ChanServ changed the topic of ##yamahasynths to: Channel dedicated to questions and discussion of Yamaha FM Synthesizer internals and corresponding REing. Discussion of synthesis methods similar to the Yamaha line of chips, Sound Blasters + clones, PCM chips like RF5C68, and CD theory of operation are also on-topic. Channel logs: https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/~h~yamahasynths
andlabs has quit [Quit: My MacBook has gone to sleep. ZZZzzz…]
andlabs has joined ##yamahasynths
andlabs has quit [Quit: My MacBook has gone to sleep. ZZZzzz…]
andlabs has joined ##yamahasynths
Ruxnor has quit [Ping timeout: 246 seconds]
kode54 has quit [Ping timeout: 265 seconds]
kode54 has joined ##yamahasynths
Ruxnor has joined ##yamahasynths
futarisIRCcloud has joined ##yamahasynths
futarisIRCcloud has quit [Quit: Connection closed for inactivity]
<Foone>
andlabs: yeah I was gonna say, I don't know if that counts as the "least expected". I talk a lot on the internet and it turns out google indexes it
<Foone>
so a lot of times other retrotech people are like "I am doing X. I want to research X!" and they google it and the first results that come up are "foone tweeted about this like a year ago"
<Foone>
heck, it happened to me this morning
<andlabs>
it happened again yesterday
<Foone>
I was trying to make a joke about the farmer's daughter BBS, a porn-BBS in wisconsin from the mid-90s
<andlabs>
in another discussion I was having about CD based systems
<Foone>
and guess who comes up when you google that? me talking about it
<andlabs>
you made tweets about the tandy VIS
<andlabs>
I bought a VIS game the other day and was wondering if it would run on a stock windows 3.1 install because it's weird like that
<andlabs>
but it hasn't even arrived yet lol
<Foone>
oh yah. I need to do more with that system, damn it. it's so interesting and I haven't ever gotten anything done with it
<andlabs>
I still havent' even looked up which one I got lol
<andlabs>
oh
<andlabs>
"Americans in Space"
<Foone>
I think most VIS games will work on win 3.1 with a little hacking? there's a main EXE thing that does some checks about windows and then the rest of it is native windows 3.x stuff
<Foone>
there's a couple games that bypass the windows API and talk to the hardware specifically but they're rare, or homebrew
<andlabs>
nice
<andlabs>
I'm not expecting the hardware to be very propiretary either
<sorear>
.oO( win 3.1 for sparc )
<andlabs>
lol
<Foone>
it's really not. the weirdest part is the BIOS, but otherwise it's really just a DOS machine
<Foone>
a dos machine with no floppy or harddrive, making it SLIGHTLY weird, I guess
<andlabs>
that era is just really bizarre
<andlabs>
everyone thought that this specific type of multimedia CD experience would take off
<andlabs>
everyone bet wrong
<sorear>
disk OS with no disks?
<andlabs>
especially Phillips who managed to CED it, even
<Foone>
yeah. it has some weirdness in the BIOS where it installs some hardware redirections so that the BIOS EPROM is treated as a disk ,like disk on chip
<Foone>
and then of course it has the CD
<Foone>
the slow, slow CD
<andlabs>
on a scale of neo geo CD to the LGR awesome 72x changer how bad it is
<andlabs>
(in b4 "neo geo CD is faster; you're expecting too much from tandy")
<Foone>
apparently Sierra prototyped porting king's quest V to it but it would take like 30 seconds to transition from screen to screen
<andlabs>
anyway I only know about the VIS because of this
<andlabs>
though that timestamp is to a different system
<Foone>
ahh, neat
<Foone>
but yeah. the CD era was weird. it's like every company was like "CD-ROM is clearly the future! we need to make a CD console" and then that's as far as they bothered planning
<Foone>
what features does it need? specs? should we talk to gamedev companies? how well will it work?
<Foone>
WHO CARES, IT'S CD
<Foone>
that's why I don't really buy into the hype around the Nintendo Playstation
<andlabs>
do we even know what they planned for the thing?
<Foone>
there's been a lot of people musing on it like "just imagine what could have been! imagine the SNES but with CD storage? it would have been great!"
<Foone>
no, it would have been Yet Another Failed CD Add-on
<andlabs>
our imaginations are better than those corporate planners
<andlabs>
=P
<Foone>
planned as in what games, or things like that?
<andlabs>
I meant do we have an idea of titles they were actually planning
<Foone>
because we have a prototype, so we know what the hardware was
<Foone>
and it's just an SNES that loads off CDs with a bit more ram
<andlabs>
ah good so it's the neo geo cd
<Foone>
but no, I don't think we have any idea about planned titles.
<andlabs>
so basically it'll load games but more cumbersomely
<andlabs>
=P
<Foone>
although I think maybe FF7 might have been prototyped for the SNES CD at one point?
<Foone>
yeah. the SNES with bigger sprites (because they can afford them) and long load times
<andlabs>
but yeah no a lot of companies were explicitly thinking that the CD would be used for All Sorts Of Content
<Foone>
I think a lot of companies had a "if we build it, they will come!" attitude. like they just had to provide a cd console and Great Games would show up to use it
<Sarayan>
well, the CD *was* used for all sorts of content
<Foone>
but it took a long while to find a killer app for CD (Myst) and even that one kinda accidentally succeeded
<Foone>
and in the meantime all the CD consoles had the same ports of FMV games
<andlabs>
I don't even think the games were the main goal
<andlabs>
like I think they genuinely thought Collier's Encyclopedia would entrance people enough
<andlabs>
insert avgn "the flowers of whatshisname" here
<Foone>
Robert Mapplethorpe! I will not have him erased. He didn't just do flowers, he also took a lot of photos documenting the gay BDSM subculture of the 60s and 70s.
<Foone>
now if they'd put THAT on their console, maybe they would have had some fucking publicity
<sorear>
are you talking about something different from the PS1?
<andlabs>
yes
<andlabs>
exactly
<andlabs>
the PS1 and the Saturn was where the companies making actual games started to actually use CDs specifically for making games
<andlabs>
and it turns out that's what consumers were more interested in
<andlabs>
3DO kinda had that idea too but not exactly
<andlabs>
games gneuinely felt like an afterthought to the earlier consoles like the VIS and CD-i
<Foone>
my favorite thing about the CD-i is that one of the big selling points they had for it was that it was going to play the photo-CD format natively
<andlabs>
and even the CDTV
<andlabs>
at least Commodore realized games were paramount with the CD32
<Foone>
but because of time reasons (and possibly spec-finalization reasons), they didn't have time to add Photo-CD support to the CD-i
<andlabs>
that thing *is* a games machine and its library shows it
<Foone>
so instead... every PhotoCD disc is both a collection of images... and a valid CD-i "game"
<andlabs>
lol
<Foone>
so the CD-i just boots it as a game and plays the player off the disc, which only exists to view its own images
<andlabs>
would the 68000 still be around if the CD-i was successful? =P
<andlabs>
(because of how it's part of the sepc)
<Foone>
cd-i vs VIS is also kinda weird because CD-i started as work on the "Compact Disc-Interactive" format at the Microsoft CD-ROM Conference, which became CD-i, running its own OS on a 68k
<andlabs>
anyway now I'm interested in the BDSM pictures of robert maplethorpe, thanks for pointing that out
<Foone>
but VIS on the other hand ended up being a CD-ROM based format running x86 and Windows
<andlabs>
(and knowing about that makes the flowers thing look even more cynical because The 90s)
<sorear>
why was there never NT for the 68000
<andlabs>
because 68000 was dead in the water by then
<Foone>
also I think the reason answer is "no one showed up with a ton of money"
<andlabs>
motorola didn't bother tyring to make it compete with the pentium
<andlabs>
they dropped it in favor of PowerPC
<Foone>
for a long while Microsoft was porting NT to everything that someone would pay for
<andlabs>
oh and also
<andlabs>
Windows technically was never ported to a big-endian platform
<andlabs>
and I think that was intentional
<Foone>
huh, really?
<andlabs>
I vaguely recall larry osterman mentioning that off-hand
<andlabs>
the fact that the disk file formats are inherently little-endian and were designed to be read directly into memory would support that though
<Foone>
wikipedia says there was an NT version for PowerPC but I guess since that processor is actually bi-endian they might have just enforced little-endian mode
<andlabs>
The PowerPC 600 series processors are natively big-endian, with an option for little-endian operation. Windows NT uses the processor in 32-bit little-endian mode.¹ Even though the processor can be put into little-endian mode, this affects only how bytes are swapped when they are read from or written to memory; the instructions themselves still operate in a big-endian way, Among other things, the bits in a register are numbered
<andlabs>
from most-significant to least-significant: Bit 0 is the high-order bit, and bit 31 is the low-order bit.
<andlabs>
(the footnote is about 32-bit mode, not endianness)
<Foone>
interesting. seems odd that it's always been big! NT has been ported to so many things you'd think there'd be at least one big endian thing
<Foone>
and I thought WinCE ran on SuperH which was big, but NOPE it's another bi-endian processor
<Foone>
although not an OS, microsoft has made plenty of big-endian software. Excel started as a Mac application, after all
<andlabs>
yep
<Foone>
I wonder if the xbox 360 is running in little-endian mode? because it's PowerPC based
<Foone>
actually I seem to remember I have a microsoft "appliance" which is a 68k-based system. it's from a photo-cd sort of era... it's a device that loads JPEGs off floppy disks and displays them on TVs
<Foone>
I guess the idea being that you buy it for your grandparents who don't have a computer but you want to mail them your Sony Mavica photos
<Foone>
although knowing microsoft they may have just licensed someone else's design for that, explaining why it doesn't follow their Traditional Design Ethos
<Sarayan>
andlabs: mips is a zombie, and it was on both the ps1 and the n64
<Foone>
my computer architecture class was heavily MIPS focused, which was slightly weird given that it was like 2005
<sorear>
apparently this is still a thing
<andlabs>
yes, because the designers of MIPS wrote the de facto standard textbook on computer architecture
<andlabs>
(computer organization and design: the hardware-software interface)