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Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2016 20:14
by Keening_Product
"Apart from the improvements, it's good."

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2016 15:40
by kvee
Keening_Product wrote:"Apart from the improvements, it's good."
Exactly! :]

But the crappy video, noisy and faulty hardware and general uncertainty whether you're gonna boot this time or not have a certain weird charm and I understand running Keen on top of that is another kind of experience, and I guess that's what this thread is about?

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2016 18:20
by keenmaster486
crappy video
Hey, EGA wasn't that bad :dopekeen
noisy and faulty hardware
Well, if you use a modern hard drive (or even better, a compact flash card) it increases the reliability by about 500% and makes it much quieter too. I'm using my Socket 5 box as a main machine right now, and I'm quite happy with it. It's super reliable, does exactly what I need it to do (play old DOS games, word processing) and if I need to get on the internet I just use my iPhone. It's not perfect for everything but it works. Of course I have a modern computer that I use for everything else :celtic
I understand running Keen on top of that is another kind of experience, and I guess that's what this thread is about?
Well sure, Keen was meant to be played on that type of hardware, although in reality I probably couldn't tell the difference between that and DOSBox. Not unless it was playing some serious OPL3 tunes, in which case emulation just can't cut it :)

Edit: Rorie, you haven't played Keen for years? Then why are you still here? :p

Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2016 11:38
by kvee
keenmaster486 wrote:
crappy video
Hey, EGA wasn't that bad :dopekeen
I meant noisy cards / poor picture quality compared to digital/LCDs here.
I love me some 16 color goodness, or I wouldn't even be here! :]
keenmaster486 wrote:
noisy and faulty hardware
Well, if you use a modern hard drive (or even better, a compact flash card) it increases the reliability by about 500% and makes it much quieter too.
I do that for most of my machines now, but I used to even boot from floppies.
However, you're still not home yet. I had a videocard failure with black smoke and all. Dunno how, but that one actually kept working even after the fact! (the cap was actually not that important probably?)
I unfortunately had a motherboard and some ISA cards that just stopped working out of the blue. Oh well, that stuff is cheap nowadays.
keenmaster486 wrote:
I understand running Keen on top of that is another kind of experience, and I guess that's what this thread is about?
...I probably couldn't tell the difference between that and DOSBox.
...which was kind of my original point. They sure did an awesome job with DOSBox!

Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2016 11:44
by kvee

Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2016 12:56
by Nisaba
Squarewave Orchestra!

hallelujah! that's frublin' awesome!

Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2016 14:00
by keenmaster486
Whoa! That's really cool, man! How were you playing those square waves, what sound card were you using? Was it digital or synthesized? And which one was you in the video? :p

This has given me ideas :evil

Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2016 15:15
by Keening_Product
That was delicious.

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2016 11:24
by kvee
Nisaba wrote:Squarewave Orchestra!

hallelujah! that's frublin' awesome!
Keening_Product wrote: That was delicious.
Thanks!
keenmaster486 wrote:Whoa! That's really cool, man! How were you playing those square waves, what sound card were you using? Was it digital or synthesized? And which one was you in the video? :p

This has given me ideas :evil
That's actually OPL3! I used some FM sounds during the show as well, but for this one I needed a squarewave. I control the chip with a program I wrote, opl_plr (you can see it running on my monitor). The soundcard is based on the Yamaha OPL3-SAx chipset.

And I'm the long haired dude in the NES t-shirt.

Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 9:50
by Rorie
kvee wrote:
Rorie wrote:I would have to depend on DOS related emulators such as DosBox
I actually have several oldschool 386 / 486 systems, but I gotta say DOSBox is great!
Apart from the lack of hardware crapping out and some minor graphical differences (stuff's generally prettier in DOSBox), I'm actually very happy with my virtual DOS machine.
Back in school, I received my very first computer whom which they were cleaning out their outdated systems and my former teacher who I keep in close contact with and we are both good friends actually gave me an what they called a 486DX2 which it's cpu was 66mhz, I did get a larger hard disk in the years ahead and more RAM, unfortunately it died me on years ago after I had left school but I did get a lot of enjoyment out of having my own computer