I still find this excerpt from the Wap 1.5 page kind of funny. "MIDI music in particular tends to hog a lot of processor capacity."
As usual, technology marches on.

Yeah, back in the day playing MIDIs, especially on Windows, was surprisingly processor-intensive.  I could never figure it out myself, apparently the Roland soundfont included with Windows was hard to decode or something.  It was bad enough that MIDI playback would actually stutter--badly--when the processor was taxed.  Then again, that was in the days of Pentiums and PIIs for which even mp3 decoding was a chore.

I still remember trying to coax Winamp into playing mp3's on a 486/66... it was an uphill battle, but I did ultimately get it to work--by forcing the mp3 plugin to decode at 8-bit quarter-resolution (i.e. 11kHz).  It murdered the sound quality, but at least I got to listen to my music!

That's weird, I don't remember having much trouble with it, and I remember using computers as far back as Windows 3.1.
Granted, I didn't listen to a lot of music on the computer until around Windows Me *shudder*.
I mostly stuck to CD players for dedicated music.

@Eggbertx: I imagine the sound cards on your old computers just supported MIDI natively up to the point where your computer was modern enough that software-based MIDI just wasn't an issue anymore. There was that sweet spot right in-between where computers were weak and some systems still needed to rely on that crappy software-based MIDI implementation from Microsoft that's common on all systems now, though.

@Fat Cerberus: That's kind of strange, I thought Microsoft specifically converted the sound bank to DLS format so that it was lighter on resources. (The original patch set was actually just a binary ROM on Roland chips for synthesizers, I believe.) Hell, Microsoft's Wavetable synth doesn't even support neat and interesting things about MIDI like chorus and reverb effects. I guess it was just expensive no matter what at the time.

Yeah, I was thinking that might be the case. They weren't exactly cheap pieces of junk, but they definitely weren't super high end either.

On an unrelated note (but still relevant to the thread in general), as if I didn't have too many pipe dream projects already, I'm sure some of you guys are probably fans Homestar Runner so I'm sure you'll be able to appreciate this.
This technically isn't really a screenshot since I made it in GIMP as a mockup, but it eventually will be a miniSphere game launcher. Assuming it actually gets anywhere. Ideally it would select a random computer (Tandy, exploded Tandy, Compy, Corpy, shotgunned Compy, Lappy, Compe, Lappier) and instead of email titles, it would show game titles.

That's awesome.  Yeah, Homestar Runner was the best thing about the 00s internet.  Shame the creators moved onto bigger and better things around 2009 and just kind of left the site to rot.  Pretty soon Flash will be totally obsolete and the cartoons won't even be watchable anymore.

I'm kind of surprised they never ran ads on that site.  Guess they made enough money from merchandise to keep it running without them.

@DaVince I think it didn't help that for a long time all my computers had just enough RAM to run the operating system on them.  4MB for Win95, 16MB for Win98, 64MB for XP, 512MB for Vista... so even light multitasking would cause a ton of HDD thrashing and hit the system even harder than usual.

Yeah, Homestar Runner was the best thing about the 00s internet.  Shame the creators moved onto bigger and better things around 2009 and just kind of left the site to rot. 

That's unfortunately inevitable, but at least they still occasionally update it.

Pretty soon Flash will be totally obsolete and the cartoons won't even be watchable anymore.

That's pretty much the reason why I wanted to recreate the Java on the Brain applets. Originally because the Java browser plugin had turned into a piece of junk, and then because it no longer worked at all. The Brothers Chaps did say that they're experimenting with different solutions to solve the issue though. And the flash player is one of the very few plugins that browsers still support because of how ubiquitous it is.
The Java plugin turning into a piece of junk is why I gave up on JavaSphere.

I'm kind of surprised they never ran ads on that site.  Guess they made enough money from merchandise to keep it running without them.

I always appreciated that fact. H*R was (and still is) 100% awesome.

I have to say, I would most definitely use that H*R startup game. Make sure it includes Strong Bad spewing out a bunch of randomized lines!

That's awesome.  Yeah, Homestar Runner was the best thing about the 00s internet.  Shame the creators moved onto bigger and better things around 2009 and just kind of left the site to rot.  Pretty soon Flash will be totally obsolete and the cartoons won't even be watchable anymore.

You might want to take another look at the website...

(I've seen glimpses of their new design as well, which relies on YouTube embeds for all the videos, with higher quality audio as well.)

I have to say, I would most definitely use that H*R startup game. Make sure it includes Strong Bad spewing out a bunch of randomized lines!

I was actually considering doing that, but I'm not sure how appropriate that would be for a game launcher.

I decided to pick my Asteroids clone that uses only Shapes/Transforms (as opposed to images or spritesets) and the font for "PRESS SPACE", and it actually does stuff now. In retrospect, I should have used this for my entry into the Ludum Dare game jam. I might have been able to finish it (maybe) and it would have had a unique look.

This is looking very nice and faithful so far!

(Though I have to disagree that it's a unique look - the Vectrex did it in 1982, after all. )

I'm going to guess that the ship is drawn as a LineLoop?  Looks really nice, and it's great to see more and more people get some mileage out of the Galileo classes.  @Flying Jester would be proud because I nicked the idea for them straight from TurboSphere.

On an unrelated note, seeing things like this in action does make me think I should add an "auto" resolution option that makes the window resizable and also to use the OS native resolution in fullscreen mode...

(Though I have to disagree that it's a unique look - the Vectrex did it in 1982, after all. )

I meant compared to the entries in the game jam. I didn't see any other vector graphics-style games posted.

I'm going to guess that the ship is drawn as a LineLoop?  Looks really nice, and it's great to see more and more people get some mileage out of the Galileo classes.  @Flying Jester would be proud because I nicked the idea for them straight from TurboSphere.

On an unrelated note, seeing things like this in action does make me think I should add an "auto" resolution option that makes the window resizable and also to use the OS native resolution in fullscreen mode...

It does, and I wrote a helper class to make working with rotating, translating, and scaling a bit easier.

I posted the screenshots in the Discord so I may as well post them here too. On a whim, I decided to write a Wavefront .obj model parser to experiment with 3D drawing in miniSphere. It's extremely preliminary, but here's what I've got so far. The screenshots are of a correctly loaded but not correctly (yet) drawn Suzanne, a built-in Blender model: