I drafted this blog post on January 13th already, but wanted Scour to review it first. He did not respond to my emails and I wasn???t able to catch him on IRC either. He got the text though. A chat with Barium on IRC on January 14th indicated that Scour got the draft. Communication is definitively something we need to improve on a lot, but then this post is about the lack of it anyway. Today is January 23, 2010 and I decided to publish the post and assume that Scours silence is to be understood as an approval of my write-up. It???s something positive after all. I was more concerned that I missed something from out long conversation, but I am now getting ahead of things. Let???s start from the beginning: Flashback The year 2009 finished good and bad. It saw the release of the first Superior Art Creations art package in over 2.5 years, show-casing high quality art by talented artists. Unfortunately this great event was overshadowed by things that happened in the background and dragged intro the open by writing things into the release NFO file of the pack that probably should never be written. Written words can all to easy be misinterpreted entirely. I know this very well from personal experience through my blogging. The things stated in the NFO were bad, but most of it was written under false or incomplete assumptions. I wasn???t innocent either, because I also assumed things that did not happen
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The recent unfortunate events surrounding SAC were not only a surprise for me and a disappointment, but also caused me to stand back for a little and reflect on what happened over the past 16 years when a friend of mine and me started the group 16+ years ago. I did not plan to write as much in detail about stuff as I ended up eventually, but what is new? Hehe. Yes, this tale is written in a personal narrative and describes things the way I experienced them and remember today. This means that it is probably full of errors and bias??? that I might or might not was aware of. I already wrote about how I got started with creating art. You can read all about it here. How it Started I co-founded SAC in December 1994 together with Hetero, whom I had just met in person for the first time a couple weeks earlier. I discussed with him the lack of a German art group and also the lack of an art group that has closer ties to the Warez scene. At that time the requests that I received just for NFO file logos and designs increased significantly. Instead of sitting around and just whining about those facts, we decided to start something. He and I knew some other local artists who were ???independent??? at the time. We asked them if they would join a local art group and that???s how it all started. The name for the
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I got such comments several times already. Some folks make a real fuzz about it and take it rather serious. I understand where the haters of OSDM (Oldskool Demomaker) are coming from and thought that I should make some comments about this issue. I have a section on my web site dedicated to OSDM and my own intro productions created with it, if you want to learn more about what I am going to talk about. First, I am not a ???CODER??? myself and never really was, at least not in the Scene. There I was a graphician and also designer, next to being a group leader and organizer and sysop of a bulletin board system, short BBS. I did program tools, such as PPE???s for the BBS software PCBoard, but never intros, cracktros or demos. Close Look at OSDM I believe that many of the nay Sayers’ never really looked at OSDM up close and personal. OSDM has many limitations and restrictions that could be compared to the limitation that programmers of old DOS PC faced and had to work with and around. You have to cheat a bit here and there to get effects the way you want to, just like back then. OSDM has its own scripting language too by the way, so it is not only point and click. Or let me rephrase it. Yes, you can get results with the tool quickly and with relative easy, but the result looks like quick and dirty as
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I created a bunch of Intros via the OSDM ??? Oldskool Demomaker by Peace of Testaware, which is based on the FX Lib for Pure Basic by Epyx. You can enjoy and even download every individual production that I did in my OSDM section of the site, but that can get very tedious.?? So I decided to release a pack with most of my intros that I created in the year 2009, where you get them all at once in a single package. I wanted to use the ???Megademo??? tool that comes with OSDM by default, which works, but had some short-comings that I was not happy with. All intros were executed in the same resolution in Full Screen and in the order that I specified. You cannot jump to a specific one, worse, you have to jump through all of them first in order to be able to exit the collection. With 28 intros in my collection, that was not an option. My First Pure Basic Program So I programmed something myself, using Pure Basic. Details and links to download my Megatro 2009 here. It is nothing fancy, but it shows a logo, plays some tracker music by DAC/SAC in the background and lets you select, which intro you would like to watch via cursor keys in an interactive menu. I also included a NFO viewer for my release NFO file, which I plan to extend on. The Menu stays active when you select an Intro to run, but
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Uh, my second post today. Well, I am German and we celebrate Christmas on the 24th (Christmas Eve). On Christmas day we usually only have a family lunch, which is kind of difficult for me to attend today, since I am living several thousand miles away from Germany and my parent now, in the much warmer California hehe. So I don???t have anything better to do than to write some overdue blog posts hehe. A quickie, for all the fans of Jason Scott and his non-mainstream projects that usually involve computer history. He finished his latest project, which is a documentary DVD (2 Discs) about Text Adventure games, you know, Zork and those kind of games, the kind of games Infocom is famous for. The documentary is called ???Get Lamp??? and I am not sure what it means exactly. I know that it could be a command from a text adventure game, but I don???t know if it is from one in particular. I hope the documentary itself will shed some light on it. The 2-discs DVD will go on sale in March for $40, but for the fans, who pre-order the DVD before the end of the year, it???s only $30, a 25% discount. Details can be found at his blog here. If you missed the opportunity to snatch up the DVD for the discount, I recommend to get over this missed opportunity now and go buy it anyway. You don???t have to buy the latest blockbuster movie DVD
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