Wallpaper for the next game

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Thanks. So this means I can put you down as a player of Cyberganked when it came out?

Paul, did you ever play any of these games back in the day?

- Wizardry I, II or III
- Bard's Tale I, II or III
- Might & Magic

Just curious if you've experienced their wonders!!

[Tdarcos]

Thanks. So this means I can put you down as a player of Cyberganked when it came out?

Yeah, sure, let me know the URL to download it when it's ready for examination. I'll donate an hour of my time to try it, and if I find I like it I'll play more of it, otherwise I'll carp, bitch and moan about how bad the game is (meaning that if I have to play any more of it, someone will have to offer to throw me money).

Paul, did you ever play any of these games back in the day?

- Wizardry I, II or III
- Bard's Tale I, II or III
- Might & Magic

Just curious if you've experienced their wonders!!

- No, never even heard of it
- No, heard of it but never played it, and
- Sorry, no, never heard of this one either.
And I don't know anything about any of them.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

All right. I think this will go a lot easier if we get you a copy of The Bard's Tale before anything else.

Do you have an account on "gog.com" or, "good old games dot com"?

[RetroR]

Might and Magic < Heroes of Might and Magic.

[ICJ]

That's wrong and you should feel bad for saying it.

[Tdarcos]

All right. I think this will go a lot easier if we get you a copy of The Bard's Tale before anything else.

Do you have an account on "gog.com" or, "good old games dot com"?

Yeah, I do. I must have bought something there a while ago because I didn't remember signing up but my username was in use and it was listed in Firefox's stored passwords list for that site.

But I probably have (or had) hundreds of site signups and probably don't remember a lot of them.

My gog.com username is rfc1394 if that's of any use.

Oh. I discovered why I have a login there, they were giving away some games including Duke Nukm 3D Atomic edition, and when I can get the original game for free I'm definitely interested.

[Tdarcos]

Thanks. So this means I can put you down as a player of Cyberganked when it came out?

Yeah, sure, let me know the URL to download it when it's ready for examination.

I found it. Jesus Christ, the proof-of-concept demo is 95 megabytes? I felt bad when the unsorted dump of everything including sources for one of my games was something like 4 meg.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I found it. Jesus Christ, the proof-of-concept demo is 95 megabytes? I felt bad when the unsorted dump of everything including sources for one of my games was something like 4 meg.

Well, this is because you're an idiot.

Hey Paul, the game has a few hours of music at 192kbps and above. Tell me how to compress that without losing quality. Tell me right now how i could compress that. Tell me now. You know how to compress music in a zip file that apparently the rest of the world is unaware of - let me know. Let me know and I will make an installer that does that. Let the world know. Put your goddamn Christing mouth up against your voice recorder and tell me how. Tell the world how. You're 100% convinced that it's "too big," well, let us know. Let us all know.

I **will not** go down to 128kpbs on the music.

It's going to look beautiful and sound clear and anyone who doesn't think so is invited to scrape the dick off their cocks.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Thanks. So this means I can put you down as a player of Cyberganked when it came out?

Yeah, sure, let me know the URL to download it when it's ready for examination.

I found it. Jesus Christ, the proof-of-concept demo is 95 megabytes? I felt bad when the unsorted dump of everything including sources for one of my games was something like 4 meg.

Also, that is not the full game, but a demo. So don't play that.

The whole idea here is that I am going to send you a copy of the Bard's Tale so you can experience that genre of game before playing Cyberganked next year.

My gog.com username is rfc1394 if that's of any use.

Oh. I discovered why I have a login there, they were giving away some games including Duke Nukm 3D Atomic edition, and when I can get the original game for free I'm definitely interested.

OK. The thing I will send you will include a modern day adventure game called "The Bard's Tale," which you can ignore. It will also include three games from the 80s. The first of which, also called "The Bard's Tale" is the one we would like you to try out.

(It will look like this, this is how you know you have the right game)

[Tdarcos]

I found it. Jesus Christ, the proof-of-concept demo is 95 megabytes? I felt bad when the unsorted dump of everything including sources for one of my games was something like 4 meg.

Well, this is because you're an idiot.

Hey Paul, the game has a few hours of music at 192kbps and above.

Okay, but nothing indicated it was done as a full multimedia product. I figured it was something like CZK that had some photos (I don't know if it had music; a lot of times Hugo's sound functions don't work or stop working.) So I figured maybe 5 meg.

95 meg makes sense if you have upwards of an hour, hour & ½ or more of audio, good MP3 compression can nicely reduce files without them sounding terrible to 1 meg a minute. A lot of music I have had at CD quality is compressed that low and I'm so old that I can't tell the difference. I'm sure if I was 22 instead of 52 I'd notice how terrible the sound is by comparison but as I am now I think it sounds the same as it does on disc.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Okay, but nothing indicated it was done as a full multimedia product. I figured it was something like CZK that had some photos (I don't know if it had music; a lot of times Hugo's sound functions don't work or stop working.) So I figured maybe 5 meg.

Well, you said you disabled the music for CZK, which is fair.

I don't mind people turning the music off. On the Internet Archive I gave people an option to download the game one file at a time, skipping the music file altogether if they wished! I will do something similar for Cyberganked.

95 meg makes sense if you have upwards of an hour, hour & ½ or more of audio, good MP3 compression can nicely reduce files without them sounding terrible to 1 meg a minute. A lot of music I have had at CD quality is compressed that low and I'm so old that I can't tell the difference. I'm sure if I was 22 instead of 52 I'd notice how terrible the sound is by comparison but as I am now I think it sounds the same as it does on disc.

In all honesty, I agree with you - I can barely hear the difference. I guess I just want to future-proof the game. Disk space will always seem like less of a big deal when time moves forward.

A game I released in 2000 had some MP3, MIDI and MOD music. It was 23 MB in size. People in 2000 LOST. THEIR. SHIT. This was the worst goddamn thing certain people had ever seen in their lives. One guy was so outraged he went back into time and murdered Anne Frank. Now, 23MB is nothiing.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Also, Paul, I hope you know I was kidding when I called you an idiot.

[Tdarcos]

The thing I will send you will include a modern day adventure game called "The Bard's Tale," which you can ignore. It will also include three games from the 80s. The first of which, also called "The Bard's Tale" is the one we would like you to try out.

(It will look like this, this is how you know you have the right game)

It reminds me of Noah "The Spoony Experiment" Antwiler's review of Final Fantasy VIII, in which he makes all sorts of snarky comnments, like where the game allows you to name the dog he gives it the name of "Anal" because the dog can be used in various ways, like "Anal Cannon."

[Tdarcos]

good MP3 compression can nicely reduce files without them sounding terrible to 1 meg a minute.

In all honesty, I agree with you - I can barely hear the difference. I guess I just want to future-proof the game. Disk space will always seem like less of a big deal when time moves forward.

Disk space has gotten so cheap as to be nearly free, removable and transfer media have gotten larger and larger as we (as a society) learned to pack bits more efficiently. I noticed when I was at the computer store on Sunday that Blu Ray burners are now at the $60 range, and DVD drives are down to $15, so we can presume that CD drives are probably no longer available since a DVD drive is downward compatible, similar to a Blu Ray.

There will always be incidents like the one in Malaysia or wherever it was where a major hard drive plant went belly up - you posted about it on Caltrops - and hard drive prices spiked for about a year, but in general hard drives will keep getting bigger at the same or lower prices, and eventually people might not even bother erasing files all that much, they'll just keep accumulating crap and occasionally pull stuff when their start menu gets too crowded, or move stuff around into fewer start menu categories, instead of one for each game or application (as a lot of software manufacturers default their installs and want to put their stuff at the highest level of the folder hierarchy) the users will (correctly) classify applications by type and include them in those folders.

The big issue is not the huge amounts of data we collect, create and retain, it's managing it. Categorizing files so we can find what we are looking for; it's getting to the point that hard drive space is so vast and the penalties for wasting it almost nil that if you download something from the Internet it's often faster to just download it again than to find it unless you're well organized.

But I'm getting old; I can remember when 100 meg of disk space was significant (and large and expensive). I gave my brother a 16 billion byte jump drive to encourage him to easily back up his computer files, it's the size of a pack of gum and was on sale for $8 at Staples; it's so cheap I bought myself one. Is he going to notice or care if there's a couple hundred meg of unimportant files? Yet you couldn't read a hundred meg of information in your entire life based on about 2K per printed page.

A real issue is conversion. Libraries and archives collect large amounts of material, which now includes digital and stored formats, and the problems we often have are of data files created by various programs. It's very bad when the system that creates them has no export to other formats function.

When was the last time you used a cassette? If I got one I'd probably have to visit my sister to listen to it. And a lot of people today have probably never handled a 78RPM record. And wire recording - I know about it but I've never seen it - existed back in the 1920s or so but if there was anything from that media if it wasn't copied it's gone forever. 8 Track tapes died a miserable death, mostly because they were a listen-only medium; cassettes lasted as long as they did because you could record on them.

There is huge amounts of data - or is it "there are huge amounts of data?" - collected for space exploration, analysis of earth information, linear accellerator data and other huge data generators back in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s where billions and trillions of bytes of data were generated to mag tape which we no longer have the hardware to read, or the machines to run the software that can read it, and the software was all proprietary, as were the file formats they generated to store it. Anyone know how to read disc files using the RMS data file format from Digital minicomputers, or DASD hard drive images from old IBM mainframes?

Lots of stuff we've had has been lost forever because we didn't or couldn't convert it when the old machines were still around and now there's no way to read or interpret the proprietary data file formats they used then.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

That's more than 10 lines.

[Tdarcos]

That's more than 10 lines.

You said the 10-line limit didn't apply in conversations in Interactive Fiction groups except games dealing with North Korea.

[Flack]

...we can presume that CD drives are probably no longer available since a DVD drive is downward compatible, similar to a Blu Ray.

It is an unsolvable mystery, left to the ages and the... wait.

When was the last time you used a cassette?

And a lot of people today have probably never handled a 78RPM record.

I'd have to go out to the garage for that photo and I don't have any shoes on yet. Pity.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

That's more than 10 lines.

You said the 10-line limit didn't apply in conversations in Interactive Fiction groups except games dealing with North Korea.

Text games, sure. The unabridged history of storing code on media though?? NO

[RetroRomper]

The first time I downloaded Necrotic Drift (on dialup no less), I was curious as to how a text game could be 120MB (considering I had just played A Mind Forever Voyaging, my thoughts were more how long and massive (as a game) could ND be).

For the record I wasn't disappointed; on the contrary, this was my first exposure to another person who had the same cultural references as me so when Robb mentioned a Chocobo in the opening spiel, I was hooked (more entranced).

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Well, in Necrotic Drift's defense, it is only around 37MB instead of 120. :)