this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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MS-DOS gaming
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Epic Mega games was the shit those days!
Never played Monster bash, but I usually like apogee platformers so I'll check it out!
Nice, another OMF and Jazz fan!
It's a pity OMF is so underrated. Whenever someone claims they're a fan of fighting games, and I ask them which games they've played, not a single one of them has replied with "OMF" so far. :(
OMF also got me more into understanding PC networking. I made my own null modem cable once (by splicing up a spare RS232 cable), connected my friends PC to it and we played OMF against each other, on our own PCs! No more having to share our keyboard! (gosh, I nearly forgot that shared keyboard multiplayer was a thing...) Those were exciting times.
OMF is by far the best fighting game I've ever played. Absolutely unmatched.
I chatted with Kenny Chou/cccatch on IRC once (the guy who wrote the soundtrack to OMF) and he told me about the technology stack they used for music in that game, which I found pretty interesting. He wrote the music in MultiTracker Module Editor and they had some proprietary software that would convert .MTM files into the music engine's native format and package them up. The clever thing is that all the songs were saved together in one package, which means that if he reused the same samples in all of the songs (which he had to do), then the tool would be clever enough to have each sample on disk/in memory only once, so samples only had to be loaded when you started the game. Then when the game switched songs, only the pattern data (notes) had to be freed/loaded.
Very cool. Jealous that you got to talk to Kenny Chou. Him, Josh Jensen, and the Elam family are all my heros - I've read the OMF manual so many times that I still remember all their names, nearly three decades later. I wonder how their baby, Bethany Kay Elam is doing these days, and if she's still chewing on joysticks and slobbering over keyboards...
I vividly recall the distinct humor and light-heartedness of the manual, which instructed me to print it out, give it to my friends and even put it in my bird cage. I couldn't do the latter since I didn't have a bird cage.. but I did I print out several copies and gave it to my friends. My first manual was printed on a dot matrix printer. Later down the line, I managed to upgrade to an inkjet version - and even printed out a few pages in color (because color printouts were a precious thing back then), put it in a nice folder and made fancy borders and stuff around it.
The manual really struck a chord with me for some reason. Maybe because it went so detailed into the back stories of all the pilots, or maybe it's was the down-to-earth language of it and the candid descriptions of the developers that made me feel like I got to know them personally... there was just something different about it, compared to all other game manuals at the time. Till date, I've never come across any official manual for a game with this sort of character to it. If Ryan Elam is still around, I'd love to meet him sometime and have a few beers with him.