Two Stop Bits | komadori's comments

komadori 172 days ago | parent | on: 84-24
I opened it on my phone and it displayed the following message:
> This is an “old school” website, crafted for leisurely reading on a large wide screen like a tablet, laptop, or external monitor.
...and suggested that I schedule a time in my calender to view it on a suitable device at a later date. I suppose that terrible Flash sites are a certain kind of "old-school", but HTML 3.2 is more what I had in mind.
komadori 206 days ago | parent | on: Why are younger generations embracing the retro ga...
It seems a bit derisory to focus on nostalgia as the sole driving factor. After all, classic film and classic literature still have an audience, even though their origins have passed much further beyond living memory. Why should games be any different?
I think that the technical and artistic constraints under which pre-modern games were created have merit in their own right. It may be less popular once the wave of nostalgia passes, but I expect people will continue to create and play retro and retro-aesthetic games far into the future.
komadori 278 days ago | parent | on: Apple ][ Myst "Demake"
The author's port of Myst to the Atari 2600 is even more impressive in my opinion: http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/myst_vcs/
komadori 319 days ago | parent | on: Monty Mole trilogy for the Nintendo Switch
Nintendo's website doesn't say, but the original games were released for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/0005617
Unrelatedly, a "Monty Mole" is apparently a type of enemy in the Mario pantheon: https://www.mariowiki.com/Monty_Mole
komadori 390 days ago | parent | on: Museum of ZZT
There was also an official sequel called SuperZZT, although I don't think it got much traction.
- RegulusG1 389 days ago
  Oh yeah, I vaguely remember it now that you mention it.
  I seem to remember it barely had any maps or fun things to get online, so you might be entirely right about that.
komadori 390 days ago | parent | on: Rarer than rare: The Mindset II
For context, the earlier Mindset documentary video he alludes to appears to be "This PC was almost an Atari" on the same channel: https://youtu.be/MRpFqz5dOPA
- dfarquhar 390 days ago
  Yes, that is indeed his earlier video on the Mindset. The Atari connection is another thing that makes this early PC fascinating.
  - komadori 390 days ago
    I watched the Mindset II video first, and it was fine if a little dry, but it wasn't until I saw the first one that I really appreciated what it was all about.
    As an aside, in that first video he says it's not clear what the capabilities of the Mindset's sound system is. It occurred to me that if MAME supports the platform then its source code might tell you, so I had a look:
    Each channel (second channel optional) is driven by a Intel 8042 microcontroller bit-banging an 8-bit resistor ladder DAC. Whatever support exists, if any, for accelerating synthesis or multiple voices must be contained within its firmware blob.
komadori 395 days ago | parent | on: ROTT in Hell – Definitive History of the Best Deat...
I loved ROTT, from the Nasty Metallic Enforcer to El Oscuro himself. Admittedly, I've barely played DOOM and Quake by comparison, but I'm under the impression that they're feted for being mechanically and technically impressive. ROTT, on the other hand, has charm :-).
komadori 401 days ago | parent | on: Bad Influence - Series 1 (1992)
This is amazing. I remember watching this on TV many years ago and the "cheat shed" segments really stuck in my mind, but I couldn't recall what the programme was called.