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Goodbye PaintShop Pro

I’ve have used PaintShop Pro for decades, even before Corel took over from Jasc Software. It has been my companion for everything that required graphical work. Game images, web development, ideas. I learned about filters, layers, selections and various other modern editing techniques through PaintShop Pro.

I’m not really a graphics artist per se, but I could usually get things done in PaintShop Pro.

Why did I choose PaintShop Pro and not Adobe Photoshop? It wasn’t really much of conscious choice. Since I knew I wasn’t going to use it professionally, I just chose whatever was cheaper at the time. That quickly painted me into a corner. I got used to the way its many features had to be used, the hotkeys, and all the subtle differences in general. I knew early on that it would probably be difficult to replace it.

PaintShop Pro did have some features that many other graphics programs couldn’t be bothered to have. It had built-in screen capture, something Affinity Photo 2 and GIMP didn’t find important to have – at least not when I checked them out shortly before writing this blog post.

I also used its batch feature a lot for processing all the game images you see in this blog. And those are just the tip of a mountain of game screenshots I have collected for decades now. Several DVD ROM images have been created to hold all these. I’m not even sure why I always saved them aside. I almost never go back and reminisce over my old gaming days anymore. I guess you could call me a screenshot hoarder.

But PaintShop Pro also made me angry at times. Even though I had bought the program, quitting it sometimes showed a dialog box with an advertisement about upgrading to a newer version. There was a check box in the bottom for not showing this dialog box again. It never worked, and I just knew it was never supposed to. No event had ever been bound to it. That frequently pissed me off.

January 1, 2023March 18, 2023PC Games Rambling

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Still Playing PC Games

I was reading a blog post I wrote two years and decided it’s time for an update.

So I didn’t dial down on playing PC games, eventually giving it up as I was pondering. As you can see in the latest couple of pages in this blog, I’ve actually played quite a lot in my recent Christmas vacation.

There has been a few changes for the better.

First, and probably most important, I’m getting better at making my writings shorter. Cutting to the chase and leaving out the fat. It’s a difficult art to master and I certainly overdid it for many years. I think I’m finally starting to find a balance that works. But it’s still work in progress, and probably always will be.

Another thing I’ve really learned is to leave games behind and not have this intense desire to complete it at all costs. This was exactly my biggest problem back when I was obsessed with PC games about twenty years ago. No matter how bad, how difficult or how amateurish, I absolutely needed to complete it. It was so important to me that I gained another tick in my spreadsheet of conquests.

Luckily, I’ve managed to shake that obsession today. It helps that many games I play are already very short, often less than 3-4 hours. But no matter the length, it really has to grab me before I decide to see it to the end. Another reason is that it helps reducing my backlog a lot. As most everyone else with a backlog, I also have a desire to eliminate it. I want to see what I paid for, even if on sale.

July 13, 2022July 14, 2022Chiptunes Rambling

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SID

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You Do Not Talk About SID Club

Having been part of the big demo scene on the Commodore 64 in the 80’s, coding a popular music editor and making music on it, I’ve been entangled in this hobby for years before taking a break for decades and then returning to make both more music as well as a web site to play SID music.

Craving to keep myself updated on this very specific hobby, I’ve been scouring through lots of web sites, editors, players and social media every day to find interesting news, and some of this has even been used to good effect at my site. At one point I even considered adding a WordPress blog to this site with SID news presented as blog posts – and maybe even allow guest posts for other SID aficionados to write.

But as the years went by since my comeback, I have been repeatedly disappointed by the lack of buzz going on in this area. Considering how many really skilled composers there are hacking away at the SID chip these days, it’s astounding how little they actually talk about it.

In fact, it’s a tendency that eventually caused me to kill my WordPress plans entirely.

January 10, 2021March 24, 2021PC Games Rambling

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Playing PC Games

Today I thought, why not let the first blog post of 2021 be sort of a rambling post. Some personal opinions, things going on in my life – you know, the purpose blogs actually served in the first place. In fact, I’ve been thinking about letting it become a regular series to take over the diminishing posts about PC games.

And then, what better place to start than with that – PC games.

Oh no, you might be thinking. This is going to be one of those blog posts where he denounces playing video games ever again. Well, not quite. Maybe. Sort of. It’s complicated.

The thing is, the past few couple of years it’s actually been a struggle for me to write these blog posts about PC games. Having to take abundant notes while playing, lots of screenshots, writing the blog post, inserting the right images. It’s not just playing a game as relaxation like watching a movie for me. I need to have this on the side to make PC games mean something special to me.

Recently, I’ve been asking myself a question. Have you actually enjoyed playing the latest five or ten games you played? I thought about that for a few days. At first I took a look at the blog posts I wrote about those games and admitted to myself that, why yes, I did get at least a little bit of joy out of playing these games. So, maybe it is still worth doing? Well, the problem is exactly the amount of work I just described in the previous paragraph. So what I needed to do was to ask myself the right question:

Does the joy I get out of a PC game match the work I have to prepare for its blog post?