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silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
We've finally crossed into the optical storage era! Games and software programs now come on compact disc to go along with the music albums that are also available on CD. (The audiophiles will say that CD audio is lossy and inferior to vinyl.) The change to optical media is awesome for a lot of things, since optical media has less likelihood of degradation than the magnetic disks and tape of the previous storage eras and less likelihood to be accidentally corrupted or erased by passing magnetic fields. Fairly quickly after the jump, hybrid discs that have a data track and audio tracks will become normal for a good long while. (Perhaps most famously, Quake contained both the game and the audio recorded by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails on different tracks. Keeping the Quake CD in the drive while playing the game would summon the recorded sound tracks to blast through speakers or headphones while you blasted interdimensional horrors.) Many games will require discs to be in the drive to both access game data and to access sound samples on the disc to play, because one of the other things that comes with the jump to optical is that games become talkies! No longer limited to snarking at you from the relative comfort of text boxes, games can now be fully voiced so that all the characters and the narrator can let you know exactly what they think of you (and each other) with precision. So you can hear Gary Owens say that Roger Wilco's reach is about as great as his personal depth, or have John Rhys-Davies describe your character's actions in the Slavic-themed world of Mordavia, or you can hear the lovable yet violent duo of Sam and Max as they Hit the Road or all of the hijinks that ensue in trying to stop the Day of the Tentacle with a nerd, a roadie, and a high-strung medical student.
In addition to having voiced audio for all the text of the game, CDs also mean it is possible to include live action clips in a game, if so desired. We're still some ways off from something like Phantasmagoria and its seven CDs of recorded acting, but something like The 11th Guest or Myst sprinkles in full-motion video (heavily compressed and at small resolutions, but FMV all the same) into the game, giving actors the possibility of both voicing game characters and portraying them in front of a camera. And a game player might not know when they were going to be treated to some cutscenes of interesting acting, often in a smaller size on their monitors than the gameplay is running at.
Games are not the only thing that benefits from the jump, either. Simon and Schuster are able to put out interactive versions of things like the Star Trek Technical Manual, the Omnipedia, and other properties that had been previously published in print form. Thanks to a partnership with the creators of Dragon Naturally Speaking, it becomes possible, in a limited and not always consistent way, to address the computer by voice and have it perform a limited number of tasks. (There is a voice training program that comes with this to help the results get better, but better is only how far they ever get with this.) The biggest letdown of this voice control is that it's only trained in certain phrases, so while you can tell it to open the find strip, you can't then dictate what you are looking for and have it search.
The Star Trek package also comes with a Klingon language learning disc, but the same limitations of voice recognition apply. Or, equally likely, I had a terrible microphone that didn't always pick up everything it needed to, and that could lead to some frustration in trying to get the pronunciations right. I did not learn Klingon, but this is the first time I'm exposed to the idea that someone could learn language through video and audio clips and a computer analyzing microphone input. That there is someone doing their daily Duolingo exercises near me as I write this is simply coincidence.
The switch to optical media has an additional benefit for game players - the wildly popular Sony PlayStation (the one that would have been the Nintendo PlayStation to match the Sega CD in an alternate universe) uses CDs, although with a different form of data encoding than PC CDs. Rather than having to do a complete ROM dump from a cartridge to extract a game and then package it up for an emulator, it's possible to write the emulator so that it can read the discs (assuming someone has the not-legal-for-distribution BIOS dump that will be readily available on the World Wide Web), and that way, you can purchase the actual things themselves and use them in a computer if you don't have the console hardware.
Where this story actually goes, however, is that because of the popularity of PlayStation games on console, a company called EIDOS attempts to make PC ports of popular games. And that is how I ended up with PC versions of Final Fantasy VII (the numbering scheme was bright into alignment at the PlayStation era, but it would be a few years into the PlayStation space before II and V made it Stateside, and III wouldn't come until a DS port was made of it much later) and Final Fantasy VIII.
These ports were, to put it mildly,.rough if you didn't have the latest and greatest video hardware with 3D acceleration. A significant amount of Final Fantasy VII involved pre-rendered FMV or matte paintings with the polygonal characters pasted on top of that in a different layer. It made for some jarringly different visuals between the interactive layer and the background layer. If your video card had onboard 3D Acceleration and was fairly recent, there would be no trouble with the layers. (But the game would sometimes randomly crash, which is Not Good when you're on the same save point system as the console release.) If you didn't have that, you were stuck on software rendering, and that had a bug in it where a certain environment would not load after the FMV, leaving the character stranded and unable to progress because the software renderer never populated the characters that needed interaction. We were only able to progress by literally taking our saved game to another computer entirely that had the correct kind of setup for hardware acceleration, do the segment we were stuck on, and then take the save back with us.
By the time Final Fantasy VIII rolled around, the 3D accelerator had become basically mandatory for anything that wasn't a top-of-the-line computer, and this one was not (it was the computer in my room. That one is never top of the line.) But, at another amateur radio and computer enthusiast show, I was able to buy a 3DFX card that worked to do the acceleration part, even if my current one did not. After a mishap where I tried to boot solely with the 3DFX card inside, I figured out how to set them up so that the regular video card would output to the 3DFX card and the combined 2D and 3D rendering would be sent to the monitor. That gave me the bare minimum system requirements to play Final Fantasy VIII. And it showed. Things were fairly slow to render, or to move, or to accept input, but that also gave me a slight advantage, in that things running at such slow speeds meant I had some forgiveness time when it came to powering up the summons in the game, so that I wouldn't be penalized if I took one extra powering up stroke when the indicator said not to try. It also made anticipating the critical hit strikes for one of the characters much easier, too. I was determined to get my way through that game on the slow machine because it was mine, darn it, but I think I eventually returned and played it in the faster family computer, even though I really did like some of those timing advantages. (Later cards would just have their accelerators incorporated, but this was the time where true 3D was really starting to get traction as a thing to do, rather than the pseudo-3D of Doom and other FPS-type games.)
In addition to this being the era of 3D acceleration, this is also the era of widespread access to the World Wide Web. Ubiquity of broadband for urban and suburban spaces is still several years off, but this is the kind of time where a hundred local companies spring up as Internet Service Providers, usually deploying a fleet of modems to take calls from subscribers and get them connected into the networks. Instead of the broadband monopolies of now, we have plenty of small and local ISPs who provider local numbers to call for access. (There's also America On-Line, but like Facebook, AOL is remembered as a place of horror and your racist relatives.) In this era, the smart thing to do, once unlimited access is available and local calls are generally either free or inexpensive, would be to have a second phone line installed and connected to the modem so that Internet can flow freely without interrupting the ability of voice calls to come through. However, adding a second line was a thing with cost, and in my household, Internet was something to be used occasionally, rather than something that would be always-on (or as always-on as the phone system allowed - four hours was often a maximum allowable call time before disconnection.)
Because Internet access would prevent voice calling, because I didn't have the money for the subscription fees, and, I suspect, because my parents were still concerned about electronic addiction,I never got into multiplayer online dungeons or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. (Speaking of text-based games, MOOs, MUSHes, and MUDs all were very text-based, since they were often telnet-ed into for playing, and they're also much older than when I discovered them.) That's not to say I wasn't Extremely Online when I could be, since the Web contained all sorts of things that I was interested in, and I could find other people who were interested in the same thing. Message Boards and webcomics were important parts of my online presence those days. (The default icon I have is an improvement on the original avatar I used on a specific message board.) Eventually, I discovered an online service, related to Jellyvision (who would eventually become Jackbox Games), called beZerk (Berkeley Systems). beZerk offered online social games to play with other people, like Acrophobia, What's the Big Idea / Cosmic Consensus ("Only a chosen few will ascend to the Dimension of Light!") and Get the Picture, which were a reskin of an IRC game and games based on the popularity of answers or captioning pictures humorously, respectively. They were fast-paced and it was fun to play those kinds of games with other people online. There were even specific rooms and room names with variations on the regular game ("Couch" rules, based on the game room of the same name, for example, said to always choose "General Acrophobia" instead of any of the themed choices, and then to declare what the actual category was in the chat) that could be selected for a different type of game experience.
With only one phone line, though, it was always a delicate balance between how long I could play games (and take care of other Internet business, too - this was also the era where lots of file sharing tools developed before the Napster decision made everyone much more circumspect about their sharing, and many of those tools had resume functions, because the assumption was that you would be dialing in and only available for a specific amount of time to download and upload your shares) and leaving the phone line open in case the parents called and wanted to talk to us for things. I didn't anyways get it right, but I tried to keep the gaming sessions to time periods where I knew there wouldn't be any calling. Which meant a lot of fun feelings of winning occasionally and a lot of times of just having fun. I still like playing Acro, but it's back to being an IRC game at this point, with the disappearance of so many studios and their unique games.
This was also the time where we had a modem stop working. I want even connected at the time, but there was a thunderstorm outside, electricity hit a line and it jumped up and fried the modem with a pop. Thankfully, we had a spare to connect, and that worked, but that was not a fun experience to have that part of the computer get destroyed by an improbable event. And we were probably really lucky that we didn't destroy the rest of the machine with that. Lucky us that we didn't let the magic smoke out.
This is basically the last gasp of MS-DOS except as a system that gets emulated itself. Windows 2000, the rock-solid one, Windows ME, the catastrophic failure, and Windows XP, the system that I will eventually land on for the collegiate years, don't do DOS except as their own sandboxed version, really. And by the time we get to Windows XP, game and software development is targeting those operating systems (and the MacOS) rather than being primarily developed for DOS and being compatible to run in Windows. Perhaps fittingly, this is also the era right before I get that handy university broadband connection right in my own dormitory room. Spoiler alert: I don't turn into someone who only does solo play and never develops any sort of social skills. What does happen, well, that's yet to come, isn't it?
- CPU: Intel x86 Pentium II-compatible chip @ 266 MHz
- Memory: 64 MB of RAM
- Graphics:
- Primary Adapter: A Super VGA compatible non-nVidia, non-ATI, no-name video card, 8 MB of video RAM, PCI bus.
- Secondary Adapter: 3dfx Voodoo² 3D graphics accelerator, 8 MB video RAM, also PCI bus, max resolution 800x600
- Sound: Internal Speaker, Sound Blaster-compatible sound card with 3.5" jacks for output speakers and input microphones
- Inputs and Outputs: Keyboard (PS/2) and mouse (PS/2), gamepad port on sound card (serial), additional serial and parallel port cards for printers or other devices (not attached)
- Storage: 2 GB hard drive, one 3.5" floppy disk drive, one CD-ROM drive
- OS: Windows 98 (on top of DOS, still.)
We've finally crossed into the optical storage era! Games and software programs now come on compact disc to go along with the music albums that are also available on CD. (The audiophiles will say that CD audio is lossy and inferior to vinyl.) The change to optical media is awesome for a lot of things, since optical media has less likelihood of degradation than the magnetic disks and tape of the previous storage eras and less likelihood to be accidentally corrupted or erased by passing magnetic fields. Fairly quickly after the jump, hybrid discs that have a data track and audio tracks will become normal for a good long while. (Perhaps most famously, Quake contained both the game and the audio recorded by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails on different tracks. Keeping the Quake CD in the drive while playing the game would summon the recorded sound tracks to blast through speakers or headphones while you blasted interdimensional horrors.) Many games will require discs to be in the drive to both access game data and to access sound samples on the disc to play, because one of the other things that comes with the jump to optical is that games become talkies! No longer limited to snarking at you from the relative comfort of text boxes, games can now be fully voiced so that all the characters and the narrator can let you know exactly what they think of you (and each other) with precision. So you can hear Gary Owens say that Roger Wilco's reach is about as great as his personal depth, or have John Rhys-Davies describe your character's actions in the Slavic-themed world of Mordavia, or you can hear the lovable yet violent duo of Sam and Max as they Hit the Road or all of the hijinks that ensue in trying to stop the Day of the Tentacle with a nerd, a roadie, and a high-strung medical student.
In addition to having voiced audio for all the text of the game, CDs also mean it is possible to include live action clips in a game, if so desired. We're still some ways off from something like Phantasmagoria and its seven CDs of recorded acting, but something like The 11th Guest or Myst sprinkles in full-motion video (heavily compressed and at small resolutions, but FMV all the same) into the game, giving actors the possibility of both voicing game characters and portraying them in front of a camera. And a game player might not know when they were going to be treated to some cutscenes of interesting acting, often in a smaller size on their monitors than the gameplay is running at.
Games are not the only thing that benefits from the jump, either. Simon and Schuster are able to put out interactive versions of things like the Star Trek Technical Manual, the Omnipedia, and other properties that had been previously published in print form. Thanks to a partnership with the creators of Dragon Naturally Speaking, it becomes possible, in a limited and not always consistent way, to address the computer by voice and have it perform a limited number of tasks. (There is a voice training program that comes with this to help the results get better, but better is only how far they ever get with this.) The biggest letdown of this voice control is that it's only trained in certain phrases, so while you can tell it to open the find strip, you can't then dictate what you are looking for and have it search.
The Star Trek package also comes with a Klingon language learning disc, but the same limitations of voice recognition apply. Or, equally likely, I had a terrible microphone that didn't always pick up everything it needed to, and that could lead to some frustration in trying to get the pronunciations right. I did not learn Klingon, but this is the first time I'm exposed to the idea that someone could learn language through video and audio clips and a computer analyzing microphone input. That there is someone doing their daily Duolingo exercises near me as I write this is simply coincidence.
The switch to optical media has an additional benefit for game players - the wildly popular Sony PlayStation (the one that would have been the Nintendo PlayStation to match the Sega CD in an alternate universe) uses CDs, although with a different form of data encoding than PC CDs. Rather than having to do a complete ROM dump from a cartridge to extract a game and then package it up for an emulator, it's possible to write the emulator so that it can read the discs (assuming someone has the not-legal-for-distribution BIOS dump that will be readily available on the World Wide Web), and that way, you can purchase the actual things themselves and use them in a computer if you don't have the console hardware.
Where this story actually goes, however, is that because of the popularity of PlayStation games on console, a company called EIDOS attempts to make PC ports of popular games. And that is how I ended up with PC versions of Final Fantasy VII (the numbering scheme was bright into alignment at the PlayStation era, but it would be a few years into the PlayStation space before II and V made it Stateside, and III wouldn't come until a DS port was made of it much later) and Final Fantasy VIII.
These ports were, to put it mildly,.rough if you didn't have the latest and greatest video hardware with 3D acceleration. A significant amount of Final Fantasy VII involved pre-rendered FMV or matte paintings with the polygonal characters pasted on top of that in a different layer. It made for some jarringly different visuals between the interactive layer and the background layer. If your video card had onboard 3D Acceleration and was fairly recent, there would be no trouble with the layers. (But the game would sometimes randomly crash, which is Not Good when you're on the same save point system as the console release.) If you didn't have that, you were stuck on software rendering, and that had a bug in it where a certain environment would not load after the FMV, leaving the character stranded and unable to progress because the software renderer never populated the characters that needed interaction. We were only able to progress by literally taking our saved game to another computer entirely that had the correct kind of setup for hardware acceleration, do the segment we were stuck on, and then take the save back with us.
By the time Final Fantasy VIII rolled around, the 3D accelerator had become basically mandatory for anything that wasn't a top-of-the-line computer, and this one was not (it was the computer in my room. That one is never top of the line.) But, at another amateur radio and computer enthusiast show, I was able to buy a 3DFX card that worked to do the acceleration part, even if my current one did not. After a mishap where I tried to boot solely with the 3DFX card inside, I figured out how to set them up so that the regular video card would output to the 3DFX card and the combined 2D and 3D rendering would be sent to the monitor. That gave me the bare minimum system requirements to play Final Fantasy VIII. And it showed. Things were fairly slow to render, or to move, or to accept input, but that also gave me a slight advantage, in that things running at such slow speeds meant I had some forgiveness time when it came to powering up the summons in the game, so that I wouldn't be penalized if I took one extra powering up stroke when the indicator said not to try. It also made anticipating the critical hit strikes for one of the characters much easier, too. I was determined to get my way through that game on the slow machine because it was mine, darn it, but I think I eventually returned and played it in the faster family computer, even though I really did like some of those timing advantages. (Later cards would just have their accelerators incorporated, but this was the time where true 3D was really starting to get traction as a thing to do, rather than the pseudo-3D of Doom and other FPS-type games.)
In addition to this being the era of 3D acceleration, this is also the era of widespread access to the World Wide Web. Ubiquity of broadband for urban and suburban spaces is still several years off, but this is the kind of time where a hundred local companies spring up as Internet Service Providers, usually deploying a fleet of modems to take calls from subscribers and get them connected into the networks. Instead of the broadband monopolies of now, we have plenty of small and local ISPs who provider local numbers to call for access. (There's also America On-Line, but like Facebook, AOL is remembered as a place of horror and your racist relatives.) In this era, the smart thing to do, once unlimited access is available and local calls are generally either free or inexpensive, would be to have a second phone line installed and connected to the modem so that Internet can flow freely without interrupting the ability of voice calls to come through. However, adding a second line was a thing with cost, and in my household, Internet was something to be used occasionally, rather than something that would be always-on (or as always-on as the phone system allowed - four hours was often a maximum allowable call time before disconnection.)
Because Internet access would prevent voice calling, because I didn't have the money for the subscription fees, and, I suspect, because my parents were still concerned about electronic addiction,I never got into multiplayer online dungeons or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. (Speaking of text-based games, MOOs, MUSHes, and MUDs all were very text-based, since they were often telnet-ed into for playing, and they're also much older than when I discovered them.) That's not to say I wasn't Extremely Online when I could be, since the Web contained all sorts of things that I was interested in, and I could find other people who were interested in the same thing. Message Boards and webcomics were important parts of my online presence those days. (The default icon I have is an improvement on the original avatar I used on a specific message board.) Eventually, I discovered an online service, related to Jellyvision (who would eventually become Jackbox Games), called beZerk (Berkeley Systems). beZerk offered online social games to play with other people, like Acrophobia, What's the Big Idea / Cosmic Consensus ("Only a chosen few will ascend to the Dimension of Light!") and Get the Picture, which were a reskin of an IRC game and games based on the popularity of answers or captioning pictures humorously, respectively. They were fast-paced and it was fun to play those kinds of games with other people online. There were even specific rooms and room names with variations on the regular game ("Couch" rules, based on the game room of the same name, for example, said to always choose "General Acrophobia" instead of any of the themed choices, and then to declare what the actual category was in the chat) that could be selected for a different type of game experience.
With only one phone line, though, it was always a delicate balance between how long I could play games (and take care of other Internet business, too - this was also the era where lots of file sharing tools developed before the Napster decision made everyone much more circumspect about their sharing, and many of those tools had resume functions, because the assumption was that you would be dialing in and only available for a specific amount of time to download and upload your shares) and leaving the phone line open in case the parents called and wanted to talk to us for things. I didn't anyways get it right, but I tried to keep the gaming sessions to time periods where I knew there wouldn't be any calling. Which meant a lot of fun feelings of winning occasionally and a lot of times of just having fun. I still like playing Acro, but it's back to being an IRC game at this point, with the disappearance of so many studios and their unique games.
This was also the time where we had a modem stop working. I want even connected at the time, but there was a thunderstorm outside, electricity hit a line and it jumped up and fried the modem with a pop. Thankfully, we had a spare to connect, and that worked, but that was not a fun experience to have that part of the computer get destroyed by an improbable event. And we were probably really lucky that we didn't destroy the rest of the machine with that. Lucky us that we didn't let the magic smoke out.
This is basically the last gasp of MS-DOS except as a system that gets emulated itself. Windows 2000, the rock-solid one, Windows ME, the catastrophic failure, and Windows XP, the system that I will eventually land on for the collegiate years, don't do DOS except as their own sandboxed version, really. And by the time we get to Windows XP, game and software development is targeting those operating systems (and the MacOS) rather than being primarily developed for DOS and being compatible to run in Windows. Perhaps fittingly, this is also the era right before I get that handy university broadband connection right in my own dormitory room. Spoiler alert: I don't turn into someone who only does solo play and never develops any sort of social skills. What does happen, well, that's yet to come, isn't it?
no subject
Date: 2021-12-12 05:34 pm (UTC)I don't do that any more, but it seemed to become a cycle for a time in PC hardware.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-12 06:30 pm (UTC)