Hi everyone. I'm still alive. what's up?

I found it odd that there wasn't one of these threads so here ya go.

Post here animated gif's you find amusing/funny/interesting.

Happy New Year Makestation!

so once upon a time, before MP3's, and CD's and all that stuff there was a style of music mostly associated with PC's, that style was the use of what's now known as general midi.
general midi was a way for games to have music and sound effects without needing the space that sampled sounds and recorded music takes up, you'll find it commonly with older games, especially does games.

these days though midi support has been all but removed from windows, and didn't even really exist in linux or mac osx.  it's a shame really, midi's are a rather unique product of an age back when space was still at a premium, before we had thousands of gigabytes of space in our laptops and desktop PC's.

however there are ways to still enjoy midi even now, there's this nifty piece of software by a company called coolsoft called virtual midi synth.
with it you can load something called a soundfont and play midi's without all the hardware or digging up old sound cards from bygone eras.

there's all sorts of soundfonts out there as well, back towards the end of the midi age soundfonts were a way to get the most from your midi music without having to shell out tons of cash for midi synthesizer hardware add-ons.

if you feel like checking out this dated but still fairly powerful type of sound I highly recommend it, as far as soundfonts go, a good one to check out is called chorium, it's got a good balance of great sounds and leveled audio, plus it's free.

so is anyone familiar with midi's?
for that matter does anyone still listen to them?

Techno-pagansim
has anyone heard of it?
maybe one of you has experimented with it or you know someone who has.

the long and short of it is, applying paganism, typically wicca or some other variant, modified to include technology as a component.

think of it like cyberspace is a separate dimension, your coven need not convene in one place, rather they can do their rituals online where everyone is taking part in their own homes across large distances.

You can also create runes, enact spells, etc, by using technology as a basis/alternative way to do things and still remain firmly grounded in the natural way of doing things.

then of course there's the idea that cyberspace has it's own forces and deities which you can call upon in place of/instead of/along with that which affects the physical world.

there's a lot of ideas out there but nothing truly concrete.

most famously it was claimed by a character in season 1 of the somewhat not forgotten buffy the vampire slayer TV show however there have been discussions and articles in magazines such as wired, and through online user groups such as usenet including a subgroup on alt.pagan.

so what are your thoughts on this?

greetings, Zalost here and today I'm going to talk a bit about a nifty new device for the sega saturn, there's actually 2 versions of it, the first is called the rhea, the second is called the phoebe.  the device is what's called an optical disc emulator or ODE and what it does is allow you to load disc images on actual hardware, as you can imagine this is actually something really amazing as for the longest time the Sega saturn CD rom drive had not been reverse engineered until about last year, given the saturn came out 22 years ago this is actually important as replacement CD rom drives and lasers are getting harder and harder to find.



this is the unit, you install it in place of the CD rom drive in your sega saturn, the rhea uses a 20 pin connector while the phoebe uses a 21 pin connector.

with the rhea if you have a 20 pin cable saturn you simply install it, for the phoebe however you do need to do some minor soldering work, this is because of the differences between the various later model 1 and model 2 sega saturns and it's to ensure compatibility.

now i could write a complete installation guide but I think I'll let the website for the product explain as they have much better instructions... I plan to pick one up soon for my own saturn by the way.

installation instructions.
Phoebe
Rhea

this is honestly really amazing and I'm glad such technologies exist
if you have any questions feel free to view the main website for the device or post here on the thread, and remember, it's still in development so feel free to check back here where I will relay any news on the device, especially as currently sales are closed but watch here for when they start up again.

GDEMU - Manufacturer of ODE for dreamcast and saturn consoles

So I decided to go ahead and get it. They kept calling me trying to get me to sign up. $16 a month is a little outrageous in my opinion but it was pretty easy to talk them down on the price. Apparently if you tell them no enough they eventually offer you $5/month, and to be honest, that actually wasn't a terrible deal.

I love it personally, save for one thing. The audio quality is absolutely horrible. Not sure why. Some people say it's more bearable than others, but apparently that has to do with the receiver. If you have a legacy XM receiver, apparently it pulls from the old XM frequencies where the codecs are a little better and therefore the audio quality is a little better. I wish my car had one because the compression is heavily noticeable. I've heard the bitrates go anywhere from 32-64 kbps or so and that's at the best. 

Other than that it's great. They have plenty of stations and the ones I listen to are pretty good. I just add the music to my library once I find songs I like and listen to them from there.  

Anyone else used it before? What did you think? And the sound quality, was it even remotely bearable?

so there's this open source remake of Rollercoaster tycoon 1 and 2, one of the nifty features they've got going for it is multiplayer support.

so my question for everybody is this, if there was a multiplayer game/server hosted map for people to work on, would you play it?

Open RCT2

Arr this be my ship, I be claimin her by right of first post.

what scurvy dog be staking a claim to her?

****************

the goal is to one up the previous poster and claim the target as yours.

so who here can claim the ship?

the catch is, you have to talk all pirate like in your response.

good luck!

discuss all space related topics here.

let's start with this new one that popped up on the NASA website.

so apparently when the hubble takes deep field images something interesting shows up sometimes.




those curvy lines are asteroid trails, they show up due to the long exposures needed for photographing distant galaxies.

the shape is because of Hubble's orbit around earth, many of these distant space rocks were too faint to be discovered otherwise.

"Astronomers found a unique asteroid for every 10 to 20 hours of exposure time." - NASA


this is part of the mission of the frontier fields program.