PC Gamer Confessions

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I read an article at PC Gamer quite a while back (actually it’s from October 2015) about gaming confessions. They talked about being opinionated; about having pet peeves and quirks.

During the years of completing now around 500 games (mostly on PC) I have of course maintained my own internal list of these. So why not steal this idea and try it out for myself? I guess it’s time to let it all out.

If you’re been looking for post where you’ll see really questionable opinions, this will be it. I’m sure there’s going to be a few oddities below that will make almost anyone’s head spin.

The Game Masters

The Game Masters

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An increasingly popular theory about this universe lately is the one about everything being a simulation. Even Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX boss, believes this to be true. It’s a fascinating but also scary thought that seems to cater to the level of computer technology we have reached these years.

In the previous century, we thought there might be UFO’s. We didn’t always have access to a camera then and our own technological level had risen to a point where we believed it might actually be possible to have levitating saucers from other worlds. Almost no reports from the middle ages? What do they know!?

Now we have smart phones and cameras all abound. So, where are the UFO photos?

Deep down, I believe the simulation theory might become victim of the same fate. It’s an intriguing theory that makes some sense given what we learn from science at the moment, but who knows, one day we might discover or invent something more that will kill this theory in an instant.

Never mind. Guess it wasn’t that after all.

That haven’t stopped myself from playing around with this idea, however. In fact, I have spun a lot of thoughts and rules around the possibility of this all being a simulation controlled by some sort of ardent game masters. There are two aspects to this idea.

My First Crack at Web Design

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I landed on the internet for the first time in 1996, and given my creative nature it didn’t take long before I wanted to have my own web site where I could present my programs and music.

At that point in time I didn’t know the first thing about HTML. Maybe I knew it was built up from tags, but that was pretty much it. So, it had to be WYSIWYG. I fiddled around with Microsoft FrontPage Express, but there was also some sort of WYSIWYG tool built into a specific version of Netscape (the browser of choice for me at the time) that could also build a web page.

I used that tool in Netscape to create my first web site in 1996, and it looked like this.

3SID: C64 SID Music in 9 Voices

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While 2SID tunes – SID tunes with 6 voices – are fairly common in the High Voltage SID Collection, 3SID tunes with 9 voices are somewhat of a rarity. I just found out today that there’s not a lot of SID emulators that support them either. SidPlay as well as XMPlay with a SID plug-in refused to play any of them.

Rolf Greven, who compiles the binaries for the Mac version of CheeseCutter, converted all he could find in HVSC update #66 to MP3 files in March 2017. He has given me permission to list them in this blog post. Rolf converted them from three 8580 SID chips playing through HardSID with no post processing.

For me, quite a few of those 3SID tunes sometimes sound like AdLib tunes. There was one 3SID tune where the third SID was only used at few bars throughout the tune just to emphasize percussion by adding some sort of echo to the percussion from one of the other SID chips. I needed to listen to these 3SID tunes a few times before I got rid of the idea that most of them probably also could have been done with two or even one SID chip.Rolf Greven

The playlist have tunes from Mihály Horváth from Hungary (Hermit, the coder of SID-Wizard), Gaetano Chiummo from Italy, and Jake Manley (Jellica).

My Amiga MOD Music

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I never made much in the line of the original MOD files on Amiga. When the first SoundTracker emerged on Amiga, I made five awful tunes in 1987. And in 1993, I made two short test tunes while developing my MOD player on PC. I’ve posted these seven MOD files here more out of curiosity and laughs as there’s not a lot to be impressed about musically.

As always, the MOD files have been saved as MP3 for easy listening.