Imagined posted:

Hell I've lamented many times recently how FAQs and walkthroughs for the web ala GameFAQS are also obsolete technology nowadays in favor of loving YouTube videos for every little thing. Gotta sit through xxweedlordxx's 8 minute video for information that would've taken 20 seconds to read on GameFAQS ten years ago, just so xxweedlordxx can try to monetize his brand.

TotalLossBrain posted:

Also obsolete technology - game cheats and walkthroughs in printed magazines. If you got stuck on a game, you better hope some magazine will carry a hint in the next few months.

My Lovely Horse posted:

Man ain't no one on youtube even call themselves xxweedlordxx anymore, they'd be too afraid of getting demonetized.

Chainclaw posted:

Everyone only read the long FAQs on GameFAQs, so xxweedlordxx's FAQ there would also have like 8 million extra characters telling you in detail why The Offspring are relevant to this PS1 RPG.

OniPanda posted:

It's also a pain in the dick for minecraft mods. Apparently documentation is obsolete. For the big mods you can get lucky and someone will make a good video with bookmarks, but mod packs get extra painful because of the recipe changes, so your only hope is a let's play.

Collateral Damage posted:

I say we should make youtube speedrunning a thing. The challenge being to present a topic in a video that's as short and concise as possible.

quote:

The Story of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut is a novel by Antoine François Prévost. Published in 1731, it is the seventh and final volume of Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité (Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of Quality). The story, set in France and Louisiana in the early 18th century, follows the hero, the Chevalier des Grieux, and his lover, Manon Lescaut. Controversial in its time, the work was banned in France upon publication. Despite this, it became very popular and pirated editions were widely distributed. In a subsequent 1753 edition, the Abbé Prévost toned down some scandalous details and injected more moralizing disclaimers.

TotalLossBrain posted:

Also obsolete technology - game cheats and walkthroughs in printed magazines. If you got stuck on a game, you better hope some magazine will carry a hint in the next few months.

I wrote a walkthrough for Fallout for a German magazine and got paid a few hundred bucks so that was nice. Then they wanted me to write more stuff but I had to buy the games they wanted walkthroughs for. I was young and dumb and I still declined.

Stefan Prodan posted:

you could always call the 1-900 hint line lol

oh if you're german maybe that wasn't a thing there but in the US you could pay to call NINTENDO WIZARDS or whatever they were called and be told where dracula's rib was and poo poo

TITTIEKISSER69 posted:

I ran up so many phone bills and pissed my parents off a lot with that number.

Stefan Prodan posted:

you could always call the 1-900 hint line lol

oh if you're german maybe that wasn't a thing there but in the US you could pay to call NINTENDO WIZARDS or whatever they were called and be told where dracula's rib was and poo poo

doctorfrog posted:

Here are the things I have to overcome to get mp3s to play properly on this car that is six years old:

• respect a limit of 700 folders, otherwise it will crash
  
• ensure the files are in individual folders per album, because the player ignores tags for sorting albums
  
• ensure that filenames sort in play order, because the player ignores tags for sorting tracks
  
• ensure that the files do not have lengthy pathnames, because the player will start skipping files with long paths
  
• resize cover art, or it doesn't get displayed, or the file is skipped
  
• use BulkFileChanger to set file creation/modify/access dates to something sequential, because before the player sorts by filename, it sorts by the gat dang date stamp
  
• transcode certain files that just won't play for reasons that I can't figure out
  

Dick Trauma posted:

Cojawfee posted:

Does it at least let you skip tracks by using the fast forward?

JnnyThndrs posted:

I have an old truck with a cassette player in it, so I bought a cassette - shaped MP3 player that sends the audio into a tape head and uses MicroSD cards.

Once you put the ‘tape’ into the truck’s player, your kinda locked into whatever order your files are in, and there’s no shuffle - it uses the same rules your car does, right down to me having to use BulkFileChanger in order to change the file dates.

Your car and my fake cassette must use the same logic/decoder chip.

Fake edit: it looks like this:

doctorfrog posted:

This thing is really cool to me. Does it pause when the "tape" isn't being spooled?

Cojawfee posted:

Does it at least let you skip tracks by using the fast forward?

taqueso posted:

It should charge from the spool spinning

doctorfrog posted:

Yes, it's a "normal" head unit installed standard with the car, so it has the features of a generic music player (skip, shuffle, etc.). Mp3 management just seems to be something of an afterthought. Shuffle will (shockingly, considering) shuffle a single folder's contents (recursive selected sub-folder shuffle = no) or the entire directory structure.

I will say this: copying things over to the USB drive used to be a major pain. I'd copy them over, then use mp3tag to apply a baroque folder restructuring so I could browse by Genre/Artist, and another program to truncate folder and filenames. I Googled/figured out how to use foobar to export a shitload of albums by genre and artist, and apply a truncated subfolder structure in one go, while avoiding the 700 folder problem.

code:

$cut(%genre%,50)/$cut(%album artist% - %album%,50)/$cut(%track% - %title%,50)

Then it's Sanse Mp3 Art Sizer to change album art.

Then BulkFileChanger.

Frankly, I'm surprised I managed to cobble a process together.

vvvvv ah, my bad

Stefan Prodan posted:

My car (2009 jaguar) has a MP3 player where you plug USB media in and I used to play like several hour long radio shows on it and it would do the weirdest bug I have ever seen in my life

So suppose I had 4 files on there, if I got out of the car 30 minutes into track 1, sometimes when I got back in it would start at the same place IN THE NEXT FILE so I would just get confused as poo poo about what they were talking about

Computer viking posted:

All of this is probably down to a handful of guys in some chinese chipmaker who had to write some barebones proof of concept firmware (that nobody ever dares change) for their media player chip. Or it's the example code from the development tools that came with one of the chips they bolted together, I guess.

I wonder if anyone has tried to track down who originally wrote the firmware for these things?