Re: ANNOUNCE: Apple Game Server Online!

[Egan Ford <datajerk@gmail.com>]

On Dec 14, 11:48 am, BLuRry <brendan.rob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 13, 2:35 pm, Egan Ford <dataj...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Dec 13, 1:28 pm, David Schmidt <schmi...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> > > On 12/13/2011 2:24 PM, Egan Ford wrote:
>
> > > > BLuRay, I fixed your name on the site.  Very sorry about that.
>
> > > Except it's still not correct... his handle is BLuRry, not what you have
> > > there now.  BLuRry.  Like the vision impairment. :-)
>
> > Thanks.  My finders do not always type what is on the mind.  Fixed
> > again.
>
> Ok, the irony here is delicious, that we talk of the correction and
> can/cannot see it spelled correctly right away.  Thanks for the
> chuckle guys.  :-D  And thanks for the description of the compression
> format. Most impressive!!  I heard the audio stream and wondered when
> it went to white noise if that's what was happening, since I'm only
> familiar with the modulated tone sound.  Too bad we can't get more
> inventive without modifying hardware.  Still, a 6x improvement is an
> 6x improvement!

I've received an email from Michael Mahon with suggestions on how to
double that.  I'll be testing this weekend.

> One of the challenges I had to overcome with on-the-fly decompression
> was that I had to time the transmission pause for CPU processing
> time.  In the meanwhile the serial port would go dormant during those
> CPU cycles.  I wonder: If you did something simiar

No, the compress stream is delivered directly to high memory as a
whole, then decompressed to low memory.  Overlap is supported.  I.e.
it is possible to have the end of the data reuse space that contained
the first compression bits.

> I wonder: If you did something simiar and there were gaps
> of silence in the audio, could you splice in regular audio data in a
> curious way?  Loader music?  :-)  Heck, I'd wait a few minutes for a
> game to load if the loading data (white noise) was the rhythm section.

I considered it briefly then quickly dismissed it.  There are a number
of challenges, e.g. when you connect up a jack to the headphone jack,
all default audio goes out the jack.

A better approach would be to two channels (L and R), one for the
data, and one for elevator music, but then you have to develop a
custom web control that can somehow redirect the data out the
headphone jack and the music out the default speaker.  That is
assuming that you have two audio out devices.

The other option would be to try to play music out the Apple II
speaker during the download.  That is very doable and the expense of
time.  My original concept included a status bar instead of just
printing the number of seconds.  But I'd rather have something in 13
seconds, than a minute, so I dumped it.