Plugging in old ISA cards is something that hasn’t really been possible since 80486 days. This makes plugging in cool things like Sound Blaster, Adlib, Monster3D and other ISA cards pretty much impossible for modern computers. It also means things like attaching 5.25″ floppy drives and old MFM/RLL drives are also off the table. Well, maybe. 🙂
There have been a few efforts to enabling plugging in ISA boards to modern pc.
dISAppointment that I wrote about before is a USB plugin that exposes an ISA interface.
Uses the LPC (low pin count) interface that still has actual legacy ISA hardware support in any PC with a TPM port on the motherboard.
ISASTM card is a little more involved setup but is able to be slotted into a ISA backplane and address multiple cards with one adapter. It seems to work with soundcards and video cards – though the USB 1.0 interface isn’t quite fast enough. A switch to USB 2 might yield enough bandwidth if Manawyrm has the time.
Mercedes added a ‘jumping’ mode to help you get out of sand and mud, but it turns out it’s pretty fly when pulling into your high end neighborhood too.
Payday 3 is coming out very soon. I played a lot of Payday 1 and Payday 2 over the years – as well as meeting the original voice actors at a PAX West party, unlocking a lot of achievements, and collecting a good bit of cash in my vault. 🙂
In the run-up to the launch, there is a Payday 3 event in which various infamous achievements earned in Payday 2 will unlock free items in Payday 3. All you have to do is link your Payday 2 Steam/Epic/etc account to Starbreeze and then launch Payday 2. Getting the specified achievements in Payday 2 will unlock the special Payday 3 item.
I had already unlocked these achievements in Payday 2, so I logged in and all of them became available to claim (you need to manually claim them from the website). But in doing so, I realized my old character build from years ago wasn’t very good anymore.
Like many modern games, the designers are constantly selling new weapons and gameplay elements as well as tweaking, nerfing, and rebalancing the weapons and gameplay. I’m not a huge fan of this trend personally, but it seems like that’s a ship that has long since sailed. It lets developers continue to cash in on the long tail of games by making some relatively easy to make skins/guns/upgrades and bundle into sellable seasons. Unfortunately, that usually means the gameplay and mastery is in a regular state of flux and goes through serious times of being broken or mechanics being completely unbalanced. You either get on the train and ride, or get left behind.
I for one found this all too annoying as a largely casual gamer these days. I didn’t have time to experiment endlessly with the different new perks and find the Achilles heals of the new powers and weapons. It felt too much like having a second job.
So, I leave that to others and just enjoy the fruits like these from KevKild who does all that grunt work and gives you the fruits of the community’s labors. Pick a build for your style and go. I can affirm his #1 build is ridiculously fun and powerful. Enjoy.
When drawing highly detailed things (fields of flowers, trees, and complex cityscapes) there is a tremendous amount of detail. As it turns out, far, FAR too much detail to actually draw. So how do you draw highly complex detail – without drawing the detail? You draw the effect of detail.
Draw some of the key, close items clearly. You need to have some clearly recognizable individual elements of the subject. Draw them of sufficient size and shape to be easily recognizable without any confusion around them – by not crowding them too close together and enhancing their edges with silhouettes.
Enhance the silhouettes of the key flowers with shadow/darkness. Fill the elements around some of the key items with shadow to highlight the shape of the individual blooms/elements.
As you move back to the background – you keep establishing the key elements (blooms, petals, buds, stalks)
Use the direction of scribbles of the darkness to point the eye towards the key elements (blooms/petals/buds).
Dark tones come forward, lighter elements are pushed towards the back. So use more shadow in closer elements and lighter elements in the background. To get lighter strokes, use less pressure or use a thinner pencil.
Don’t fill all the gaps – move around randomly and leave gaps. You must leave gaps and randomness . Stop every moment or two and see how the wandering of the shadow is going. Is there too much of a grey tangle of lines (too many) – add more dark shadow. If you don’t pay attention, you’ll fill everything in evenly and the giveaway is that it will all be the same overall tone of grey. You want some areas very dark, some light, and some grey.
Architectural drawings
Architecture often has repeated patterns. Capturing the repeating-ness is more important the actual pattern that is repeating.
Closer repeated patterns should be drawn with more detail than the same repeated pattern far away. Follow the same basic design of the close repeated pattern but make it simpler in the far away repeated pattern – your eye will naturally bring the nearer detail to those elements in the background.
If there is a repeated element, draw them all with the same stroke strength and style. This means it’s usually best to do all the repeated elements one after the other to make sure the technique is consistent (pressure, line width, size, etc). This helps you keep them all as symmetrical as possible.
For repeated elements that move away from your camera, draw the closest one with much more detail first, then less and less as you repeat the elements further and further away from the camera. Again, drawing the more detailed ones first helps you ‘summarize’ or make a smaller repeated one match easier.
Another key element to know that capturing the symmetry of the scene is more important than the details of the elements/decorations. Like before, capturing the flow and pattern of the architectural lines is more important than the actual path it takes.
You can also use tone to emphasize form much faster than just using lines
This is one of the better videos showing the filming locations for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Almost all were in Munich, and in my travels I have visited several of these very locations. It is definitely a hobby of mine to seek out fun filming locations near where I’m traveling.
I was lucky enough to catch one of the top three festivals in all of Kyoto, the Heian Shrine’s Jidai Matsuri (Festival of the Ages). Held on October 22nd at noon each year, the festival is primarily composed of a two kilometer, five hour long procession of countless volunteers dressed in historical garb representing Japanese cultural history from the Meiji era all the way back to the Enryaku era in the 780’s.
Everything is painstakingly recreated and researched, going so far as to even make and dye the fabric using the same techniques as they used a thousand years ago. The procession is more like watching a living history museum march by. Not only do famous historical figures and princesses make appearance, but warriors, priests, politicians, merchants, and commoners are all represented.
I wonder how cool this would be if other cultures did a kind of living parade of their heritages as well.
