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The Spam Thread!
Got a few new shovelware game CDs in the mail this week, pandemic be damned.

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The first one I sought out after seeing it in an LGR Thrifts episode. Clint didn't look at it, but it was on a shelf in the background. Tongue Did some research and decided to buy it as the eBay seller gave me a decent offer. The collection is by Global Star Software, which was a division of Take-Two Interactive. It's from around 2001/2002, and like shovelware discs from the 90s, it consists of free or demo games. There's no mention of shareware on the packaging or small print, and a few of the games I tried didn't have nag screens. One game was "1945", a pseudo-remake of the Capcom classic 1942 redone in what I think is Clickteam MediaFusion. Another one is Moraff's Maximum Mahjongg volume 3, which is interesting since the creator also sold his games directly on the second disc I acquired.

The 'Jongg CD is interesting. Back in the early 2000s, I played around with another shovelware disc that had one of Steve Moraff's games, UltraBlast. It's a quirky Arkanoid clone with strange graphics and sounds. That game is on that CD along with a whole bunch of others like several different Mahjongg games, CyberDice, Pinball, some Lode Runner clone called Escapade, some word games, and tons and tons of MIDI files and photographs to use in said games. This Moraff guy is a nut for Mahjongg games, and even sold a CD that contained nothing but different variations of said game using rings, spheres, photos, etc. The 'Jongg CD has become rather rare. As of this writing, there is only one other used copy on eBay. Moraff used to sell a DVD containing his arcade games, but sadly he no longer sells it and focuses solely on his Mahjongg games. I need a way to do a screen recording of the games just to show people how odd these games are. Tongue
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Vietcong... I recall it being developed by Illusion Software, who would later be known as 2K Czech of Mafia fame.
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Nothing better to do right now while supper cooks. I've started going through my YouTube video backlog and I'm going to remove nearly all my old YTP videos. I still have all of them archived either on disc or hard drive. At the time I made them, I thought they were good, but nowadays, a lot of the humor hasn't dated well and they don't get many views anyway. I'm refocusing my channel on rare animated cartoons and those commercial blocks from American TV. I may still do a YTP now and then, but it's going to be a rare occurrence when I do. Also, that stupid COPPA mandate complicates things as well.

I also downloaded CamStudio for attempting screen recording on Daffodil. I had to get it off SourceForge. They had a warning there that the old CamStudio website is serving malware and SF hosts official clean builds. One video series in the planning stage is showing off old shovelware games without commentary, starting with those odd MoraffWare things.
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(03-22-2020, 11:13 AM)cpd2009 Wrote: Nothing better to do right now while supper cooks. I've started going through my YouTube video backlog and I'm going to remove nearly all my old YTP videos. I still have all of them archived either on disc or hard drive. At the time I made them, I thought they were good, but nowadays, a lot of the humor hasn't dated well and they don't get many views anyway. I'm refocusing my channel on rare animated cartoons and those commercial blocks from American TV. I may still do a YTP now and then, but it's going to be a rare occurrence when I do. Also, that stupid COPPA mandate complicates things as well.

I also downloaded CamStudio for attempting screen recording on Daffodil. I had to get it off SourceForge. They had a warning there that the old CamStudio website is serving malware and SF hosts official clean builds. One video series in the planning stage is showing off old shovelware games without commentary, starting with those odd MoraffWare things.
COPPA did more harm than good as what we all can tell. I mean sure, one could just set his/her channel as "not-for-kids", but doing that ex-post-facto for videos using children's content but aren't intended for them like YTPs, commentary and other parodies is extra work especially for prolific uploaders.

Heck, a number of parody videos using kids' content were unfairly and sometimes bizarrely locked down like that Scarface parody of "Do You Want To Build A Snowman", even if said video explicitly showed mountains of snow, er, cocaine on Tony Montana's desk.
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I think I have a theory on why Rusty's Win10 install is "losing" files as I described earlier. I'm not ruling out a problem with the hard drive, but it happened again today and I did some investigating with Linux.

I remember that when this issue happens, once you reboot Windows, I can again access the files that went "missing". After it happened again today, I booted into openSUSE and accessed the same files that went "missing". I was able to access the file just fine and no errors appeared.

It appears Rusty's Toshiba 1TB HDD is one of those "green" drives. I believe "green" HDDs have built in power saving features. Greta's old 320gb HDD is one of these. After the drive sits idle for a little bit, it goes into low power mode, and it will spin up again if access is needed. I can hear it do this. When the file I was looking at went "missing" today, it occured when the drive woke up to access the file. Seeing as how the file was still accessible under Linux, it leads me to believe that this missing file issue is a very odd Windows 10 bug and not a sign of the drive failing. This is just a theory though, as the possibility of drive failure is still there.

What I'm going to do is see about disabling the drive's power-saving features. It's a bit annoying with it on anyway as if I'm listening to music or working with my video files, there is a bit of lag when the drive spins back up.
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(03-25-2020, 12:40 PM)cpd2009 Wrote: I think I have a theory on why Rusty's Win10 install is "losing" files as I described earlier. I'm not ruling out a problem with the hard drive, but it happened again today and I did some investigating with Linux.

I remember that when this issue happens, once you reboot Windows, I can again access the files that went "missing". After it happened again today, I booted into openSUSE and accessed the same files that went "missing". I was able to access the file just fine and no errors appeared.

It appears Rusty's Toshiba 1TB HDD is one of those "green" drives. I believe "green" HDDs have built in power saving features. Greta's old 320gb HDD is one of these. After the drive sits idle for a little bit, it goes into low power mode, and it will spin up again if access is needed. I can hear it do this. When the file I was looking at went "missing" today, it occured when the drive woke up to access the file. Seeing as how the file was still accessible under Linux, it leads me to believe that this missing file issue is a very odd Windows 10 bug and not a sign of the drive failing. This is just a theory though, as the possibility of drive failure is still there.

What I'm going to do is see about disabling the drive's power-saving features. It's a bit annoying with it on anyway as if I'm listening to music or working with my video files, there is a bit of lag when the drive spins back up.
That could very well be a possibility assuming that Windows 10 isn't taking the Toshiba drive's features and/or firmware into account.
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Even though I have Pinball FX3 on my Switch, I've decided to start buying table packs for the PC version. I'd like to see how well the RX 580 performs. Smile The Switch version is fun as always, but I'd imagine the PC version has better visual quality.

It's too bad that you can't share table pack purchases between platforms. It would make things easier and you'd spend less money on the same games too.
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(03-26-2020, 02:02 PM)cpd2009 Wrote: Even though I have Pinball FX3 on my Switch, I've decided to start buying table packs for the PC version. I'd like to see how well the RX 580 performs. Smile The Switch version is fun as always, but I'd imagine the PC version has better visual quality.

It's too bad that you can't share table pack purchases between platforms. It would make things easier and you'd spend less money on the same games too.
I could imagine your RX 580 would make short work of those pinball tables. Same would presumably go with my RX 570.

I've also tried rendering videos on Vegas 16 and while I haven't actually done a baseline with my GTX 1050 I did notice some improvement on the rendering time.
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I had no idea why I did this:
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Hmm... this ReShade thing is interesting. I had to look it up to make sense of your video, to be honest. So with ReShade, you can inject things like ambient occlusion and better lighting effects in real time from what I'm reading.

As for me personally, I'm finally making headway on getting my backlog of old VHS tapes converted to MP4/MKV files. Once I get good transfers of these old tapes, I plan on discarding most of said tapes to free up space and reduce baggage, in case I ever have to move somewhere. Tapes that are far more important to me or have sentimental value I am keeping.

I was also playing through another Chinese bootleg game... Super Contra 8. It's the exact same game as the other Chinese Contra knockoff, Super Contra 7. The only difference is an English title screen. It actually could be a rather decent Contra clone if it weren't for the bad enemy placement and enemy bullets that sometimes spaz out and bounce uncontrollably on screen.
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