cacomonkey

I made a big discovery tonight that you can install the trial version of Roland Sound Canvas VA then configure Foobar2000 to use the "secret sauce" path and point to where you have the Sound Canvas DLL and core files and you can get official Roland Sound Canvas VA emulation. If your midis were composed using SC-55 or its various flavors the result is superior to any custom soundfont since you're practically using the original hardware the MIDIs were composed on to listen to your midis. The trial supposedly doesn't run out using this method.

I remember seeing Man in the Wilderness (1971) with Richard Harris in the theater as a kid when it first came out, which also explores the same real-life story of the fur-trapper and the bear. The bear attack in that film seemed much more convincing than Revenant. Sometimes when they try too hard and go for the ultra-real FX in modern cinema it comes off as completely unreal.

I hope I don't get censored or even banned for saying this but the single funniest thing I ever read online was a certain american professional game and software coder's account of his uncomfortable meetings with the Australian game developer company (if you can call it that: I don't think they ever produced a single game since they were too busy hosting teenage runaways) that was hired to do the sequel to Wizardry 7. Horrifying but also the funniest thing I ever read, right up there with the joke about the two parrots praying in their cage with rosary beads and the punchline: "You can put the rosary beads away; our prayers have been answered!"

Breaking in a new pair of JBL 2.4GHz headphones (model 610) so I've been listening to heavy 70s techno pop for about 3 hours a night the past few days. Never knew Kraftwerk could sound so so good. ♫we are the robots♫ I felt the volume levels/sensitivity on these new cans were unusually low so I had to use the equalizer in the JBL software and basically crank up EVERYTHING (bass, treble, midrange) and now I have about a 30db volume boost and the lows sound deep and pounding (with no boom), the midrange (vocals) sharp and well defined, and the highs crystal clear. This is how Kraftwerk was meant to sound. Also went to this YT channel to listen to more heavy techno-pop/trance accompanied by lovely psychedelic imagery in 4K. If this doesn't break my new JBL cans into perfect smoothness, nothing will. It certainly broke my brain into perfect smoothness. Where am I again? Oh the Doomworld forum!

My last purchase was a 10ft 20 Gbps/240w USB-C to USB-C data transfer/charging cable that was advertised as "the fastest charging cable in history!" on the Amazon web page. Received it today (within 24 hours of ordering) and I tested its transfer throughput with my external SSD drive that I KNOW can do 1000 MB/s with a 5Gbps cable I bought from JacobsParts. So what did this - the fastest charging cable in history - do? Exactly less than half the speed of my 5Gbps cable, and not even USB 3.0 throughput let alone USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 speeds. Basically bought it for shits and giggles knowing it was not as advertised because it was only $10 with Free Returns so I had nothing to lose. The seller will certainly be honoring that return policy soon.

Tried to watch Homunculus - a Japanese "horror" film about a homeless guy who allows an odd medical intern to drill a hole through his forehead and into his skull to open the doors of his perception but it's too filled with the typical Japanese weirdness (like the way they tend to fetishize sex or bizarre sexual fantasies about female high school students, and, naturally, of course, there's a very strange, unpleasant sex scene between the middle-aged protagonist and a high school student wearing her short skirt school uniform) to finish. It reminded me of Videodrome slightly with us seeing his strange hallucinations but I grew bored after the 2/3 point.

I remember playing and quite enjoying this when it first came out but I couldn't handle the final boss fight with him morphing into 3 different forms. Just when you think you defeated him, he popped up again, and rinse, repeat, until I realized I wasn't enjoying myself because it was taking too long. Up to then it was one of the best Doom wads I ever played.

Anyone else get framerate drops once you start exploring the house's main floors? I'm on an i9/RTX 3070 rig and no other wad I've played - even Elementalism Phase 1 - drops this much. It's still quite playable but it's just curious because I see nothing particularly graphically demanding in those house levels. I play at 4K at 120 Hz.

Ah, okay. I remember you mentioning it supporting a subset of zdoom features and I might have misinterpreted it to mean gzdoom too. Temple of the Lizard Men 2 plays really odd on my system. When you first appear on the beach, you get the full 120 FPS framerate. Then a minute later without doing anything it slowly drops to below 30, even without leaving the beach. Weird. Might be a driver issue. No other wad I tested does this.

Was trying to test this with a wad called Temple of the Lizard Men 2 that becomes unplayable on all the other source ports at 4K (including latest GZDoom) but can't get it to load with Helion. Is there a certain command line? Is it not compatible with that wad possibly?

I'm not worthy! Hobomaster22 saves the day yet again. It was obvious in the error msg what was wrong and what I needed to do but I got confused if it was the iwads or the pwads that needed to be checked. It's working perfectly now that you steered me right. Thx, man. Just an unrelated observation: I was playing a few minutes of a cpu-intensive Hexen mod called Hexen Curse of the Lost Gods with an equally old version of a source port (GZDoom 3.1.0 x64 that was configured with my old build of Doom Launcher) and noticed the framerates were dire, going from my normal 120 FPS to around 30. So I updated to the latest build of GZDoom 4.10 x64 and voila! Right back up where it belongs. Moral of the story - always use the latest build of a source port. I'm frequently reluctant to upgrade any useful program I have because of the Mad God Bloat but in the case of source ports you gotta stay current. Just gotta.

Hobomaster22 has been kindly helping me in private msg to transfer my old Doomlauncher database and collection of 300+ wads to the latest version, even fixing my DoomLauncher.sqlite from the old v2.6.0.0 version so it wouldn't give me an unhandled fault error on start up, but I continue to have issues that I decided to take here to this topic in the event others have similar issues and it may help them. All the zipped wads, source ports, and iwads are in their appropriate directories but I get this whenever I try to launch a wad. Any ideas?

I think even "visually enhanced" community map packs like AD and Alkaline will advise you in the documentation to use gl_texturemode "GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR" setting instead of the filter. Was playing the user-made map Altar of Storms recently and smiled when I encountered these female necromancers who were reanimating the dead ogres, death knights and other baddies as fast as you could kill them. Gee, I wonder where they got that idea from. The same map has an end-fight with a boss ripped right out of the big baddie from Hexen II, give or take about 5 giant statues a'comin' to life to offer him support. Play a good community Doom or Quake map and it feels like you're playing a free AAA release, only not as E-Z ;)

Had the same problem so what I did to solve it was create an autoexec.cfg file in the id1 folder. Then add "crosshair 0" or "crosshair 1" or "crosshair 2" (without the quotes). I find that autoexec file very useful for other purposes too like creating weapon groups for the D-pad of my DS4 controller or assigning Save/Load slots to specific function keys. Before anyone asks, "YOU PLAY DOOM AND QUAKE WITH A CONTROLLER??? MUST BE A PERVERT MASOCHIST!" I just want to say that I found the ideal control scheme for me (a couch monkey) - I use the controller for moving/strafing in my left hand and mouse in my right for aiming, turning and Fire/Jumping. It's perfect for me and this hybrid controller/mouse scheme is as good as any KB/mouse config I've tried but with the added benefit of analog movement with the controller (good for inching and creeping along ledges or peering over them).

Unfortunately that built-in Mod menu in Ironwail's Options can have limited functionality if the mod has a dependency like Copper or Quoth. So I use a nifty little Quake Launcher/organizer called QMLauncher. Its companion program by the same author is QuadaddictedTool and is better for my needs than Quake Injector (unreadable map info fonts at 4k). There's an incredibly ambitious user-made Quake map pack called Peril that runs buggy as fuck on Ironwail (clipping issues in the elevators with the player taking damage) where you have to use QSS but otherwise Ironwail has worked flawlessly with every user-made map I've thrown at it. Best. Source. Port. EVER.