Take a plasma speaker, for example - a high voltage arc that makes sound.
Is that similar to using a Tesla Coil as a speaker?
Take a plasma speaker, for example - a high voltage arc that makes sound.
Not exactly.Is that similar to using a Tesla Coil as a speaker?
And now you can emulate the way this stuff was calculated:
http://homepages.slingshot.co.nz/~timb3000/index.html
This virtual slide rule is amazing!!!
I saw a slideshow from one of the big hacker conventions in which the presenter showed a picture of a "trench radio" like the one above, made by troops in WWI so they could listen to the news.
Doing good things with that Microbrute / Volca Beats combo!Fortunately, analog synths are once again popular, and now there are some very affordable, high quality ones on the market, which benefit from modern production and use digital technology for interfacing and control, while using pure analog to produce the sound itself. Anyway, enjoy:
Hey, that was my first sim, too!:thumbup:Some of those items are quite Fallout-esque
---------- Post added at 07:04 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:33 PM ----------
My first one. It is sitting in a corner (litteraly) of my parent's house and still works perfectly.
Notice that it had both a cartridge port in a console fashion that directly booted the inserted game on power up, or the "Basic OS", and a 3'5" disc port ("thick", not like the PC ones), that allowed to run programs/games through the "OS" (you had to type "run nameofprogram" and it worked). The cartridge games worked the best, honestly. The disk-loaded programs were prone to loading errors, but they also could be more complex. The first space-related program I had was an astronomical software, that gave you the angles and the positions of the planets in the sky on 10,000 years or so. I was a bit young to understand it, but it worked well. Pure maths. There was some graphical display though, with stars as pixels with letters near them.
I never finished Burnin' Rubber, the cartridge "24h Le Mans" game that was bundled with the computer. It was insanely hard near the end, as a lot of games were. I also remember "Crazy Cars II", I loved that one because it allowed you to drive freely a Ferrari F-40 (nice car, certainly) on a road network that included Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. You had a map with the road numbers and all, police cars were trying to ram you and you had to go from town A to town B in a limited time, it was pretty cool (sadly, the computer resources did not allowed to render town).
But the game that impressed me as I was a young boy, and that probably ultimately led me to Orbiter and other simulations, was "F-16 Combat Pilot". It was a simulation as precise as the platform could provide. Display was reduced to the minimal to free simulation resources : 4 colors (you could have 16 !), the ground was a flat green surface with a grid of points to render the altitude and speed feeling (that was smart !), and all other assets, including airbases & planes, were wireframe. You had a nice cockpit view, with MFDs (GPS map, SMS, AA & AG radars AFAIK) and an impressive level of detail given the limitations. I also remember a cool loadout screen, where you could select a nice choice of ordinance (AGM-65D ; AGM-65E, AGM-88 HARM, Durandal, such refinements were awesome for the time).
Loadout screen
In flight
I remember when I tried it for the first times with my father (an aviation enthusiast). We weren't able to move the plane "or fire a single bullet", as he said it. The manual was very rich and it took us time to figure out the basics of flights, without speaking of using the weaponry systems.
Also the "combat environement" was correctly rendered, when you had to strike an objective in enemy territory, climbing above 500 feet was nearly suicidal as you suddenly got locked by EWR that sent you Mig-23, 25, 29, 31, SAMs, etc... When you kept low, flying too close of an enemy military base rewarded you by scary flak barrages, that was cool.
War Room map
Even landing was challenging. After crash (yeah it happened often) you had an analysis of what got wrong with your landing. I will always remember "Sink rate too high". That was my most common error. It was not rare to be surprised by a Mig on landing, so I was prone to "rush" on the runway. But the vertical & horizontal velocities were carefully tracked, and no off-runway was tolerated. It was strict military landing.
Notice the ILS ! (the cockpit is not the same than above, that was the Commodore 64 version, I think)
Pass over a runway
Main menu (mission selection, and YES there was a P2P Network Multiplayer mode !!)
Loading screen, 16 colors art !
Dev team : 3 people. Yeah.
Good memories
Then I got a PC, Compaq with 386 Processor, Win 3.1. Upgraded it to 486 with arithmetic coprocessor quickly. Then the Pentiums & Win 95 came in, but it took some time before I got my hands on one of those, I directly switched to Win 98 AFAIR (not a bad thing, indeed !)...
Some of those items are quite Fallout-esque
---------- Post added at 07:04 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:33 PM ----------
My first one. It is sitting in a corner (litteraly) of my parent's house and still works perfectly.
Notice that it had both a cartridge port in a console fashion that directly booted the inserted game on power up, or the "Basic OS", and a 3'5" disc port ("thick", not like the PC ones), that allowed to run programs/games through the "OS" (you had to type "run nameofprogram" and it worked). The cartridge games worked the best, honestly. The disk-loaded programs were prone to loading errors, but they also could be more complex. The first space-related program I had was an astronomical software, that gave you the angles and the positions of the planets in the sky on 10,000 years or so. I was a bit young to understand it, but it worked well. Pure maths. There was some graphical display though, with stars as pixels with letters near them.
I never finished Burnin' Rubber, the cartridge "24h Le Mans" game that was bundled with the computer. It was insanely hard near the end, as a lot of games were. I also remember "Crazy Cars II", I loved that one because it allowed you to drive freely a Ferrari F-40 (nice car, certainly) on a road network that included Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. You had a map with the road numbers and all, police cars were trying to ram you and you had to go from town A to town B in a limited time, it was pretty cool (sadly, the computer resources did not allowed to render town).
But the game that impressed me as I was a young boy, and that probably ultimately led me to Orbiter and other simulations, was "F-16 Combat Pilot". It was a simulation as precise as the platform could provide. Display was reduced to the minimal to free simulation resources : 4 colors (you could have 16 !), the ground was a flat green surface with a grid of points to render the altitude and speed feeling (that was smart !), and all other assets, including airbases & planes, were wireframe. You had a nice cockpit view, with MFDs (GPS map, SMS, AA & AG radars AFAIK) and an impressive level of detail given the limitations. I also remember a cool loadout screen, where you could select a nice choice of ordinance (AGM-65D ; AGM-65E, AGM-88 HARM, Durandal, such refinements were awesome for the time).
Loadout screen
In flight
I remember when I tried it for the first times with my father (an aviation enthusiast). We weren't able to move the plane "or fire a single bullet", as he said it. The manual was very rich and it took us time to figure out the basics of flights, without speaking of using the weaponry systems.
Also the "combat environement" was correctly rendered, when you had to strike an objective in enemy territory, climbing above 500 feet was nearly suicidal as you suddenly got locked by EWR that sent you Mig-23, 25, 29, 31, SAMs, etc... When you kept low, flying too close of an enemy military base rewarded you by scary flak barrages, that was cool.
War Room map
Even landing was challenging. After crash (yeah it happened often) you had an analysis of what got wrong with your landing. I will always remember "Sink rate too high". That was my most common error. It was not rare to be surprised by a Mig on landing, so I was prone to "rush" on the runway. But the vertical & horizontal velocities were carefully tracked, and no off-runway was tolerated. It was strict military landing.
Notice the ILS ! (the cockpit is not the same than above, that was the Commodore 64 version, I think)
Pass over a runway
Main menu (mission selection, and YES there was a P2P Network Multiplayer mode !!)
Loading screen, 16 colors art !
Dev team : 3 people. Yeah.
Good memories
Then I got a PC, Compaq with 386 Processor, Win 3.1. Upgraded it to 486 with arithmetic coprocessor quickly. Then the Pentiums & Win 95 came in, but it took some time before I got my hands on one of those, I directly switched to Win 98 AFAIR (not a bad thing, indeed !)...