[-empyre-] Games, histories and preservation

[Paul Brown]

On 19 Mar 2008, at 00:51, Julian Oliver wrote:

> i remember seeing the Australia Council throw large swathes of cash at
> CDROM based art in the mid-to-late 90's, most of which was made using
> the proprietary Macromedia Director.
>
> nowadays there are very few Director-based projects made more than  
> a few
> years ago that function properly on modern hardware. this is due to
> Director's internal time structure being (it seems to me) metered  
> on the
> basis of CPU clock-cycles, not system time.  this means any animation
> will play too fast and any event management implicating timed events
> will be grossly out-of-sync.

As someone who has been using Director since it first appeared in the  
late 1980's (as VideoWorks) I'd just like to post a point of order  
here.  There's nothing wrong with Directors timing structures (see my  
pieces here:  http://www.paul-brown.com/GALLERY/TIMEBASE/INDEX.HTM  
which should play stably over different platforms/cpus etc... [and  
note there is a mixture of Java and Director/Shockwave pieces linked  
from that page])  The problem was that - especially in the early days  
- people didn't use them correctly and resorted to using wait loops  
and other hacks to time work so performance was based on a specific  
platform/cpu.

But - yes!  it's precisely this problem that makes emulation/ 
reconstruction difficult.  Even i don't really remember what some of  
my early works looked like!

Paul

====
Paul Brown - based in OZ Dec 07 - Apr 08
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Visiting Professor - Sussex University
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html
====