My favourite bad volume control was in Real Player around 1997 where changing the volume in the application actually changed the global volume of Windows.
It's funny because Microsoft Teams does this today, in 2026.
Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
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Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
#42My favourite bad volume control was in Real Player around 1997 where changing the volume in the application actually changed the global volume of Windows.
I was so confused by the CD drives of that era. They all had a volume wheel and a headphone jack, but never once did I experience those working. The audio CDs were always “owned” by the OS, which piped the audio through the normal channels out my speakers or the PC headphone jack. I imagine the existence of those means that CD drives had their own DAC and other logic. I guess there was an idea of wanting to play CD a…
I remember my father powering one of these old cd ROM drives, without a computer and using it to play music CDs using these jack connecter
Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
#43My favourite bad volume control was in Real Player around 1997 where changing the volume in the application actually changed the global volume of Windows.
I was so confused by the CD drives of that era. They all had a volume wheel and a headphone jack, but never once did I experience those working. The audio CDs were always “owned” by the OS, which piped the audio through the normal channels out my speakers or the PC headphone jack. I imagine the existence of those means that CD drives had their own DAC and other logic. I guess there was an idea of wanting to play CD a…
Almost all IDE and SCSI CD-ROM drives were indeed capable of playing audio CDs fully autonomously, with the host PC basically only sending them the command to start playing; many drives took it one step further and provided a play button in addition to the usual eject button, which worked even if the drive wasn't plugged at all into a machine. The audio was typically output both to the front panel headphone jack and to a 4-pin connector on the back of the drive, which you were supposed to connect to one of your sound card's aux inputs so that it would get mixed into the system audio output.
Unfortunately, a decent number of machines were not fitted with the relevant cable. Combined with the low-quality DACs that most drives used, the compatibility issues that plagued ATAPI implementations and the dramatic increase in CPU power and sound card quality throughout the mid-to-late 90s, this led media player software to quickly move on from drive based playback to so-called "digital audio extraction", where the CD is basically ripped in real time and streamed to your sound card's own DAC. Thus, unless you played older games that relied on hardware CD-DA playback [1], it's somewhat unlikely you ever experienced it under, say, Windows 98 or XP.
[1] As offloading playback to the drive had no CPU overhead, games often stored their music as additional tracks on the game disc and played it that way. Incidentally, basically all CD-ROM-based game consoles and arcade systems relied heavily on hardware accelerated playback as well, with some going even further and allowing for compressed (ADPCM) CD audio streaming with no CPU intervention.
Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
#44My favourite bad volume control was in Real Player around 1997 where changing the volume in the application actually changed the global volume of Windows.
It's funny because Microsoft Teams does this today, in 2026.
Happy I never had to use Teams so far. Only heard bad things about it lol.
Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
#45This works for almost all levels:
for (i = 0; i Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
#46Prwtty neat. Unfortunately wasn't able to solve the UI desync one :/
Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
#47There are two types of volume slider I've encountered thus far, "too logarithmic", and "not logarithmic enough".
It's actually possible to turn a linear pot into an approximation of a log pot by wiring a resistor in parallel with the wiper and one end. The volume pot is a voltage divider so the amount it "scales" by is given by Scale = Rbottom / (Rtop + Rbottom).
But, if you put a resistor in parallel, you need to work out that:
R = 1 / ((1 / R1) + (1 / R2)) or Rbottom = 1 / ((1 / Rbottom) + (1 / Rfixed)) where Rfixed is the amount you're "bending" it by.
So you could make the amount of "logness" be adjustable by having another (linear) control to vary Rfixed.
You'd work out, for a pot rotation Vol from 0 to 1:
Rbottom = 1 / ((1 / Vol) + (1 / Rfixed)) Rtop = 1 - Vol Scale = Rbottom / (Rbottom + Rtop)
Now for those better at arithmetic than me, how can you reverse this? Imagine you've got a pot in a piece of equipment with a resistor between the wiper and ground giving a log curve, and you've got to read that with an ADC and turn it back into the linear position of the wiper.
It ought to be possible but I've always sucked at arithmetic.
Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
#48Level 27 is not possible.
Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
#49This is not an issue at all, but when ever I come across something like it, I like to poke at the frontend in dev tools a bit. You can pass most levels with `setVolume(25)` in the web console, since that function is just sitting in the document object. That feels like the ultimate volume UI puzzle heh.
I'll have to patch that!
Please don't. The game was fun, but level 22 didn't work on Tor Browser due to CORS errors. At first I thought the "NETWORK ERROR. TRY AGAIN" was part of the game until I saw the actual network tab. I wouldn't have made it past level 22 if not for the console command. Plus, if someone wants to cheat, why not?
Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
#50Prwtty neat. Unfortunately wasn't able to solve the UI desync one :/
It's inverted, 100 == 0, 75 == 25