Woolie Wool

How much for the fake Rolex?

foobar2000 doesn't allow hardware midi though, which is the best midi. I prefer using WACUP (a community update for the old WinAmp 5) though it has stability issues.

Not the fastest setup in the thread, but maybe the strangest: Main setup (GODZILLA) Fractal Design R5 case Corsair RM1000x 1000W ATX PSU (complete overkill lol) AMD Ryzen 5 1600 @ 3.2 GHz Noctua NH-D14 air cooler Gigabyte GA-AB350 Gaming 3 motherboard 64 GB DDR3 RAM @ 2933 MHz nVidia GeForce RTX 2070 8GB GPU Generic LG Blu-Ray rewritable drive Panasonic LS-120 IDE floppy drive (3.5" 1.44MB compatible) 500GB Crucial SSD 2TB WD Red SATA hard drive 4TB WD Gold SATA hard drive StarTech IDE controller Intel 802.11ac wireless network card Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium PCI-e sound card Roland SC-88 MIDI synthesizer Schiit Bifrost DAC Schiit Asgard amplifier Logitech G502 mouse IBM Model M keyboard, manufacture date 4/30/1987 LG 27UD58-B 27" IPS LCD monitor (3840x2160) Windows 10 Home Retro setup (FUNKENSTEIN_3D) Chernbro SR209 beige case Corsair RMi 750x 750W ATX PSU (perhaps not so much overkill because the Athlon is very hungry for +5V and I don't trust vintage PSUs) 1.5GB PC133 SDRAM AMD Athlon XP Thoroughbred @ 1733 MHz StarTech socket A air cooler Abit KT7A KT133A motherboard with modded KT7ASB4 BIOS nVidia GeForce FX 5900 GPU TEAC FD-235 3.5" floppy disk drive TEAC FD-55GR 5.25" floppy disk drive Apple 678T0191 6X IDE DVD-ROM drive (yes, you can plug a beige Mac CD drive into your PC) PCI CompactFlash rear bracket, 2 swappable 16 GB and one 2 GB CompactFlash cards (boot disks) 40 GB WD Caviar IDE hard drive 2 x 500 GB WD Green SATA hard drives Netgear FA31105 10/100Mbps NIC StarTech USB 2.0 controller card StarTech SATA controller card Sound Blaster AWE64 Value ISA sound card Logitech MX518 optical mouse with PS/2 adapter Dell Bigfoot AT101W PS/2 keyboard (black Alps) Sun Microsystems GDM-5010PT 21" Trinitron CRT monitor (at least 1600x1200) Roland SC-55 MkII MIDI synthesizer Windows XP Professional (main HDD) FreeDOS 1.2 (boot disk #1) MS-DOS 6.22 (boot disk #2) IBM PC-DOS 7 (boot disk #3) Laptop (THELASTIBM) Lenovo ThinkPad T520 15" Dual-core Sandy Bridge Intel i7 Some GeForce GPU I leave turned off to avoid the wrath of proprietary Linux drivers DVD-RW drive 12 GB DDR3 RAM 500 GB Samsung 960 Evo SSD The infamous "zero contrast" TN LCD panel (1600x900) Arch Linux

Doom's hell doesn't need Satan so its heaven doesn't need God.

The IKblue theme from custom Quake maps would be cool in Doom.

But...but...but...the good old days! Coding discipline! Bloat! Every byte counts! Assembly language! *wanking hand gesture* (yes, I have had a Sonic rom hacker tell me that modern game programmers all suck because they don't write entire games in ASM anymore) As far as dependencies go, I have hated external libraries ever since I experienced my first Windows 9x DLL hell in the '90s, but at least then hard drive space really was scarce and expensive.

Since this is basically a Linux argument thread now, I just had the experience of updating Arch on my ThinkPad when several AUR (a separate repository for unsupported software that is distributed as source rather than binary packages) packages I had installed updated simultaneously. On this groaning old dual-core laptop, the process took two and a half hours. God, what would updating Gentoo be like?

Another thing to note is that computer stores made brisk business administering people's machines for them. If many people had problems they would take their box to CompUSA or the like and pay to have it reconfigured. Nowadays these problems usually never happen to begin with because modern commercial operating systems administer themselves. This also means that people like me who have a DOS system in the present day have a harder (if much cheaper) time maintaining and using it than people in the actual '90s, because I have no one to run to if I fuck something up; I have to fix it myself using the (often fragmentary and incomplete) information available online.

The other what? General acceptance of computers in the home was not a thing until the late 1990s. My family had a DOS PC, but my family was weird and almost bankrupted itself maintaining the thing. The closest most people got to their own computer was having a Super Nintendo console.

Usenet was almost entirely the domain of university students and researchers. The entire legend of Usenet's golden age and the "Eternal September" that ended it comes from Usenet's largely closed, exclusive user base up until AOL opened the floodgates for huge numbers of home users on Mac and Windows 9x machines.

Most people didn't. Personal computers were rare in the DOS era, and a much larger proportion of them were Macs, precisely because Macs were designed to be appliances that required as little technical skill from the user as possible.

Do you have anything to offer besides moral polemic?

"Managers" and "competence" seem to rarely go together. The modern managerial class is a decadent aristocracy with the usual problems of decadent aristocracies.

There people go saying the fucking C-word and now everybody is talking about politics. Jesus Christ. I want to smash capitalism as much as the next wannabe revolutionary but can we please not? Not everything has to involve goddamn political culture war bullshit, I get enough of that on the rest of the motherfucking internet and I certainly don't want it in a thread about Windows.

Early adopters are chumps, let them beta test it and wait. I think it's pretty self-explanatory. Most people expect a computer to work like an appliance: a washing machine doesn't expect you to know anything about how washing machines work, a microwave doesn't expect you to understand anything about how microwaves work, even cars haven't required their users to know anything about internal combustion engines since the 1980s other than "put gas in tank, take to dealer when check engine light goes on". Linux still comes with the mentality that you must learn and understand how PCs and Unix-based operating systems work at least to some degree, or at best you're locked out of much of the OS' functionality and at worst it simply won't work at all, which was perhaps a good assumption in the 1970s and 1980s when Unix was the best OS going, but is completely antiquated in TYOOL 2021 where most Windows boxes (including mine, which is a baroque monstrosity with five expansion cards, two hard drives, an SSD, a floptical drive, and a Blu-Ray drive that would likely cause nightmares running bare-metal Linux) work fine for years without any active maintenance or configuration on the user's part because they maintain and configure themselves. With Linux, even the operating systems that do try to maintain and configure themselves often fuck it up because they're a Frankenstein's monster of different, disparate pieces of software from different sources, which is why my one full-time Linux system, my laptop, uses Arch so I know exactly what is on it and how it is set up, because I trust Linux less to not blow itself up than the Microsoft product. Yes, Windows 9x was a house of cards built on a glorified 8-bit home micro OS that was just waiting to melt down at any opportunity, but 9x has been dead for 20 years and the rest of computing has moved on. And the worst part is that the Linux community thinks it's a good thing that only computer obsessives like me can maintain a Linux system consistently without degrading any of its functionality, because in their mind computers must be these delicate, fragile, fussy little things that require the user to constantly take their temperature and babysit them so they don't hurt themselves and pat them on the ass to burp them after they eat, whose secrets are kept by the wise and august sysadmins, whom the mere lusers must run to for help when Baby Computer has a boo-boo. Meanwhile Windows can administer itself much better than most humans can, eliminating the need to have somebody with sysadmin skills at all. Worse, every time Linux takes a step towards being self-administering like the commercial operating systems (e.g. systemd), the graybeards pitch a fit because their arcane computer wizardry loses value if the computer just works without the user having to intervene all the time.

It seems like a lot of FOSS people are very invested in the idea that computers should not "just work", and even that some people are too incompetent to be trusted with computers. The 1970s hierarchical division of wheels who can be trusted with the system and lusers who cannot is still the animating spirit of much of the free software community and Unix derivatives in general.

Who cares? In an era when smooth-scrolling platformers were considered cutting edge, it was extremely radical and immersive, and that's all that really mattered.

I agree, especially because the only engine I can use it with is some funky Windows port of Q2DOS that has basically no extended features other than OGG music. There's a fairly new unit called Sonic Mayhem I couldn't play in this engine because it exceeded the render limits.

Qbism did a software renderer for Quake II that incorporated leileilol's colored lighting from Engoo and colored lighting works with Quake II's palette amazingly well:

Why don't you just try it and see what happens? It's not like your PC will blow up or something.

Until Windows 10 approaches EOL I'm not interested in switching. I hope by then there's a good equivalent to Classic Shell, because Windows got the start menu right 20 years ago and there's no reason to keep changing it just for the sake of change.

I think it should also be noted that older versions of Windows are completely insecure and going on the internet under Windows XP (to say nothing of 98, which doesn't even have a multi-user model) is like driving through a war zone with a million dollars in your trunk, and a giant neon sign on the roof reading "MILLION DOLLARS IN TRUNK". The fact is that legacy Windows versions are toys, and nothing more. It might be a shame that that is the case, but it is what it is.

Oh hey, I remember seeing this mod promised years and years ago and I thought it died like so many other ambitious mod projects. I am glad to see I was wrong. Can a commercial game qualify for a Mordeth Award? 😜 I played both levels of the demo yesterday and did an encore playthrough of the first level this evening. Great stuff! In terms of tightness of gameplay I think it's considerably superior to the other two major retro-engine boomer shooters Wrath and Ion Fury, with a really satisfying rhythm and flow to the combat and enemies that both pose a significant threat and also have clearly legible patterns that make it feel like my fault when I get hit (though I think the long spin-down and large health pool of the Tandems make them a bit of a time-waster). I like how mobile they are, and how they pressured me in groups while being individually quick to kill in a way that blended aspects of the Quake and Doom bestiaries in a very seamless way. The Sevore is my favorite of the enemies, a really nice and intimidating take on Quake's Fiend. The music, with its melodic and eclectic style (saxophones, yes!) was an absolutely delightful change from the one-dimensional "me angry" harsh noise and industrial metal that every other retro shooter seems to have these days (yeah Andrew Hulshult is a good musician, but I'm kind of sick of him or someone who wants to sound like him appearing in every single game). The game also gets my respect for picking a base resolution and color palette and sticking to it, especially since the palette looks really vibrant and attractive. That said there are a few demerits: * No traditional status bar. None of the big boomer shooters has an oldschool full-width status bar with rich texture work and it just breaks my heart. * If "Outpost Romeda" is truly going to be the first level, and the terminal messages seem to indicate it is, it is way too big and complex for the role, and the opening stages of the map are quite nasty going in without any prior exprience. Maybe the terminal messages are just placeholders and it's really going to be like the third or fourth level? It would certainly be more comfortable in such a slot, after a player of the final game would have had time to find their feet. * The floor blood is clearly meant to be a decal and only a decal, and looks really terrible in the software renderer. Considering how much work went into the palette, I think there should be an option for floor blood that fits the software renderer or else an option to turn it off. * With the size and ambition of these maps, the standard Doom intermission screen feels a bit anticlimactic. Something like Square's with a panoramic view of the map would be a nicer reward. * Some of the textures have the Doom heritage a bit too close to the surface. I'm thinking especially of some silver textures in "Terminal Meltdown" that look like they were traced from the TEKGREN series. * The Monger and Mangler are very difficult to tell apart, especially at a distance. Those nitpicks aside, I am extremely impressed with the demo and I'll definitely be getting the full game when it comes out. Bravo for a fantastic release! I am intrigued by the mention of a "special arranged" version of the soundtrack. Are esselfortium's arrangements the versions shipped in the demo? Will that mean there will be an optional midi soundtrack to feed into my Sound Canvas?

But at the same time we're losing a shared music culture, we're still bombarded in public spaces with top 40 pop music that almost nobody aside from social media influencers and Republican governors seems to actually like. Does anyone actually enjoy Imagine Dragons, or is the ability of modern people to listen to music together so stunted that nothing more demanding than Imagine Dragons is even possible to play in commercial spaces? And if that's the case, why not just get rid of music in stores and businesses altogether? However bad Limp Bizkit may have been, they at least had a distinctive sound that reflected the musicians' interests, tastes, and personalities and a keen sense of what sort of people they wanted to make music for.

To me, the worst thing about the new Doom games is their making Doom yet another one of these universes over which people engage in pointless, point-missing fanwank. Doom doesn't make sense. Doom doesn't have to make sense. None of the classic Id games have a coherent narrative or universe, and when Id made one for Quake II, the game was made a much duller experience for it. I daresay Doom is better for not having "realistic" cities or the perfectly linear escalation of difficulty that every game has to have nowadays because it's "good game design". Maybe they put "The Inmost Dens" exactly where they wanted to put it and the difficulty spikes are there because they were meant to be there because designers went by feel and personal preferences instead of basing all their decisions on what Gamasutra or similar outlets decide is the Correct Way to make video games. To me, asking what if Doom had a strong narrative progression with realistic map settings and a linear difficulty curve is like asking what if the first Black Sabbath album had triggered bass drums and sweep-picked arpeggios, or what if the 1960s Batman TV series were shot on 35mm film with Depress-O-Vision color grading and Adam West growled like Solid Snake and tortured people.