I think I can sum it up in three words:  Fear of death.

Everybody needs a coping mechanism for dealing with the inevitability of death.  Social interaction, religion, family, blind ignorance, sex, drugs, and various causes (environmental, human rights) are the most common, but there are people for whom none of those apply.  I believe these people turn to anything that gives them comfort, or used to give them comfort.  Ventriloquists collect ventriloquist dummies, maybe because they remind the owner of receiving adoration on stage.  Housewives collect porcelain dolls to glorify their memories of youth.  Christopher Dennis has an extensive collection of Superman memorabilia because the image of Superman is what keeps him alive.  But you don’t have to be down on your luck or unhappy to have a collection; just look at Jay Leno or Steve Martin.

For those who grew up using early computers to better themselves or others, it’s not inconceivable that such objects would give them comfort.  I am one of those people, so I have a collection of computers.  It is modest by most hard-core retrocomputist standards; I have around 30, and many are duplicates for parts.  But I definitely spend otherwise productive time hauling them out, getting them working, running old favorites (or new discoveries) on them, and writing software for them.  It reminds me of a time when I was the technological wunderkid, and had control over my environment — you tell a computer to do something, and it actually does it.  When I “retrocompute”, I have something pleasant to occupy my thoughts, and I gain a sense of accomplishment and completion.

Some collectors in my hobby look at their crawlspace, storage space, shed, or warehouse and wonder how their collection got so big and how they’ll ever get rid of it.  I think the answer is to recognize your collection for what it is:  A coping mechanism.  It should not have any more value beyond that.  Your collection is not a replacement for people.  Your collection is not more important than your job, your marriage, or your kids.  Once you realize that, you can start letting it go.  Maybe only one piece at a time… maybe never all of it completely.  But you can let go.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 48,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 18 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

One of the things we got dinged on was the audio rating (3 out of 5), not because the sound was bad, but because the audio tracks weren’t lossless.  I agree lossless audio would have been best, but we couldn’t use lossless because of a technical limitation in Adobe Encore.  Encore had trouble dealing with .wav files over 2gig, which was the original RIFF .WAV format’s limitation (the W64 and RF64 extensions to .wav have overcome this, but Encore doesn’t support them).  At 3.5 hours of stereo audio @ 48KHz @ 24-bit resolution, a lossless track is 3.6gig.  I ran into odd random problems trying to use lossless 24-bit audio, but had no problems at all using Dolby AC3 audio.  So I chose the devil I knew.

The official launch date is December 6th, however the first shipments will be going out to people who pre-ordered as early as Friday of this week.  You can order directly from us, from a reseller in your hemisphere, or from Amazon.

I’d like to thank the entire MindCandy crew past and present for getting “that  demodvd project” to this point.  From capturing some clips of a Capacala demo in 1996, to a professional Blu-ray in 2011 with over 3.5 hours of demos and 7 hours of extras, it’s been a long great ride.

And special thanks to my family, for putting up with me and my hobby :-)

In 1983, having started using the Apple IIs at my school for word processing and simple programming with LOGO, I became quite interested in computers and really wanted one, but our family didn’t have a lot of money at the time and couldn’t afford one, even a C64. My father was sympathetic to how I felt, and as a small consolation bought me a subscription to Family Computing Magazine. It turned out that the magazine subscription was just as valuable a gift as the computer I wanted. Whenever it arrived, I read it cover to cover in 2-3 hours, absorbing everything in that magazine and learning about every system on the market as well as what kinds of software and hardware were available for them.  More importantly, I also learned what other people were using their computers to accomplish, far beyond a simple checkbook balance or playing a game.  And for those specialized tasks, they were often writing their own software in BASIC.

That’s a nice memory, but not a life-changing one.  What changed my life, specifically, was the combination of three things:  My desire to use a computer + not actually owning one + the BASIC listings in every Family Computing magazine.  Every mag had a few BASIC programs that did various things, usually a utility program, a simple game, and some “mystery” program that displayed or printed some graphic or message and you had to run the code to see what it was.  They were written in Applesoft BASIC, with diffs for other computers of the time (usually Atari 8-bit, C64, TRS-80, and TI 99/4A were represented, with later diffs for Spectrum and PCjr’s sound and graphics).  Because we didn’t own a computer, I would spend hours tracing through the BASIC listings in my head to “run” them to see what they did.  Sometimes I had a pad next to me to jot down notes, as I couldn’t juggle more than 5-6 variables at a time. For the “mystery” programs that output graphics, I would plot the output on graph paper.  Each program was a puzzle to solve.  My brain became an emulator.

Dad saw me spend hours reading each magazine, and going over older ones, so he found a way to save monthly for a computer.  A little over a year later, he surprised the family with an AT&T PC 6300, which he was able to get at a discount because he worked at AT&T at the time. I nearly exploded, and barreled through that machine with a purpose.  I used that computer just as long as I read Family Computing, both until roughly 1989.

Today, I program in 8088 assembler for fun.  It calms me down.

Thank you, Joey Latimer, for writing all those BASIC programs, and thank you Dad, for a simple act of empathy.

You may want to poke around 1-bit Music News for some previous entries; the entire blog is dedicated to creating polyphonic music with only a single speaker interface and no hardware other than the ability to pulse the speaker on and off at various intervals.  This leads to, no surprise, a lot of pulse waveforms.  The predominant platform for exploring this is the ZX Spectrum, where the technique was made popular through some of the amazing compositions of Tim Follin.  Some of the music can be slightly harsh and/or an acquired taste, but others are respectful of the platform and composed specifically for it.  Just remember to turn down your speakers before listening to an example.

Update: As corrected by Dan, pre-orders before Black Friday and launch in December.  Assuming no problems at the replicator, of course.

Well, imagine my surprise when I tried to burn it to my rewritable test disc and saw this:

Considering our premastering tool is highly accurate, and hadn’t shown any errors when I was premastering the project, this was confusing.  Fifteen minutes of research didn’t pull up anything concrete other than someone claiming that BD-RE discs take a few hundred meg as “reserve space”, whatever that means.

Rather than trust tha interwebz, I decided to check the media sizes of my rewritable BD-RE DL (50G) disc, and a regular BD-R DL (50G) blank using the media information window of ImgBurn.  Results:

BD-RE DL: Sectors: 23,652,352, Size: 48,440,016,896 bytes

BD-R DL:  Sectors: 24,438,784, Size: 50,050,629,632 bytes

Well look at that:  A rewritable dual-layer blu-ray has nearly 1.5 gig less available space than a regular blank.

Now you know!

He wrote me recently to let me know he had purchased an XT to do some democoding on it, a shared passion of ours.  It came with a monochrome card, but he lacked a suitable monitor; it also lacked a keyboard, and a working disk drive.  Did that stop him from using it?  Hell no, this is Andrew Fucking Jenner!  Step aside, son:

I ordered a CGA card but decided to see if I could jerry-rig something up in the meantime. I programmed my Arduino to pretend to be an XT keyboard and also the “manufacturing test device” that IBM used in their factories to load code onto the machine during early stage POST (it works by returning 65H instead of AAH in response to a keyboard reset). I then used this to reprogram the CRTC of the MDA to CGA frequencies (113 characters of 9 pixels at 16MHz pixel clock for 18 rows (14 displayed) of 14-scanline characters plus an extra 10 scanlines for a total of 262 scanlines). The sources for this are on github.

I had to re-read that a few times to make sure I wasn’t having a seizure.  Let’s confirm what happened:

1. With no input device or working disk drive, he still managed to load code by reprogramming a microcontroller to emulate a long-forgotten IBM diagnostic protocol, formerly used only in factories by test devices to QA units before they went out the door.
2. The code he loaded was to force a monochrome card to output NTSC signals, so that could be connected to a TV.  Not dramatic enough for you?  How about this:  He forced a monochrome card to behave like a color card.
3. He made the schematic and source code available, because that’s the kind of guy he is.

You don’t mess with Jenner.  You do read his blog, however.

However, with the Blu-ray build taking several hours at a time to test changes, I have some time to concentrate on the DVD (and write blog posts).  Let’s talk about MPEG-2 encoders.

Ever wonder what the very best MPEG-2 encoder is?  Each have different strengths, parameters, quantization matrices, sensitivity to noise, and so on.  There’s no way to see which one is best for your source footage until you try one.  So you may be tickled to know that we tested pretty much every single Windows encoder that someone claimed to produce decent results (with the exception of ProCoder, which kept crashing on my rig, which is a shame since I recall it produced great output).  A few months ago, I prepared the then-current 480i version of the main timeline, a thoroughly interlaced 3h29m27s 30i video.  I made an avisynth wrapper for it that presented itself as a YV12 colorspace format (what MPEG-2 uses) and fed it to several encoders, each set to the same average bitrate (4.7 mbit/s) and set to DVD-compliant settings.  I then ran the encoded results through the MSU Video Quality Measurement Tool and concentrated on five metrics:

• SSIM (the metric x264 uses)
• 3SSIM (a modified version of SSIM)
• VQM (a metric that exploits the DCT to simulate human visual perception)
• PSNR (older, depreciated)
• The color results of PSNR (U and V components) since the previous four only looked at luminance (Y)

Finally, I took the average metric score for all 376642 frames, stuck everything in a spreadsheet, and color-coded each from green (most similar to the original input file) to red (farthest):

• Adobe Media Encoder, which uses MainConcept’s engine, clearly uses PSNR as its comparison metric when optimizing 2-pass encodes (unfortunately, PSNR is not a good metric to optimize to, which is why it doesn’t do well in the metrics that actually matter like SSIM and 3SSIM, and why it looks worse visually)
• CinemaCraft readily sacrifices color accuracy during a CBR encode, presumably to fit the target bitrate better and try to preserve as much luminance as it can.
• CinemaCraft’s default settings produce, for it, the best SSIM metric.  All attempts to make it better by me (10-bit DC precision vs. 9-bit, different matrices, different filter settings, etc.) actually made it worse.

The subjective viewing quality of each of these results was mostly in-line with the technical results with one exception:  The QuEnc output was noticably worse than its SSIM score above would suggest.  It’s hard to explain without showing individual frames as comparison, but there was just something in QuEnc’s output that made it feel worse to the viewer than the others.  The PSNR metrics confirm that somewhat.  I think I must have made a mistake somewhere along the way with my testing of the QuEnc encoder, so I mentally ignored it when making my comparisons.

So which one did we end up using?  To understand that, you should understand my motivation.  I have a history of using psychology in most of my projects to gain a slight edge with my target audience wherever I can:  I chose nerd-familiar material for 8088 Corruption, I played virt’s rickroll composition during my presentation of MONOTONE, the contribution point reward system in MobyGames was my idea, etc.  So while TMPGEnc produced the best overall results in subjective user observations across the entire video, we went with CinemaCraft SP.  Why?  CinemaCraft SP allows you to skew the bitrate for any number of user-defined sections.  I used this feature to ensure perfect visual quality for the very first and last demo in the timeline.  Start strong and finish strong.

The software and packaging called it the Bank Street Music Writer card, and it was capable of six synthesized voices with different instrument types, some of which could be percussive.  If that sounds a lot like the Ad Lib, don’t be fooled — the output was square waves, the volume envelopes were controlled by the software, and the percussive sounds were made by mixing white noise with a waveform.  It sounded a lot like two PCjrs glued together.   Apple users are familiar with this sound:  It’s the Mockingboard.  The PC board doesn’t say anything like that on its PCB, and the components aren’t arranged the same way as they are on a real Mockingboard, but it sure sounded awfully similar.  So much so, in fact, that I pulled my card out of storage a few years ago to see if I could decipher it for adding support for it in MONOTONE.  I discovered it was built around a GI AY-3-8913, which itself is a smaller pincount version of the AY-3-8910, which was, in fact, the main chip on a Mockingboard.  But that was the only connection, and it was mostly conjecture on my part.

Until tonight.  I was browsing through The Internet Archives’ collection of Family Computing Magazines (thank you, Mr. Scott) when this caught my eye:

Well look at that — it is a PC version of the Mockingboard!  So at some point there was going to be a PC Mockingboard, but the only fabrication of it was as the “Bank Street Music Writer Card” bundled with Bank Street Music Writer.  You don’t see this written in any Mockingboard/Apple history, which is a shame because I’d be curious to know what the plans were and how far they got off the ground.  All we have proof of, thanks to Family Computing, is that they were planning to market it as a Mockingboard at some point.

This is easily the rarest sound card I have in my collection, and is probably the most rare and valuable PC sound card second only to the Innovation SSI 2001 music card, of which only two are known to still exist.  (Only one BSMW card is known to exist — mine — but remember the first lesson of the collector:  Rarity != value.)  And the Innovation has its own trump card:  It’s a PC version of the SID.

Scans of this card, reference samples of its output, and my interview with Glen Clancy about Bank Street Music Writer and it’s music file format will probably be inaugural entries in my Sound Card Museum project, which I will start building before the year is over.  If you can’t wait and want to hear what it sounds like right now, you can check out both a sample file that came with BSMW, or a piece of music I transcribed myself (a section of “Consider Yourself” from Oliver).

(PROTIP: Bank Street Music Writer also supports the PCjr and Tandy 1000 sound chip in a limited capacity, so you can snag BSMW from your favorite abandonware watering hole to play with it in DOSBOX.  It requires ANSI.SYS, so hopefully that won’t be a problem in DOSBOX.  If you’re especially lucky, it will come bundled with the songdisk I released with it so you can play with 20+ extra tunes.)

It is almost entirely Adobe Encore’s fault.  Encore is the only halfway decent solution to creating a Blu-ray, allowing Photoshop files for menu creation (very flexible and handy), multi-page menus, subtitles including a subtitle editor, and other fun stuff.  It also has a lot of help for the newbie if you need it, including encoding of assets, a library of themes and buttons, and most importantly a clear interface.  Coupled with the excellent Blustreak Tracer CMF, you can produce BDCMF output suitable for professional replication.  This is a lot of money (roughly $1800), but the nearest solution for BDCMF output upwards from this is Netblender’s DoStudio, which is nearly double the cost at $3000.  We are of a limited budget, and already familiar with Adobe’s tools, so we chose Encore+Tracer.

Encore’s blu-ray support, we have discovered, is extremely buggy and almost unusable.  Here’s a few fun showstoppers we’ve had to work around:

1. You can have only 15 buttons per page of a multi-page menu.  Any more and they’re not guaranteed to show up on hardware players.
2. You can have only 9 pages per multi-page menu.  Additional pages aren’t guaranteed to show up on hardware players.
3. You can have around 90 buttons spread across your multi-page menu.  Any more and they’re not guaranteed to show up on hardware players.
4. Subtitles closer than 5 frames together will choke the project.  (CS 5.5 has an option to fix this, but I refuse to pay $600 for a bugfix, so for CS 5.0 I had to write a Subtitle Workshop script to adjust the subtitles so this wouldn’t happen.)
5. Any video asset used as a background to a multi-page menu will be transcoded whether it is in a compliant format or not.  This is especially idiotic when you consider that multi-page menus are just graphical overlays on whatever is playing in the background, so no transcoding is even necessary.  Even more hilarious, it forces a transcode to 30fps, even if your asset is 24fps ot 60fps.
6. Using H.264 video with open GOPs (higher quality in a smaller space, perfectly valid for blu-ray) causes Encore to freak out and decode the entire asset once, causing near lock-up of your computer at 100% CPU across all cores while this is happening.  Working with any timeline greater than a few minutes is impractical because of this.
7. Encore, for lack of a more eloquent term, fucks with blu-ray player registers it has no business fucking with.  As a result, subtitles turn on when they’re not supposed to.  BluStreak Tracer (mac) or BDEdit (PC) is required to fix this.
8. There is no way to enable  ”title” or “return” remote control button functionality.
9. Trying to encode a 480i pop-up menu results in a garbled menu (720p and 1080p/i works fine).

Keep in mind that Adobe doesn’t disclose these issues.  (They disclose three of them in the CS5.5 release notes and claim to fix one of them, but like I said, I shouldn’t have to pay an extra $600 for a bugfix that restores advertised functionality.)  So my build process for the last two months has been something like this:

1. Make changes to the blu-ray project in Encore to work around bugs (1 hour)
2. Build the project (2 hours, thanks to bug #5 above)
3. Burn and verify to a rewritable BD-RW50 (3 hours to burn, 2 hours to verify)
4. Test in a PS3, as these bugs only affect hardware players.  Note bugs and issues.
5. GOTO 1

This means it takes a minimum of 8 wallclock hours to test a change, and that’s if it happens on a weekend when I’m there to babysit the process and start one step as soon as the prior one finishes.  But, of course, that usually flushes out yet another bug that you need to fix.  I’ve been through at least 20 iterations of this when Encore should have just simply worked as advertised.

Looking back, we should have spent the $3000 for DoStudio.  It was significantly more expensive, and we would have had to probably borrow money to pay for it hoping that the sales of MC3 would repay the cost, but the time it would have saved would have been worth it.  We might have been done months ago.

I wouldn’t be so frustrated if Adobe publicly acknowledged bugs.  Hell, I’d be happy if they acknowledged bug reports, of which I’ve submitted 5 (they don’t even acknowledge if they’ve received a bug report!)  I could have designed MC3 around those bugs a year ago, saving all this time.

So, how’s my driving?

Directly after graduating high school, my senior class went to a party thrown by the school in a rented skating rink masquerading as a giant dance hall.  Despite being less than 5 miles away from the graduation ceremony, some teens were showing up drunk, something I hadn’t ever seen before.  Some arrived with JBF hair, something else I hadn’t seen before.  And when the party was over at 2am, everybody went to a Lake Michigan beach about 2 miles away where the party continued (under the watchful eye of police who had been given “incentive” by wealthy township parents to watch over the party without arresting anyone) with much alcohol and the occasional disappear into the bushes.  I imbibed of neither, being a completely sheltered and, at that moment, shocked virgin.  Midway through the second party, I asked a similarly-sheltered friend, “I thought only 10% of our class had sex and did drugs; what the hell is going on?”  “Where have YOU been?” he replied.  “Your percentages are inverted.”

I vowed a few things that morning:

• I would stop contemplating suicide
• If I was still a virgin by New Year’s Eve 1999, I would commit suicide
• I would give alcohol a chance

I’m happy to report that I was no longer a virgin less than a year later, having met my soulmate in college.  21 years, 16 marriage anniversaries, and two children later, things simply couldn’t be better.  For anyone who thinks that there is nobody out there for them, I say this:  Get out more.  Someone, somewhere, really wants to meet you, and you really want to meet them.

What about that alcohol vow?  I’ve had so few drinks in my life that I can remember every single one of them, and to prove it, here goes:  A Miller Light at a party when I was 16, a small glass of everclear punch at a frat party when I was 19, rum and coke at my bachelor party, Malibu rum and coke at a company party, a Corona at a company outing, a Bud Light after a successful day of running the MobyGames booth at Classic Gaming Expo 2004, a glass of salmiakki at Pilgrimage 2004, another one at Block Party 2009, three different types of spirits at Whiskeyfest Chicago 2010, about 10 beers over an 18 month period at a recent company, two “rum barrels” at same said company’s outing, two shots of something unidentifiable yet quite strong while leaving said company, and a Malibu rum and coke at a recent wedding.  That’s everything.  I think that’s enough to say I’ve given alcohol a chance, and I still really fucking hate it.  Every one of them has burned on the way down.  Every single one.  I don’t understand the appeal of a substance that directly attacks you as you imbibe.  “Well, you didn’t drink enough!” I hear someone shout in the back of the room.  Maybe not, but if I wanted to get relaxed and/or euphoric, I would rather just go to a demoparty or get sleep-deprived (or, as is usual for demoparties, both simultaneously).  You know what really lifts me?  Watching something so goddamn funny that tears stream down my face from all the laughing.  I can’t believe being drunk is better than that.

As a physical specimen, I could have gone better.  I was born with one foot turned 80 degrees towards the other.  I inherited terrible eyes from both my parents; one was cross-eyed with astigmatism, and the other quite nearsighted, so naturally I got all three of those and am legally blind without my glasses.  My eyes are so bad, in fact, that I don’t qualify for LASIK (the best it could do for me is reduce my prescription, two eye doctors have told me; no point in doing it if I still have to wear glasses!).  I’ve never had any natural athletic ability.  Every September is hell thanks to hayfever allergies.  But it’s not all bad; innovative eye training at a young age almost completely cured my crossed eyes without surgery (and earned me a Speak’n’Spell as a reward), and a leg brace worn until I was three corrected the foot.  I shot up to 6 feet 2 inches by age 16, where I remain.  My weight is a problem, but I’ve started running again and it’s something I have control over and hope to be in good shape in four months.  Heck, I still have all my hair.  I could have turned out a lot worse.

I’ve experienced a lot of heartache my first 40 years.  I’ve been beaten up on a regular basis, nearly got kicked out of high school for ditching class, was kicked out of college for the same thing, washed out of a physical labor job after only two days, and blew a shot at a potentially high-earning new career by screwing up a managerial position.  I’ve also CAUSED a lot of heartache, by being pretentious and rude to people who didn’t deserve it, treating every member of my immediate family badly or disrespectfully at least once, dumping my first girlfriend in a truly horrific way, acting unprofessionally in front of customers, and even stealing (in both the plagiarism and retail sense).  I’ve nearly doubled my high-school graduation weight.  Early in my career, I was known (and treated) as “the smartest kid in the room”, something I’ve lost due to age and time and has resulted in some depression.  I’ve even lost a few friendships along the way.  Deservedly, I am cursed with extremely detailed memories of every single one of these events.

Thankfully, I’ve had a lot of good things happen to me as well, some by chance, and others by my own doing.  I met my wonderful wife, who I somehow convinced to put up with me and gave me two wonderful children.  I made some considered and crafty career choices that kept me fulfilled with how I earn a living, something I’m especially proud of given that I never completed college.  I’ve personally witnessed the birth (and death, in some cases) of home computers, music videos, the space shuttle, digital media, the internet, the web, the fall of the Berlin wall, cell phones, the bicentennial, and of course video games.  The day I was born, astronauts from Apollo 15 first took the lunar rover out for a spin.  I’ve started a few projects that I am well-known for in certain small circles, including one that wildly outgrew what I could give it and continues to survive without me.  I even gained approval and acceptance from a small group of underground creative hackers, which tickles me.

If I had to go back and live my life again, I’d do it all exactly the same.  Cliché or not, I really would, since deviating from the course would put me somewhere else entirely today, and I’m not sure I want that.  If I hadn’t gotten picked on and beat up so much as a youth, I probably wouldn’t have turned to computers and music for solace and comfort.  (And believe me, computers pretty much saved my life.)  If I hadn’t done so poorly in high school, I wouldn’t have picked Monmouth College to attend (the only nice college that would take me based on my ACT scores and not my GPA) and I wouldn’t have met my wife, and consequently had our children.  If I hadn’t flunked out of college, I wouldn’t have had the career path that led to where I am today; I probably would have graduated with a liberal arts degree with a specialization in computer science, and gotten work in a local rural town doing mediocre application programming.  And so on.

No, really – I really would do it all over again.  Want one last example?  High school.  Most people never want to revisit high school.  Me, I wish I could do some of this stuff ten times over:

• Slept in a mall overnight (Northbrook Court, December 1987)
• Sang in an octet at the Swift mansion in Lake Forest (although our rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus was, predictably, a bit underwhelming)
• Modeled in a McDonald’s ad
• Sang a John Rutter piece at Carnegie Hall

Today on the train ride into work, I sat across the aisle from a large mid-40’s guy with unkempt shaggy balding hair 2 inches too long, black sneakers worn with blue jeans, an 80’s hair-metal black t-shirt one size too small, and a dirty no-name mp3 player that he was using to listen to uncomfortably loud metal on his cheap earbuds.  Think Brian Posehn but without the personality and success.  His music was so loud that I could make out the lyrics, and my initial impulse was to ask him to turn it down.  But as I kept glancing over, I saw he was really rocking out to what he was listening to, in his confined sitting-in-a-train-seat way.  This loser had nothing but his cheap metal, which was enough.  I opted not to bother him; let him have his moment, something nice to sustain him for the rest of his inevitably crappy day at a crappy job.  I mention this to illustrate two things:  The first is this attitude I have, something I’ve gained with age and did not have 20 years ago — patience, forgiveness, empathy, consideration.  The second is how tiny changes early in life could have turned me into this guy.  It’s in these moments that I’m actually glad I’m older.

Every six months, one aspect of your life gets much easier, while something else gets much, much harder.  I can live with those odds for the second half.

Bryan Jones wrote a wistful account of the end of the space shuttle program, along with his personal photo of Atlantis’ final approach.  I saw the first and the last shuttle launches live on TV (as a 10-year-old, my mother woke me at 5:30 in the morning to watch the first one), and I feel, as he does, that our lack of commitment to a space program is a shame.  For those who wonder what we gained from spending money on the shuttle program, he lists some of the advances the shuttle program has given us, such as cell phone cameras and LED lights.

Optimus wrote a little on why he has pulled back from the demoscene a bit, and I urge all my scener friends to read this because he sums up very closely the state of mind I’ve had in the last couple of years.  In fact, his history mirrors mine a little, including how I felt when I first discovered the scene, how I treated the scene the first few years, why I attempted some scene “outreach” at times, and why I mostly hold back.

So there you go.

Quick, without doing any research: What early 1980s computer was faster, the IBM PC or the Commodore 64? The IBM PC ran an 8088 at nearly 5MHz, whereas the C64 ran a 6502 variant at 1MHz. The PC cost thousands of dollars, the C64 hundreds. The PC had a 1 megabyte address space; the C64 only 64K. Is this a trick question?

It is!  The C64 was faster.  The original IBM PC, despite appearances and bias on the part of both consumers and marketing, was actually the slowest popular personal computer on the market at the time of its release, even compared to the Apple II and Atari 400.  Here’s why.

The 8088 holds an uncomfortable position between the realm of 8-bit and 16-bit personal computing; while the internal word size was indeed 16-bit, the 8 in 8088 means that its external data bus was only 8 bits wide.  This means that the 8088 could only access one byte of data in a single bus operation, giving it speeds much more like an 8-bit personal computer than a 16-bit one. Normally this is no big deal; the 6502 used in the C64 had the same limitation.  But unlike the 6502, which could access a byte in a single cycle, the 8088 took 4 cycles to access that same byte.  Another way of looking at this: every time memory is touched, the 8088 wastes 75% of its cycles, effectively turning the IBM PC from a 4.77MHz computer into a 1.1925MHz computer.  This gave it a “lead” of only 0.1695 MHz over the C64.

If it still had a slight lead, then why was it slower?  While the 8088 could indeed operate on 16 bits at a time, the machine instructions were between 2-4 bytes large, and only the simplest instructions took 2 cycles to execute.  Contrast that with the 6502, where most instructions are 1 byte large and most execute in 1 cycle.

Let’s illustrate this with a fun example:  Rotating a byte of memory once using ROR (rotate right). We’ll keep it fair by treating the PC like it only has a single 64K segment of memory. First, the 6502 version using ROR:

6 cycles. Now the 8088 version:

What took 6 cycles on the C64 takes 37 cycles on the IBM PC, no thanks to the slow memory access of 4 cycles per byte. Taking both machine’s clock speeds into account, this means the operation takes about 6 microseconds on the C64 and about 8 microseconds on the IBM PC.  It can get much worse than that, especially if you’re foolish enough to access more than a single 64K memory segment.  IBM PC is teh suck! (*)

The gap between the IBM PC and the Atari 400 is even wider, if you can believe that, because the Atari 400 ran the 6502 faster (1.78MHz) than the C64 (1.026 MHz).  The BBC Micro?  2MHz!  It’s painful to think about!

Ever wonder why there hasn’t been a true demoscene demo on the original IBM PC aside from three scrollers (all Sorcerers releases, btw)? Well, now you know one major reason. (Lack of decent graphics is another; in fact, I’d be willing to argue that only the Apple II had slower graphics.)

(*)Yes, I know the 8088 has 4-byte prefetch queue that sometimes speeds things up.  That comes in handy, oh, almost never.

• All the demos, intros, NVScene footage, production notes, and easter eggs are completely finished and through production.  (And the blu-ray footage looks absolutely stunning.)
• All the group commentary is in, except for the very last one which I hope will come through because it’s pretty important in my opinion, but I’m not going to wait until MekkaSymposiumBreakpointRevision 2018 to get it.  (edit: we got it!)
• Our cover is done, another masterpiece from fthr.  Our booklet is 95% done.
• I dusted the cobwebs off my Cinema 4D knowledge and put together an intro animation for the disc.  (Just a 15-second abstract thing, mind you, but it’s better than being dumped unceremoniously into the main menu without so much as a how-do-you-do.)  I also did some background drone and foley for it — shocking, I know!  Don’t be too impressed; I used loops.
• The blu-ray is finished authoring, which was an arduous process because Adobe Encore is so damn buggy.  Phoenix did some great menus given the limitations we had to work with.  I had to start over from scratch a few times, and even then there are some bugs which will just have to stay in.

If things are looking so rosy, why are there still about 8 weeks left before you can hold this masterpiece in your hands?  One word:

Subtitles.

At my most maximum speed, typing between 90-100 wpm with a clear understanding of what is being said, it takes at best 4x realtime to subtitle what people are saying on the commentary.  Because there is a mixture of accents and varying degrees of being able to speak English, this can take as much as 10x realtime.  And you can only do about an hour of it before your hands start to cramp up.  So let’s do some math:  If it takes, say, 7x realtime on average to subtitle, and we have 4 hours to subtitle (main feature+intro featurette+production notes), it would take one person about 28 solid hours to complete the subtitling.  I have about 90 minutes a day to do subtitling, from my train ride back home from work where I can get a good seat and fall into a groove, to free time during evenings.  Still, that means the soonest I can get done is about 18 days (2.5 weeks!) from now.

Luckily, I have some weekend time too, and other members of the group are taking chunks, so hopefully we’ll be done in less than 2 weeks.

I hate subtitling.  I really, really hate it, especially since you are creating subtitles for something that should never be watched without audio in the first place (these are demos for goodness sakes!).  But because we have an international audience, and that audience may not understand English all that well, we are going through this ordeal for you, the customer.  All praise attention to detail!  All hail the customer!

I haven’t thought about who is going to do the translation of the subtitles, which is unfortunately going to extend time even further.  Maybe we’ll only offer English subtitles.  I really don’t want to delay MindCandy 3 beyond Assembly — I want it to be ready by Assembly.  Which is also the reason I’m not going to subtitle the additional TEN HOURS of NVScene 2008 footage, even though it is hard to understand sometimes.  I’m sorry, but really, do you want MindCandy 3 to be delayed until the end of the year for subtitling?

Enjoy a frame from the opening anim:

No entries for me this year, as my sole agenda for the party is to finish MindCandy 3, as Phoenix will be there as well.

First off, you owe it to yourself to check out Paku Paku, the astonishingly great pac-man clone written by Jason Knight.  Why astonishingly great?  Because, as a hobbyist retrogaming project, it does everything right:

• Uses a 160×100 16-color tweakmode on CGA, PCjr/Tandy, EGA, VGA, and MCGA, despite only VGA being capable of a truly native 160×100 resolution
• Plays multi-voice sound and music through the PC speaker, Tandy/PCjr 3-voice chip, Gameblaster CMS, and Adlib (yes, CMS support!)
• Runs on any machine, even a slow stock 128K PCjr
• Has convincing game mechanics (ghosts have personalities, etc.)
• Comes will full Pascal+ASM source code

This is just as good a job, if not better, than I like to do with my retroprogramming stunts.  Very impressive work!

One of the things I love about coding for the 8088/8086 is that all timings and behavior are known. Like other old platforms like the C64, Apple II, ZX Spectrum, etc. (or embedded platforms), it truly is possible to write the “best” code for a particular situation — no unpredictable caches or unknown architectures screwing up your optimization. Whenever I see a bit of 808x assembly that I like, I try to see if it can be reworked to be “best”.  I downloaded Paku Paku just as much for the opportunity to read the source code as for the opportunity to play the game (which I did play, on my trusty IBM 5160).

On Mike Brutman’s PCjr programming forum, a discussion of optimizing for the 8088 broke out, with Jason giving his masked sprite routine inner loop as an example of how to do things fast:

lodsw
mov  bx,ax
mov  ax,es:[di]
and  al,bh
or   al,bl
stosw

However, one line (“MOV BX,AX”) bugged me, as it also bugged the author:

The sprite data format is stored as byteMask:byteData words which I point to with DS:SI for LODSW… which I then move to BX (which sucks, but is still faster than MOV reg16,mem; add SI,2) so I can use bh as the mask and bl as the data.

So, was that code “best”?  Is there no faster way to write a masked sprite in 160×100 tweaked text mode on the 8088?

First, let’s look at his original code, with timings and size:

lodsw            16c 1b
mov  bx,ax       2c  2b
mov  ax,es:[di]  10c 3b
and  al,bh       3c  2b
or   al,bl       3c  2b
stosw            15c 1b
--------------------------
subtotal:        49c 11b
total cycles (4c per byte): 93 cycles

Some background knowledge of how Paku Paku works can help us:  The game does all drawing to an off-screen buffer that mirrors the video buffer, and when the screen needs to be updated, only the changed memory is copied to the video buffer.  Because Jason does all drawing to an off-screen buffer in system RAM, and the video buffer is smaller than the size of a segment, you have room left over in that segment to store other stuff. So if you store your sprite data in that same segment after where the video buffer ends, you can get DS to point to both screen buffer AND sprite data. Doing that lets us point BX to the offset where the sprite is (it was originally meant to be an index register after all), and use the unused DX register to hold the sprite/mask. We can then rewrite the unrolled inner loop to this:

mov  dx,[bx]     8+5=13c 2b ;load sprite data/mask
lodsw            16c     1b ;load existing screen pixels
and  al,dh       3c      2b ;mask out sprite
or   al,dl       3c      2b ;or sprite data
stosw            15c     1b ;store modified screen pixels
inc  bx          3c      2b ;move to next sprite data grouping
--------------------------
subtotal:        53c     10b
total cycles (4c per byte): 93 cycles

mov dx,[bx+1]
(next iteration)
mov dx,[bx+2]
(next iteration)
mov dx,[bx+3]

mov  dx,[bx+NUM] 12+9=21c 3b ; "NUM" being the iteration in the loop at this point
lodsw            16c      1b
and  al,dh       3c       2b
or   al,dl       3c       2b
stosw            15c      1b
----------------------------
subtotal:        58c      9b
total cycles (4c per byte): 94 cycles

Reverse-engineer extraordinaire Andrew Jenner thinks two steps ahead of me and provides the final optimization that not only gets the cycle count down, but frees up two registers (DX and SI) in the process.  He writes only what is necessary, and since we need to skip over every other byte when writing in 160×100 mode, manually updates the DI index register to do so.  The end result is obtuse to look at, but undeniably the fastest:

mov ax,[bx+NUM]  12+9=21c 3b ; “NUM” being the iteration in the loop at this point
and al,[di]      9+5=14c  2b
or al,ah         3c       2b
stosb            11c      1b
inc di           3c       1b
----------------------------
subtotal:        52c      9b
total cycles (4c per byte): 88 cycles

Is this truly “best”?  I think so.  But to prove it, we have to time the code running on the real hardware.  Thanks to Abrash’s Zen Timer, we have the following results:

• Jason’s original code as listed above, repeated three times to plot a 5×5 sprite:  48 microseconds
• My code block, three times with [bx], [bx+1], [bx+2]: 41 microseconds
• Andrew’s optimization, also written with [bx], [bx+1], [bx+2]: 37 microseconds

And just to make your head spin, check the comments for this entry — the resulting discussion shows that if you’re willing to rearrange both your sprite data and your thinking, you can get things even faster!

Lazy Game Reviews – Produces 10-minute reviews on both hardware and games, with a touch of humor and lots of footage captured from the real hardware whenever possible.  The Carmageddon review in particular is perfection, having been captured from a real 3Dfx card and with meaningful illustrations of gameplay, including some accurate history of the development of the game.  His Youtube channel is easier to navigate past shows, but the blip.tv channel earns him a modicum of cash and has better quality video, so… choose.

Ancient DOS Games – While LGR covers the gamut of classic personal computers and gaming, Ancient DOS Games covers only DOS games, and the thoroughness and attention to detail is astounding.  Features like tips and tricks on how to play the game, recommending the best graphics mode or DOSBOX settings per game, noticing what the framerate of the game is and how it affects gameplay, and even a comparison of dithering methods in Thexder and whether or not they were effective — these are all OCD traits that I would have put into my own coverage of the material.  His fly-outs are pixel-art amusing.

Those guys are doing such an amazing job that I really don’t see the need for me to do so.  The both of them combined equals a quality of work that I can’t see myself improving upon, which not only makes me very happy, but frees me up to work on other projects.  Check them out, dammit!

PS: I found I have a true doppleganger over on tumblr.  We have very much in common — moreso were I lesbian.

I have an idea for a regular podcast I would indeed like to do, but not until MindCandy is finished and maybe one or two other projects as well.  The idea would center around vintage IBM PC and DOS-era computing as a hobby, of course.

I also got a spiffy new Samsung Galaxy S variant (Epic 4G) which has data access no matter where I am (2g/3g/4g/wifi) and has a slide-out keyboard and other bells and whistles, so I have no excuse not to update the blog once in a while, even from a moving commuter train.  Which, guess what, I’m doing right now!

Seeing as this was combined with the yearly local Commodore 64 fest, it was a bit of a double-fest. Jim Brain was there, and I also had a nice conversation with Nate Lawson who educated me on the finer points of how BD+ does and does not work. MC3 will intentionally use as little protection as possible, but the 16-yr-old cracker in me still likes hearing about the details.

I couldn’t arrive until 9pm, but most of the exhibits were still up.  I took pictures with my 9-yr-old 4MP “prosumer” camera, and was mildly happy with how they turned out.  Enjoy:

Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 5.0

Most collectors of classic game software tend to focus on an entire company (Sierra, Infocom, Adventure International, etc.) while others tend to hone in on a particular series (Wizardry, Ultima, etc.)  I am guilty of both, but my collection is biased towards series that may not seem to be worth collecting, have any relationship to each other, or have any rational pattern (even to fellow collectors!).  What I collect reflects why I like old PCs as a hobby:  Not because “old komputers R k00l” but because “what people did to get past old computers’ limits is k00l”.  If a game was really well-programmed, or had great graphics, or managed to produce audible sound out of the beeper, it gained my admiration.  Sure, story and gameplay mechanics are a contributing factor, but they’re not the main focus of my collection.

Another odd thing about what I collect:  It’s 99% PC.  I have some Apple II, Mac, and C64 titles, but those have been donations I’ve promised to take good care of, and I have.  My heart lies in the original PC, mostly because it was the hardest platform to get a decent game experience on, making successes all the more impressive.  This is atypical; most of my fellow collectors don’t discriminate platforms like I do.

Here’s an incomplete list of some “series” I’ve collected and why I consider them a series:

All the PC versions of Cinemaware adventure titles: Defender of the Crown (including the euro bootable EGA/Tandy/3-voice version), King of Chicago, S.D.I., Sinbad, The Three Stooges, It Came From The Desert, Rocket Ranger. Cinemaware games were a mixed bag:  Awesome graphics, music, and sound — on Amiga.  Other platforms usually got worse graphics and sound, but better gameplay because they would tweak some games between platforms.  Play the original Defender of the Crown for Amiga and you’ll find it is nearly impossible to win.  Play it on C64 or PC, and you’ll find it’s a much more balanced game.  Anyway, the graphics rocked CGA at the time.

EA Chuck Yeager flightsim series:  Chuck Yeager’s Flight Simulator, Chuck Yeager’s Flight Trainer 2.0, Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat. The first was a very fast simulator for an old PC with CGA; you could even flyby the “EOA” logo in the desert.  Then Microsoft sued over the “flight simulator” name and they quickly rebranded it as Flight Trainer.  Then came Flight Trainer 2.0 with more of a focus on training, and an audio cassette with many notes from Chuck himself.  Finally Air Combat, with a completely new engine by Brent Iverson which traded 20% less speed for 100% better graphics, models, video modes, clouds, cameras…

Deus Ex series: Deus Ex, Deus ex 2: Invisible War, Project: Snowblind. Snowblind?  Yes, Project: Snowblind was originally developed by Crystal Dynamics as a spin-off of Invisible War, but when DE2:IW sold poorly, the story and assets were changed somewhat to distance the game from a then-failing property.  Playing the game, however, reveals much of the familiar Deus Ex biomod mechanics, and the story — while taking a backseat to action — smells heavily of conspiracies, like all Deus Ex games.

Sierra Game Arts collection:  Thexder, Silpheed, Firehawk, Sorcerian, Zeliard.  All of these games were ports from the PC-88, and all of them look best in their native 640×200 16-color mode which you can see on a Tandy SL/RL/TL series computer or on an EGA card with more than 64K of video RAM.  For everything but Silpheed, the full-screen graphics updated very quickly by dividing the entire screen up into 16×8 tiles (8×8 if a 320×200 mode) and only repainting the tiles that change.  Since movement was quantized to tile locations, very little updated per frame even though it didn’t look like it.  These were essentially 40×25 textmode games but using graphical tiles — brilliant!  (Oh yeah, they also support Tandy 3-voice sound and all but Thexder supported a ton of extra sound devices for the time, but it’s the graphics mode and engine that I love.)

DSI road engine games: Test Drive, Test Drive II, Outrun, Grand Prix Circuit, The Cycles.  This is extremely obscure and deserves an explanation.  When Distinctive Software Inc. was an independent Canadian developer, they came up with a relatively simple-yet-effective road repainting engine that got used in several games published by Accolade:  Test Drive, Test Drive II, Grand Prix Circuit, and The Cycles.  During this time, they also took on a job for Sega porting Outrun to the PC.  They used the same engine, which one could argue they didn’t own because they developed it while under contract from Accolade.  They must have known something was up because they didn’t use their DSI name and logo, but instead used Unlimited Software Inc. Accolade felt they violated a working agreement, and filed a lawsuit.  (Ironically, the Outrun version of the engine is the smoothest, running much better on faster machines.  It’s playable even on gigahertz machines.)

Would you be fooled by this?

DSI:USI:

Access adventure Series:  Mean Streets, Martian Memorandum, Countdown, Amazon: Guardians of Eden, Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, Overseer. Access knew that the best technology could sell games, even if the story was a bit lacking.  Their engines had (crude) motion video, digitized audio, and 256-color graphics as early as 1989.  Later games like Under a Killing Moon and Pandora Directive also had a great engine with pre-rendered lights and a fully-textured world to explore.  While I loved all of them, my heart belongs to the Mean Streets engine because it used 256-color VGA graphics as the base data but would FS dither to all common lower graphics modes as well.

Here’s part of one shelf of my collection; I have five more shelves:

It’s a small collection compared to some of the superstars of my hobby, and I’ve had to pare it down over the years due to financial hardship, but I’m happy with what I have. It’s special to me, and that’s what counts.

Corruption

Corruption was one of the legendary Magnetic Scrolls series: text adventures from the UK that are regarded by many to be on equal footing (if not better) than the venerable Infocom series of interactive fiction.

Playing the included audio tape before it’s required by the game isn’t recommended, but doing so sets up the basic premise of the story. The first track on the first side of the tape is a conversation with your boss that was used to frame you. In it, you hear your boss calling you into his office and confronting you about insider trading. (boss: “Using heavy inside knowledge — it’s a criminal offense.” you: “I agree.”) The conversation generally makes you out to be the bad guy (at one point, you bluntly answer accusations with “I’ll be frank: I admit it.”) For atmosphere, the tape has “Derek Rogers, March 25″ scrawled on it in a kind of handwriting.

Sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it? There’s only one problem: You never had this conversation with your boss! You’ve been framed! You have to unravel your life and figure out the corporation’s secrets to win the game and get your life back.

C. E. Forman, an avid interactive fiction gamer, had this to add:

During the course of the game, you the player-character actually find this tape in one of your business partners’ offices, and can play it in the cassette deck of a car you break into. (Magnetic Scrolls also offerred a written transcript you could send for, in the event that the tape got damaged, since it’s a rather vital part of the plot.)

After the conversation, the theme music written by John Molloy starts. The title theme is extremely appropriate for the source material; the musical style evokes images of a mystery that needs to be solved, with sympathy for the hero. The other side of the tape, which is unlabeled, hides the original conversation you had with your boss from which the “framed” version was created. It’s a bit long, but is engaging to listen to as it demonstrates where your tormentor got all his sound bites from to make the version that framed you.

All in all, the tape adds a nicely textured clue that helps flesh out your purpose (and what you’re up against) in the game.

Highlight: The passage “Stupid sod spilled all the beans!” in the “framed” version of the conversation.

High Points: Good voice acting; realization that the “framed” conversation is very cleverly edited together once you hear the original conversation.

Low Points: Annoying reverb effect applied to both actor’s voices makes it hard for some to understand what they’re saying

Audio: For this installment, I’ve linked to the various available mp3s in the above article text.

The President Is Missing

The unthinkable has happened: During a secret conference of national leaders in Switzerland, terrorists break in and capture several world leaders, including the President of the United States! It’s up to you to find out where he is by examining all of the evidence, including multiple audio cues and photographs. Along the way, you’ll uncover a diabolical conspiracy (of course) that may involve even those closest to the President himself.

The audio cues you need to play the game are numerous and vital to solving the game, so they were provided on the included audio tape. In addition to setting the mood for the game through some introductory audio clips, you have a multitude of “file tape” recordings that can help you locate the President and solve the case. Included are interviews with government officials, taped radio communications, recordings from tapped telephones, the terrorists’ spoken demands, and even some (very squelchy) morse code signals.

All in all, it makes for a good mystery. Cosmi titles were never high on quality, but The President Is Missing makes a great attempt at publishing a good game.

High Points: Wide variety of clues; slow realization that it’s not quite as important as what is being said as to how it is being said.

Low Points: Voice acting ranges from acceptable to poor; recording quality ranges from good to poor; too many audio clues lessens the impact of all of them (in other words, a few great clips would’ve been much better than tons of mediocre clips)

Highlight: Hearing an unlucky informant getting blown to smithereens over the phone. :-)

Audio: The President Is Missing Side 1 and Side 2 are available.

Sub Mission

Continuing our exploration into the mind of Tom Snyder, we pull 180 degrees and take a look at Sub Mission, a diabolical game of hide and seek with a warlord. It takes place underwater using submarines and mines; a bit of action, a bit of simulation, and a bit of strategy round out this game with very unique aspects. Sound unique enough for you? If not, consider this: If you play the game “for real” (ie. not with “robots”), you run the risk of permanently killing one of the characters in the game, who has clues vital to escaping. It deletes the character data off of the disk!

Gameplay suffers from seemingly poor planning. One gets the feeling that Tom thought of a couple of neat elements — submarine play, hide-and-seek tactics, permanently killing characters, etc. — and tried to mesh it all into a game. The end result has some holes in the story, and some gameplay elements feel arbitrary and forced. These elements are probably what prompted for the inclusion of a cassette in the game: The first side of the tape has an 8-minute introduction that sets up the premise, and the entire second side of the tape — 22 minutes — is an extremely thorough tutorial.

Highlight: (Cheezy) Computer telling the player that “To save them, you have to play the game — and play to win!“

High Points: Tutorial fully explains all aspects of the game such that reading the manual is probably not necessary; first 46 seconds of the tutorial clearly explains gameplay purpose better than the entire introductory story on the first side of the tape.

Low Points: Weak title theme; “computer voice” in introduction is sometimes hard to understand; (seemingly) randomly-generated music constantly playing in the background; tutorial narrator is dry and reads as if he’s high on weed; repeated careful pronounciation of the words “sonar scope” is irritating to some; tutorial is very long; tutorial was recorded in one take, probably improvised, resulting in some long pauses, stumbling over words, and computer noises in the background; your character himself keeps pointing out glaring holes in the plot and gameplay, such as “Wait a minute — I don’t need those two kids to help me beat the warlord. Why should I risk their lives when I can pilot (the sub) through a remote robot?” and “Why play the wargame at all? Why not just put Sigourney or Peter in the sub and go looking for the escape route?”

Audio: Sub Mission Intro, and Sub Mission Tutorial

Trivia: As previously mentioned, Tom Snyder Productions branched away from computer games and into traditional media, like cartoons. If the name wasn’t familiar before now, do the shows “Dr. Katz” (Comedy Central) and “Squigglevision” ring a bell? They’re the brainchild of Tom’s production company. In fact, listen to the beginning title theme in the Sub Mission intro — there is a faint resemblance to the sequeway music played when moving from one scene to another in Dr. Katz.

The American Challenge: A Sailing Simulation

Tom Snyder was creating games while the personal computer game industry was still young. As a result, unconventional ideas in gaming were much more widely accepted than today, as the market wasn’t saturated. Tom liked to sail these uncharted waters (if you’ll pardon the bad pun) and created some games that, while unconventional, were generally good. The Infocomics series are part of his experiments, and are are well-known to Infocom collectors. But what of his other projects?

Sailing and music were two of Tom’s passions, and he created a product that had both: The American Challenge: A Sailing Simulation. The sailing aspect is obvious; the music aspect is in the form of the title track “Win Back The Cup”, included with a tutorial on a cassette. It’s generally a bad idea to call your new song “soon-to-be-a-classic” as mentioned on the box advertising, but the truth is, it’s not that bad. Game designer Tony Van mused it was “kinda homey, sorta folksy”, and that’s about right. It’s got a mid 1980′s light rock feel to it. As a theme to the game, it’s catchy. It stands on its own as well — Tom can probably claim to have written the only song ever dedicated to the America’s Cup.

As for the tutorial, it’s cute: Someone (I’m assuming it’s Tom) walks you through starting the game in the character of a New England sailboat captain, complete with accent. The tutorial takes you from choosing program options, to explaining where common simulations items are on the screen (compass, etc.), to helping you bring in your sail to catch some wind. It doesn’t cover the entire game, but it helps novices get the boat moving.

Highlight: A tie, between the pseudo-New Englander trying to pronouce the words “television set” in accent correctly, and the song lyrics “You’ve got the cup, so we’ve got nothing to lose”.

High Points: The sailing song “Win Back The Cup”; narrator of the tutorial does a passable job at a New England accent (“…it looks like a fye-een afternoon to head out into the hah-bah for a cruise.”).

Low Points: Narrator slips out of accent occaisionally; entire tutorial was recorded in one take, so there’s a stumble over words once or twice; tutorial mentions being stuck in irons (when your boat heads right into the wind) but doesn’t address how to get out of it other than to escape the simulation if you get stuck.

Audio: The American Challenge: Title Theme, as well as The American Challenge: Tutorial

• Title music (20%)
• Introduction or backstory (30%)
• Tutorial (35%)
• Game elements or clues (15%)

Title music was sometimes serious, sometimes silly, and usually done pro bono by either the programmers themselves or friends wanting to break into the business.  Introductions to the game and tutorials were much more common, especially for more complicated games like simulations.  Game elements was arguably the best use of included audio cassettes, as it provided the designers a way to provide more depth to the game.  For example, In The President Is Missing, the audio provides several clues as to where the President might be held, but you have to listen carefully to terrorist radio transmissions and decode some morse code.  Corruption has arguably the coolest use of cassette audio — the cassette in the game package represents the actual audio cassette that you search for and find in the game world, and listening to it provides insight into how you were framed.  For both games, the cassettes are required listening not only to get the most enjoyment out of both games, but also to finish them!  (Corruption even included a coupon to send in if you didn’t have a way to play cassette tapes, although I don’t recall what the coupon was for — probably a transcript of what was on the tape.)

So, 9 years ago:  Back when I was still writing feature articles for MobyGames, one article idea I had was to shed light on this mostly forgotten aspect of computer gaming history.  I was going to do this by writing up a small segment per game on what audio was included and why, and then provide snippets of audio to illustrate what it was like.  But the more I listened to the tapes and wrote, the more I felt that little snippets of audio weren’t going to be good enough — there was some real historical gems in these things, like Chuck Yeager talking about what it was like to be a test pilot, or how early home computer programs needed to hold the hands of new users every step of the way, or how much craft went into a title song (with lyrics!) composed specifically for a game.  Small snippets of audio just weren’t going to cut it.  But I couldn’t just blatantly reference an entire dump of the cassette either, because I was worried about copyright infringement.  So while I wrote up the entire article, I never published it.

Flash-forward to 2010, and I’m not so worried about copyright infringement any more.  In the last nine years, we’ve seen some great advancements in how game companies treat their older IP — they either respect it and turn it into new-old properties (like Sam & Max or Monkey Island episodes), or they have built goodwill amongst their fan base by either giving away entire libraries (such as the entire Vectrex game library) or changing their minds and allowing fanfic productions to be distributed.  Even Apple, notoriously stingy about protecting their marks and IP, cleared the release of some significantly historical code today (the original QuickDraw and MacPaint).

So I’ve decided to publish the article after all, but as regular installments here in my blog.  I’ve re-read the Fair Use clause of US copyright policy (title 17, chapter 1, paragraph 107 is the relevant part) and I believe my use of these works fall squarely into educational non-profit usage, nor harm the present or future profitability of these works as the companies that produced them are long gone (and, sadly, some of the people involved in creating them are gone too).  I view these installments as a historical exercise, but as always, if any corporate lawyer disagrees with me, I’ll be happy to take the articles down.

What follows is the original intro I wrote for the article, as well as our first featured included audio cassette:  Homeword.

(One note before we begin:  If the audio cassettes sound like they have a lot of hiss in them, that’s because they do.  With only a few exceptions, I did not attempt noise reduction.  Most of these tapes were not produced with any sort of Dolby noise reduction, and so there is a lot of wideband hiss in the audio and attempting to filter it out completely mangles parts of the audio signal you want to keep, like hihats, rimshots, and subtle high-end stuff.)

1988: You’re Rainbird, and you’re set to publish another one of the highly-regarded Magnetic Scrolls interactive fiction games. This time, it’s a tale of double-crosses as you get framed by the corporation you work for, where you have to unravel your life and their tricks to win. It’s a good adventure, but it’s missing something that would help immerse the player deeper into the mystery. If only there was a way to demonstrate how you were framed…

Pardon the pun, but it sounds like some audio would do the trick quite nicely. A read-aloud tutorial that eases new computer owners into word processing would help Sierra’s case, and the evidence that was used to frame the main character would be a great addition to Rainbird’s game. But what can you do? As a publisher, you can’t just jam disks and disks of digitized sound into the package; the cost would eat at your bottom line. And most computers in the 1980s didn’t have built-in sound devices to play digitized sound anyway, let alone hard drives to store it all.

The solution, for a select few companies, was audio cassettes. I’m not talking about data cassettes that early 8-bit computer programs used to come on, but real cassettes that you can pop into your home or car stereo and listen to. They were relatively cheap, easy to mass-produce, and held at least 30 minutes of stereo sound to fill with what you needed. While cassette players will eventually go the way of the dinosaur in the new millenium, they were as essential a component of a stereo system then as CD players are today. (CD players were considered a luxury in the 1980s.)

The use of audio cassettes in early software (not just games) was diverse: Some held instructions or tutorials, others held enhanced title music, and still others were essential portions of the adventure game you were trying to play — audio cues/clues, if you will. We take multimedia for granted today; there are no game titles released without music and speech that expect to make a buck on store shelves. But opening a software package in the 1980s and finding a cassette — well, that was a real treat. In most cases, it was justified and honestly enhanced the end-user’s enjoyment of the product.

In this feature, we’ll take a look at some of the included audio cassettes that came with early software titles (not all of which were games), examine how they made the software experience more enjoyable for the end-user, and — this is the best part — provide full-length low-bitrate versions of the cassettes so that you can hear what they sounded like.

Just before we begin, we’d like to thank a couple of people:

• Jason Artman contributed a recording of the Sierra Lounge. Jason has contributed to MobyGames before in a big way: he was the first person to write a feature article for MobyGames.
• C.E. Forman lent me a copy of The President Is Missing (thanks Chris!). You can visit his excellent Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe if you want to see how a true software collector works his hobby.
• Tony Van, who went above and beyond the call of duty to contribute four rare audio clips with descriptions to the project.

We’ll start our journey into the world of low-tech audio with Homeword, a word processor. Wait, don’t leave! Yes, it’s a word processor, but it was put out by Sierra On-Line, once one of the most prolific game companies in the first two decades of computer gaming.

Homeword (Sierra, 1983)

Homeword isn’t a game, but it was produced by Sierra On-Line in the early 80′s, so we thought we’d cover it as a historical exercise.

Homeword was marketed as a word processor for the entire family. Using graphical icons like pieces of paper, a printer, and a filing cabinet, Homeword’s goal was to make word processing easy for someone who had never used a word processor. Only one problem: In those days, it was very common for someone to have purchased a computer without any prior computer experience whatsoever. Users would rely on the software not only to help them perform specific tasks, but also to teach them how to operate the computer in the first place. There wasn’t a common operating platform for consumers like there is today; back then, every program had a different interface. (The philosophy back then was to make program interfaces standard across platforms, which is substantially different than today’s model of making all program interfaces standard across the same operating system.)

Sierra helped solved this problem with a helpful tutorial included in the Homeword package that walked you through the word processor’s various functions. It did so from the absolute beginning: “Hold your diskette with your thumb on the label, label side up. Insert your Homeword diskette into the disk drive, close the drive door, and power on your computer.” The resulting cassette is a mostly a tutorial on working Homeword, but also a small primer on the basics of computing, floppy disks and other basic computer concepts.

High points: Calm, friendly narrator; long pauses while the user attempts what was just suggested; cute early-1980s synthesizer music intro.

Low points: Included pauses weren’t consistent — some were very long for short tasks, other were a bit short for longer tasks.

Audio: Homeword (IBM PC)

Bonus: Homeword (Apple II)

Trivia: Sierra wasn’t the only game company to test non-gaming markets; early software companies often shifted product lines around. Tom Snyder Productions, which we’ll cover later, did the same thing (although the successful business they’re in today is educational software and television production, not entertainment titles). Broderbund came out with several applications for the home, including the popular Bank Street Writer. Even Infocom attempted to go into the business market, but with disastrous results — the effort involved in getting the Cornerstone database product to market contributed greatly to the demise of the company.

I’ve written about my plans for the Soundcard Museum before.  Like MobyGames and MindCandy, it’s a project that gets me excited every time I think about it.