How Multimedia Computers Work - Disk And Video Recording - Info and Reading Options

The Internet Archive:

<div>How Multimedia Computers Work - Version 1.1a</div><div><br /></div><div>An interactive 3D walkthrough of the parts of a multimedia personal computer.</div><div><br /></div><div>Includes a rip of the CD-ROM, a video recording of a complete "playthrough", and some screenshots.</div><div><br /></div><div>***</div><div>Uploader's Note:</div><div>--------------------</div><div>This was on a disk called "How Computers Work, Third Edition"</div><div>It is marked Copyright 1998 Que Corporation and its licensers, All rights reserved.</div><div>ISBN: 07897-1650-XCD</div><div><br /></div><div>Presumably this was the companion CD with the book by Ron White. Although I never had the book, just the disk. In a jewel case for "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" no less.</div><div><br /></div><div>This absolutely captivated me back in the day (circa 2009 maybe). The animated "Zip Data" character performing wacky hijinks around the parts of the computer, the interactive 3D animations, the charismatic voiceovers, the unintentionally-eerie music, the surprising technical depth, and the "expert interviews" are all totally '90s. I'm all here for that.</div><div><br /></div><div>And as old as it is (even at the time) it gets a lot right. Very funny hearing about how the Pentium was the new hotness at the time, or how adamant some of the experts were about their predictions of the future proliferation of speech recognition interfaces. If nothing else, it's a really interesting look into what was considered "cutting edge" for personal desktop computing in 1994. And I didn't want to see it completely lost to time, so here you go!</div><div><br /></div><div>This genuinely taught me quite a bit, even if I was about as far removed from the time the content was fresh as I am now from when I first tried out this program. Ugh, time marches on.. But it taught me how a laser printer works, with a really intuitive and visual explanation. It taught me why you had to save your documents to disk before shutting down your computer, because the data in RAM couldn't persist without power. It also taught me not to poke around inside a PC's power supply. As a natural hardware hacker from an early age, this was an important lesson. I vividly remember being scared by the animation of the Zip Data character sticking a screwdriver into the power supply, only to be reduced to a pile of ash. Watching it now it's hilarious, but it did help to instill a healthy fear of large capacitors in my otherwise disassembly-obsessed mind.</div><div><br /></div><div>To record the footage for the "playthrough" I hooked up my old Lenovo desktop via a DVI -&gt; HDMI converter to an HDMI capture card on my PC running OBS Studio. I also connected the computer's line out (via a ground loop isolator) to the capture card's audio input. And I tried having both my main PC and the Lenovo on the same powerbar. Don't know if that ultimately did much, but I was really trying to eliminate grounding issues when recording the audio. I did what I could. It didn't seem to want to record properly under Wine or VirtualBox, so I had to had to use actual hardware. So if the audio isn't perfect, that's why.</div><div><br /></div><div>And there were some graphical bugs, which even on an original Windows 98 SE machine I couldn't fix. Like the intro when you start up the program is just a blank screen with the voiceover. And for some reason, the bottom-left corner of the screen is filled with magenta instead of black in some parts of the video. Tried to fix that in post, but it's beyond me. Everything is captured in its original resolution, 480p, and I chose to record at 30FPS.</div><div><br /></div><div>Funny enough, most of the content is stored as AVI and WAV files on the disk itself. There's even a little surprise in the content/sound folder, called singsong.wav. I don't know if it's accessible by other means, but I'll let you find it. Let's just say, it sounds like the voice actors had fun with this project. Which is great, because I sure had fun using it. Hope you enjoy!</div><div>***</div>

Search for “How Multimedia Computers Work - Disk And Video Recording” downloads:

Visit our Downloads Search page to see if downloads are available.

Find “How Multimedia Computers Work - Disk And Video Recording” in Libraries Near You:

Read or borrow “How Multimedia Computers Work - Disk And Video Recording” from your local library.

• The WorldCat Libraries Catalog: Find a copy of “How Multimedia Computers Work - Disk And Video Recording” at a library near you.