Whoever said Ônot a gaming solutionÕ wasnÕt kidding.
ItÕs ten on a cool central Michigan night. Looking outside my window, all light
is gone... yet, invited by the chill and quiet, I make my way outside. Here,
unlike on a computer, reality not only confronts you, it surrounds you; and in
surrounding you, it ultimatly controls you. There is no Ômaking nature
cooperate with usÕ, no compromise- She learned that lesson when we captured
little bits of her and gave them air conditioning. And so there is no little
ÒXÓ on the top corner of life or reality out there, no popups, no barrage of
information at our fingertips and no anonymous poking.
Unless you want to go to jail.
Outside, itÕs not totally dark; the fleeing remains of daylight are simply
drowned out by the lights inside. There is still some luminance straining off
to the west- and sounds of fireworks fill the distance. Or maybe theyÕre
shotguns at the sporting range. But itÕs cold, and wet, and immersive- and
real. Not text, not IMs, not 8-bit color at 60 hertz. But the most immersive
thing is the expanse and the silence. I felt half... well, more than half...
tempted to quit this contest and wander off ala Frodo Baggins; but lacking Sam
or the Ring [I swear Cheney has it] that must be done at another time.
After all, I had to do something after straining through DOS for an hour.
Growing up, from age 8 on, the family computer was an MS-DOS 6/Windows 3.11 box
made by a company called ÒPonyÓ- a simple, ubiquitous beige metal box. Some of
my fondest computing memories come from there, in dos and windows, from a time
where gameplay ruled over graphics and code was lean as a rule.
My, how times have changed.
Tonight, anything with any sort of graphical element beyond the dos shell was
remarkably slow... at the behest of the manual to Nitemare 3D [best dos FPS
*ever*] I checked the ÒmemÓ command.
Installed RAM: 640k. Largest usable block: 590976 bytes. 577k.
N3d takes 500k free to run. Not liking the sound of cutting so close, but I
give it a shot anyway- and
ÒSoftPC has encountered an illegal processor instruction CS:1393 IP:0c6f OP:66
c7 06 44 41Ó
*Reset SoftPC*
The main way to get around the 30Meg hard disk size here is to use a network
disk- really, a Mac folder allowed to operate as a hard drive. Poking around in
there, I find another peice to try out:
Red Baron 16 colors.
It decompresses from the dos shell and loads like a color tour bus driven by a
blind monkey that canÕt reach the pedals, after which I go insane.
Back on the Finder side, I up the memory allotments for SoftPC... nearly
tripling it. Then I add 4Mb of extended memory to the 640k base that Bill Gates
was stated as saying, Òought to be enough for anybody.Ó
N3d: same illegal processor error. Shame, itÕs my favorite game.
Red Baron: Faster, but my dead great-grandmother can still beat it.
Telnet: Tried the telnet client for dos; I wasnÕt expecting this to work [not
fully expecting a packet driver to work with emulated processors on a non-shared
ethernet card anyway] but furthermore, I wasnÕt expecting a long list of files
with incoherant names [yay for eight plus three!] that prints two lines on the
screen and goes away.
Windows 3.1. There is something wrong with the installation file.
I have a screenshot of reading the directory tree on the disk followed by a Ônot
ready reading drive aÕ error.
So, I up the PC memory again. Expanded memory is now to 5 meg, extended, 1mb.
*reset softpc*
ÒNonsystem disk or disk error...Ó
*eject floppy*
*hit ÔanyÕ key*
Red Baron: The screen loads in and wipes faster, but the 3d plane models are
only *slightly tolerable* to look at.
Frankly, IÕd rather volunteer at a fox news telethon.
Windows 3.1: general failure...
So then.
How ya doing?
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