Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI

hostilevolume.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 89 posts

Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI

#62

Post by acomjean »

spicyjpeg wrote: post #43
Waterluvian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Had a 3x NEC external scsi cd drive. It had play/ ff and rewind buttons and a little lcd that showed the track #. With the headphone jack it made a decent cd player.

https://recycledgoods.com/nec-cdr-400-3x-scsi-external-plus-...

Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI

#64

Post by jonathanlydall »

darknavi wrote: post #41
jonathanlydall wrote: post #23

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.

I almost didn't believe this, but I just tested and you're absolutely right.

I've never noticed because I use a Steel Series headset which presents as two output sound devices to Windows, the idea being that you can independently control the volume of your "game" and your "chat" application. Turns out it's useful for Teams as well.

Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI

#65

Post by jonathanlydall »

whycome wrote: post #26
jonathanlydall wrote: post #23

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.

That was a hardware/software thing as far as I remember. If it was using something like DirectSound it would adjust the audio independently. Other media players did the same thing.

It was definitely noteworthy that it did this since I was used to other programs not doing so, for example Winamp, I would also have thought Windows' Media Player did not do this, but I can't remember for certain.

Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI

#66

Post by jonathanlydall »

anyfoo wrote: post #28
jonathanlydall wrote: post #23

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.

I feel like that was super common. Apart from changing the volumes of entire channels (e.g. changing the level of Line In vs. digital sound), volume was a relatively “global” thing. And I’m not sure if that was still the case in 1997, but most likely changing the volume of digital sound meant the CPU having to process the samples in realtime. Now on one hand, that’s probably dwarfed by what the CPU had to do for deco…

I mentioned this in another thread now, but it was definitely noteworthy to me that it did this since I was used to other programs not doing so, for example Winamp, I would also have thought Windows' Media Player did not do this, but I can't remember for certain.

Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI

#68

Post by SkySkimmer »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #23

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.

For some time this was the default in pulseaudio on linux https://200ok.ch/posts/2019-05-20_disable_flatvolume_for_pul...

The debian bug linked there implies it started 2012 or earlier, and ended in 2019.

Re: Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI

#69

Post by mort96 »

ua709 wrote: post #58

I am familiar with this game. I play a variant of it on iOS everyday, sometimes multiple times a day, with my AirPods and iPhone. I'm not very good though. Somehow iOS always wins and finds a hostile volume to initiate playback with regardless of what I do with the UI.

iOS is great! I especially like how they tied the "alarm through speakers" volume to the "notifications through earbuds" volume so that you can choose between "loud enough to wake you up in the morning and also burst your ear drums when you receive a notification with earbuds in" and "quiet enough to make notifications comfortable and also not wake you up in the morning". Truly genius parody of hostile UX.
Post reply on HN