Roy of Superior Art Creations archive
Date : February 2008

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The Demoscene Came a Long Way

Categories: history, Scene-Videos
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Published on: February 23, 2008

Boy, the demoscene came a long way since their humble beginnings in the early 1980s on archaic computers like the Apple II, Atari 800 and especially the Commodore 64 and later the Commodore Amiga 500. If you want to learn more about the old days and stuff like that, check out my post about the history of the demoscene that I wrote about one month ago. My older post “Introduction to the World of Demos” is also fairly interesting IMO. Well, the examples from my previous posts may be nice, but things improved a lot since those days. A very good example is the winner demo from last years Assembly demo party in Finland called “Lifeforce“, created by Andromeda Software Development or short ASD or Andromeda. I uploaded the demo to several sites, including Facebook. I am an Internet marketer and that is how I make my living. I have naturally many Facebook friends, who are also in advertising and marketing. One of them watched the demo and left a comment, asking me, which “Agency” this “Video” created. I had to educate him that his “Agency” is a bunch of high school or maybe college kids from somewhere in Europe and that the “Video” is actually a program that creates all the visuals and stuff in real-time… and in a much higher resolution than you can see on YouTube, which only has a crappy 320×240 resolution for all their videos. Too bad that I was not able to see his[…]

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Software Piracy, Abandonware and Today’s Messed up Copyright Laws

Categories: Artscene, BBS, Personal, Politics
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Published on: February 18, 2008

I was browsing in the Defacto2.net document archive of the PC scene and found a reference to an interesting article written by Stephen Granade titled “Warez, Abandonware, and the Software Industry“.The article discusses in detail the subjects software piracy, copyright with a few on it from a perspective of a new type of software piracy called “Abandonware”.Abandonware provides access to games that are old, out of print and not supported anymore by the software company who created it or owns the copyright. It provides multiple functions; one of which is to provide support for rightful owners of the software to get a replacement, if their copy was damaged or the disk where it was stored on is not readable anymore. It also provides people access to historic games that cannot be acquired legally anymore, since they are not being sold anymore. The third function is to provide current game designers with an archive to study how other game designers in the past worked and how they did things that worked or not.Abandonwares sites often provide also the means to play the old games, especially if they are for hardware platforms that are also unavailable today, such as Apple II, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Super NES and other old Nintendo consoles, Sega consoles, old Sony Playstations, Atari game consoles and home computers. This means are emulator programs for modern computers (mostly Windows PC) that emulate the old hardware platform and load old game code to run on your computer. Even old[…]

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About One on the Quest, to Burn a Legal CD

Categories: Personal, Politics
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Published on: February 17, 2008

I had some fun with copyright laws over the past weeks, mainly regarding video productions I did or re-published. I experienced different things, but one reminded me of a short story that I read over a year ago in the German IT magazine “CT”, which I am still subscribed to here in the US. I first scanned the original article, but then decided to also buy the digital version of the main article, which included this short story on the publisher???s website at Heise.de. I paid one Euro for it, even though I own the print magazine and also the PRO CD-ROMs where the story should also be on. I basically purchased the story three times altogether. I then translated to English as good as I could to make sure that the subtle humor is not lost because of my translation. I hope that what I did was enough to not infringe on any copyright for publishing it on my personal blog. Considering that this is also only a short “box story” within a main article, fair use might be applicable as well. Well, copyright laws and its application are not only hard to obey, but also hard to understand and to know for sure, if you are doing everything 100% alright and perfectly legal, or if something is missing and you are infringing on somebodies copyright. Even if you know what you need, is it sometimes hard to impossible to acquire it. Enjoy the story.About One on the Quest,[…]

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Major Windows XP and Microsoft Media Player 11 Rant.. plus some tips

Categories: Personal, Tools, Video
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Published on: February 10, 2008

I wasted today and in the past months a lot of time on solving a problem that is actually very simple and if you would believe the advertisements than there shouldn’t be a problem at all or a simple solution right around the corner. Well, that is obviously not the case.Lets start with an explanation of what am I trying to accomplish.Part 1. The Simple IdeaI have multiple computers in a home network. They all see each other and permission are set that each computer can access resources and data on each of the other ones.I also have a lot of media data. Music, Videos, Clip arts, Foley Sounds, Video Snippets etc. I converted most of my 300+ CDs to MP3’s, but only converted a fraction of my 200+ DVDs for several reasons. Anyhow, what I already have is a lot and nothing that I could copy from A to B with a thumb drive or USB stick. I also don’t want to have all those GB of data on each computer (which would not fit and does not make sense). No problem, you can buy for a fair price something called Network-Attached Storage Devices, which are basically hard drives in a smart external casing that allows not only access to them via USB 2.0 or Fire-wire, but to hook them up into the network and make them visible via network share to any other computer in the same SUB-C class network, if it authenticates itself properly. Well done, now[…]

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DefCon 15 Session Videos and Audios Update

Categories: DefCon, Scene-Videos
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Published on: February 4, 2008

It has been six months since the world largest hacker conference is over. I am referring to DefCon 15 of course, which was held on August 3 – 5, 2007 at the Rivera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.The educational sessions where video-taped, converted to .MOV format (Apple) and pressed on 10 DVD-ROMs, which were then sold for $299 at the conference and for $499 thereafter.Video DVD-ROMS on Google VideoI bought (pre-ordered) the DVD-ROMs at the conference and received the DVDs sometime in September 2007. I uploaded all of them to Google Video. You can find the links to the videos in this article and the three additional articles it refers to.People were asking me constantly for the videos for download rather than on a video sharing site. Some people reported that the download of the original video files (yeah, it???s a trick and not visible to the general user hehe) was also not working for all of the files for unknown reasons. Google must have screwed something up, that???s why is Google Video still in Beta, right?!Video DVD-ROM ISOsSo I spent countless hours to rip the DVD-ROMs, create nice ISO files out of them, then RAR and split them and finally ZIP and upload to Usenet. Ages later (no, I don???t have FiOS) were all ISOs finally up on the Internet. See this post of mine from November with all the details needed to download the ISOs.Well, maybe because of the fast availability of the videos or maybe[…]

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