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The Thompson Twins Adventure
''The Thompson Twins Adventure'' is a 1984 graphic adventure game that was distributed by ''Computer and Video Games'' magazine as a advergame, promotional 7" flexi disc "freebie" along with its October 1984 issue (Issue 36). The game is based on the Thompson Twins' Single (music), single "Doctor! Doctor!", and features the Thompson Twins band members as the protagonists. The Unusual types of gramophone records#Unusual materials and uses, unusual storage format of the game showcases an experimental technique pioneered by the London-based Flexi Records label, and places the game alongside a small handful of other Vinyl data, games distributed on grooved disks. This format never became established and ''The Thompson Twins Adventure'' is today valued more for its nostalgic and artifactual value than for its ludology, ludological aspects which have been uniformly panned by critics. Plot Based on the Thompson Twins' 1984 "Doctor! Doctor!" single, the plot of ''The Thompson Twins Adventu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quicksilva
Quicksilva was a British games software publisher active during the early 1980s. Quicksilva was founded by Nick Lambert in 1979. The name Quicksilva was inspired by a particular guitar solo in a track on the album Happy Trails by Quicksilver Messenger Service. Quicksilva mainly released games for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, but also did conversions and some original games for the VIC-20, Dragon 32/64, Oric-1/ Atmos, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron home computers. One of their earliest successful titles was a '' Star Raiders''-style game entitled ''Time-Gate'' which reached the top of the ZX Spectrum charts in December 1982. Amongst the company's other successes were Jeff Minter's ''Gridrunner'' (1983), '' Bugaboo'' (1983, a.k.a. ''La Pulga'') and ''Fred'' (1983, titled " ''Roland on the Ropes''" on the Amstrad), two titles licensed from Spanish software house Indescomp S.A. Sandy White's ''Ant Attack'' (1983) for the ZX Spectrum featured revolutionary 3-D graphics for which a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joe Leeway
Joseph Martin Leeway (born 15 November 1955) is a British musician and songwriter, who is best known as being a member of the pop music, pop band Thompson Twins, joining the band in 1981 after being one of their Road crew, roadies. Leeway was born to an Irish mother and Nigerian father, and from the age of two, was fostered by an English family in Dartford, Kent. He grew up mostly in Manchester, in the North West of England. At college he studied English and Drama, then began teaching English, which is how he met Tom Bailey (musician), Tom Bailey. He joined a theatre group in Cardiff after failing to establish his own company. He spent a year with the Young Vic theatre before working with Thompson Twins as a roadie at Bailey's invitation. Thompson Twins Playing Bongo drum, bongos and congas, he appeared on Thompson Twins debut studio album ''A Product Of... (Participation)'' (1981). By the time the band recorded their second studio album ''Set (Thompson Twins album), Set'' in 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Text Parser
{{Refimprove, date=August 2007 In adventure games, a text parser takes typed input (a command) from the player and simplifies it to something the game can understand. Usually, words with the same meaning are turned into the same word (e.g. "take" and "get") and certain filler words are dropped (e.g. articles, or the "at" in "look at rock"). The parser makes it easier for the game's author to react on input. The author does not have to write special code to process the commands "get the gem", "take the gem", "get gem", "take gem", "take the precious gem", etc. separately, as the parser will have stripped the input down to something like "take gem". For the player, the game is more flexible, as the game has a larger vocabulary, and there are fewer guess-the-verb and guess-the-noun problems. Parsers are used in early interactive fiction games like the ''Zork'' series, and more recently in games created by systems like Inform and TADS. See also * Natural language parsing External l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Graphic Adventure Game
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (List of text-based computer games, text and List of graphic adventure games, graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include ''Zork'', ''King's Quest'', ''Monkey Island'', and ''Myst''. Initial adventure games developed in the 1970s and early 1980s were text-based, using text parsers to translate the player's input into commands. As personal computers became more powerful with better grap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Broken Record
A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English), or simply a record, is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts near the periphery and ends near the center of the disc. At first, the discs were commonly made from shellac, with earlier records having a fine abrasive filler mixed in. Starting in the 1940s polyvinyl chloride became common, hence the name vinyl. The phonograph record was the primary medium used for music reproduction throughout the 20th century. It had co-existed with the phonograph cylinder from the late 1880s and had effectively superseded it by around 1912. Records retained the largest market share even when new formats such as the compact cassette were mass-marketed. By the 1980s, digital media, in the form of the compact disc, had gained a larger market share, and the record left the mainstream in 1991. Since the 1990s, records contin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abrasion (mechanical)
Abrasion is the process of scuffing, scratching, wearing down, marring, or rubbing away. It can be intentionally imposed in a controlled process using an abrasive. Abrasion can be an undesirable effect of exposure to normal use or exposure to the elements. In stone shaping Ancient artists, working in stone, used abrasion to create sculptures. The artist selected dense stones like carbonite and emery and rubbed them consistently against comparatively softer stones like limestone and granite. The artist used different sizes and shapes of abrasives, or turned them in various ways as they rubbed, to create effects on the softer stone's surface. Water was continuously poured over the surface to carry away particles. Abrasive technique in stone shaping was a long, tedious process that, with patience, resulted in eternal works of art in stone. Models The Archard equation is a simple model used to describe sliding wear and is based on the theory of asperity contact. Q = \frac H whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Background Noise
Background noise or ambient noise is any sound other than the sound being monitored (primary sound). Background noise is a form of noise pollution or interference. Background noise is an important concept in setting noise levels. Background noises include environmental noises such as water waves, traffic noise, alarms, extraneous speech, bioacoustic noise from animals, and electrical noise from devices such as refrigerators, air conditioning, power supplies, and motors. The prevention or reduction of background noise is important in the field of active noise control. It is an important consideration with the use of ultrasound (e.g. for medical diagnosis or imaging), sonar, and sound reproduction. Other uses In astronomy, background noise or cosmic background radiation is electromagnetic radiation from the sky with no discernible source. In information architecture, irrelevant, duplicate or incorrect information may be called background noise. In physics and telecommunicat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
VU Meter
A volume unit (VU) meter or standard volume indicator (SVI) is a device displaying a representation of the signal level in audio equipment. The original design was proposed in the 1940 IRE paper, ''A New Standard Volume Indicator and Reference Level'', written by experts from CBS, NBC, and Bell Telephone Laboratories. The Acoustical Society of America then standardized it in 1942 (ANSI C16.5-1942) for use in telephone installation and radio broadcast stations. Consumer audio equipment often features VU meters, both for utility purposes (e.g. in recording equipment) and for aesthetics (in playback devices). The original VU meter is a passive electromechanical device, namely a 200 µA DC d'Arsonval movement ammeter fed from a full-wave copper-oxide rectifier mounted within the meter case. The mass of the needle causes a relatively slow response, which in effect integrates or smooths the signal, with a rise time of 300 ms. This has the effect of averaging out peaks and troughs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Preamplifier
A preamplifier, also known as a preamp, is an electronic amplifier that converts a weak electrical signal into an output signal strong enough to be noise-tolerant and strong enough for further processing, or for sending to a power amplifier and a loudspeaker. Without this, the final signal would be noisy or distorted. They are typically used to amplify signals from analog sensors such as microphones and pickups. Because of this, the preamplifier is often placed close to the sensor to reduce the effects of noise and interference. Description An ideal preamp will be linear (have a constant gain through its operating range), have high input impedance (requiring only a minimal amount of current to sense the input signal) and a low output impedance (when current is drawn from the output there is minimal change in the output voltage). It is used to boost the signal strength to drive the cable to the main instrument without significantly degrading the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Record Player
A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones. The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made seve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Audio Cassette
The Compact Cassette or Musicassette (MC), also commonly called the tape cassette, cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips in 1963, Compact Cassettes come in two forms, either already containing content as a prerecorded cassette (''Musicassette''), or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. Both forms have two sides and are reversible by the user. Although other tape cassette formats have also existed - for example the Microcassette - the generic term ''cassette tape'' is normally always used to refer to the Compact Cassette because of its ubiquity. Its uses have ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers; the Compact Cassette technology was originally designed for dictation machines, but improvements in fidelity led to it supplanting the stereo 8-track cartridge and ree ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
