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The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

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Re: The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

#221

Post by tanzam75 »

nlh wrote: post #215
cocoflunchy wrote: post #12

Motocross Madness 2 is also still up: http://www.microsoft.com/games/motocross2/ And this list wouldn't be complete without Midtown Madness (1?) http://www.microsoft.com/games/midtown/ [edit] I'm sure you can find a bunch of others by browsing through the wayback machine ( http://web.archive.org/web/19980214201021/http://microsoft.c... ), like http://www.microsoft.com/games/outwars/

I basically know the geography of Chicago, having only been there in real life a handful of times, because of my time playing Midtown Madness and the various MS Flight Simulators. I actually got a bit sad during a trip a few weeks ago when I saw that Meigs Field had been demolished.

> I actually got a bit sad during a trip a few weeks ago when I saw that Meigs Field had been demolished.

And Microsoft Flight Simulator has also been cancelled. :-(

Re: The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

#222

Post by phillc »

I actually owe my programming career to MTM. When I was ~10-11 years old, I held many tournaments. At some point, my tournament grew to the point where I couldn't manage signups day of, and tried to make a website using frontpage + some form of extensions (angelfire? tripod?) to have early signups. I eventually learned javascript and a tiny bit of perl.

Looking back at that point in time, I did a horrible job of managing those tournaments (Sometimes my pre-teen responsibilities took priority and made me miss some tournaments. Oh and I seem to remember storing passwords in clear text). However I look at myself today and am extremely happy to be a successful developer, which may have never happened if it hadn't been for the MTM1/MTM2 games and websites, which I am certain I probably copied a ton of "codes" from back then.

Re: The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

#223

Post by tanzam75 »

zschallz wrote: post #25
everettForth wrote: post #22

http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm

When I read campaign stances on this site last year I was really surprised how socially moderate their campaign was. I'm glad the site is still around.

> When I read campaign stances on this site last year I was really surprised how socially moderate their campaign was.

If you were surprised by Dole/Kemp from 1996, you should look at when Bob Dole ran for Vice President -- Ford/Dole in 1976.

The 1976 Republican platform [1] featured: Environmental protection, willingness to "negotiate differences" with foreign countries, "vigorous" antitrust enforcement, federally-funded child nutrition programs, support for the Equal Rights Amendment, better access for the disabled, urban development, railroad electrification, recycling, increased funding for the arts and humanities.

On the other hand, "The Republican Party opposes compulsory national health insurance." So that part isn't new. Also, the usual Republican stuff -- lower taxes, bigger military, opposition to abortion, etc.

[1] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25843

Re: The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

#224

Post by tanzam75 »

martindale wrote: post #18
TheTechBox wrote: post #10

I used to love this game. Wonder why they keep these sites up? I mean looking at the domain it's hardly buried deep within the MS site...

Why would they take them down?

Besides, it's refreshing to find a site structure from the 1990s that hasn't succumbed to link rot.

Re: The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

#225

Post by Justsignedup »

klodolph wrote: post #134
Lagged2Death wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure a .doc file created fifteen years ago also still renders in Word. Check this out: http://timtyson.us/archives/2008/01/theft-by-taking/ Old MS Office file formats were never engineered to be future proof in any way, and they're a huge headache for Microsoft, and they do indeed behave oddly in new software, and Microsoft cannot wait to get rid of them, and nobody in their right mind can blame them, hone…

> Open standards rock . I'd like to expand on this. The Microsoft Word team is the only group of people that ever had any say over what goes in a Word document. In the old days, a Word document was nothing more than the serialized version of what Word had in memory. Photoshop files are the same way. As soon as you're not the only one with a say over the file format, you turn it into a standard. And you step up to mak…

To keep going. Any standard that is not open will not open itself for multiple implementations (see old MS standards with word xml format). The problem of course is that if I cannot implement your standard, you are still the only consumer. So really:

Standards with producers/consumers from different independent teams from different organizations with different goals are awesome.

Re: The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

#226

Post by TallboyOne »

nkassis wrote: post #61
TallboyOne wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Motocross Madness and Midtown Madness were both such fundamental pieces of my childhood. I wish I could convey the amount of nostalgia I have. Motocross Madness was the first time I actively tried to use a computer to 'do' something. I had to program my own tracks, and it was insanely hard at the time, but god were those the glory days.

I'm with you that game was amazing. The track designer was such fun. Really wish they would have continued the series. The track designer was really easy to learn I feel compared to the current modding tools that come with games. And it had enough stuff to keep me for a long while. Must have played that game for a few years.

no track designer, heh. Im talking a pirated copy of 3dsmax and a lot of reading. In retrospect this might have been motocross madness #1

Re: The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

#227

Post by TheTechBox »

unreal37 wrote: post #23
TheTechBox wrote: post #10

I used to love this game. Wonder why they keep these sites up? I mean looking at the domain it's hardly buried deep within the MS site...

A client of mine has a site with 4000+ individual pages, and no content management system. In the corporate world, you just don't touch stuff if you don't need to. There's no time to go and find web pages that haven't changed in 10 years and figure out what to do about them.

4000 files(?) must be crazy to manage. Is there any kind of templating system at all with them?

Now I come to think of it I guess there may also be a need to keep it in place due to links from other parts of the site.

Re: The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

#228

Post by peterhunt »

code_duck wrote: post #160
peterhunt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a meme. Everything high quality happening on mobile is crazy resource constrained.

1-2 gb of ram is insane luxury compared to say, the Amiga which typically had 1000 times less - 512k or 1mb of main ram and the same amount of 'chip' ram (for video/audio processing). I'm not a mobile device expert, but programmers don't have to think that much about 512k on an iphone, do they? On an Amiga it was often all you had for the entire system including the OS.

Yeah but the Amiga drove 640x256 at 16 colors (4 bits), so around 80kb. Contrast that with the newest iPhone which drives 640x1136 at 24-bit color, so around 2.08mb. This is 26x the number of pixels. Keep in mind you also have a networking stack and lots of semi-realtime sensor data.

Not to mention that the demands on the system in terms of features and performance are so much higher.

Re: The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

#229

Post by pbhjpbhj »

lmm wrote: post #193
derleth wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're blind, or trying to render the page on a different-sized browser and the tables are fixed size (because 640x480 is a Law Of Physics).

I've never understood the argument that "semantic" tags are easier to render for screenreaders. Like a screenreader knows that is for emphasis, but couldn't possibly render the same way it renders . Or knows that a must be for layout but couldn't possibly treat the same way (modern UI toolkits build tables out of divs, so it's not like div-users semantically distinguish between layout and actual tabular data).

>knows that a must be for layout but couldn't possibly treat the same way //

How then would you treat actual tables, like ... ?

Screenreaders treat tables differently because they carry semantic weight - table headings, rows and such relate to one another in a way that mere areas of a web-page do not.

It's not the table tag that's bad, people don't [shouldn't!] use divs for marking up tabular data.

Re: The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998

#230

Post by pbhjpbhj »

TheTechBox wrote: post #227
unreal37 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A client of mine has a site with 4000+ individual pages, and no content management system. In the corporate world, you just don't touch stuff if you don't need to. There's no time to go and find web pages that haven't changed in 10 years and figure out what to do about them.

4000 files(?) must be crazy to manage. Is there any kind of templating system at all with them? Now I come to think of it I guess there may also be a need to keep it in place due to links from other parts of the site.

>any kind of templating system at all with them? //

I'm going to go ahead and guess search-and-replace is their version of templating?

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