butterburp1 wrote: ↑
It's fun reading about your retro adventures! Wow that is a lot of Ataris, you should open up an arcade lol. Classic NES consoles are hard to come by these days, but I do have an old Atari in the closet with a large handful of games. I also got one of those "Gamestation Pro" models as a gift, but the joysticks are dreadful.
Glad you had a chance to try the C64, that was my main computer before I got into DOS. Of course, DOS will always be a never-ending wonderland. Besides the games on this site, there's tons of games/apps on textfiles.com and elsewhere. I could try a bunch of new stuff every day and never run out of things to do. And I LOVE Computer Chronicles! I often have it playing in the background while I'm playing DOS games, haha. Lastly, I too have optical drives on most of my machines, and even a USB floppy drive on one of them. It boggles my mind to see computers without them, or phones without headphone jacks - thanks for the reminder to watch for that.
So yeah, we have a bunch of things in common. I do hope you get your Linux machine up and running. What DOS games or apps do you like to run these days? For me it's mostly Windows 3.1 chess and solitaire, while listening to MIDI files on Creative player, plus a DOS Mahjong game (the 4-player game, not the solitaire tiles version). Have also been experimenting with an infamous series of ASCII games called Tommy's Toys. I think they're pretty good, except for the later titles that have an annoying 60-second countdown timer, trying to nag people into registering. Knowing human nature, it probably accomplished just the opposite.
This is crazy lol. I feel like I'm talking to myself just with everything that we have in common. Awesome
Yeah, I as well installed my Windows 3.1 disks onto my games drive, but I have a bit of a funny story with that one. Because I'm so into everything that I am, and more on the old school side of things, I typically mount my actual hard drive for DosBox which is my E:\ drive. I know they say not to do that, but it's just a games drive. Now, I try to keep as little as I can on the C:\ drive, just so there's less problems. So my autoexec for DosBox is basically mount e E:\ and it mounts the entire E:\ drive.
So, I found my 6, Windows 3.1 3.5" disks and decided to install to the E:\ drive, got the SB16 sound driver so I get sound. So everything works fine and dandy like it should. Then, I had a moment of clarity. I went, GASP! And I told my friend, "You do realize that if I had had my C:\ drive mounted, I would have installed Windows 3.1 over top of my actual Windows?" He goes, yep. So yeah that little part was fun. Didn't happen but it was just one of those, OMG what if, moments.
As for Linux, I'm probably going to look for the most recent version of Mint, make a bootable CD, and then once Windows 10 becomes unsustainable, I'll make the switch. I do run Malwarebytes Premium, not sure if it works with Linux, I hope so though. Since I'm a gamer it's generally what I stick to, but I did try basic programming with the C64 Maxi. I printed out the first couple chapters of this book for basic programming, but the 2nd chapter got into loops and it just went over my head, so kinda gave up on basic for now, but it's so fun just turning it on and having it boot to just the original C64 screen. (you can set that in the settings, it typically boots up to a carousel of games, I have mine set to boot to the actual blue C64 screen) But there are days when I'll sit and play a few C64 games.
Actually now that I think of it, a younger guy I work with, he went to some flea market a while back and got an original working C64 WITH the disk drive and the 5.25" disks!! I think he said he just needs to find an old monitor for it. But at that point I think if he could just find the connector, I would think he could take any old display device and tie in the old connector to the new device, as long as you got your colors on the wiring right.
That Tommy's Toys sounds soooo darn familiar. I think when we would go to the shareware software store, they had a ton of disks like that. I think we got ones that said Mr. Disk on them, and it'd be like one or 2 shareware games, mostly from Apogee. We mainly played Commander Keen, but before that we'd go to Egghead software and dad would let us get a game from there. I still have most of the disks we got from way way long ago, and the 3.5" disks still work to this day. What I REALLY want to find is a 5.25" floppy drive that is USB. Again, I could probably figure out the wiring and make it USB compatible, but I would rather have it properly connected, inside the computer.
I have a 66mhz DOS 6.0 machine, but the 5.25" disk drive doesn't read the disks anymore, so I'm thinking the heads are dirty, but I don't have any of those cleaning disks. It was a floppy disk but it had a white cotton disk on the inside of the sleeving, and you'd put alcohol on the white part and then just run the drive to clean the heads. Really wish I could find one of those.
I really wish I could still get a hold of the old dot matrix printers with that paper with the holes on the sides, I used to use that stuff all the time as well. But heck if they made a disk drive for the C64 Maxi with actual disks, I'd probably buy that up too lol.
Okay so, TLORD or The Legend of The Red Dragon is a BBS Door game. So it's linear and not a game I consider to be a mud. I have that game along with several others VirBBS and Hacker. They are also door games in which you are running a BBS and have to maintain it and a game where you are a hacker. Back in the day on the 2600 baud modem I played Major Mud with help, but back in 2005 I REALLY got into this MUD called Medievia. I played that for several years before the owner went nuts and changed a bunch of stuff. The nice thing with Zmud was that list of muds. I would go off on a tangent and just randomly connect to a MUD, might only be 1 or 2 people on, so the help was very minimal on these other muds, but it's the overall experience that I enjoy. Another fun game is Continuum. It's a top down space shooter and you are auto assigned to a team and you shoot other ships, collect upgrades, there's some kind of soccer game where you get the ball and then you have to get it back to a special designated area, and there's these gem things you collect as well (part of the soccer game I think). GOD! I miss the good old days.
Back when Circuit City was still in business, I owned one of the first flatscreen TV's. It was a 32" for $600 I believe. I wanted something larger so broke down and got rid of it for a TCL Roku smart TV 40". It doesn't have all of the RCA hookups, but I have this 4 switch box that has RCA hookups on it that I got from Radio Shack when they were in business.