I’ve mentioned before that it’s possible to run Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic in DOSBox with Tandy sound enabled but I couldn’t figure out how to get it working. Today I’m back with good news in that I can tell you how to get this fixed so the trillions of SWFM fans out there can enjoy this fantastic game with the excellent Tandy sound!

First you need of course DOSBox (v0.74 as of now), a copy of SWFM (you can find a pre-installed one here), and – the magic fix – my replacement files which you can get here …

Next, in the pre-installed version is a folder named FM, simply copy the files from my zip into that folder, overwriting the old ones (you might want to backup these first, but then, once you go Tandy you never go back! ).

Finally you need to tell DOSBox to use Tandy graphics and sound. I recommend using a frontend like D-Fend to configure those settings (and in all honesty I don’t know how to apply them to DOSBox without the frontend). So in D-Fend edit the profile of SWFM (wich you undoubtedly already created) and under ‘Graphics’ set ‘videocard’ to ‘tandy’ and under ‘Sound’ set ‘Tandy sound’ to ‘On’.

And, voila … you got SWFM with Tandy sound running. Note that any savegame that was saved with the non-Tandy version might get you scrambled graphics so you have to start a new game.

Listen Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic with Tandy sound

Kore 2 from Native Instruments is probably every sound organizer’s wet dream with sugar on top. Not only  can it control a multitude of Softsynths but it’s database makes it easy to organize sounds and find them quickly when needed. I’ve purchased this nice tool last December and what’s better than telling a few details on how I put it’s features to good use?!

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User Tags in Kore

Kore’s database browser already has quite a bunch of factory tags under that Kore sounds can be categorized like Type, Mode, Timbre etc. Most of them are useful, some of them are less interesting for me. For example I almost never use the Genre tags, but maybe that’s just me. However I’ve added a few other user tags to categorize sounds even better.

To add user tags to the database select any sound in the Kore browser, press the Edit button and on the left side is a tag named ‘User’. Selecting this tag reveals a (Create new…) entry with that a new Tag Category can be added. After adding a new Tag Category, it can be filled with user-defined tags in the same manner.

Some user-defined categories in the Kore browser.

I’ve added three new categories to my database: PlugIn, Preset Tags and Synthesis Type. The first and third are pretty much self-explanatory, the second, ‘Preset Tags’, however contains a bunch of collective tags for that it wouldn’t be necessary to open up an extra-category. Here’s a rundown of the ‘Preset Tags’ and what they are used for …

Preset Tags

The 'Preset Tags'.

Device Preset – tags all Kore Sounds that are a ‘Default Device’. Now what is a Default Device? I give this tag to Kore Sounds that contain a Synth or Effect in it’s factory state but (optimally) with Kore Hardware controllers assigned to it. You could also call these simply templates because that’s what they ultimately are. When I need a new fresh Synth to work with I select this tag and all the Synths (and Effects) to that I have assigned controllers earlier are listed.

Sound Preset – basically the opposite of Device Preset tag. All true ‘Sound Presets’ get this tag but Kore Sounds that have the Device Preset tag should not have this tag! So when I dig through the database on search for a good sound I highlight this tag so that no Device Presets are listed. This of course means that you shouldn’t highlight both these tags at the same time because then you get none.

Effect Preset – the same as Sound Preset but for effects.

Single Sound – Kore Sounds that only contain one instrument or effect are tagged with this.

Multi Sound – the exact opposite of Single Sound! Only lists Kore Sounds that have more than one instrument and/or effect in it’s channel hirachy.

Kore Device – Only the internal Kore Sounds are tagged with this. I.e. the Kore factory sounds and official Kore Sound packs from NI.

NI Device – Only instruments and effects from Native Instruments are tagged with this. What it’s good for? Well for example there might be times where you want to guarantee 100% compability between Kore and the used instruments. And the NI synths are certainly the most compatible with Kore.

Thirdparty Device – Likewise the tag that only non-NI devices are tagged with.

Tool Preset – Now what is a Tool Preset tag? Well it tags tool presets! Ok ok let me explain! I tag stuff under this like the Kore 2 Reaktor Toolpack. These are not sounds or effects but some sort of tools that for example can be used to control stubborn VSTi’s or even Reason (with some obstacles) with the hardware controller.

Stable – I’m not sure if I will keep this in but for now I use it to tag stable instruments with it. Yes Kore is quite nice but I experienced some Plugins running unstable in Kore. Only Plugins that run absolutely stable receive this tag.

PlugIn Category

Why add an extra category for PlugIns?? Kore already provides one, automatically generated from the installed PlugIns! … I agree but the auto-generated PlugIn category isn’t very efficient because many thirdparty manufacturers name their Plugins like whatever they want or the default Plugin names aren’t very descriptive. In that case you could add your own custom PlugIn category. The fastest way to do this is to edit the User Tags file (see below).

Synthesis Type tags.

Synthesis Type

This category can be useful if you are looking for a sound specific to it’s generation source. I’ve added all the synthesis types found on KVR plus a couple more that were missing (like Vector or PCM. Now don’t get me into a discussion whether PCM is the same as Sample Based or not!). And you are right, not all of these are really ‘synthesis’. Drum Sampler or Rompler obviously aren’t. Also to my knowledge there is no Graintable synth existing to this date except for Reason’s Malstrom (I’d be happy though if you prove me wrong). But these tags give a good conclusion about what kind of sound we are dealing with. You could for example tag a Spectrasonics Atmosphere sound with ‘Rompler’ and ‘Analogue/Subtractive’ if you know what the Rompler sound originally came from. The image on the left shows all of these tags. Sometimes you know right from the start if a set of sounds that are being imported into Kore are of a certain synthesis type. In that case you can tag them all right ahead with the correct attribute.

Editing the user tags file manually

Sometimes you want to change tags that you’ve defined before but doing this in Kore would probably mean that you have to delete the tag or remove other tags that were added after the desired tag, e.g if you want to sort your tags alphabetically.

In such a situation it’s often easier to edit the tag file directly, and yes there is such a file. On Windows Vista you will find this file under the path C:/Users/username/AppData/Local/Native Instruments/Kore 2/User.kad. On Windows XP the path is very similar and for Mac users maybe somebody can help me out with that? Either way the file is a simple XML file that can be opened and edited with a text editor.

For people who don’t want to add all these tags manually, you can download my User Tags file right here. From there on it’s easy to just copy over either only the synthesis types or whatever part you want in your user file.

A while back I’ve created a custom skin for Ableton Live with this handy freeware skin editor. The editor dates back to Live 6 but it seems that skins made with it work just fine in Live 7. Live’s approach to UI design is very minimalistic which I think is a step into the right direction but the default color palettes are not everyone’s taste. I’ve been using this skin since a couple of months and it works nicely so here is Dark2008, a dark – but readable – theme for Ableton Live 6 and 7.

To install this skin simply unpack the zip file and copy the Dark2008.ask file into your Ableton/Live/Resources/Skins folder and activate the skin in Live’s Options dialog.

In game development randomness is often necessary for certain tasks, be it the random distribution of graphic tiles, a random factor in NPC AI or random stats in a roleplaying game. Especially for the latter purpose the static Dice class provides a set of methods to roll dice as it is common in a Role-playing game, to be exact four-, six-, eight-, ten-, twelve-, twenty-sided and percentile dice.

The Dice class (and it’s supporting classes) are rather elaborated, using for example the Linear Congruential algorithm in the process of generating ‘true’ random numbers so it might not be the most speed-optimized method for calculating random numbers. For absolute performance the LCA and rounding routines can be removed to speed up calculations.

Using the Dice class is very simple! For example rolling two ten-sided dice can be done with the following call …

var result:int = Dice.tenSided(2);

… rolling the percentile die is even simpler as it does not need any arguments. It always returns a value between 1 and 100 …

var result:int = Dice.percentile();

… the class also provides the roll method with that any x-sided die could be rolled, 3 sixteen-sided dice for instance …

var result:int = Dice.roll(16, 3);

The following small Flex application uses the Dice class and can be used to test dice throw probability according to the bell curve (the more dice are used the lower the probability to roll boundary results).

(Please open the article to see the Flash content.)

Update: The Dice class is now part of the hexagonLib and can be found here.

What are the advantages over using a generic MovieClip? When writing games you might have several animated graphics (also called sprites, but not related to the AS3 Sprite class) that should run with a different framerate than the game’s global framerate. Let’s say your game runs with a global framerate of 99 and you put several animated sprites into your game that were created for playing back with a framerate of 24. With a MovieClip all those sprites would also play with a framerate of 99 which means they play way too fast. However with an AnimatedBitmap you can set every framerate individually. There are a couple of other advantages like that a Bitmap is more lightweight than a MovieClip and it has a isPlaying() method. Also it changes the way of how to embed assets. Instead of embedding many files for one animation only one image for a whole animation sequence is embedded which has positive effects on the file size. The ring sequence used in the demo has 21 frames that use 102Kb as single images but only 44Kb when they are combined to one image.

The following demonstration plays with a global framerate of 99 but all AnimatedBitmap instances play at a framerate of 24 …

(Please open the article to see the Flash content.)

You can download the class including demo source code and demo image here:

Update: The class is now part of the hexagonLib and can be found here. You want this version because it’s the one that is being maintained.

Changes in v1.1
The timer object used to time the frame animation has now been made external. For this purpose a custom FrameRateTimer class has been added. This has the advantage that AnimatedBitmap objects don’t use their own timer objects anymore. Instead you can use one timer for many animated objects if they use the same framerate. This saves memory and CPU cycles. However you are still able to use one FrameRateTimer for every animated object if it is desired.
An IAnimatedDisplayObject interface has been added so that future animated display object types can be integrated more easily.

Also included is a jsx script for Photoshop CS named HDRS- CreateImageSequence that can be used to easily create a ‘single-frames image’ with Photoshop. Simply run the script in Photoshop and choose the images in the file browser that appears. Photoshop will then generate a single image with all the frames laid out horizontally. All images should have the same size to get a correct animation sequence. Also sometimes you need to fine-tune the position of some frames, e.g. for the ring in the demo (which was rendered to single frame images from a 3D modeler) I had to adjust the horizontal alignment on some frames because otherwise the animation would glitch to left/right by some pixels.

The MultiMap is heavily based on Michael Baczynski’s HashTable class but I modified it to my requirements and added a couple of additional methods for luxury. At first I wrote an even more customized version that would decide automatically which hash function to use but as it turned out some of these changes weighted heavy on the performance, especially not using a strict equality operator (===) and having a HashEntry object with non-numeric keys. In fact Michael’s class is still a tad faster (he really squeezed out the last bit of performance there) but as long as the MultiMap isn’t too large/full there is only a minor difference of some milliseconds.
As a trade-off I added checking for existing keys (which can be omitted to improve performance when adding values) and of course there is the multiple values functionality which required a more complex implementation of some methods.

I’m sure there is still a lot of room for improvement so if you have any suggestions it would be cool to let us know!

Tested on WinXp Photoshop CS2 and Mac OSX Photoshop CS! The script is Open Source so feel free to use, extend or modify it! If you add any new functionality, I’d love to hear about it!

My big move has been delayed for a short time! I will leave here at the end of December and move to far east in middle January! I actually packed everything and made most preparations so I’m stuck with being bored now, counting every minute and hope that time passes faster.

So what to do? One good idea I had, was to keep up with writing some blog stuff that I already planned in my mind. One if it being about one of my favorite Abandonware DOS games Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games!

Over the last couple of decades this game kept me from being bored often! With it’s cozy winter evening fireplace warmth strategy gameplay atmosphere and quietly playing midi music it charms easily to take a session of round based war monging.

While the hi-res graphics are outdated since long now, it’s gameplay and atmosphere still sets measures and I would even claiming it’s actually more fun than the followers Jagged Alliance II and Unfinished Business! They surely have better graphics and sound and some other really well worked out things like improved weaponry but sometimes low-res gaming beats all state-of-the-art!

I even went far enough to create my own missions and campaign within JADG and the good news is, you can actually download them here!

After download you can unpack the scenario and campaign files to the folders in the JADG folder. There are ten missions within the campaign reaching from freeing organization members from a prison to very ridiculous things like raiding a cannibal camp in the south sea. All missions are set more or less within the VEB scenario however.

The difficulty level will raise mission by mission and at the end you have to raid a nuclear missle compound where the VEB head is hiding and it will get very hard to survive until then! So for all you lazy players who don’t want to approach the whole thing, the single missions are also included.

Check Underdogs excellent review on the game here. You might be able to get the game here. But I didn’t told you! If you want to play on a newer Windows system like 2k or XP you will find this and this tool useful!

Now stop reading here and get playing some excellent 16bit strategy. The Villains await you! But don’t forget to check back here from time to time as I’m going to introduce some other classic gaming stuff!

After finally having the change to access some of my over ten years old C64 floppy disks relics with the XE1541 cable, I’ve found some neat rare tools which we used back in the old days and which you might want not to miss for your D64 file collection …

So here are the two SMS tools disks which contain various useful tools from my time on the 8bit era.

SMS-Tools 1:
--------------------------------------
DIR MASTER V1.0
DISK DOCTOR
RESTORE
GDM V2.2 (Geos Disk Monitor)
S-MON(C000) NEW
S-MON(9000) NEW
EXMON V2.0
EMON V2.3
CRACKER TOOL
MDGPACKER/LINKER
SMS COMPACKER
AUTOSTART V2.0
AUTO-START V3.0
ACCELERATOR V1.0
C64 SYSTEM-TEST
MSE V1.0
AUTO-CODER V1.2
FILE-CODER V1.0
HIDE (49152)
UNCOVER (49664)
SPEEDCOPY V2.0
SUPER COPY V1.5
SECTOR BACKUP V3
ULTRABYTE NIB.
NIBBLE HACK'EM
BURST NIBBLER V1
TURBO NIBBLER V4
FILE MASTER V1.0
FILECOPY C64
FILE HACK'EM
FAST-BACKUP

SMS-Tools 1:
--------------------------------------
CHARSET MIXER
CATCHER V1.1
PICTURE-ROBBER
PICTURE-ROBBER 2
SPRITE-FINDER
DATEC V3.1
KALENDER
HAUSHALTSKASSE
MINI WRITER V2.0
MINI INSTRUC.
THE MAGIC WRITER
YIE AR SOUND

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