Mastodawn

Michael Marshall 3d ago

Now that I’ve got the Chronicle program on GitHub ready for testing, I’m kind of at a loss as to how to get exposure for it.
The thing that makes me nervous above all is that even if I found a place where I could sort of put it out there, if people found out it was vibe coded, they might just tell me to fuck off.
It's one of those really divisive things and I kind of see it from both sides but it's a complication that I don't want to have to deal with.
I basically just want as many people to test and tell me what they think of it.
Donations would be an absolute fucking bonus!
I'm just kind of at a bit of a loss.
This is the link to it for what it's worth.

https://github.com/harry6116/Chronicle
#Accessibility #chronicle #Development #AI #Blind #History #preservation #newspapers

GitHub - harry6116/Chronicle

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GitHub

André Polykanine 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy Yes, you're right, especially here there are lot of far-left aggressive mobs that would tell you to fuck off. Tell them to fuck off themselves, they don't like it, may they go touch grass.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@menelion Hundred percent in agreement regarding the anti-AI crowd.
The saying that I always use when thinking about people like this is a very obscure Australian one that used to be said by people in the Navy.
The word is dilligaf, which stands for do I look like I give a fuck.
You say that word with gaff on the end.
dilligaf!

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion I had an anti-AI person come after me yesterday. when I wanted to understand more about their views, I was told they weren't getting into it with me and if I didn't understand why it mattered then I should consider the conversation closed. It makes me wonder if people have their own opinions or just parrot what they red. AI is good. AI is bad. AI is AI. It's also not going anywhere, and people are going to have to deal with that. AI is also a stupid buzzword, but so is cloud, and we all use that everywhere.. so... here we are.

Michael Marshall

@lerven @menelion That’s right. I’m a voice actor as well, don’t get a tonne of work because that’s a nature of the industry, if you listen to some of the doom and gloom, AI has killed us.
Bullshit! I agree that it's hurt some but for me, AI has been so good for my voice.
You've just got to adapt which is one of those other buzz words that I hate.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion Adapting really isn't a buzzword though. it's what humankind has been doing since whenever humankind started. I used to tell my students that adapting is something we do well. a lot of my students lost their vision later in life. I would tell them that the thing we as people who are blind do is it to not only adapt, ut to overcome.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion Yes I understand what you’re saying.
It’s just that when you’re constantly told to adapt every single day in the VoiceOver industry, it’s sort of loses its power.
As I've always said, if a person can write 5000 lines of code on their own manually, more power to them but I tell you what, AI has allowed me and there's that buzz word again to build on ideas that I could never have done otherwise.
It's a seismic shift in my life and I don't say that lightly.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion It allowed me to get super liam 1.5 out. I would have never done that if not for Claude.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion Something I’m trying to do is get some old windows Audio games to play.
Grizzly Gulch is one.
it’s being a total bitch because of the way it was built and the way the files were named.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion As long as that doesn't mean you are reverse engineering any part of it, I have no problem with this, but I feel we start getting into ethical blurryness when we are disassembling someone's work without their permission.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion I wish I could find someone to speak to from the company that went out of business.
There’s just nothing of them anywhere.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion I unfortunately never spoke to jeff, but I know at the time bavisoft was very finatical about protecting their properties. I also have real concerns that disassembling old games will enable behavior by others to do the same. When does that spill over into disassembling my current work? I can be overprotective of the audio game space at times I suppose.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion I totally understand your concerns, I’m certainly not discounting them.
For what it’s worth it’s been far from successful and I’m at the point of giving up on it.
There's only so much you can do without source code for one thing.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion Thank you for listening to my concerns. At the end of the day, that is all I can ask for :)

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion Absolutely I’ve listened and I totally understand.
Your protective of your craft and you've been added a lot longer than me.
All I'm trying to do is get this game so I can play it on a modern system and it's proving very challenging.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion Best I suggest is trying either compatibility mode or spinning up a windows 7 vm. neither of which are awesome options TBH.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion Compatibility mode does not work for this game on Windows 11 and as for Windows 7, I don’t know how that would go with modern builds of NVDA for one thing.
Even tried getting a hold of certain DLL’s to make things nice and smooth but that didn’t do much.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy I'm about 129 percent sure modern dll's just won't work. some folks got my old games running in win 11, but I have a feeling bavisoft used an even older code stack which could have used direct x 7 or some such. I forget what the lastest version of NVDA that will run on win 7 is, but I think it is out there somewhere.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven My knowledge is probably nowhere near as good as yours but you are quite right, from what I have deduced, Grizzly Gulch ran a Direct sound stack meant for Windows 98 and NT which makes sense because the game was released in 2000.

@TheVoiceGuy @lerven The thing that I've found is, while you can get these older games to run on windows 10/11, there will be weird issues that you can't make sense of. I tried to play Monkey Business on 10/11 and the stereo field just isn't as wide as it was on XP or maybe 7. I think it's because of the emulation of the old direct sound layer in WASAPI not being completely 100% faithful. I'm still trying to figure it out, or create some kind of minimalist platform for playing older games on that doesn't introduce a ton of overhead.

@TheVoiceGuy @lerven I'm thinking more and more that Wine for Windows, while that sounds counterproductive, would actually be very useful for this sort of thing.

Michael Marshall 2d ago

@Bri @lerven This is certainly something I’m thinking about. I don’t know how it would go because last time I tried this, I ran an audio game that was far more modern and it barely ran at all.

@TheVoiceGuy @lerven well yeah. Running modern games in Wine isn't really a great idea, I just mean for older titles that need specific things from the OS that it's not getting

Michael Marshall 2d ago

@Bri @lerven I’m actually making some good progress with grizzly today.
I haven't had to reverse engineer at all.
I'm just working on the timing in the game and the way it handles modern systems.
I'm getting things to function a lot better.

@TheVoiceGuy @lerven How are you managing that without reverse engineering the game?

Michael Marshall 2d ago

@Bri @lerven You’re quite right regarding weird issues. With the game I’m trying to fix, there’s plenty of them and it’s just unfathomable.

James Dean 2d ago

@Bri @TheVoiceGuy @lerven This made me think of a Mac App that I was very sad I couldn't use years ago called Crossover. The idea was that you have a very small windows "bottle," as it called it, to run a specific Application, so it wasn't a full Windows installation thus no speaky, but something along these lines could work for just this purpose. This probably doesn't actually help you figure out what this minimalist thing would look like but that's my 2 cents or something.

@GamingWithEars @TheVoiceGuy @lerven Crossover is cool. But it's really weird to use.

Michael Marshall 2d ago

@Bri @GamingWithEars @lerven In a very small nutshell, all I have done is this.
- one startup/input compatibility patch
- one small action timing tuning pass
- This was enough to get the game running properly on Windows 11 without ongoing DLL-hook dependencies.
Obviously I need to do a little bit more testing.

James Dean 2d ago

@Bri @TheVoiceGuy @lerven Oh so you do know about it! Cool! When I tried it, I couldn't figure out how to even make it switch keyboard input.

Michael Marshall 2d ago

@GamingWithEars @Bri @lerven I think I heard of that a long time ago.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven The game is actually quite clever because it used different lanes from left to right to move that mono sound file around.