Re: CDR's & MP3 for GS???

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote:

>In article supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) writes...
>
>>spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote:
>>
>>>    I think the reason for the lack of CD-ROM titles for the IIgs
>>>has to do with 1) Very few IIgs owners have a CD-ROM drive hooked
>>>up to their systems and 2) The Apple IIgs software market died
>>>long before compact discs and drives became affordable.
>>
>>Unless you unleash the USER CREATED software forum.
>>I'm taking about the bastion of people who create
>>HyperCard or HyperSudio based software.  This is the
>>target audience I'm talking about.  These people create
>>software for the sole purpose of enjoying it and sharing
>>it with others.  But they are hampered by storage
>>considerations.  It would be silly to try to upload a 300MB
>>archive to ground and Zip disks costs too much as a
>>distributing medium for non-profit software distribution.
>
>[lots snipped]
>
>    I do agree with your basic arguement. The standard storage
>medium on which Apple IIgs software is distributed is an 800K
>floppy disk (some people now use 1.44 MB floppies, Flopticals,
>Zip disks and SyQuest carts, but they are in the minority). As
>it stands that really limits how large programs get even
>though it may eventually install to a hardisk, the program has
>to get stored on floppies to be distributed. Wolf 3D comes on
>3 or 4 floppy disks, but imagine if it came on 50-100 disks?
>
>    Larger offline storage *would* be benefical obviously, but
>I still think 650 MB at a shot is overkill. Say you do create
>large HyperStudio stacks, the IIgs still doesn't generate large
>data files. If you create digitized audio recordings of music,
>it cannot exceed 6-7 megabytes because there is no such thing
>as a spooling digitization program (and how do you play back
>samples even that large if HyperStudio doesn't have the same
>spooling playback capability as Oversampler?).

That is precisely the reason large HyperStudio and
HyperCard creations need an easy way to maintain the
logical organization of files.  You are not going to
record 6-7MB of audio recordings or build a single
stack to hold the entire game.  You are going to
distribute the files.  Each level a stack.  Each
stack 1MB in size.  Several hundred levels in the
game.  Since no digitized recording exceeds 1MB, you
won't run out of memory.  See below:

>
>    For a single Apple IIgs user alone, to create and fill up
>650 MB of data, would be quit so undertaking. I think in
>the end most of the CD would get wasted,here only 15-30 MB
>of space would get used (more realistically, much less even).
>Still, if a user today does create a 30 megabyte HyperStudio
>stack, all he or she needs to do is compress it with ShrinkIt,
>give it to a PC or Mac user (null-modem, through a Zip disk,
>etc) and then have them burn the *.SHK archive to an HFS disc.
>Nothing is stopping anyone from doing this (like you writing
>that Hyperstack game for example) and then anyone with a CD-ROM
>drive and hardrive with large HFS partition could have a look
>at it. Right?

Well first of all, you don't want to SHK archive it.
That would make it just as boring as the Golden
Orchard.  You want it to be bootable.  Or at least
executable from the Finder.

Second, I disagree with "30MB is it."  You are still
thinking with an 800k disk mindset where 30MB sounds
large.  Have you seen some of the newer HyperCard and
HyperStudio stacks?  Some are 1MB or more.  You don't
want to exceed that due to memory constraints.

The reason you want large samples is because you
want an enjoyable gaming experience.  You want
digitized voices to be clear, not muffled.  That
means recording them at 22Khz or above, not low
quality muffled like "NinjaForce proudly presents"
in MegaDemo (no offence to NinjaForce...you were
restrained by disk space considerations).

What I am envisioning is, for example, the intro
to be "In the final years of the Age of Light, the
forces of Drakah attacked the Imperial Fortress
and stole the Keifer stone, the power source of
all the land.  The world fell into darkness and
the Knowledge was lost."  That's one stack where
a digitized sound of the intro is combined with
a scrolling text version.  This stack would itself
be 1MB in size.  But right after the intro plays,
a PaintWorks animation would play showing the
forces of Drakah stealing the Keifer stone and
cities crumbling.

Then you go to level one, which has a short intro
introducing the hero (the player) who must
retrieve the stone armed with only a sword.
That's already 500K.  Then you may have a maze
or a puzzle that the hero must solve, followed
by a link to another stack and another
PaintWorks sequence (perhaps the hero slaying
an evil beast to gain the power of Spells).
There's another 1MB.  And that's only one level
plus the intro for 3MB.  I wouldn't want just
10 levels in my game.

In HyperCard, stacks are easily linked together
by the 'Go to stack "stackname"' command.

HyperStudio stacks are often even more
distributed with more of what would be stored
IN the stack as separate files.

Lots of disc space (hundreds of megabytes) and
keeping the logical organization of all the
files is crucial.  Otherwise the links would
break.

Like I said, a game of this nature is not going
to be one big stack.  It is going to be tens
if not hundrends of stacks and other files
taking up hundreds of MB of storage.

And if the author was REALLY inventive, he or
she might even burn a few audio tracks and
use the Media Control XCMD to play them from
within stacks as background music!

>>>    In any case, this is all fantasy since it doesn't seem
>>>likely the GS would be fast enough to support a CD-R burner.
>>
>>This has not been proven.  Now before you start
>>attacking me saying "he thinks I'm GS bashing again"
>>or something crazy like that, I'm not saying that
>>I'm 100% sure it can be done.  But they said the
>>same thing about FAX on the IIGS, MultiFinder for
>>the IIGS, UNIX style shells for the IIGS, multitasking
>>for the IIGS, and TCP/IP for the IIGS.  They've been
>>proven wrong for all of these and today these tasks
>>can be done on the IIGS.  You will forgive me if I
>>take your view with a grain of salt?  Again, I'm not
>>saying I am sure it can be done.  Only that until
>>it is proven that it can't be done, it is still within
>>the realm of possibility and maybe even probability.
>
>    I personally don't own a CD-R, but my brother does and I've
>seen his system burn CD's on many occasions. It looks fairly CPU
>intensive as far as I can tell, since it _noticably_ slows down
>the machine (not that he uses it during a burn--he just dimms the
>screen and walks away until the process is complete). Oh, did I
>mention his system is a 292 MHz Pentium with 83 MHz bus? It's
>possible that's slightly faster than your average Apple IIgs. ;-)

That's just his CD burner.  I'm sure there are different
types, just like there are different types of laser
printers.  There might be some with internal CPUs
that do most of the work.  Who knows.

I see both your brother and you have Intel units.  I
prefer non-Intel units myself.  Even though I'm an
IBM/Cyrix fan, I'd go AMD before stooping to Intel. ;-)

>    If it can be done, that'd be great, but I can't see a lot
>of Apple IIgs users rushing out to buy CD-R drives for their
>systems. No one has even taken advantage of CD-ROM readers for
>the Apple IIgs so far, and again, that does not require you
>have a CD-R burner on that same system to publish CD-ROM
>based games and stacks.

It would help keep the logical organization of hundreds
of data files and stacks totalling hundreds of megabytes.

If it turns out that running CD-Rs on the IIGS is really
not possible, I might one day use a Mac or Mac emulator
to produce my game.

However, I still think that if the CD-R were ON my IIGS,
it would be a lot easier and more incentive for me to
do a project like this.  Like I said, I would be happy
to make it freeware for the price of the disc and
shipping ($5 for the US, $7 for Canada for example).

If I had a CD-R, I might just do it in order to see
a CD-ROM game title for the IIGS!  Just for the
pleasure of seeing the disc and using it myself.  A
few other IIGS users I can ship it to is icing on
the cake.  It is just not the same to put it on
Zip disk.  Just not as polished, you know.

>    One last thing, before you label me as anti-IIgs person
>once again, I would *love* to see someone write a game or
>program that uses several hundred megabytes of data and ships
>on a CD. I enjoy seeing the IIgs pushed to do things not
>imagined before, and it would encourage me to track down an
>external SCSI CD-ROM drive for my system (DiscQuest and 5 or
>6 discs filled with only SHK archives hasn't been enough
>incentive for me so far).
>
>Mitchell Spector
>spec@vax2.concordia.ca

Glad to know.  You might want to look at older one
or two speed models.  These are pretty cheap these
days.  Maybe even a few bucks if you find a Mac
user throwing them out.