• @wheeldawg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9•2 years ago

      I remember this from the school library computers. That and even back then the school had some kind of broadband, it blew my mind that to get online all we had to do was open IE. I was used to that part but always had whatever dial up service we had at the time to open up and connect first. Just clicking IE and going was crazy to me.

  • Mom Nom Mom
    28•2 years ago

    Baud. Maybe kilobauds… That and “da bomb” are very memorable to me from then…

    • @wheeldawg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      I don’t remember kilobaud being a word. I only remember it being a word that was misused for some reason. Or maybe just disfavored against an actual unit. Like it was equivalent to like some small unit, and got outgrown quickly.

      Like when going from bits per second to kilobits per second, I think hair was a single word that meant bits per second, but was not a literal unit, so kilobaud didn’t make sense, whereas kilobits did.

      At least that’s how I remember it off hand, could be wrong.

      • @Eufalconimorph@discuss.tchncs.de
        3•2 years ago

        Baud rate is the maximum number of transitions per second of the state of a transmission medium. Hz is the actual number of cycles per second, so it varies degending on the data transmitted. Bitrate is the number of bits transmitted per second.

        Usually bits are transmitted in groups with some redundancy to allow errors to be corrected. E.g. early Ethernet used 8b/10b encoding; 8 bits of data were transmitted as a 10 bit “symbol”.

        With a 1b/1b encoding baud rate would equal bit rate, but in practice that was essentially never used so the numbers woud diverge. Bitrate is more meaningful to the user.

        SI and binary prefixes can be applied to baud, so kilobaud is certainly a word.

      • Mom Nom Mom
        1•2 years ago

        It may have been misused at some point, but “baud” was a word long before the internet, and I distinctly remember my modem at the time using the word baud on the box. I was just a teenager, so I’m sure I was missing key information. It was used, tho.

        Here, this is proving us both right:

        If your modem-to-modem connection is at 14400 bps, it’s going to be sending 6 bits per signal transition (or symbol) at 2400 baud. A speed of 28800 bps is obtained by 3200 baud at 9 bits/baud. When people misuse the word baud, they may mean the modem speed (such as 33.6k).

        Kilobaud is definitely a word that means a thing. Baud is a literal unit of measure that uses the metric prefixes.

        ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • ginaEnglish
      10•2 years ago

      Ad Riven. I read all the novels, too!

        • ginaEnglish
          3•2 years ago

          Sweet, I guess I’m going to have to get a PC at some point. I actually played Riven for iPadOS recently and it was still fun, but the point and click is pretty tedious.

          I’m not sure a remake willl ever match the magic of when I originally played in 1998, though. My laptop was so junky I played most of the game under a blanket because the screen was so dark, haha.

          • @nightmareofahorse@programming.dev
            2•2 years ago

            Im pretty sure I missed a lot in the first playthrough due to a dark screen haha

            But agreed that it will be hard to recreate that magic - Riven really was ahead of its time and is still my favorite of the series

            • @nuez_jr@lemm.ee
              2•2 years ago

              DUDE. It took me ages (get it!!?) to spot the switch to get in to the elevator on the forest island from the ground level. Thought you had to go the long way around every time.

          • @lavadrop@lemmy.ml
            1•2 years ago

            It plays perfectly fine, it uses ScummVM. You’re just spoiled with first person controls and a free roaming environment.

            • @tias@discuss.tchncs.de
              1•2 years ago

              No, I played the original Riven on Windows 2000. This looks much worse. For example the embedded videos aren’t aligned properly and they clearly have different color correction so they pop out from the rest of the static images. And, I could be wrong but it just seems much more pixelated or lower color fidelity. I realize having a better quality monitor and higher resolution might explain some of that, but regardless of the technical explanation the user experience becomes worse than playing on contemporary equipment. They should have used a better upscaling algorithm. There were other issues too that I can’t recall at this moment. Just the fact that you get the geek-oriented ScummVM interface in your face when you buy a game is kind of jarring.

              • @lavadrop@lemmy.ml
                1•2 years ago

                Most things you describe are the side effects of displaying a 640x480 game on a modern LCD. I agree, however, that the default settings make the game look worse because of aspect ratio correction and the default nearest neighbor scaler. Both can be improved by either using an SVGA CRT or a pixel shader.

    • Coskii
      5•2 years ago

      The bundle of myst games was on humble bundle a week or two ago. I’ve been waiting for the right time to immerse myself in myst VR and be just as confounded as I was as a kid. Then I get to see if Riven is still completely impossible for me.