated question, probably without knowing it. No, that's not how it works, you need two. Pay close attention to how I wrote 256x4. The 4 Is also important. In case of this chip it means the memory is organized as 256,144 four (! not eight) bit words. With two of the chips, you actually get 8 bit words, which is the smallest bus width the graphics chip can handle. One chip handling the most significant bits, the other handling the least significant ones, both accessed in parallel. So if you would leave one chip out, 1/4 of the 16 bits wide bus would contain garbage from the perspective of the graphics chip. Now if you take four chips, you get 16 bit. The wider the bus, the more data can be moved at once. Now understand why the cirrus will be faster with four chips instead of two even if not all that memory is used? Right now, without the two additional chips the graphics chip is connected to it's memory 8-bit wide. For something that can be done in one access by the chip in 16 bit, it would need two in 8 bit.  Thanks for the explanation, I love computer games but I'm a totally poo poo computer scientist. I'm definitely gonna buy a couple and try it out!
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Jun 14, 2014 11:30
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reading posted:What's a good RTS from the past 20 years that I could play on Linux? Steam doesn't have much other than ultra casual tower defense games in this category. OpenRA (Command & Conquer/Red Alert/Dune 2000) is all the RTS you will ever need :edit: Ok maybe you're more of a Total Annihilation kinda guy. Lord Dudeguy fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 13:32
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Lord Dudeguy posted:OpenRA (Command & Conquer/Red Alert/Dune 2000) is all the RTS you will ever need Thank you, this (openRA) is exactly what I was looking for. Although the Debian package manager complains that the installer is "badly made" and "could cause problems with my computer." The game works fine. I've had problems with TA Spring crashing to desktop in the past, so I'm going to avoid it for now.
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Jun 14, 2014 16:22
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reading posted:What's a good RTS from the past 20 years that I could play on Linux? Steam doesn't have much other than ultra casual tower defense games in this category. Wargame! All three games in the series have Linux support and you can play cross-platform multiplayer. It's also on sale for the weekend. http://store.steampowered.com/app/251060/
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Jun 14, 2014 16:37
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Hahaha. My Wages of War testing hit another snag. Monkeying around in Linux to get 8bit(256 color)graphics mode working wiped out the X11 configuration files for the desktop GUI....Linux was sturdy enough to not drop me to a command prompt immediately....instead I found that issue when powering up Linux Mint today. Luckily I've been working in a VM instance, and have a snapshot to fall back on. Only lost about 90 minutes of progress in real time, lost about 2 days of motivation mentally. That failure got me playing Wasteland 1 again (on my openpandora).  
quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 22:06
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reading posted:What's a good RTS from the past 20 years that I could play on Linux? Steam doesn't have much other than ultra casual tower defense games in this category. There is only one answer to this question, and that is Myth 2: Soulblighter. I don't know whether or not the first Myth got a native Linux port, but if it did, include that too.
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Jun 14, 2014 22:23
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| # ? Jun 12, 2024 05:28 |
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reading posted:What's a good RTS from the past 20 years that I could play on Linux? Steam doesn't have much other than ultra casual tower defense games in this category.
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Jun 14, 2014 23:12
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