The reason why the date of Geese's death in the Fatal Fury 1 ending is always in the early 1900s is not due to some typical localization screwup. It is based on the Neo Geo BIOS clock which wraps back to 1900 after the turn of the century. Neo Geo has the dreaded Y2K bug.

As is tradition with the pop culture influencing Gen X developers in the 90s, the internal video filename for the ion cannon FMV in Command & Conquer is simply called "akira.vqa"

The Quake 1 axe sound is just the Metal Hit sound from Korg M1, and the signature grenade bounce is in fact the same sound nearly 2 octaves lower.

I've always assumed the fireball works the way it does in Super Mario Land because they gave up programming any semblance of gravity physics for them. No idea if that was the actual reason or if there's an explicit design reason for it.

Sonic CD US Metallic Madness is mostly just riffing on top of this sequence preset from Korg Wavestation

Nothing makes me not want to support an audio company quite like having a plugin UX acting like a glorified storefront deceiving you by presenting presets (alongside the ones you actually own) you don't even have full access to. There's so much annoying friction like this in Addictive Drums 2.

The FL Studio sampler getting an offset knob is a relatively recent addition but an extremely welcome one. By automating it with a random LFO signal you can add a degree of humanization to any kind of repeated oneshot sample.

Once in a while I like to indulge in some Techno but I have a crazy deliberating amount of impostor syndrome when it comes to this genre. I have no clue how you're "supposed to" produce this stuff and just operate purely on vibes.

The epilogues for some of the villains shown during the credits for the Genesis version of the 1995 Spider-Man TAS game are kinda messed up.

Denoisers are usually seen as very clinical editing tools but I like the way they work on pads in place of a typical filter, especially after you add reverb+delay back in afterwards and how the "artifacts" interact with them. Doing EQ/filter preprocessing before the denoiser also sounds cool.

It must be validating to know your little sci-fi music project really gets under the skin of these people thequietus.com/news/trump-a...

I don't know if putting a transient shaper on the drum bus should be considered bad form but I just love messing around with the entire signal this way

Different varieties of FM Gabber kicks going doink doink doink

Just an old brief style study trying to make Acid Breaks in FM simulating squelchy distorted 303s. Dated January 2021. God, it didn't even feel like it was that long ago.

The mastering industry is mostly a bunch of snake oil leveraging people's insecurities on wanting their music to sound "professional". Used to be a legit discipline in the analog days but pivoted as the loudness war proliferated.

Heard of Klaus Doldinger's passing and I feel obligated to tell people that apart from the movie scores he also did amazing Fusion back in the 70s www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj7y...

First time doing growly FM sax. Very unwieldy with inharmonic noise as a byproduct. I just hope the worst artifacts are buried enough in the full mix. Essentially you have to abuse the hardware LFO at max speed to attain the effect. OP1 feedback values need to be very surgical as well.

Nope

Currently fascinated by Bleep Techno which was an a short lived, almost exclusively UK offshoot from the late 80s that didn't really survive the rapid evolution of dance music at the time. And to really drive home the point this Hypnotone single uses Game Boy imagery for the vinyl cover.

Hot take but I actually liked the doc robots in MM3 and thought having the original stages recontextualized with harder level design was more interesting padding than the back-to-back castles that became formula in subsequent games. I think they could have really iterated on this concept somehow.

Literal technobabble www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0S6...

If you want a trip, just browse Discogs for thumbnails of compilation albums from the 90s.

The trend of having very subdued/silhoutted level artwork in modern 2D games makes me feel so out of touch. It's an issue I've had in Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, even the new Shinobi. I guess it's for readability but I feel no motivation to explore these worlds when they feel so samey/interchangeable

Appears that actually being nice and paying to register WinRAR is effectively pointless, when it turns out your "perpetual" license is only valid for that specific version. Found out the hard way after updating due to the exploit announcement.

Wish more of Earthion's SFX had been FM-based instead of PCM. Yuzo Koshiro's best sound design work is from his earliest batch of MD titles that were almost entirely FM, where he was very good at thinking outside the box to create noisy sounds that were not screechy/abrasive like in other titles.

I would also encourage stepping up from mere mitigation to active sabotage. Use browser extensions like AdNauseam to send fake junk data to trackers. With how the modern tech industry treats people with such utter contempt, it's only fair we return the favor.

I saw an infographic a couple years ago about how to remove source identifiers from links and why it's important, but I can't find it again and too many people I know are sending me links with them so here's an infographic straight from the oven

RAMP 2025 is out which is a collection of user submitted Doom maps all neatly packaged together in a nice hub world by DavidXNewton. These are always a joy to check out every year. rampart-dev.teamouse.net

Oh, there's another Superman movie coming out. That gives me an excuse to post this lame joke

Playing WoW again. As a habitual orc player I never thought I'd play a kul tiran but this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Blast baking

Something I find funny/interesting about Joe Satriani's 1987 album Surfing with the Alien is that the production and mixing has a very timeless quality to it, while his subsequent albums for the remainder of the 80s sound very much of their time, caked in reverb and sorta aged worse.

Most DAW-using musicians who ever played bards in RPGs at some point probably wished they had something like this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fiZ...

I don't know who did this carnival music arrangement of the Quake theme for Joke Jam but I appreciate it

Trance is such a peculiar genre. For a fleeting moment around 95-96 it was precisely calibrated exactly to my tastes and then it went completely off the rails. Most of the good stuff seemed to come from the UK but when I look up what else those artists did later it never reaches that same high.

I wish more modern pixel art games utilized hue shifting for the colors as opposed to monotone shading which feels so much more pervasive. To illustrate the point I took this screenshot of Seiken Densetsu 3 and removed all the hue shifting to make all the elements shaded using the same gradients.

Shoutouts to Tron Bonne for sneaking a Sega Dreamcast into a PS1 game

Wow this second GTA trailer is pretty realistic www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KQO...

It's bizarre how I'm really getting into 90s new age world music but when looking up artists on YT I have to shamefully open the links in incognito mode cause I don't want the algorithm to start sending me down an antivaxer rabbit hole.

Unfortunately playing the GoG release of BoF4 with filtering off makes entire columns of the sprites jitter in a very distracting way whenever there is motion. Not even sure this is fixable. I'm starting to think that proper emulation is still the preferable method of playing this game.

Actually managed to release new original material www.youtube.com/watch?v=W82Q...

Rendering a 30 second CG animation at 480x270 15 FPS takes approximately 50 minutes on a modern CPU in Bryce. Bryce 7 is from 2011 but I suppose the code is essentially still from the 90s and running on a single thread.

BoF4 GoG had a patch to toggle the filtering but I still think the main issue is the HD 3D geometry contrasting harshly against the chunky pixel sprites. While imperfect I downscaled one of the screens by 800% to show how the art feels more cohesive when the overall fidelity remains consistent.

So, the soundtrack bundled with the Deluxe edition of Oblivion Remastered on Steam contains both MP3 and lossless wav, but the wavs are mastered completely different and are audibly distorted in places. The MP3s have a lot more headroom and sound cleaner.

Trying to fix the iconic cliff racer song melody from the rerecorded lines in the remaster

At this point I can pre-emptively identify the signs and tropes of Suno AI remixes showing up on my Youtube feed before even listening to them. Usually I shrug and move on but this one went a step further by having the guts to also flood Bandcamp with tons of AI remix albums sold for actual money.

Browsing for fantasy games to play but realizing that I actually have very little interest if the only playable race options are humans or humans with pointy ears. I need my orcs and trolls.

I help with sound design for Skyblivion. These are some of the 1-handed blunt weapon impacts I designed, showing them both with and without the post processing FX. Also I keep a reference of the original Oblivion sound so I can roughly match the original tone and character. #gameaudio #sounddesign

Updated my collage of YouTube music making thumbnails