Doom (2016)

If you’re talking about Doom, it’s the original Doom game

Sorry but you’re not the arbiter of worldwide speech, so you don’t get to decide that. The name of the 2016 game is just Doom. If there’s a chance of confusion you can add (2016) for clarity, as I did, but it really has the same title as the original Doom game and there’s nothing wrong with just calling it Doom. Which it is.

See:

It’s like Scarface and Scarface, or Cape Fear and Cape Fear, or Dune and Dune, or … you get the point.

First of all, there really isn’t all that much story to the original Doom. There are a couple of paragraphs in a readme.txt file tucked away in the installation folder, and an ending screen after each episode… but that’s basically it.

As I understood it, Doom 2016 is a re-imagining of Doom, so the universes are not canonically linked. Kinda like how The Thing From Another World (1956), which takes place in Alaska, isn’t canonically linked with The Thing (1982) which takes place on Antarctica.

The original DOS version of Doom runs at 35fps, exactly half of the 70Hz refresh rate of 320x200 VGA mode. I thought it felt really smooth back in the day, but it does feel weird and stuttery on modern systems when played through Dosbox. I get used to it after a bit, but still.

Fortunately as Doom is open source, there are many enhanced Doom ports that lift this 35fps limit and allow it to run on modern machines without emulation. I usually play in GZDoom which can run at the max refresh rate of my monitor (144Hz), so it feels silky smooth.

Also… and I never see anyone else mention this… DOOM does not take place on Mars.

But Doom (2016) does.

I feel that many gamers nowadays mean the 2016 reboot, when they talk about Doom, and not the original from 1993. We’re getting old …

As a European I always wonder why Americans don’t create an alternative party to the Democrats

A third party has no chance in a first past the post system. If you create an alternative party to the Democrats, you’re just making sure the Republicans win every election.

Actually lot less than the browser. Under 300MB, I just checked, and that’s mostly just the network buffer which is 150MB by default.

Sound typically (*) didn’t require “drivers” or any TSR though. The game had to do all the hardware control itself.

It was usually enough to set a BLASTER variable to point it at the correct IRQ, DMA and memory address, and perhaps run a program at boot to initialize the card and set volume levels, but no TSR eating up memory.

(*) Some exceptions are later soundcards of the Win 9x era that did crappy emulation of a real Soundblaster via a TSR in DOS.

Ah the sweet sounds of a simpler, worryfree time …

The point is that your example use case of “YouTube 4k videos” doesn’t need a browser full of bloated js garbage.

Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.

strange, mpv handles it just fine

I remember when I got my first computer with 1GB of RAM, where my previous computer had 64MB, later upgraded to 192MB. And there were only like 3 or 4 years in between them.

It was like: holy shit, now I can put all the things in RAM. I will never run out.

most PCs by that time had built-in MIDI synthesizers

Built-in? You had AdLib cards for FM synthesis, but they were never built-in and most PCs didn’t even have them. Adlib cards used the Yamaha OPL2 or OPL3 chip.

Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM

You are skipping a very important part here: cards that could output digital audio. The early Soundblaster cards were pioneers here (SB 1.0, SB 2.0, SB Pro, SB16). The SB16 for example was waaaaay more popular than the AWE32 ever was, even if it still used OPL3 based FM synth for music. It’s the reason why most soundcards in the 90s were “Soundblaster compatible”.

Digital audio meant that you could have recorded digital sound effects in games. So when you fired the shotgun in Doom to kill demons, it would play actual sound effects of shotgun blasts and demon grunts instead of bleeps or something synthesized and it was awesome. This was the gamechanger that made soundcards popular, not wavetable.

The wavetable cards I feel were more of a sideshow. They were interesting, and a nice upgrade, especially if you composed music. They never really took off though and they soon became obsolete as games switched from MIDI based audio to digital audio, for example Quake 1 already had its music on audio tracks on CD-ROM, making wavetable synthesis irrelevant.

BTW, I also feel like you are selling FM synthesis short. The OPL chips kinda sucked for plain MIDI, especially with the Windows drivers, and they were never good at reproducing instrument sounds but if you knew how to program them and treated the chip as its own instrument rather than a tool to emulate real world instruments, they were capable of producing beautiful electronic music with a very typical sound signature. You should check out some of the adlib trackers, like AdTrack2 for some examples. Many games also had beautiful FM synthesized soundtracks, and I often preferred it over the AWE32 wavetable version (e.g. Doom, Descent, Dune)

The Egg by Andy Weir.

There are basically four positions you can take about this:

1. Jesus existed and was crucified
2. We can’t know, because there is no conclusive evidence, but I think (1) is more likely
3. We can’t know, because there is no conclusive evidence, but I think (4) is more likely
4. Jesus is a myth

I am on (2), as are most historians, and you put yourself on (1).

if it’s good enough for the majority of historians

It isn’t. Historians would love to have independent evidence of the existence and crucifixion of Jesus, but there isn’t… so most historians refrain from taking a position one way or the other. The ones that do have to make do with what little objective information they have, and the best they can come up with is: well because of this embarassing thing, it’s more likely that he did exist and was crucified than that he didn’t, because why would they make that up?

That’s rather weak evidence, and far from “proof”.

Not sure why you’d need more

Well for one because the more prominent people who have studied this have a vested interest in wanting it to be true. For example, John P. Meier, who posited this criterion of embarassment that I outlined in my previous comment, isn’t really a historian but a catholic priest, professor of theology (not history) and a writer of books on the subject.

There was a guy named Jesus that was crucified by the romans and all that. There is proof of that

There isn’t actually. The proof is basically: it’s embarassing that their cult leader got painfully crucified, so the early Christians and writers of the new testament wouldn’t have made that shit up.

Personally I find it rather unconvincing.

Yeah and Flatpaks also exist.

Flatpaks are probably the best generic solution for using an LTS release like Debian Stable on a desktop system. You get the best of both worlds: up to date desktop packages and a stable base.

Pro tip: set a 40 minute timer on your phone as soon as you put the beer in the freezer.

How can air get heat saturated? i followed you thus far but its not like humidity, you can always add more heat

When the temperature of the air and temperature of the object you want to cool reach an equilibrium, no heat gets transfered anymore.

who is going to use a VPN (an internet privacy tool) from Google?

Exactly. That would be like using a web browser made by Google so they have direct access to your internet browsing history. Ridiculous!