Hehehe. Neat! I always keep a CRT around to play my old consoles. I am a big fan of the Mattel Intellivision (and home-brew programmer too) and once in a while I launch the console on my 32" Sony Trinitron television set. Now, that’s a glorious picture – best of breed from a long forgotten age.
I must admit, I never considered hooking up my PC to the TV to play Thimbleweed Park (or any of my old adventure games) for extra retro-pleasure. I think I may just have to.
Against all odds, an authentic 4:3 CRT display is still incomparable, if you want to play a point & click game! Unfortunately, I don’t have one any more - only a ten-years-old 4:3 tube TV, predestined for old consoles.
Then again, my eyes are more grateful when I play on a modern LCD device.
CRT TV’s won’t typically do 640x480 VGA resolution - the Commodore 1942 is a bi-sync that does usual 15KHz 480i TV plus 31.5Khz VGA. Would be interesting to see if you could get it running on a regular TV tho.
Hm… I would love to see this feature in the game and the other TWP fans will stone me to death for the following, but: Instead of adding new little features and stuff like this, why don’t put the time for the work into the ports and a brand new game from Ron Gilbert? (I’m talking about the features that are not necessary for the game itself like the floppy sound or the pixel perfect mode.)
…especially when it comes to some few sound effects. As we know, some new ports are already in the works. And, he can not start a new game project until he has “opened” the TWP Arcade.
Well, Ron said that TWP sales were not enough to start working on a new game right now, so I think that it makes sense to add new stuff & embellishments to the existing game, assuming that this wouldn’t postpone the ports.
The problem is, that adding new features could introduce new bugs or even break the game at a place where you haven’t thought about. So the “20 minutes” could be “one day” or more. (But of course I don’t know your/Ron’s code… :))
Yes and no. That depends on the stuff you add. And you could add new stuff nearly forever, because everyone has new ideas. If we look at TWP, Ron had already added a lot of new stuff or is planning new stuff. A good example is …
… the arcade. Adding a floppy sound might take 20 minutes. But then there is the Arcade, the Ransom-swear-DLC, …
He could use the time to work on new prototypes, fix bugs, polish the ports and do more ports or other things that generates (more) money for a new game.