DOOM1_0.zip IS OUT!!!

[michael dobbs (micro bio)]

IT'S ON FTP2.UML.EDU /msdos/Games/ID

I'm FT-PING (PUN IN TENDED!) AS I WRITE THIS!

I was luck to get on.....all day it's been wide open for this mirror of
FTP.UML.EDU.....it's got 75 anonymous user accesses...As of 2:00 pm EST
there was only 2 left...I got one of them....

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> LET THE MADNESS BEGIN <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

[Cedric J. Sims]

In article <1993Dec10....@csi.uottawa.ca>,

DOOM is now on sell.tamu.edu (128.194.13.222) in /incoming/doom

enjoy...

Cedric J. Sims
SELL Site Administrator
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Cedric J. Sims Texas A&M University
ced...@tamu.edu (CIS/SELL) Room 216 Teague
+1 409 862 4104 College Station, Tx 77843-3142
-------------------------------------------------------------------

[Ron Asbestos Dippold]

ced...@malia.tamu.edu (Cedric J. Sims) writes:
>DOOM is now on sell.tamu.edu (128.194.13.222) in /incoming/doom

And sell is actually pretty responsive compared to the boglike
slothfulness of wuarchive, uwp, etc. today. I really hope some of
these archive sites post their 12/10 stats vs. a "typical" day.
--
"I'm a cat person, myself," she said, vaguely. A low-level voice said: "Yeah?
Yeah? Wash in your own spit, do you?" -- Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

[Cedric J. Sims]

In article <rdippold.755562148@happy>,

Ron "Asbestos" Dippold <rdip...@qualcomm.com> wrote:
>ced...@malia.tamu.edu (Cedric J. Sims) writes:
>>DOOM is now on sell.tamu.edu (128.194.13.222) in /incoming/doom
>
>And sell is actually pretty responsive compared to the boglike
>slothfulness of wuarchive, uwp, etc. today. I really hope some of
>these archive sites post their 12/10 stats vs. a "typical" day.

We generally get 20-30 connections per day for TAMU related archives.
On 12/10, I had over 650 connections, just for DOOM. The initial rush
as tappered. I only expect ~200 today.

Cedric Sims

[navi...@gmail.com]

суббота, 11 декабря 1993 г., 0:15:11 UTC+5 пользователь michael dobbs (micro bio) написал:

Doom4

[Ant]

Woah, flashbacks.

navi...@gmail.com wrote:
> ??????????????, 11 ?????????????? 1993 ??., 0:15:11 UTC+5 ???????????????????????? michael dobbs (micro bio) ??????????????:

> > IT'S ON FTP2.UML.EDU /msdos/Games/ID
> >
> > I'm FT-PING (PUN IN TENDED!) AS I WRITE THIS!
> >
> > I was luck to get on.....all day it's been wide open for this mirror of
> > FTP.UML.EDU.....it's got 75 anonymous user accesses...As of 2:00 pm EST
> > there was only 2 left...I got one of them....
> >
> > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> LET THE MADNESS BEGIN <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

> Doom4

--
Quote of the Week: "It's them!... Not THEM, the giant ants?!" --Girl and Crow
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://antfarm.home.dhs.org
/ /\ /\ \ Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail privately. If credit-
| |o o| | ing, then please kindly use Ant nickname and URL/link.
\ _ /
( )

[Dimensional Traveler]

For some reason I'm reminded of people saying "If you can remember the
60s, you weren't there for the 60s."

On 6/27/2018 3:13 PM, Ant wrote:
> Woah, flashbacks.
>
> navi...@gmail.com wrote:
>> ??????????????, 11 ?????????????? 1993 ??., 0:15:11 UTC+5 ???????????????????????? michael dobbs (micro bio) ??????????????:
>>> IT'S ON FTP2.UML.EDU /msdos/Games/ID
>>>
>>> I'm FT-PING (PUN IN TENDED!) AS I WRITE THIS!
>>>
>>> I was luck to get on.....all day it's been wide open for this mirror of
>>> FTP.UML.EDU.....it's got 75 anonymous user accesses...As of 2:00 pm EST
>>> there was only 2 left...I got one of them....
>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> LET THE MADNESS BEGIN <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>
>> Doom4
>


--

Inquiring minds want to know while minds with a self-preservation
instinct are running screaming.

[Ant]

Haha. I still remember. ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idsoftware/ in classic
DOOM's glory days. ;) I didn't get DOOM 1 shareware until my local BBSes
got them. I couldn't even play the game on my IBM PS/2 model 30 286 10
Mhz PC and my king ant's work IBM P70 386 10 Mhz portable PC (no MCA
sound card). My next door neighbor could! Lucky punk.

Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:

> For some reason I'm reminded of people saying "If you can remember the
> 60s, you weren't there for the 60s."

> On 6/27/2018 3:13 PM, Ant wrote:
> > Woah, flashbacks.
> >
> > navi...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> ??????????????, 11 ?????????????? 1993 ??., 0:15:11 UTC+5 ???????????????????????? michael dobbs (micro bio) ??????????????:
> >>> IT'S ON FTP2.UML.EDU /msdos/Games/ID
> >>>
> >>> I'm FT-PING (PUN IN TENDED!) AS I WRITE THIS!
> >>>
> >>> I was luck to get on.....all day it's been wide open for this mirror of
> >>> FTP.UML.EDU.....it's got 75 anonymous user accesses...As of 2:00 pm EST
> >>> there was only 2 left...I got one of them....
> >>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> LET THE MADNESS BEGIN <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
> >
> >> Doom4
--

[Xocyll]

ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) looked up from reading the entrails of the porn
spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>Haha. I still remember. ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idsoftware/ in classic
>DOOM's glory days. ;) I didn't get DOOM 1 shareware until my local BBSes
>got them. I couldn't even play the game on my IBM PS/2 model 30 286 10
>Mhz PC and my king ant's work IBM P70 386 10 Mhz portable PC (no MCA
>sound card). My next door neighbor could! Lucky punk.

Hrm 1.0, is that when they finally got soundblaster support working?

I do recall that the first DOOM I played was actually 0.99 (shareware,
episode 1 essentially) and had no support for my SB card and thus was
totally silent (well you could use it in adlib mode, but that did
nothing with my SB clone card really.)

Why do I even still remember this, it's been 25 years?

Xocyll
--
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably,
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr

[Dimensional Traveler]

On 6/28/2018 12:19 PM, Xocyll wrote:
> ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) looked up from reading the entrails of the porn
> spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:
>
>> Haha. I still remember. ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idsoftware/ in classic
>> DOOM's glory days. ;) I didn't get DOOM 1 shareware until my local BBSes
>> got them. I couldn't even play the game on my IBM PS/2 model 30 286 10
>> Mhz PC and my king ant's work IBM P70 386 10 Mhz portable PC (no MCA
>> sound card). My next door neighbor could! Lucky punk.
>
> Hrm 1.0, is that when they finally got soundblaster support working?
>
> I do recall that the first DOOM I played was actually 0.99 (shareware,
> episode 1 essentially) and had no support for my SB card and thus was
> totally silent (well you could use it in adlib mode, but that did
> nothing with my SB clone card really.)
>
> Why do I even still remember this, it's been 25 years?
>
> Xocyll
>

Because you're an old fogey on Usenet reliving his glory days? :D

[Ant]

Like me! ;)

[Spalls Hurgenson]

On Fri, 29 Jun 2018 02:47:37 -0500, ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) wrote:

>Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>> On 6/28/2018 12:19 PM, Xocyll wrote:
>> > ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) looked up from reading the entrails of the porn
>> > spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:
>> >
>> >> Haha. I still remember. ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idsoftware/ in classic
>> >> DOOM's glory days. ;) I didn't get DOOM 1 shareware until my local BBSes
>> >> got them. I couldn't even play the game on my IBM PS/2 model 30 286 10
>> >> Mhz PC and my king ant's work IBM P70 386 10 Mhz portable PC (no MCA
>> >> sound card). My next door neighbor could! Lucky punk.
>> >
>> > Hrm 1.0, is that when they finally got soundblaster support working?
>> >
>> > I do recall that the first DOOM I played was actually 0.99 (shareware,
>> > episode 1 essentially) and had no support for my SB card and thus was
>> > totally silent (well you could use it in adlib mode, but that did
>> > nothing with my SB clone card really.)
>> >
>> > Why do I even still remember this, it's been 25 years?
>> >
>> > Xocyll
>> >
>> Because you're an old fogey on Usenet reliving his glory days? :D
>
>Like me! ;)

Old fogeys unite!

I remember that I was one of those people hammering the FTP server -
ftp.wustl.edu - the night of Doom's release. I also remember that I
didn't have much problem getting in; I made maybe two or three
attempts (spaced apart by five or ten minutes) and then I was lucky
enough to get in, which was rather usual for the time (ftp.wustl.edu
was a major software distribution node even before Doom and it always
took a few attempts to log-in). It didn't even occur to me that this
was unusual until years later when I learned that the servers had been
incredibly overloaded and most people waited hours or days to download
the game.

I don't remember any sound-card issues but by then I may already have
had the Gravis Ultrasound which I believe was supported natively. In
any event, I don't recall any real difficulties installing or playing
the game. That is not to say I didn't have any, just that they don't
stick out in my memory.

I remember that I loved Doom, of course, but it didn't really strike
me as anything that extra-ordinary at the time; it was Wolfenstein on
steroids but beyond that nothing too exceptional. I mean, the
production values were excellent - the soundtrack especially - and I
quite enjoyed the removal of the points and lives, but Doom seemed
more an evolutionary step than a revolutionary one. I certainly would
not have expected that people would still be talking about it - and
playing it! - 25 years later.

[Xocyll]

Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the

By 1.0 they had the sound sorted out - it was just the 0.99 version that
was SB soundless.

>I remember that I loved Doom, of course, but it didn't really strike
>me as anything that extra-ordinary at the time; it was Wolfenstein on
>steroids but beyond that nothing too exceptional. I mean, the
>production values were excellent - the soundtrack especially - and I
>quite enjoyed the removal of the points and lives, but Doom seemed
>more an evolutionary step than a revolutionary one. I certainly would
>not have expected that people would still be talking about it - and
>playing it! - 25 years later.

It had somewhat better graphics and wasn't limited to 90degree blocks,
but yeah it was a step up not a leap forward.

I remember playing Ultima Underworld at about the same time - similar
graphics quality, but actual 3d environment not DOOM's 2d pretending to
be 3d stuff.

Dooms biggest seller was how moddable it was with the sprite graphics,
so you could customize your experience heavily - want the fireball
hurling demons to be giant pacmen, ok, want the end of ep1 Baron of Hell
to be Barney the Dinosaur, you can, etc.


Then again not long into the future we had Duke Nukem 3d which wasn't
really 3d and Quake which really was and I always preferred Duke of the
two. Quake was just so relentlessly brown and I was never much of a
NiN fan.

[Ant]

Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Jun 2018 02:47:37 -0500, ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) wrote:

> Old fogeys unite!

:D I wonder how many there are still in this newsgroup!

> I remember that I was one of those people hammering the FTP server -
> ftp.wustl.edu - the night of Doom's release. I also remember that I

Woah, I remember that FTP server too!

> didn't have much problem getting in; I made maybe two or three
> attempts (spaced apart by five or ten minutes) and then I was lucky
> enough to get in, which was rather usual for the time (ftp.wustl.edu
> was a major software distribution node even before Doom and it always
> took a few attempts to log-in). It didn't even occur to me that this
> was unusual until years later when I learned that the servers had been
> incredibly overloaded and most people waited hours or days to download
> the game.

> I don't remember any sound-card issues but by then I may already have
> had the Gravis Ultrasound which I believe was supported natively. In
> any event, I don't recall any real difficulties installing or playing
> the game. That is not to say I didn't have any, just that they don't
> stick out in my memory.

I remember listening to DOOM 1's MIDI with a GUS in college on a
stranger's PC. It was AMAZING since I heard it on my crappy SB16 ISA's
FM MIDI! I loved id Software' ICE compression to install. ;)

> I remember that I loved Doom, of course, but it didn't really strike
> me as anything that extra-ordinary at the time; it was Wolfenstein on
> steroids but beyond that nothing too exceptional. I mean, the
> production values were excellent - the soundtrack especially - and I
> quite enjoyed the removal of the points and lives, but Doom seemed
> more an evolutionary step than a revolutionary one. I certainly would
> not have expected that people would still be talking about it - and
> playing it! - 25 years later.

Classic DOOM > Wolf3D > Catacomb 3D. :P I remember making my own DOOM
maps: http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/files/doom2/j2doom/j2doom.html ...
DOOM will live forever. :P

I did like DOOM 3, but never tried DOOM 4 (no time and PC harwares to
play it at the moment).

[Ant]

Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:
...

> so you could customize your experience heavily - want the fireball
> hurling demons to be giant pacmen, ok, want the end of ep1 Baron of Hell
> to be Barney the Dinosaur, you can, etc.

Remember ALiens TC from that UCLA guy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpsbX1q6z6U ;)

> Then again not long into the future we had Duke Nukem 3d which wasn't
> really 3d and Quake which really was and I always preferred Duke of the
> two. Quake was just so relentlessly brown and I was never much of a
> NiN fan.

I enjoyed Duke3D. Quake games were OK. Don't forget Rise of the Triads
(ROTT). My college friends loved that, but I thought it was OK.

[Spalls Hurgenson]

On Fri, 29 Jun 2018 15:22:36 -0400, Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
>entrails of the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs
>say:
>
>>On Fri, 29 Jun 2018 02:47:37 -0500, ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) wrote:
>>
>>>Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>>> On 6/28/2018 12:19 PM, Xocyll wrote:
>>>> > ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) looked up from reading the entrails of the porn
>>>> > spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:
>>>> >
>>>> >> Haha. I still remember. ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idsoftware/ in classic
>>>> >> DOOM's glory days. ;) I didn't get DOOM 1 shareware until my local BBSes
>>>> >> got them. I couldn't even play the game on my IBM PS/2 model 30 286 10
>>>> >> Mhz PC and my king ant's work IBM P70 386 10 Mhz portable PC (no MCA
>>>> >> sound card). My next door neighbor could! Lucky punk.
>>>> >
>>>> > Hrm 1.0, is that when they finally got soundblaster support working?
>>>> >
>>>> > I do recall that the first DOOM I played was actually 0.99 (shareware,
>>>> > episode 1 essentially) and had no support for my SB card and thus was
>>>> > totally silent (well you could use it in adlib mode, but that did
>>>> > nothing with my SB clone card really.)
>>>> >
>>>> > Why do I even still remember this, it's been 25 years?
>>>> >
>>>> > Xocyll
>>>> >
>>>> Because you're an old fogey on Usenet reliving his glory days? :D
>>>
>>>Like me! ;)
>>
>>Old fogeys unite!

>>I remember that I loved Doom, of course, but it didn't really strike
>>me as anything that extra-ordinary at the time; it was Wolfenstein on
>>steroids but beyond that nothing too exceptional.

>It had somewhat better graphics and wasn't limited to 90degree blocks,
>but yeah it was a step up not a leap forward.

>Dooms biggest seller was how moddable it was with the sprite graphics,
>so you could customize your experience heavily - want the fireball
>hurling demons to be giant pacmen, ok, want the end of ep1 Baron of Hell
>to be Barney the Dinosaur, you can, etc.

You don't have to defend Doom to me. Today I recognize Doom's
importance; I was only speaking above of how ordinary it seemed on
that first day. It was just another game; cool, but not mindblowing
and probably not worthy of all the hype. Its longevity, of couse,
speaks of how wrong I was. Its modability was a factor in how popular
it became but it wasn't really of that much import when the game was
new.

>Then again not long into the future we had Duke Nukem 3d which wasn't
>really 3d and Quake which really was and I always preferred Duke of the
>two. Quake was just so relentlessly brown and I was never much of a
>NiN fan.

More than the browness, Quake failed me on its lack of polish. It was
a great engine but it had no character. It was a mishmash of genres,
poorly cudgeled together, with sophomoric plot, setting and characters
all glued together with "dudebro" attitude. It's tech and solid
gunplay made it a notable game, but never one I really enjoyed playing
all that much.

But I still play Doom to this day.

[Spalls Hurgenson]

On Fri, 29 Jun 2018 22:53:35 -0500, ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 29 Jun 2018 02:47:37 -0500, ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) wrote:
>
>> Old fogeys unite!

>:D I wonder how many there are still in this newsgroup!

I would wager a surprising number of the regulars are old-timers.
Usenet isn't al that well-known anymore and most of the people who
utilize it have probably done so since its heyday - twenty plus years
ago.

The younger generation is on the Twitch and the Instagram and my lawn
;-)

>I remember listening to DOOM 1's MIDI with a GUS in college on a
>stranger's PC. It was AMAZING since I heard it on my crappy SB16 ISA's
>FM MIDI! I loved id Software' ICE compression to install. ;)

I am still a huge fan of the Gravis Ultrasound and every now and again
I will fire up TiMIDIty (or DOSBox) just to play some old MIDI files
done right ;-).

Although there is something to be said about the brashness of an old
Soundblaster's FM synthesis, especially with a MIDI file crafted
around the device's limitations.

>I did like DOOM 3, but never tried DOOM 4 (no time and PC harwares to
>play it at the moment).

Doom 3 got a bad rap, although not entirely undeservedly. It is a
solid game with excellent atmosphere and design, not to mention
graphics that still hold up fairly well. Its over-reliance on
"dark=scary", monster closets and its departure from the classic Doom
formula resulted in a less-than-favorable response from its audience,
but if judged on its own merits, Doom 3 is actually a good game.

Personally, I wasn't that much a fan of Doom 4. I understand what the
developers were going for - relentless non-stop action - and I can
understand that sort of game appeals to some but I found it more
exhausting than enjoyable.

[Ant]

Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Jun 2018 22:53:35 -0500, ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) wrote:

> >Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Fri, 29 Jun 2018 02:47:37 -0500, ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) wrote:
> >
> >> Old fogeys unite!

> >:D I wonder how many there are still in this newsgroup!

> I would wager a surprising number of the regulars are old-timers.
> Usenet isn't al that well-known anymore and most of the people who
> utilize it have probably done so since its heyday - twenty plus years
> ago.

> The younger generation is on the Twitch and the Instagram and my lawn
> ;-)

> >I remember listening to DOOM 1's MIDI with a GUS in college on a
> >stranger's PC. It was AMAZING since I heard it on my crappy SB16 ISA's
> >FM MIDI! I loved id Software' ICE compression to install. ;)

> I am still a huge fan of the Gravis Ultrasound and every now and again
> I will fire up TiMIDIty (or DOSBox) just to play some old MIDI files
> done right ;-).

How good are the GUS music in those emulators? Are they accurate now?

> Although there is something to be said about the brashness of an old
> Soundblaster's FM synthesis, especially with a MIDI file crafted
> around the device's limitations.

Heh. I used to listen to FM MIDI before I discovered Wave Blaster II
daughtercard for my SB16 ISA card. :P

> >I did like DOOM 3, but never tried DOOM 4 (no time and PC harwares to
> >play it at the moment).

> Doom 3 got a bad rap, although not entirely undeservedly. It is a
> solid game with excellent atmosphere and design, not to mention
> graphics that still hold up fairly well. Its over-reliance on
> "dark=scary", monster closets and its departure from the classic Doom
> formula resulted in a less-than-favorable response from its audience,
> but if judged on its own merits, Doom 3 is actually a good game.

I just wished its modding and multiplayers were good as the classic DOOMs.

> Personally, I wasn't that much a fan of Doom 4. I understand what the
> developers were going for - relentless non-stop action - and I can
> understand that sort of game appeals to some but I found it more
> exhausting than enjoyable.

:(

[Spalls Hurgenson]

On Sat, 30 Jun 2018 19:20:58 -0500, ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> I am still a huge fan of the Gravis Ultrasound and every now and again
>> I will fire up TiMIDIty (or DOSBox) just to play some old MIDI files
>> done right ;-).

>How good are the GUS music in those emulators? Are they accurate now?

Honestly, I couldn't say. Although I still own my GUS Max (with a
whopping 1MB of patch memory!!!) it has been a long time since I've
owned an ISA motherboard in which to insert said card. So I can't make
a direct comparison.

That said, TiMIDIty /sounds/ accurate enough. My (admittedly limited)
understanding is that the GUS itself wasn't that complex in terms of
what it was doing with MIDI - its biggest advantage was that it
managed to do everything it did at a fraction of the price of Roland -
and thus it is not that difficult to emulate in software. I am sure
there are some edge-cases where the emulator fails but on the whole
I've not had any complaints about emulation accuracy.

How it sounds? Damn good, if you ask me. Personally, I usually prefer
MIDI on the Gravis to MIDI pumped through a similar-era Roland
(MT-32), especially with games. The Gravis has larger wavetable
patch-sets. Although the GUS only had 1MB for active patches, it can
load and unload individual patches on the fly and the total size
patch-set can be hundreds of megabytes. The MT-32 had a 1MB ROM. This
gave the GUS a richer and more realistic sound. The Gravis was also a
favorite of many game developers and they specifically designed MIDI
around the strengths - and limitations - of the device; Doom, for
instance, sounds awesome on a GUS (in fact, recent Doom ports
incorporate the TiMIDIty emulator into their engines).

I mean, it is all MIDI - software recreations of actual instruments -
so there will always be some artifacting but the GUS did a damn fine
job, especially for its day. It holds a special place in my heart, as
you can probably tell.

[Rin Stowleigh]

MIDI actually doesn't have anything to do with software creation of
instruments. MIDI is basically just a data format that contains
instructions on "how to play" the instruments that is combined with a
hardware standard for devices to communicate with each other. There
is no audio or sound, per se, in MIDI.

Remember the old "player pianos" that had preforated paper rolls with
the music data on them, that tells the piano hammer when to strike the
strings? MIDI is sort of the electronic format of that.

A device that plays MIDI does so in one of two basic ways, synthesis
or sampling. For example when you hear a kick drum or a violin play,
it could be an actual recorded sample of a drum or violin, or it could
be a synthesizer producing the sound via oscillation, modulation etc.

There are drawbacks to samples vs. synthesis. Around the mid-80s we
started to see "hybrid" methods of "synthesis" which combined samples
with synthesis to provide more flexibility, but it was far from the
"best of both worlds". Roland's flavor of hybrid synthesis was called
Linear Arithmetic Synthesis... really just a marketing-gimmick term
for samples combined with subtractive synthesis.

Even though it was nowhere near as flexible as a true synthesizer, the
Roland D-50 was one of the first successful synths to use this hybrid
technique. It is insanely prevalent on music of all genres, including
film scores from the late 80s-early 90s. I never actually owned one,
because while the out of box sounds were amazing, programming it from
the front panel was a bitch if you didn't also buy the PG1000 (picture
here:
https://reverb.com/item/3275365-roland-pg1000-pg-1000-programmer-for-roland-d50-d-50-synthesizer)

The Roland MT-32 sound module was the "cheaper step brother" to the
D50, aimed at the "prosumer" market. Basically it contained samples
with a synthesis engine that enhances them.

When people say "MIDI", at least in the context of retro computer
gaming, they may be at times referring to "General MIDI", which was
basically a standard that ensured MIDI data played as expected on the
target device. So, if someone created a track as general MIDI, they
could be sure that when they specified note data for the kick drum, it
would be played on a kick drum and not a cymbal or a trumpet sound.

But, depending on the engine of the device being played on the actual
sound of the specified instrument could vary greatly. For example,
general MIDI tracks played on a Roland MT32 are going to sound very
different than if the data were sent to an EMU Proteus for example.

[Xocyll]

I'm just pointing out that it was the modding that gave DOOM it's legs
so to speak, something (some) game devs have recognized (Bethesda for
one.) A moddable game is a game that sells because you get far more
bang for your buck and anything you dislike about the game might be
moddable to remove or change.

>>Then again not long into the future we had Duke Nukem 3d which wasn't
>>really 3d and Quake which really was and I always preferred Duke of the
>>two. Quake was just so relentlessly brown and I was never much of a
>>NiN fan.
>
>More than the browness, Quake failed me on its lack of polish. It was
>a great engine but it had no character. It was a mishmash of genres,
>poorly cudgeled together, with sophomoric plot, setting and characters
>all glued together with "dudebro" attitude. It's tech and solid
>gunplay made it a notable game, but never one I really enjoyed playing
>all that much.

I think Quake was the first of iD's "Engine Demo pretending to be a
game."

[Xocyll]

ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) looked up from reading the entrails of the porn
spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:
>...
>> so you could customize your experience heavily - want the fireball
>> hurling demons to be giant pacmen, ok, want the end of ep1 Baron of Hell
>> to be Barney the Dinosaur, you can, etc.
>
>Remember ALiens TC from that UCLA guy?
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpsbX1q6z6U ;)

Oh yeah, more atmospheric and better done than some of the actual Alien
games.

>> Then again not long into the future we had Duke Nukem 3d which wasn't
>> really 3d and Quake which really was and I always preferred Duke of the
>> two. Quake was just so relentlessly brown and I was never much of a
>> NiN fan.
>
>I enjoyed Duke3D. Quake games were OK. Don't forget Rise of the Triads
>(ROTT). My college friends loved that, but I thought it was OK.

Never cared for RotT, because the controls were wonky.
Engine like that of DOOM, but with less granularity in the controls so
it was damn near impossible to shoot some things since you could never
aim directly at the right pixel.


The issue was there to a lesser extent with DOOM, since you could not
aim UP at things so you had to be exactly pixel-on aimed in a line with
them so the gun would shoot up to hit the ting on the wall top, instead
of shooting into the wall.
Pretty much the only time I used a mouse in DOOM was to get the fine
granularity necessary to get that exact aiming.

RotT as I recall didn't have separate controls, the mouse basically
duplicated the exact same controls as the keyboard so you never got fine
control.

Because of that I don't think I got more than 2-3 levels into the game,
it was just too damn frustrating not being able to aim properly.

[Ant]

Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:
> ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) looked up from reading the entrails of the porn
> spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:

> >Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:
> >...
> >> so you could customize your experience heavily - want the fireball
> >> hurling demons to be giant pacmen, ok, want the end of ep1 Baron of Hell
> >> to be Barney the Dinosaur, you can, etc.
> >
> >Remember ALiens TC from that UCLA guy?
> >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpsbX1q6z6U ;)

> Oh yeah, more atmospheric and better done than some of the actual Alien
> games.

Yep, I remember playing it as a college freshman. It was amazing!

> >> Then again not long into the future we had Duke Nukem 3d which wasn't
> >> really 3d and Quake which really was and I always preferred Duke of the
> >> two. Quake was just so relentlessly brown and I was never much of a
> >> NiN fan.
> >
> >I enjoyed Duke3D. Quake games were OK. Don't forget Rise of the Triads
> >(ROTT). My college friends loved that, but I thought it was OK.

> Never cared for RotT, because the controls were wonky.

For me, it was the game.

> Engine like that of DOOM, but with less granularity in the controls so
> it was damn near impossible to shoot some things since you could never
> aim directly at the right pixel.

Yeah.

> The issue was there to a lesser extent with DOOM, since you could not
> aim UP at things so you had to be exactly pixel-on aimed in a line with
> them so the gun would shoot up to hit the ting on the wall top, instead
> of shooting into the wall.
> Pretty much the only time I used a mouse in DOOM was to get the fine
> granularity necessary to get that exact aiming.

Yea, I remember. DOOM was like 2.5D. Hehe.

> RotT as I recall didn't have separate controls, the mouse basically
> duplicated the exact same controls as the keyboard so you never got fine
> control.

> Because of that I don't think I got more than 2-3 levels into the game,
> it was just too damn frustrating not being able to aim properly.

Ah, Quake would had been perfect for you. :P
--
Quote of the Week: "... Let's go pour these (peas from a can) onto an anthill I've found." --Strong Bad (Witness the Cheatar! episode)

[Ant]

Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:
> >You don't have to defend Doom to me. Today I recognize Doom's
> >importance; I was only speaking above of how ordinary it seemed on
> >that first day. It was just another game; cool, but not mindblowing
> >and probably not worthy of all the hype. Its longevity, of couse,
> >speaks of how wrong I was. Its modability was a factor in how popular
> >it became but it wasn't really of that much import when the game was
> >new.

> I'm just pointing out that it was the modding that gave DOOM it's legs
> so to speak, something (some) game devs have recognized (Bethesda for
> one.) A moddable game is a game that sells because you get far more
> bang for your buck and anything you dislike about the game might be
> moddable to remove or change.

Yep, also replayability!

> I think Quake was the first of iD's "Engine Demo pretending to be a
> game."

Well, id Software did license its game engines to other companies to use
like Raven. Remember those guys with Heretic and Hexen games? ;)

--

Quote of the Week: "... Let's go pour these (peas from a can) onto an anthill I've found." --Strong Bad (Witness the Cheatar! episode)

[Ross Ridge]

ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) wrote:
>How good are the GUS music in those emulators? Are they accurate now?

Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>That said, TiMIDIty /sounds/ accurate enough. My (admittedly limited)
>understanding is that the GUS itself wasn't that complex in terms of
>what it was doing with MIDI - its biggest advantage was that it
>managed to do everything it did at a fraction of the price of Roland -
>and thus it is not that difficult to emulate in software. I am sure
>there are some edge-cases where the emulator fails but on the whole
>I've not had any complaints about emulation accuracy.

Yah, the emulatation should be very straight forward. The GUS was pure
wavetable synthesis, so all it did was mix PCM samples in the digital
domain. A perfect emulation would just require reproducing this simple
mathematical function. There might have been some approximation in
the original hardware that made a subtle difference between the ideal
function and actual function used, but it wouldn't be something games
and applications would be trying to exploit. (Notably the GUS had to
lower the sample frequency when playing more than 14 samples a time.)
Removing this error would be much more likely to make playback sound
more like what the composers intended than not.

(This is notably different than FM (Adlib/OPL3) or LA (MT-32/LAPC-1)
synthethis where the relatively crude nature of the sythesis meant that
composers were creating tracks and effects that were not only designed
to live within their limitations but sometimes exploited them as well.)

--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/
db //

[Rin Stowleigh]

Actually there is nothing crude about FM or LA synthesis compared to
wavetable synthesis. A wavetable is simply doing the same thing an
oscillator does (or an operator in the case of FM synthesis), it's
just doing it in a pre-determined way instead of requiring computing
power to create the waveform. It could be thought of as being much
more versatile than a pure sample player/ROMpler that contains a fixed
set of samples, but it suffers the same fate because on every
wavetable synth I'm aware of, there is a fixed number of waveforms.

The primary "real world" benefit to wavetable synthesis would be that
complex waveforms can be generated more efficiently on any given
processor (for games that would be the CPU or DSP of the synthesizer
or sound card as opposed to the PC... for music producers its the
synthesizer itself or the CPU of their PC if using virtual
instruments). The "on paper" benefit is more "natural" sounding
sounds, although this is incredibly misleading, because it makes the
assumption that reproducing the harmonic profile of some sound will
necessarily result in a more convincing sound, and anyone who works
with synths of all of the various types knows that the net result of
wavetable synths is no more convincing than any other type of
synthesis. That's not to say wavetable synths don't sound good, many
of them do, but it's not necessarily because it's a wavetable synth. A
wavetable can be thought of as a "cheat sheet" for a harmonic profile,
but the harmonics of a sound are only one factor of many that makes
one sound differ from another.

A good example is a saxophone, this is notoriously hard to synthesize,
and the only convincing renditions I've ever played have been samples.
You can get something that sounds "enough" like a saxophone out of a
synthesizer to be suitable for a video game (wavetable, FM,
subtractive, LA.. whatever), but it's never going to fool someone into
thinking someone was playing the sax. A ROMpler / sample player can
do this easily (well, not easily as sampling is a difficult art in
itself).

Synth purists would probably say that additive synthesis is the most
capable of producing natural sounds, because of the flexibility it
provides in producing a given set of harmonics. However, additive
synthesizers have never sold well, and in the entire history of modern
music, I've never heard an artist mention an additive synth as their
goto instrument of choice, nor have I ever seen one on stage. I'm not
even aware of anyone making an additive hardware synth board. Why?
Because the theory that we can Google or look up in wikipedia is often
at odds with real world results. Additive synthesis is a very
interesting technology, but it is incredibly difficult to program
well, and the end result always seems to be underwhelming.

Wavetable synthesis certain has it's place, and does some things well,
but it is no more sophisticated than any other synthesis method.

[Xocyll]

As noted in another message, I never much cared for Quake since it was
so relentlessly brown. I found fake3d Duke Nukem 3D vastly more fun
than real3d Quake.

I will give it one thing though it was incredibly consistent in speed.

I originally played it on an underspec machine and it ran at a dead
stable 2/3rds normal speed, unlike how most other games behaved on
underspec machines then and now - running fine in some areas and then
dropping to seconds per frame mode in others.

[Xocyll]

ANT...@zimage.com (Ant) looked up from reading the entrails of the porn
spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:
>> >You don't have to defend Doom to me. Today I recognize Doom's
>> >importance; I was only speaking above of how ordinary it seemed on
>> >that first day. It was just another game; cool, but not mindblowing
>> >and probably not worthy of all the hype. Its longevity, of couse,
>> >speaks of how wrong I was. Its modability was a factor in how popular
>> >it became but it wasn't really of that much import when the game was
>> >new.
>
>> I'm just pointing out that it was the modding that gave DOOM it's legs
>> so to speak, something (some) game devs have recognized (Bethesda for
>> one.) A moddable game is a game that sells because you get far more
>> bang for your buck and anything you dislike about the game might be
>> moddable to remove or change.
>
>Yep, also replayability!
>
>
>> I think Quake was the first of iD's "Engine Demo pretending to be a
>> game."
>
>Well, id Software did license its game engines to other companies to use
>like Raven. Remember those guys with Heretic and Hexen games? ;)

I remember Raven. I also remember ripping the "Gauntlet of the
Necromancer" from Heretic and putting it into DOOM to use instead of the
chainsaw.

Hexen I found a bit annoying since it was hub based and you kept on
coming back to the same areas.