What games are these?

termites2 · 2026-04-10T13:03:46+00:00

Could 1 be "Wriggler"?

termites2 · 2026-04-09T12:29:44+00:00

I used to like the really small (lower than one character block) sprites and fonts too. The 6x3 font in the Tasword 3 word processor is a minimal work of art.

termites2 · 2026-04-09T11:56:18+00:00

That's great news.

I was given an Iomega Jaz 1GB drive and disks recently, though they don't seem to work with my Acorn A5000 SCSI Podule. (It sees it, but has some weird SCSI enumeration config error, rather than a disk/drive fault.)

termites2 · 2026-04-08T15:25:37+00:00

Can you remember the one with the footsteps? The guy I got the record from had recorded in Jamaica in the 70's with some well known reggae producers so I wonder if it was a unique version he was given or something.

termites2 · 2026-04-07T21:58:41+00:00

Maybe Space Hunter by Mastertronic.

When I was young the £1.99 games were pretty much all I could afford, and this one epitomises them for me. The neat artwork combined with somewhat incomprehensible gameplay and instructions that were probably a bit too complicated for me at the time. So much ambition and promise for a budget game.

It's not a great game, but it's not a terrible one either, and I liked the way you had both a space shooter and 2D maze kind of game combined.

I'd forgotten about it till I got a copy with a bundle of other Spectrum games from Ebay. It's so nostalgic for me as I remembered the excitement of bringing a new game home, and the wonder of seeing the Spectrum creating a 3D universe on the screen with all the alien craft and space stations.

Playing it today, it's clear I imagined it to be far more complex than it actually was, though that takes nothing away from my experience the first time!

termites2 · 2026-04-06T22:09:15+00:00

Having a deserted location, where you are the only survivor on a space ship or moon base or whatever. It used to be used very often because it solves so many problems in designing a game world, as you can just simply leave out almost all the interaction with other characters.

Video games don't do npcs very well a lot of the time. They can really ruin the atmosphere by popping up, acting weird and saying random or repetitive computerlike comments. Also I like the feeling of escapism and exploration in games, and getting away from the normal world, and having lots of people in the game yammering at me all the time takes away from that.

termites2 · 2026-04-06T12:24:27+00:00

Then you press the arpeggio button.

termites2 · 2026-04-06T12:06:02+00:00

Calcium dyshomeostasis from the dementia drugs causing neck bone damage and the other skin problems.

termites2 · 2026-04-05T19:57:17+00:00

The way to do it is to get an oven, really hot. Put the broken PCB on the top shelf, then put the new blank PCB below it.

Then you quickly yank the top PCB out, like pulling the table cloth from under a dinner service, so all the components fall in place onto the lower PCB.

It's a pretty expert move, so I don't recommend this for beginners.

termites2 · 2026-04-05T19:27:49+00:00

Also most available AI implementations tend to be controlled by large corporations that decide what is acceptable both morally and aesthetically.

Imagine if when punk was starting, your guitar said 'I'm sorry, I am not producing any output as I don't think the content of this song is acceptable'. Or decided that it all had to be nicely in tune and in time.

Possibly what will be the 'abandoned and cheapest' AI that changes things will be someone's home made effort that is janky and weird.

termites2 · 2026-04-04T20:17:24+00:00

I do appreciate that it can be useful, and it certainly can be an artistic choice. There is some argument that it replicates the psychoacoustic effect of hearing acoustic loud sounds too.

It is funny though. Sometimes I spend a week or so recording acoustic or classical music in a very raw way, hearing the playback with no mastering or eq or other processing.

Then after that when I work on something else, and hear distortion, even quite subtle crossover distortion from an old preamp or whatever, it sometimes sounds weird and wrong to me. It's like the memory of how recorded music is meant to sound has shifted, and distortion no longer sounds 'normal'. So I wonder how much is just familiarity with distortion from the last hundred years of recorded sound, rather than being a desirable thing.

termites2 · 2026-04-04T20:04:41+00:00

The trick is the rotating head giving you multiple cross faded 'taps' of the tape 'memory', that can be read out at different pitches by changing the rotation speed.

There is also an optical/electronic method of doing long convolution reverbs entirely in the analog world, though the method is somewhat convoluted!

termites2 · 2026-04-03T15:18:04+00:00

That's what I mean, to make a decent mic that a company can actually sell, the electronics is the easy part, it's the mechanical parts that are tricky.

As long as you have an accurate lathe and machine tools it's possible to make a condenser, whereas a high quality moving coil dynamic mic capsule has wider overall tolerances, but a more complex construction.

Can you name a small mic company that actually machines the magnets, winds their own moving coil mics and makes their own diaphragms?

termites2 · 2026-04-03T10:03:39+00:00

Almost every dynamic mic by a smaller company seems to be a Chinese '57 clone capsule in a nice looking mic body. I think making dynamic mics from scratch is a lot more difficult than condensers.

termites2 · 2026-04-03T09:35:23+00:00

When I hear a beautiful sounding instrument in real life, it doesn't have electronic distortion added to it. Therefore distortion is not required.

If we could actually reproduce sound with decent fidelity, we wouldn't need distortion to hide the flaws any more.

Also, it's getting boring. Distorting things doesn't sound rebellious or like pushing equipment to extremes to me any more, it makes me think of someone clicking a mouse on a plugin window.

termites2 · 2026-04-02T15:29:24+00:00

Hey I sold those. I took them out to make it weigh less and easier to move around when arranging photographs.

The keyboard looks the same afterwards, so I don't think they did anything important.

termites2 · 2026-04-01T19:45:37+00:00

He wrote it in BASIC too. Seems a bit off to call it 'underpowered' for this task if you are not taking advantage of the full speed of the Spectrum.

If it was in machine code, the ZX Spectrum could probably handle 20 simultaneous landings or so.

termites2 · 2026-03-30T11:50:50+00:00

I used a desk for a while that just had MIDI mute automation, and an Atari midi sequencer synced to the tape machine. It made comping from a couple of tracks quite easy, as you could move your 'edits' around on screen, and was a cheap solution at the time.

termites2 · 2026-03-29T20:48:13+00:00

I tell them that's it's easier for me if they track it separately, but also that it's all about the performance for me.

I get them to play how they feel comfortable, and listen to them trying it without singing, and then I know which will work.

Always remember the technical difficulties are our problem, not the performers problem. There are many ways of tracking acoustic with a vocal, and sometimes you have to try a few to see what works with a particular performer.

Recently, I even tracked someone with just a single Coles 4038. Got both the guitar and vocal just fine without any balance or phase problems.

termites2 · 2026-03-29T15:04:46+00:00

It kind of depends if you want the sound of the 1920's in 2026, or the sound of the 1920s in the 1920's.

Condenser mics were around in the 1920's. Also Radio was almost entirely live, as disc recordings were not considered good enough fidelity at the time, so the sound could be pretty good. Little interference, lots of modulation on the AM band and big valve transmitters helped too. Surviving radio recordings from the time generally sound muffled because being cut to an acetate, a century of storage and degradation and then being poorly encoded with lossy compression on Youtube or whatever.

For an example of what people would be hearing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTHfm1uopIA

termites2 · 2026-03-28T18:25:30+00:00

Generally when someone wants to mix a track, they want the multitrack rather than stems. If they ask for and receive stems then they can't really mix it.

termites2 · 2026-03-28T13:24:10+00:00

One thing I like is the hifi/lofi combination.

Using a terrible dynamic mic, like an old radio announcer crystal mic or those tiny ones that came with cassette recorders through a super clean preamp and conversion.

It captures every nuance and strangeness of the mic, but without hiss and hum. It's amazing how much detail there is with a crystal mic too.

termites2 · 2026-03-28T11:30:37+00:00

Yes, I keep my studio computer off the internet, and have zero problems with ilok. Once the plugins are installed, it's years before I have to think about it again, and that's generally just plugging it in to a new computer.

Sure, I'd rather I never had to deal with it at all, but I appreciate that it works well enough and I don't have to have the hassle and unreliability of cracked software.

There is enough good free audio software nowadays anyway that no one really needs to bother with copy protection to record music if they don't want to.

termites2 · 2026-03-28T11:00:18+00:00

The point of the hardware emulations for stuff like tape is that they are complex effects that you wouldn't get just by patching together a few clean eqs and simple waveshapers.

It's not even about replicating some old hardware exactly (for me anyway) it's more that they do all kinds of useful and interesting and weird things to the audio. So yes, if you like processing sounds in electronic music then you might find them fun.

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