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Reminds me of certain medical software that runs on Windows Server and has a service that specifically establishes a RDP connection to localhost, where it runs one program that displays an image, and then another program which takes a screenshot to convert that image to another format.
(install of said software includes waiting for Windows to inform you that a service is trying to display some UI, switching to service desktop, establishing said RDP connection [don't forget to click "Remember password"!], then disabling the Windows service that reminds you that some service is trying to display UI)
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@ender said in Mouse cursor on top:
establishes a RDP connection to localhost
Unf. If memory serves, a lot of trickery and a few hacks need to be performed to get that to happen in recent versions...
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@cvi said in Mouse cursor on top:
even a function call is pure magic (there are of course exceptions every now and then, ...
... which are even more magical — stack unwinding and all that stuff).
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
5 years ago, VR wasn't even an acronym.
VR, at least in the form of VRML, has been an acronym since 1994.
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@HardwareGeek that's five people telling me the exact same thing now. Do I get an achievement?
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@Parody said in Mouse cursor on top:
VRML was something I rarely got working in the 90s browsers.
I did quite a bit of playing around in VRML in, probably, the late 90s with occasional tinkering into the early 00s. Unfortunately, it never gained much mainstream popularity. At one time, IIRC, there were three browser plugins, only one of which was anything close to popular, and eventually it was abandoned, too.
It was eventually replaced by X3D. It's reportedly a strict superset of VRML. I've never used (except insofar as VRML is a subset of it), but AFAICT it still lacks browser support.
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@dcon said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
for not knowing TV shows that went out of fashion before I was born.
Lucky for you there's lots of
s around here! (I didn't remember either of those shows)I may be just about the most
of s around here, but I don't remember them either. (INB4: Losing my memory in my old age; my memory was 
long before I acquired my .)
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@HardwareGeek said in Mouse cursor on top:
@dcon said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
for not knowing TV shows that went out of fashion before I was born.
Lucky for you there's lots of
s around here! (I didn't remember either of those shows)I may be just about the most
of s around here, but I don't remember them either. (INB4: Losing my memory in my old age; my memory was long before I acquired my .)Yeah I heard those were terrible times when it comes to memory. You've had to use two whole diskettes just for a single poor quality MP3!
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
@HardwareGeek that's five people telling me the exact same thing now. Do I get an achievement?
I hadn't read the other posts, yet.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
Yeah I heard those were terrible times when it comes to memory. You've had to use two whole diskettes just for a single poor quality MP3!
Just two? You must be using those newfangled HD diskettes! Real Men™ need at least two dozen SSSD 5.25-inch ones.
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@Gurth said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
Yeah I heard those were terrible times when it comes to memory. You've had to use two whole diskettes just for a single poor quality MP3!
Just two? You must be using those newfangled HD diskettes! Real Men™ need at least two dozen SSSD 5.25-inch ones.
Don't forget - you had to constantly swap them because there was only one floppy drive.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Mouse cursor on top:
Unf. If memory serves, a lot of trickery and a few hacks need to be performed to get that to happen in recent versions...
Not on a server, it just opens a second session (you can have 2 sessions active for administration).
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@Gurth said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
Yeah I heard those were terrible times when it comes to memory. You've had to use two whole diskettes just for a single poor quality MP3!
Just two? You must be using those newfangled HD diskettes! Real Men™ need at least two dozen SSSD 5.25-inch ones.
Psh. I can fit plenty of songs on just one of those. It's just notes, people.
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@Gurth said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
Yeah I heard those were terrible times when it comes to memory. You've had to use two whole diskettes just for a single poor quality MP3!
Just two? You must be using those newfangled HD diskettes! Real Men™ need at least two dozen SSSD 5.25-inch ones.
We've moved on to hhddvvddbvd discs.
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@dcon said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gurth said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
Yeah I heard those were terrible times when it comes to memory. You've had to use two whole diskettes just for a single poor quality MP3!
Just two? You must be using those newfangled HD diskettes! Real Men™ need at least two dozen SSSD 5.25-inch ones.
Don't forget - you had to constantly swap them because there was only one floppy drive.
Oh that's right! DOS had virtual drives very early back then!
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@Gribnit said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gurth said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
Yeah I heard those were terrible times when it comes to memory. You've had to use two whole diskettes just for a single poor quality MP3!
Just two? You must be using those newfangled HD diskettes! Real Men™ need at least two dozen SSSD 5.25-inch ones.
Psh. I can fit plenty of songs on just one of those. It's just notes, people.
Yeah, you could fit a lot of MIDI music on a floppy disk.
Speech can be pretty heavily compressed... I wonder how much storage it would take to make a hybrid format that contains MIDI plus a heavily compressed speech track which is auto-tuned to a MIDI instrument? It would've been interesting if storage hadn't advanced quite so quickly and we ended up with a format like that.
edit: upon considering that, I suspect that just decompressing the audio and then auto-tuning it would've probably been a heavy load on processors of that era.
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@brie What’s stopping you from creating this for a hobby?
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@brie Check out Soundex.
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@brie said in Mouse cursor on top:
edit: upon considering that, I suspect that just decompressing the audio and then auto-tuning it would've probably been a heavy load on processors of that era.
You should take a look at this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDrqBYkco-YThere's an explanation of how it's done here:
The Speak & Spell toy implemented something similar in hardware in 1978 (for speech, but they could have made it sing too).
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@brie said in Mouse cursor on top:
Speech can be pretty heavily compressed... I wonder how much storage it would take to make a hybrid format that contains MIDI plus a heavily compressed speech track which is auto-tuned to a MIDI instrument? It would've been interesting if storage hadn't advanced quite so quickly and we ended up with a format like that.
edit: upon considering that, I suspect that just decompressing the audio and then auto-tuning it would've probably been a heavy load on processors of that era.
Wasn't this basically what MODs did? (music trackers) I want to say I did stuff like this with OctaMED way back when.
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@Parody said in Mouse cursor on top:
Wasn't this basically what MODs did? (music trackers) I want to say I did stuff like this with OctaMED way back when.
The samples in MOD files are simply played back at different pitches. It works fine for musical instruments, but not for voice. You could include the voice as a single long sample, but it would make the file huge, since the audio is uncompressed (unless the lyrics are repeated again and again -- you can probably find examples...)
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@Zerosquare said in Mouse cursor on top:
The samples in MOD files are simply played back at different pitches. It works fine for musical instruments, but not for voice. You could include the voice as a single long sample, but it would make the file huge, since the audio is uncompressed (unless the lyrics are repeated again and again -- you can probably find examples...)
In theory, given the processing power of modern computers you could probably just include a set of phonemes and do the processing to combine them in real time. It'd just be a total bear to actually create without a very custom composer program. Also, there's no real reason why the vocal track couldn't be compressed, not these days when the decompressor hardware is so widely available.
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@Zerosquare said in Mouse cursor on top:
You should take a look at this:
X2010 - C64 Demo - Cubase64 by Mahoney (Live footage) – 04:52That's pretty nifty. I'm frankly amazed that they were able to pack enough processing into so few clock cycles to even make it work on the C64. Sounds pretty terrible, but on better hardware I'd think that it could sound a lot better... the fact that they were limited on memory meant that they had to limit the sound to a library of only 255 different waveforms, which meant they had to make a lot of approximations.
On a more powerful microcomputer you could get better sound quality and lay down some MIDI tracks behind the auto-tuned voice track, and it might all sound pretty amazing, for what it was.
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@dkf said in Mouse cursor on top:
In theory, given the processing power of modern computers you could probably just include a set of phonemes and do the processing to combine them in real time. It'd just be a total bear to actually create without a very custom composer program. Also, there's no real reason why the vocal track couldn't be compressed, not these days when the decompressor hardware is so widely available.
That's basically how text-to-speech synthesis works. It's gotten pretty good, but you can still tell that it's a computer voice. To make it sound anything like a real human singing, you'd need more information stored about the subtle vocal qualities that make that track recorded by that human sound different from the same track if it's sung by other humans. If you could capture that, compress it, and recreate it accurately, then the person's voice should even still be identifiable as their own, as opposed to having a generic robot voice singing it.
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@brie said in Mouse cursor on top:
If you could capture that, compress it, and recreate it accurately
… you'd be able to make a lot of money. (For example, it'd let you do computer games where the cast of thousands of NPCs all have unique voices. This is totally out of the question without something like this.) Mind you, the abilities of some people with blending within MODs makes me think this is highly possible; we definitely can control synthesis systems with the fidelity required. The hard part is definitely on the initial capture side, and I'm pretty sure we've not got a good way to map from convenient input formats (e.g., ordinary text, perhaps with “stage directions” added) to an annotated phoneme stream.
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@dkf I don't see why. I'm not talking about mapping from text straight to a digital format; I mean that there would still be a human voice reading it, and I'm talking about mapping that to a compressed digital format.
Text-to-speech has gotten much better at stuff like "make this sound surprised!" or "make this sound angry!" or "emphasize this syllable", and better at predicting when it should do these things so that it sounds almost human. It can get you pretty close to "thousands of NPCs all have unique voices"... but to really make them sound human, I think you'd still need a human in a studio recording their scripts. The biggest cost of that isn't the storage space that all the audio requires, but rather, it's the voice actors and studio time.
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@brie do you want voiceless phonemes combinable with a voice model, or voiced phonemes for joining? I think Soundex operates in the former space but it is lossy. See also the compression schemes for voice.
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@Gribnit Well, what I was originally imagining was something like a very heavily compressed (low bitrate) MP3 containing just the monotone vocal track, which would then be auto-tuned in real time for playback. Extracting the phenomes from the vocal track could probably be used for a more efficient compression system, but it wasn't originally what I had in mind.
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@brie said in Mouse cursor on top:
I'm frankly amazed that they were able to pack enough processing into so few clock cycles to even make it work on the C64.
Yeah, pretty much all of the effects were accomplished by carefully selecting samples from the compression table and doing very minimal math when required. And using a compression format that was conducive to this kind of manipulation.
Still pretty neat.
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@brie said in Mouse cursor on top:
MP3
Might I recommend OPUS instead? I think it's the new format that's all the rage so long as you don't need FLAC-levels of accuracy.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Mouse cursor on top:
@brie said in Mouse cursor on top:
I'm frankly amazed that they were able to pack enough processing into so few clock cycles to even make it work on the C64.
Yeah, pretty much all of the effects were accomplished by carefully selecting samples from the compression table and doing very minimal math when required. And using a compression format that was conducive to this kind of manipulation.
Still pretty neat.
Right... and if I'm not mistaken, their fundamental waveforms themselves were stored in the C64's memory with little or no compression. They just didn't have the clock cycles to spare decompressing anything. Most of the compression was just in finding 255 fundamental waveforms that sounded "close enough" to the desired waveform when they were looped at some desired frequency.
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@brie said in Mouse cursor on top:
Most of the compression was just in finding 255 fundamental waveforms that sounded "close enough" to the desired waveform when they were looped at some desired frequency.
// ... sample['sounds like'] = allSamples[0x69AF] sample['s a fuck'] = allSamples[0x69AF]
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@hungrier You omitted "an" and "ing" :)
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@kazitor what do you think is at 0x69B0?
Pex "Mahoney" Tufvesson's homepage!
