Select a article :

• 11/16/2020 - Chasm: The Rift Mapping
• 4/16/2020 - The Old Unreal Weapon Sounds
• 4/6/2020 - One Must Fall 2097 Theory
• 4/4/2020 - Hard Drive Corrupt
• 3/28/2020 - Doom Alpha .EXE edits
• 12/23/2017 - Gotek Floppy Emulator
• 12/18/2017 - Vintage Computer Scalper Rant
• 12/10/2017 - Doom 24th Anniversary Article

"I think I just spawned a Chasm: The Rift mapping/modding community."

Well, this is something! My tutorial video (from December 2019) about the basics of Chasm: The Rift's level editor has spawned a small community of mappers and modders, which they now run a Discord server titled "The Shadow Zone". The screenshot above you is a user addon (episode) being made by Jezzah and Jason Mumford. Progress on this user addon I believe started to show back in early October 2020.

Chasm: The Rift rarely (if not at all.) had user-levels and addons. However back in 2011, a few YouTube videos were uploaded about a Wolfenstein addon being worked on by "Sunny" for Chasm, which sadly was abandoned I believe and has not seen a release. I also originally thought my tutorial video wouldn't get as much attention and I had other projects and personal life to go through meaning I didn't get time to document other things I pulled off in editing Chasm. However due to the effort shown by Jezzah and Jason Mumford, I am really glad I uploaded that video because we might be seeing new things for Chasm in the foreseeable future.

4/16/2020 - The Old Unreal Weapon Sounds

What you are seeing here is my Pentium II 450MHz with 256MB RAM, and a Diamond Viper V550 running Unreal build 219, which is the last version of Unreal before some or most of the sounds were replaced by the ones by Sonic Mayhem, which for most people would know them for the Quake II soundtrack. So why did the sounds change in build 220? Well according to a friend of mine "LeoTCK", The sound changes was supposed to be included in the "Botpack" expansion which would later become the stand-alone game most would know and love as Unreal Tournament.

So then the changed sounds especially the weapon sounds was put into build 220 possibly to match up with Unreal Tournament. I honestly preferred the old weapon sounds despite the new ones being 16-bit while the old ones were just 8-bit audio. Nowadays the original sounds can be played again in the form of a mutator that works with versions 224v or higher. (Unless you just want to play the unpatched version for old times sake)

Anyways, I'm gonna log out now, expect more articles to come up sometime in the future. ~THEBaratusII

4/6/2020 - One Must Fall 2097 Theory

So after playing around in One Must Fall 2097, I took a look at the Wikipedia page about the game, and I just now heard recently about a 3D sequel being planned in 1996, but was cancelled. However the series instead got this sequel titled "One Must Fall: Battlegrounds". So I could be having a theory here.

What if OMF:BG could be the sequel from 1996? or perhaps it might be one of those "Sequels we never got". If I remember correctly I saw Usenet posts from back in the day about rumors of a 3D version of One Must Fall being in development but would turn out to be Unreal (which didn't release till 1998).

A friend of mine looked into a file that was recovered on a zip file containing certain 3D models for Unreal, containing a exe file named "ED2.EXE" You can see his BetaArchive post about it here. There was mentions of two robots, one named the Stealth and one named the Juggarnaut. Which adds another theory on this canned sequel to OMF2097...

What if ED2.EXE (possible very early Unreal Engine?) was meant for this sequel to OMF2097, or maybe... What if Unreal was planned as the sequel to OMF2097? So perhaps that's one of my theories here. Stay tuned for more news, and other possible theories. :P

4/4/2020 - Hard Drive Corrupt

As of the writing of this article it's nearly midnight, so this won't take place in April 3rd...

Before I go on topic, here is a screenshot of me playing a Quake II modification titled "SOG" with a friend of mine. It's like a id Software crossover that was based on "Generations" which had the same idea but id Software would eventually threaten legal action to the developers of Generations which resulted in the modification's development getting canceled. I used to have the original screenshot but *I will get to that later in this article* but I still had the screenshot that was on my Twitter.

So yesterday, I had Windows XP installed on my main rig on a different hard drive for old-times sake! It was fun until the drive eventually bit the dust. So what happened was while I was playing through Unreal Tournament singleplayer, I was going through DM-Liandri and all of a sudden, a Blue Screen of Death occurred.

I tried to reset the machine to boot back to Windows XP but I was given the message from the BIOS that there was no boot drive and told me to restart the computer. So I went into the boot menu only to notice the HDD with Windows XP didn't detect at all. It doesn't even help that its a old Samsung hard drive from a old HP Touchsmart.

I could perhaps use another spare hard drive but I'm not sure if the drive is any good, and if I wanted to get another hard-drive, I could've just shell out the money on a cheap SSD instead. And yes, I am writing this on my Windows 10 partition. It's a shame that my Windows XP nostalgia journey didn't last long because of a dead hard drive.

That's it for this article, hopefully I,ll have more to talk about someday.

12/18/2017 - Vintage Computer Scalper Rant

This was a rant article that I had to get out of my chest for a while.

People be bumping up prices for their vintage computers like it was a goldmine, but the facts are the matters of shipping damages, bad compacitors, non-working power supplies, etc. This term of bullfuckery is called scalping (or price gouging as some of my friends call it.) and eBay is no joke when it came to this.

I became stressed about it because not only about eBay but the lack of vintage computer finds on thrift shops and flea markets in my location! I mean sure they are cheap to get on there but it's a rather hit or miss when it comes to this. To make matters worse, the scalpers go ahead buying these vintage computer hardware from other eBay sellers or some flea market or thrift shop etc. and then they resell them in a higher price because PROFIT! and they make excuses not to lower the cost to make at least somewhat affordable.

And what makes even more worse for the people wanting to preserve those hardware is the scalper threaten to do damage to the machine if it wasn't doing any profit, like destroying the hardware, scrapping CPU pins for gold (That isn't worth SH*T!) etc. Here's an advice to those planning to scalp on eBay, It isn't worth it! it's not like those plastic action figures or rare DVD collections that could bump up in value, and not to mention not everything would last forever! Remember that vintage computers out there can be known to bite the dust at some point because of how old the components are, I mean sure people can recap the bad compacitors and other bad parts but still! This scalping issue is probably why people rather use emulators such as DOSBox for example.

12/10/2017 - Doom 24th Anniversary Article

The article celebrates the 24th birthday of DOOM which released in December 10, 1993. I went ahead to tell my story of my experiences with Doom.

It changed my life as a six year old, my mother was into horror movies and it used to have me scared a lot, not to mention the nightmares I had when I slept hehe. Anyway I was introduced to the game both from Xbox Live Arcade (it came out around in late 2006) and on PC (via Doom 95 Shareware). The first time I played it was a funny one. Remember me being scared of horror movies my mother watches? That started to go away after I started playing Doom on those platforms, I won't forget the time my mother let me play cooperative with her Xbox Live friends.

Another fun fact here is that, I remember visiting the id Software website just to discover other Doom engine games like Raven Software's Heretic and Hexen, and even drooled on screenshots of the Quake games! I've created a screenshot reimagining my young self visiting the Quake webpage via IE6.