Re: audio game market and audio game status around the world
Well, most audiogames come from the us.
I am also blind, from birth.
In 1989 I was introduced to my first computer of sorts.
A language master se, it had some word games on that and it was fine for a while.
In 1993 I was introduced to my first computer a keynote gold 1850, this was a voice card in a now non existant toshiba t 1850 series with ms dos 5.00.
This lasted me till 2008 when it finally died.
During its life I worked on it with mastertouch 1.33 and keysoft 1.33f and did word processing.
it had duxbury on it but I never ever managed to work with that.
It had wordperfect on it and while I was told how to use 5.1 I never really used it.
In 1995 while on the way home I dropped the computer on my foot.
The box was never the same afterward.
Still I got it updated to dos 6.22 and so on and so on.
Round this time though dos while a real good os, was fast outgrowing my needs.
No one had told me to try windows 3.1 though and I had never asked to use it.
The new box I got was a toshiba sattelite 310cds.
It was an real upgrade from the old 386sx with monocrome display, 4mb of ram and a 256kbp card.
It was now a 8mb shared chips and tech card, able to do 256kb colour and 16 bit and 32 bit true colours.
It also had sound, I never had sound till then, with a gemini sound synth from dolphin computers and hal 2.0 I started to get into the win95 ecosystem.
This also ended with me having a xircom cm56g a 56kbps pcmcia credit card modem which enabled me to get on the net.
Up till now I had achieved a few things.
On the keynote I had been through trial and error to modify my cmos to tell it that I was using a colour display, this meant I could take ownership of the monocrome memmory on my video card and make it part of the memmory I had.
I was also able to along with dos 6.22, obtain norton utilities 7 and then 8, and quarterdeck expander emmory qemm 7 eventually upgrading to 8 when I found out how to get access to it.
With all this stuff in my posession I started to game.
Up to then, I had fiddled with disks my dad had, wolf3d, agent, dave, cat, morce code tutor and a few others just fiddled about.
Later on while at school I got friendly with an autistic geek wno had a lot of old style mojo game disks and prism game disks.
Out of all these a game we enjoyed playing was intergalactic battle, a menu driven graphical game.
Igb was not playable, but the turns were so you could make your choices, it would go to graphics mode and your actions would run.
Round this time I got into the net, my first site owned by paul henrichson had a few games on it.
Also the audyssey magazine, 17 issues of it.
I spent ages reading, learning about the games.
I never had a chance to access a bbs or compuserve at all.
My geek friend got the net before I did, it was interesting you looked up info and mucked about.
Spam back then didn't exist as such.
If a site said we want to subscribe you to something or install our software and get you to look at adds you just did it, if they said they would give you something they usually did.
I never took advantages for those things, xdrive was the first cloud drive but it never lasted to long.
One thing I did take advantage of was what was then mp3.com
Got there, and got asked to put my name in to view a file I did and got subscribed to a news letter and got adds on my system I had no interest.
I ignored it, 6 months later a message popped up, thanking me for viewing the adds and asking me to enter my interests saying I would get a cd.
After that the software was uninstalled.
6 weeks later I got a cd of interesting but weird stuff.
Sadly that just like free internet is no more.
I was happy I was round back then though.
Windows 95 didn't even have much in the way of security updates.
I was able to update to 1998 se a little later on and a swan smart 56kb modem to boot.
In 1998 I also obtained a software upgrade to hal 4.0 then 5.0.
Amongst the improvements was a synth called orphius1.
That was good in a way because my gemini through over use had gotten dry several times and had to get serviced/ replaced at least twice.
In fact when I took the system to get repaired the second time, I was recomended to upgrade and was given the upgrade in exchange for my synth and postage.
Well that was all ok but things get old.
I had by this time played some of the bsc titles and also an early prototype of shades of doom.
There were the pcs games, cops, lonewolf, shooting range math panzas in north africa and others.
But I had no idea how to buy them and I don't know if I would have anyway I never really played that much zcode, tads and adventure game toolkit were my babies cosmoserve was my favourite title in the games.
In the year of 2001, came the truth, even with all my hacks and modifications, the old dos box was falling apart and the old 310 wasn't doing much better.
I still have the first box, but after reformatting the cds, I traded it into my gym instructer for 2 dvds of mp3s and that was about it.
My next was my introduction to university, a nec versa premium.
It ran xp just barely with a 128gb ram stick, a 20gb hard drive, a slightly better intel graphics card, a crook fan, and the wish to get stuck and not clear its buffers.
2 years of reformats sometimes weekly followed.
Often I had to return to my cds still not traded just yet to complete work and what a hastle that was.
Gaming was out of the question, the internal modem was nice though, I think I used a soundmax card or was it yamaha it may have been that still with a hardware midi synth.
By this time I was using jaws 4.5 and with smas 6.0.
But it was horrible there were no mirror drivers or dcms or any chaining.
Basically, you had a registry and chain ini hack that went like this.
If exist video card run screen reader driver.
Screen reader driver loads video card.
videocard loads screen reader.
Screenreader a loads screen reader b, the last reader loads video card, video card loads kernal and os.
That was fine but if you uninstalled screen reader a or b or did out of order or started a and b, suddenly it was broken even if I was carefull.
Often this resulted in a non booting machine.
The same would happen if I had a driver update for the display.
And even if they booted, the system wouldn't work with either reader.
To fix this a full reformat was required.
However if I wasn't on my toes, I could break the chain easily.
So every couple weeks I reformatted because in haste I hit the wrong button.
Luckily the nec didn't last long, during a bios update the main board started beeping and beeping and beeping.
In panic I turned off the system, the board died, it got hot, and it blew up and I was happy.
Using my insurence cash I was back to a toshiba sattelite this time an a10 which somehow I still have even though its fan, keyboard and cd drive are both useless.
It ran xp home, had double the ram of my nec, worked with a 40gb hard drive, and this time I got an external cd writer which I still have.
For a while things went fine, I built loads and loads of disk backups I still have a bunch of disks all of which are old now.
I still have my flopydisks to.
Due to jaws being quella I had a floppy disk drive and was able to transfer all my dos games from failing disks to a 100mb folder which for unknown reasons I still own.
By now its 2009, my old toshiba the a10 keyboard due to me gaming from everything from lworks to bsc, to sod, to gma tank commander 1x to well all sorts was failing mostly the arrow keys.
I got an external board but never bothered using it fully for anything bar games.
In 2008 my dos box died and I tried to get another without success.
My next machine was an old now toshiba same type but a tecra a9, still intel but a core2 with windows vista, downgraded to xp pro.
There I had an issue jaws needed to be upgraded to pro to work with xp pro and that was all.
Dcm was about and I managed to get the cash to upgrade to hal 12.0.
This came with easyreader express which I should have got but didn't in responce I simply got an apology and a code in the mail for a full version of easyreader 6.0 a bonus you may be sure.
By this time I was migrating to hard drives a 320 which I dropped in 2013 followed by a 500gb drive that died 2 years back and 2 large drives of 1tb which also died I have 2 seagate drives now.
In 2013 or there abouts my university and job hunting life came to an end.
There was no funding, and I just couldn't afford migrating to win7, the old system 120gb hard drive and all needed to be replaced, its my linux muck about box now.
I also wanted to take advantage of the new 150-300n wireless standard.
The next box is the current one an i5 3rd gen intel, an now outdated hd8600 amd 1gb card and win7 pro.
I have drives, a cd writer and games.
Sadly I lost all my analog internal cards and use a realtech card still good enough and the effects for a laugh are not half bad.
Game wize I play just about anything audio sadly because dosbox does not want to work on x64 for me, I can't play the classics, its also harder to play the old audiogames.
Things like bavisofts titles I have been given, played, beat and binned.
It also is the end of the major players, the only active player in the field is l-works with draconis and gma still probably on the side but noone knows anymore.
Pcs is quiet usagames with the death of its owner is gone, jim kitchen and his stuff are gone, still online but nothing doing.
The rest are no more.
With bgt and a few things smaller developers have come on.
The japanese have made a killing with developers as yung as 12 making actual professional games, there is also 1 or 2 french games the most successfull is crazyparty.
Over that though there is not much left.
In new zealand we have sonnargames the company I test for which seems to be doing well, sadly they are a smartphone previder only.
I did test some of their games etc but still.
The game market I don't know about.
Its been static for some time and only saved from death because of bgt and the fact l-works does streams for audio games and other things bar that and the japanese there is not much going on.
Eurofly from slavakia is one game which is new,with code7 by goodwolf studios, and a heroes call by outofsight well maybe a revolution is starting, who knows.
As for the game market in general, I don't know.
we started off fast paced and action packed, now bar the renpy system we hardly turn over a game a year or anything really new.
A lot of the games are old and well lets face it we won't be needing gaming grade machines any time soon.
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