Me too!

Sometimes badly tainted by cracking screens, but some bright people could remove that and restore them, it's all in there. Has to be, or they wouldn't work.

It`s good that music moves on to new formats and platforms, it lives on, sometimes remixed, often remastered. It`s data only, whereas with computer games, they are data and programming, so they go out of use, and we then use new technology to emulate the old technology. At least they are preserved.

Seemingly no-one knows what exactly the chip is doing. The technology has been buried and that`s it. No idea if the HDCD decoding chips are still being made and installed, but on the other side, no more HDCD discs are being mastered. DVD-audio and then Blu-ray superseded them. So many formats!

Possibly the lesson there is to stop at the 6 unit ship, don't go for the 8. No-one is obliging you to "go large". Sometimes there's a curveball in there. All games with weapons add-ons make for a bigger target.

I feel like I want to drop some day-glo paint in there.

I`ve been on that for years. It is split into articles, latest first, which isn`t how to read them.. I see it from the publisher page, so I don`t know if there`s a start page for readers.

There are a few variations, but www.uridiumauthor.blogspot.com should get you there. Is it visible at the top of my profile? It is to me, but so's my birthday, and that's not public.

Interesting! Give the meanies a taste of their own medicine.
And Heavy Metal Uridium...
Not quite as easy to drop in the graphics due to the diagonals, but now...

Somewhere on my old 5.25" Commodore diskettes there are likely the early game manuals. I used to write them all, that was part of the creativity. Especially when I had to explain some little coding weirdness, since a game world has to be enclosed to ensure the players don`t go off-piste.

I`ve tended to do technical pages on my blog about each game. There might be an opportunity here to dive into play strategies instead. I still have things to learn there, as I sometimes get surprised and impressed by what people do to, shall we say, distort the game rules in their favour.

It was a big manual from the start. Morpheus got assigned to the Rainbird label pretty quickly due to its complexity. It`s not a shoot-em-up, it`s a strategy game, about keeping your ship up to date with latest developments and how big should it be?

Well, it's quite a lot about planning to expand and build your ship for survival. All the components interact: power storage and recovery. You have to order them too, so plan ahead. New, better parts get released as time goes on. You need a plan for now and a plan for later. The manual helps!

Been listening to the 'new', meaning second-hand but new to me, power amplifier. Percussion sparkles a little more and all the instruments sound a tad clearer. Chris Huelsbeck's Turrican Medley sounds excellent. Got to try a movie soon.

dbPoweramp has various features that one can invoke before transfer. The HDCD one probably has to be selected manually. It was 10 years ago when I did this. Indeed my computer's DVD drives were reading the data, at high speed.

Took a week of testing at a higher wave since it was something that only happened sometimes, and only after wave 30. Some error messages were appearing in the Debug log, so I put some breakpoints in to catch it in the act and figured out what was happening. Much relieved to find it was an easy fix.

Full disclosure: I muffed one new addition that caused a level to become never-ending. It created an un-hittable 'something' that was just visible in the top-left corner. I had a wrong address in the list of creatable objects. It was valid enough to be recognised, but not create anything useful.

Made a major correction to Monster Molecules as my definitions of electron orbits were somewhat incorrect, leading to some strange shapes. I offset the orbits differently too, which makes them less symmetrical and patterned. Toned down some more colours and added Krypton, Xenon and Radon.

Definitely not essential, but now I captured the data and play through a network streamer then I am only missing the magic filter. One HDCD recently got superseded by a new remaster in 24-bit 96KHz. 6 to go!
I just find it interesting hearing improvements. The source data makes the most difference.

There was data encoding in the low and high few bits, each did something specific, and both were optional, i.e. they didn`t necessarily remaster with them. Just doing a nice master was enough. The third feature was switching on a filter that the chip applied. No-one seems to know how or what it did.

Now both CD players live in their boxes in the loft. Got quite a collection of old gear that I start by keeping in case of a breakdown of the new gear, and the end up going obsolete. Also got 2 DVD players with SCART outputs, and possibly HDCD decoders.

To round off the Arcam story, I spent a summer`s afternoon listening to many CDs until the Alpha 9 overheated and the sound started breaking up. It had to go back to Arcam. I believe they upgraded the cooling somehow.
10 years later, it started skipping and I got a CDS 27. I had the laser replaced.

Back in the late `90s when I got a job in the reinsurance software Co., I took a colleague, hi Alan, to the hi-fi shop to audition the Arcam CD players 7SE, 8SE and 9. I took some CDs I liked. I preferred the detail of the 9 and bought it. Alan preferred the less detail of the 7SE for musicality.

I have the Arcam Alpha 9, and the later CDS27, both with the HDCD chip.
dbPoweramp has an HDCD decoder that can unpack the data correctly, which covers 2 of the 3 (optional) clevernesses. The third was this magical filter bit that needs the HDCD chip to decode it. That`s the lost feature.

Arcam supported them, and they were a must-have on multi-format players. Already that appears to be 30 years ago! Apparently there were something like 5,000 titles on HDCD. MY go-to album to show off the quality is Dire Straits` Sultans of Swing best of. All superseded by hi-def these days.

I`m fascinated that HDCD data can be interpreted in 2 different ways and sound great in both. Makes me think that the actual sample values can vary by a fair amount and we won`t notice.
I read originally that they used the checksum data for 4 extra bits of sample depth. Complete nonsense?

I have used dbPoweramp to create 24-bit flac files of my 7 HDCDs. They didn`t play properly via my Arcam network streamer that had an HDCD decoder. It`s as if it was decoding something that was already decoded, so it produced nasty clicks. They play OK on my Lumin streamer - no HDCD decoder there.

Apparently they recode the top few bits of every sample to give more headroom, and they encode some more information in the low bits that are virtually unhearable. Then they can switch on some special filtering.
All this cleverness was bought out and later junked. No-onw knows how it all worked.

Watched a video about HDCDs. I have 7 of these discs. So, they play as normal CDs, or, if you have a player with am HDCD decoder chip, it can apply up to 3 strategies to get more detail. The biggest benefit though is that the music has been remastered optimally. So they sound better than many discs.

Been dusting off my old telescope that I bought with shillings and pence. We had to fix a broken metal part, the finder scope is permanently out of focus, and the small eyepieces are in need of cleaning. Popped in an adapter and sighted up Jupiter with a newer eyepiece. Not half bad.