covox

You're thinking of the show A*mazing. And you're right about Bubsy, it's as memorable as it is difficult to win.

I see your Descent 3 and raise you the rest of the Descent series. All classics, and even better now there are engine-ports like D1X and D2X-XL bringing Descents 1 & 2 into glorious OpenGL. Tremendous fun in multiplayer. If you can't stand complex ordinary flight sims, be warned that this makes dogfighting highly enjoyable. Interplay, however, are in the soup due to financial irregularities ("that money was just RESTING in my account!") so you'll probably need to torrent the game.

Probably not. Due to the way Windows works, application-wise you can only pipe sound through one card. Some apps are kind enough to give you a choice of which soundcard, most go with the system default. One way to work around this is by attaching the soundcard (via digital out if possible) to an external amp with plenty of outputs, or try using the black plug (analogue line out for rear speakers) for one and the green plug (analogue line out for front speakers) for the other.

When you say "two green ports on the back", do you mean one belonging to the motherboard's onboard sound and one belonging to a PCI card?

If there are any people out there still after advice, specifically non-programmers who want to write games now but want to contribute to their programming skills for later on: Don't learn Visual Basic 6/Blitz/QuickBASIC/Pascal/Delphi if you can avoid it, as they are showing their age and belong in a museum. Don't jump straight into C/C++ if all you want to write is games, as you will go mad. SOLUTION: As CPUs are now quite fast and Open Source is everywhere, there are loads of high-level scripting (or "interpreted") languages just begging to be used. Prominent ones include Python, Ruby, Perl, .NET and Java; all of which have bindings to multimedia frameworks such as the SDL library (which is a complete framework sort of like DirectX, but freely available for Windows/OS X/Linux). My suggestion is to download Python, get the official tutorial (READ IT WHILE STARTING, no excuses) and some of the many internet references (this one is good for absolute beginners to coding, this one is good if you're versed in another language and want a crash course), and have a go. All you need is a handy text editor with syntax highlighting. I use gedit but you Windows sufferers would be after something like Notepad++. Then, once you're fairly suave with lists and dictionaries and strings and loops and classes (if you are unsure about any of those things, keep tutorialing on), install Pygame. This gives you a whole buncha new methods for loading images, blitting them, controlling framerate with a timer, playing music etc. It comes with a multitude of examples, and (nearly) every game made in Python is source code, giving you plenty of reference material. (Python prides itself for enforcing readable source code). As far as difficulty goes I wouldn't rate it more taxing than Blitz Plus. The two are different, as Python has a lot more in common with languages like Java and C++ as opposed to BASIC. Learn Python and you pick up and use OOP principles, so you actually LEARN SOMETHING!

Well bugger me with a fish fork. It's still here. Consider me suprised that the forum is still alive after endless reorgs and "OH NOS TOO MANY UNSKILLED EEJIOTS" town cryings. I'm still about-ish, sometimes lurking amidships. The new debate forum needs a some more drawn-out angsty prose arguments, those make great reading on rainy afternoons I'm in the middle of an engineering double-degree (Chemical/Process with CompSci on the side), I've developed a healthy addiction for Scotland's favourite indie band, I've ditched Clicktools, my lappy runs Ubuntu full time with the fancy graphics module, and I've started having a go at remaking a certain overlooked classic in Pygame. I think that's everything. Ta ta for now. [shamelessplug]Oh, and be sure to visit ld.net.au for super-cheap web/shell/subversion hosting [/shamelessplug]