I know we can get some nice results out of it. But for the moment I am completely lost in the program.
I will have to read a book to learn it. 😅

And the rendering times are so long! My machine is a G3 500MHz, powerful when Bryce 4 was used, in 1999. I forgot how slow rendering could be ; iterating is painful.

But I won't give up, I will try to produce something worthwhile 🙂 I will have to use old tricks: small previews with degraded image quality in order to make the process faster.

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I wanted to do something with my Mac OS 9 laptop, beside listening some MP3s. So I decided to try Bryce 4.
Bryce was a 3D "landscape generator" that was very popular around me during the 90s. Without priori knowledge you could generate impressive images.
At the time, it was praised for it's intuitive GUI.
But...
I find it horrible!!! Nothing is clear. I didn't find the traditional "4 views". Most of the tools are limited to being displayed in 640x480 and occupy a small portion of my screen.

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#retrocomputing #3D

I guess that many people had a bad experience in the first months, because a common PC configuration was barely enough to run it properly. Most people still had 486 machines with 8 or even 4 MiB memory.
Plus, there were a lot of new instable drivers that were still not "battle tested".

I think that we could agree that when OSR2 was released more than one year later, the situation was better for everyone.

In the process of writing an article about the technical aspects of Windows 95, I stumbled upon a YouTube video called "Why everyone loved Windows 95: 30 years later".

But wait a minute. In my geek environment of the mid-90s, not everyone loved Win95. Quite the opposite actually 😅

What was your personal experience with this OS?

Personally, I really liked it from day one. But I had the luck to have an extremely beefy setup for the time (P90 / 32GiB RAM), did not do anything heavy on Windows, an went back to DOS to play games 🙂

#retrocomputing #OS #pc

"Voyage" by Razor 1911

https://youtu.be/x_rbJrSLnXY

I think I now have a correct setup to capture from my #Amiga 🙂. Even if I cannot accurately play 50Hz videos on my PC 😅

In France, before the Internet, I read about demos in magazines. I remember vividly the article about Voyage in Tilt.
This kind of creations sparked my interested in the Amiga: I was a PC guys and all my friends were either PC or Atari ST users.
So I did not have my first Amiga until well into the 00s, and one of the first thing I tried on it was... Voyage 🙂

#demoscene #retrocomputing

I wrote an article about the SEGA Saturn.

For years I read that the 3D capabilities of the Saturn were kind of hacks added on top of a 2D machine, in reaction to the Sony PlayStation. This story always puzzled me because it didn't make much sense.
So I dug about the Saturn and wrote this article in which I try to demonstrate that the Saturn was designed, from the beginning, to be able to produce good 3D for its time.

Of course there are plenty of comparisons with how the PS works 😉

https://www.xtof.info/Yes-the-SEGA-Saturn-was-designed-with-3D-in-mind.html

#retrogaming #sega #saturn

I was not ready for such a level of violence in a Mario Game 😂
I love it!

#gamecube #switch2 #nso

I played it with @aaronsgiles DREAMM. It worked flawlessly 🙂

Yesterday I played Loom and managed to go to the end.

It is a game that made a great impression on me when I played it as a kid. One of the first I could complete all by myself.

Now I understand why: it is quite easy and incredibly short 😅.
Nonetheless it is a wonderful experience. The story is interesting and served by the most beautiful EGA graphics ever. And the music is sumptuous. 35 years ago it was one of the very first game I played after buying a Sound Blaster. I've loved Tchaikovsky ever since.

#LucasArts #loom #retrogaming

I wrote an extensive article about the Mac Mini G4 as a retro-gaming machine.

For me it is near perfect as it is able to run almost anything from the late 80s up to early 2000s. And it has a very reduced footprint and can be easily plugged into modern display 🙂

This article also expose some technical aspects such as the way PowerPC Mac OS machines could ran 680x0 software and delves into the history of PowerPC until the G4.

https://www.xtof.info/MacMiniG4-the-best-classic-macintosh-for-retrogaming.html

#retrogaming #retrocomputing #apple #mac #powerpc

I just read an article of the New York Times with this illustration that demonstrates the disruptive emergence of SpaceX.
But I am wondering: why is “Britain” present on this graph? Do they have a “new space” launcher? I am not very versed in the recent developments, but I had the impression that UK was not a thing concerning space launchers sinces decades.

#space #uk

If you know more about old #macosx and #mac than me, please read.

I have 2 Mac Mini G4 that I cannot boot on the DVD provided with the machines

I can enter *multi-boot* by pressing *ALT* after the chime. Then I see my DVD listed as boot device. But I cannot select them as no button of the mouse has any effect. I can move the pointer though. I cannot use the keyboard for anything else than *ENTER* that will boot the HDD and *SPACE* that refreshes. So I cannot enter OpenFirmware.

Could it be because I am using USB PC keyboard and mouse?

#retrocomputing

I received my new reprint of « Understanding the Apple IIe » 🥰

This book, originally printed in 1985, is the ultimate reference concerning this computer as it goes really deep.

#retrocomputing #appleii

A few months ago, I had the pleasure to visit South Korea 🙂
I was a treat!

I published a selection of photos of this trip on my web-site dedicated to photography:
https://www.xtof.photo/porfolios/korea/

#korea #seoul #busan #travel #photography

🇬🇧Today I attended the RGC, a generalist Retrogaming Convention taking place annually near Paris. It was a lot of fun and there was many interesting machines to try.

🇫🇷Aujourd’hui j’étais à la RGC, une convention de retrogaming qui se tient annuellement près de Paris. J’ai passé une journée très sympa, merci à l’organisation 🙂

#retrogaming #amiga #sega #nintendo

Installing #windows10. You take care of choosing a strong password that follows the good practices, then #microsoft ruins all by imposing you to provide three silly questions that can bypass it.

Seriously. Event my children could answer most of these ones! 😠

🇬🇧 I was at a book signing session with @jmechner who just released a graphic novel about the history of his family through the 20th century.
Jordan is really a super nice guy and the art style of his book is terrific! 🙂

🇫🇷 J'étais à une séance de dédicace à l'Extra Life Café à l'occasion de la sortie de la BD de Jordan Mechner narrant la vie tumultueuse de sa famille au cours du XXe siècle.
Jordan est vraiment quelqu'un de très sympathique et de très abordable. Je n'ai pas encore lu la BD, mais j'adore son style !

I wrote a detailed article about the inner side and the engineering of Windows 3.x.

Most people affirm it is only a subpar GUI on top of DOS, but it is much more than that! Win3.11 on a 386 is not as far from #Win95 as we could imagine.

https://xtof.info/inside-windows3.html

#Windows #DOS #retrocomputing

Two weeks ago, I stumbled on an annoying problem concerning my #homebrew rogue-like game for the #AppleII. It appeared that the game ran flawlessly on two different emulators, but not on the real machine!

That could lead to some big troubles, as debugging on the real hardware is far from being as easy and comfortable as on the debugger provided with an emulator.

If you want to know how this could happen in the first place and how I managed to find the problem, I wrote a blog post on the matter 🙂

https://www.xtof.info/sometimes-emulation-is-not-enough.html

#retrocomputing #emulation

Now the Gameboy Advance.

The Analogue Pocket is very close to them. It's really impressive, albeit not perfect as the pixel grid appears to be missing.

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