You remind me that I didn't have a sound card at the time and I played all my games (mostly LucasArts) with the PC speaker. For me, the MIDI versions are too boring as they lack the "raw electric power" of the speaker that I loved for years.
I can still perfectly hear the twang of the Monkey Island theme song on PC speaker, and vastly prefer it to generic MIDI renditions. My, where did the years go...
Canyon.mid
21–30 of 214 posts
Re: Canyon.mid
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your YT/Winamp/whatever volume isn't at 100%, then what you're doing is: 1. generate audio signal 2. reduce volume of that signal, losing information because it's quantised 3. take that volume-reduced signal and boost it right back up again, but now with the lower bits destroyed You can make this effect as bad as you like, e.g. turn it down to 1% and then amplify by 100x... but why?
Apps shouldn’t even have local volume controls. It’s an OS function.
I do not want to have to go hunt down the app in a list of all currently running apps in some os-level mixer to turn down or up one app. It is absolutely both an os and an app function. Both are needed.
Re: Canyon.mid
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can still perfectly hear the twang of the Monkey Island theme song on PC speaker, and vastly prefer it to generic MIDI renditions. My, where did the years go...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ
Glorious!!! Even the channel name is too perfect :)
Re: Canyon.mid
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The video shows Windows 3.11 though.
My point is that while there is a small time window where Zip drives were available and Windows 3.11 was still the latest consumer Windows (ignoring NT here), Zip drives feel more like Windows 95-era. A stack of 3.5” floppy disks would have felt more authentic.
It's a very "borderline between eras" picture. The 1000 RSX was a late Tandy model. It has a 386 CPU and VGA graphics, which makes it a pretty reasonable Win 3.11 machine. It's a system that could technically run Win 95 but it'd struggle with that CPU and limited RAM capacity. You really wanted a 486 or Pentium for Win 95.
The monitor is the standard Tandy VGA monitor of the system's era. The styling on the speakers feel newer than the RSX's 1991 launch, they're more what I'd expect from the mid to late 90s.
You had to upgrade the VGA chip's BIOS to use Win 95 on it:
> The ACUMOS VGA graphics can be software-updated with Cirrus Logic BIOS (via MS-DOS driver) to allow VESA/SVGA to function in Windows 95, as the Windows 3.xx Tandy VGA drivers are insufficient for Windows 95.
ref: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Tandy_1000_R-Series
I think the background image is probably authentic, it has the feel of a mid-late 90s digital camera picture. It reads to me as the desk of someone who is trying to keep that system alive long past its prime years. Which were arguably over before they started, given 486 systems had been available for a bit when this launched. We end up with an early 90s system with a handful of mid-late 90s peripherals.
The bigger problem to me is this sounds like MIDI played back on a sound card with FM synthesis. The 1000 RSX had the poorly supported Tandy 3 tones + DAC sound hardware. You could install an AdLib, Sound Blaster, or other card to give it MIDI FM synth capability, but the base system can't do it. Alas, we can't see the back to see if it has such an upgrade...
Re: Canyon.mid
#25Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
Re: Canyon.mid
#26Yes, I know it's just a "retro looking computer" to frame a YouTube video but... I had to look up the Tandy 1000 RSX, because it seemed very wrong to have 16-color VGA graphics coming out of a computer labeled as "Tandy 1000". Tandy 1000 RSX was the last model from 1991, and it had Super VGA rather than the famous "Tandy graphics" that originated with the IBM PCJr. It did not come with an Adlib or Sound Blaster card,…
VGA on a Tandy 1000 wasn't all that unusual. Most if not all of the earlier Tandy 1000 models that had ISA slots could take a VGA card in them. The hardware worked fine (it's just memory bus accesses under 1mb and I/O port instructions), it just depended on software support to do anything with it. Tandy's magazine PCM often listed and rated add-in VGA cards. I remember reading of a later version of DeskMate that supported VGA resolution.
Re: Canyon.mid
#27The Zip drive in the picture feels slightly anachronistic though. Technically it isn’t, having been release a few months before Windows 95, but still.
Zip Drives began as Parallel Port devices, and PCs had parallel ports since the beginning. It's not like it's a USB device or something like that.
I don’t think that’s a good counterargument. For example, an Olympus P-330 dye-sublimation photo printer from 1998 also uses a parallel port, but would nevertheless seem out of place for the Windows 3.11 era.
Re: Canyon.mid
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your YT/Winamp/whatever volume isn't at 100%, then what you're doing is: 1. generate audio signal 2. reduce volume of that signal, losing information because it's quantised 3. take that volume-reduced signal and boost it right back up again, but now with the lower bits destroyed You can make this effect as bad as you like, e.g. turn it down to 1% and then amplify by 100x... but why?
Apps shouldn’t even have local volume controls. It’s an OS function.
Not affiliated at all but just came across and I wish this was built in to windows:
https://github.com/File-New-Project/EarTrumpet
Re: Canyon.mid
#29Please please please NEVER disable video player controls. Like a fool I didn't lower my system volume, and got blasted with maximum volume of the YouTube video.
If your YT/Winamp/whatever volume isn't at 100%, then what you're doing is: 1. generate audio signal 2. reduce volume of that signal, losing information because it's quantised 3. take that volume-reduced signal and boost it right back up again, but now with the lower bits destroyed You can make this effect as bad as you like, e.g. turn it down to 1% and then amplify by 100x... but why?
Because the quality drop is imperceptible for most people, but the convenience of having volume controls at the component that makes sound isn't.
Re: Canyon.mid
#30Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
This is a silly question.
It will never be enough until we can manipulate the fabric of space and time directly as gods and create entirely new universes and physics and live forever for an infinity infinities.
The ratio of our infinitesimal, geologically small existence to the whole of the light cone and the observable universe - it is just a glimpse at the fractal of what will be enough to satiate our curiosity and desire.