We Built an Arcade!
Added 2024-10-27 19:33:15 +0000 UTCWell, this video has been 2.5 years in the making. I think once you see this, it will become clear why my video output has been so low the last few months. But also, the light is at the end of the tunnel, so hopefully video production will go back up soon. Anyway, I hope you guys are able to come by the arcade if you are in Texas!
Comments
i like 1942 and 1943
Patrick and Rachel
2024-12-24 19:04:03 +0000 UTCHey that would be something, top ten favorite arcade games, everybody! Mine (not in any particular order): Mario Brothers Space Dual Joust 1942 BurgerTime CrazyClimber Pengo Robotron MappyCap MoonCresta I hope your crane operator games don't use the inequalities and random number generator that determine when the claws actually grip. Its cheating the kids and should really be identified as a game of chance and not of skill.. They've been found to use a payout ratio.. Having played a lot of planetside 2, I came to the realization, that due to internet latency, close quarter combat cannot be accurate .. This means if you want a fair multiplayer FPS, a LAN is the fairest , best you can do.. I think if you could arrange a room of 8 old school PCs, that would be suitable for Warcraft 2 , Starcraft, Rise of the Triad, Quake, Half Life 2 based death matches. Doom had a 4 player limit but it was open sourced, meaning there may be a version with a higher player limit. Multiplayer Rise of the Triad had ten funny audibles and the weapons were cute like the baseball bat that lauches flaming baseballs. When people die the explode into a mess of intestines and eyes, that are not as graphic as they are funny .. I recall in the early days of quake there were sample packstgat would load in as you connected to servers, one night it was beavis and butthead and chasing someone with a axe whacking them you'd hear beavis scream "Owwww" and Butthead follow it with "shutup butt munch". Im sure that there are places you can play these on the net, not warcraft 2, it was strictly a LAN game, it required Pentium class machines.. Maximum players is 8.. It had units no other Blizzard game has had since, and more strategic than starcraft, best played in person.. Redneck Rampage which was an open field Doom style game where the food affected your level of blood toxicity, which affected the effectiveness of the controls. Choice of health powerups included moonpies and moonshine. Those by the way predated Nvidia cards, all that was needed was a 486 or pentium and VGA graphics card.. I'm not 100% sure of this.. I played these in college in the 90s..
Kiernan Holland
2024-12-08 01:38:50 +0000 UTCMy step father ran a vending business in the 80s called fair deal wholesale out of hurst, near northeast mall, putt putt and Malibu Grand Prix.. And cause he was a vendor he would get the vending times, which permitted me to get first hand clues as to what video games were being released for the arcades. The Gorgar pinball game came with a tear out flimsy record where you could hear what it would say "gorgar speaks".. Something I noticed later on in the 80s was that kits were being offered to mod a game to run say Crazy Kong on Scramble hardware. There was also a pacman clone that was rather cool called inchworm. If you can get it, SuperPacman was a favorite of mine, Xevious, I was fairly good at Zaxxon (trick is to shoot the wall) .. Xevious had a lot of secret bonuses in it. Wizard of War you could get to high levels by just sitting in a corner and rapid-firing,, Something you begin to realize after having had MAME is that a lot of these games were made to make money like little gambling machines. The ones that were more popular were the ones that permitted mastery like paceman and frogger. I have an elder brother who could go a long time on a quarter on frogger, his high score was like 300,000 but since the score could only go to 99,999 and flipped, nobody was there to record that he had beat the record in the country at the time. Something I forgot to mention on the Atari computer article above was that due to my Amiga taking a while to chip from CMO, I bought a NES to play Super Mario Brothers, partially cause I was losing money sinking quarters into the arcade cabinet and had noticed that the NES version was a perfect clone.. Another video game machine I had owned was the Colecovision. But I don't recall if it came before or after. the C64.. The color graphics on the colecovision had a color bleed not unlike that which Steve Wozniak exploited with the Apple computer by messing with the scaline clock frequency. Some arcade machines you might focus on getting : Gyrus (a 3D Galaga clone with a mesmerizing soundtrack. Reactor, which would grab peoples attention with a beat, fairly simple yet exciting and action packed, trackball driven. Hercules the mamoth Skeeball. based pinball machine. Crazy Climber (used two joysticks and had sample playback).. ROBOTRON (also a two joysticker).. Either Defender or Stargate.. Joust is a must have. I-robot was an Atari game, not necessarily fun to play, it was like a cross between paceman and tempest, but it had an alternate creative mode, where for some time you could paint with the 3D objects in the game in realtime which was a treat at a time, when money for nothing was on MTV.. Warlords (four player breakout game,, Gorf (had sample playback, there was a C64 cover of the game, that would also use sample playback if you had the voice synthesizer add on for the C64. OMegaRun was another game popular on the c64, but was in the arcades first. I saw you had rally-x that was a good one. LadyBug, a paceman clone that used revolving doors. Kickman (also available for the C64) which was like the Activision game Kaboom and made use of characters from other Bally-midway games like Pacman, as balloons. I'm pretty sure I spent enough money in Quarters on video games in the 80s, I could have paid for a few years of college tuition. Of all the games I've played through MAME, Toobin seems to be the most impressive. Marble Madness compelled me to get my Amiga, and I still have the Amiga floppy for it.. I also have an Amiga 3000 I'm looking to sell off but no Hard drive.. Its the 16Mhz model.. It works, I'd part with it for $600.. I Also have a rack mount alpha Juno (mks-50) which I've heard is no relation to the JUNO except in name. Someone on YouTube was pointing out that the Sequential Circuits $4000 Prophet X is really a linux motherboard inside.. LOL.. I think the major reason people are collecting old synthesizers besides melancholy, is the reliability that modern computers can't really offer due to bugs in libraries .. Synthesizers of the past had more intimate developments and since the devices made use of logic circuits and analog oscillators and such, were much more authentic, and ya reliability.. Macintosh and Linux have kernels customized for realtime processing which is necessary for latency free time bound sound processing.. Consider Microsoft took forever to get to using MMU based multitasking and parallel processing, I figure they are not as reliable for media work. I bought into an Arturia sale, that may still be on, where all their software offerings are available for $500 (a result of the 50% off Black Friday sale).. I found out that after purchasing the Collection of vintage synths for $300,. they offered $50 crosssgrades into FX 5 (sold for $250 along) and Pigments individually.. I bit the bullet and got the Analog Lab Pro at another $100, which offers 2000. patches and the ability to layer two of one of the 17 soft synths that come with it.. Like the Arp2600 and Synclavier. I really only planned to get the Synclavier V, but when I saw that I could get 37 more soft synths, I splurged for that, for another $150 .. The Synclavier alone was $150.. Then FX 5 had 37 more effects processors like Leslie emulator and compressor, delays, reverbs.. Pigments is a hybrid synthesizer, with a cheesy looking interface, it combines all the features of all their years of synth design, has stuff like fm synthesis, wavetable, sample playback, subtractive, and multi parameter feedback options, to make up for a patch-cable routing interface. Before this I got a MacMini M4.. It's zippy, I highly recommend it. It's what I'm using now. When I use pigments, the most of the CPU it uses is about 10%.. The Synclavier takes upto 30% .. Something to mention about the Mac line is it comes with office style software, garage band with VST-style plugin support, hence how I'm using the Arturia plugins. And Xcode (which I believe is the IDE that the NeXT was known for. DOOM's AI engine was written on the NeXT then ported to Intel assembly. Xcode is free for the Mac, and is used to write applications for Apple other products like iPhone and iPad. I've done a little coding on a previous Mini I got solely cause I bought an iPad and I wanted to code an app for the iPad. Oh I still have the original iPad 1 and docking keyboard if that interests you. On the Docking keyboard it looks like a ALTO computer, and you get this feeling that the. iPad's release was his dying wish, as the entire Mac line was inspired by the XEROX Parc Alto computer. The reason Xerox brought Apple in to look at their ALTO was the computer was too costly to market to the public and Xerox executives figured Apple might offer suggestions on how to make it more affordable. Steve said he was so overwhelmed by the stuff he did see that he didn't see their other ground breaking technologies.. But it's okay, as the researchers ditched Xerox to work at Apple. Alan Kay who evidently wrote the first incarnation of smalltalk himself.. the language that inspired Java and Objective-C. Objective-C is the language that is in all of apples products.. It's a message passing augmented version of C. Smalltalk used message passing. Java uses object abstraction and compile time data type definitions. This is why C is used. Python, LISP and Javascript and such are more interpretive languages, and due to the parsing phase makes them slow, they are not suitable for applications development. If anyone recalls the reason Minecraft was so jaw dropping is that Java coders used to brag about the efficiency of Java, saying it could be as efficient as C, and not having any really exceptional video gams to show for it.. Java's market is enterprise closed source sales, but the problem is the javaclasses are really just tokenized source with the symbol table removed, it can be decompiled back into source code. Smalltalk could be used for the same applications design as Java, but it was explicitly open sourced, and as such was cumbersome and risky to be sold to others who could take the source and customize it even redistribute it. Unlike Java and Smalltalk, Objective-C is just enough object oriented to offer the utility while stile being compiled into assembly.. And it likely cannot be easily decompiled into source. But I figure AI could be used to decompile any assembly into source patterns that the compiled source represents.. Sorry I got off on a tangent.. ANYHOW.. there were kits that were offered for the arcade machines in the vending times for businesses that hadn't the money to fix multiple machines while still offering a variety of games to play.. What really killed the arcade industry was the cost of maintenance, the progress of the computer industry, the wear and tear, the same sort of things that challenged the film industry when television and vhs, laserdisc became affordable.. Its the leap frogging of technology that make it a challenging industry to profit from.. Someone on YouTube was pointing out that computers don't lose their value as fast as couches, and how many people are willing to buy a refurbished couch versus a refurbished Macintosh?
Kiernan Holland
2024-12-07 21:33:26 +0000 UTC
