(no subject)
While waiting for a load of laundry this morning, I spent a little time browsing one of my favorite time-wasters, an abandonware site called The Home of the Underdogs. I love poking around their archives, reading reviews of both games that I know and love and ones I've never heard of. Of course, seeing all the classic stuff over there reminded me of the computer I have reserved for the oldies that has been sitting on my workbench, disconnected since the move.
So, I took a few minutes to scrounge peripherals from Fibber McGee's closet of lost electronics and hooked the thing up. Now here's a flaming-hot system: 66Mhz processor, 800 megabyte hard drive, a whopping 8MB of RAM, and a dinosaur as the case badge! (No kidding: it's made by a company called "DynaSource Inc." and their symbol is a dinosaur. Perhaps not the best example of forward thinking, no?) Watch out Posi; I've got a real killer system here. *snickers* Actually though, the niftiest thing about this hardware is the keyboard I plugged in. It's an old (1988) Zenith keyboard with a full-size AT plug. But what's really neat about it is that the LEDs that mark the status of caps lock, num lock, and scroll lock are not the typical green, but blood red! Now that's cool! I wonder how hard it would be to mod another keyboard and put different LEDs in.
I think in some of my copious free time, I'm going to pull the hard drive that's in there, replace it with a slightly bigger one (I think I have one with two or four gigs lying around, if it will read something that large), and rebuild windows 3.11 from scratch. The installation that's on there now works, but it's cluttered with a bunch of software from the place I got it from (the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation gave it to my dad as a loaner until the system they were buying him came in, and then they never wanted it back), and I'd like to build a "lean and mean" build that maximizes available memory to play some of the old memory-hogging DOS games I love. of course, It's been so long since I've worked with Windows 3.11 that I'm not entirely certain I can remember how to do it, so that's why I'm keeping the old hard drive around. I'm sure I can figure it out eventually, but why take chances? Then, once I'm done, I'll install a bunch of stuff like Wing Commander, Ultima 7 (I have the entire Ultima series, one through eight, on a compilation CD somewhere and would dearly love to get a copy of nine from someone...), and Betrayal at Krondor (I have the CD version with the voices that I picked up at a thrift store), not to mention a ton of other oldie-but-goodies.
In the meantime, I'm going back to cleaning up. I'm finally making some progress now we've cleared up some of the basement and I can do the laundry at home. My goal is to clean our bedroom up enough that I can take pictures of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wooisme without having to worry about clutter. Wish me luck!
So, I took a few minutes to scrounge peripherals from Fibber McGee's closet of lost electronics and hooked the thing up. Now here's a flaming-hot system: 66Mhz processor, 800 megabyte hard drive, a whopping 8MB of RAM, and a dinosaur as the case badge! (No kidding: it's made by a company called "DynaSource Inc." and their symbol is a dinosaur. Perhaps not the best example of forward thinking, no?) Watch out Posi; I've got a real killer system here. *snickers* Actually though, the niftiest thing about this hardware is the keyboard I plugged in. It's an old (1988) Zenith keyboard with a full-size AT plug. But what's really neat about it is that the LEDs that mark the status of caps lock, num lock, and scroll lock are not the typical green, but blood red! Now that's cool! I wonder how hard it would be to mod another keyboard and put different LEDs in.
I think in some of my copious free time, I'm going to pull the hard drive that's in there, replace it with a slightly bigger one (I think I have one with two or four gigs lying around, if it will read something that large), and rebuild windows 3.11 from scratch. The installation that's on there now works, but it's cluttered with a bunch of software from the place I got it from (the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation gave it to my dad as a loaner until the system they were buying him came in, and then they never wanted it back), and I'd like to build a "lean and mean" build that maximizes available memory to play some of the old memory-hogging DOS games I love. of course, It's been so long since I've worked with Windows 3.11 that I'm not entirely certain I can remember how to do it, so that's why I'm keeping the old hard drive around. I'm sure I can figure it out eventually, but why take chances? Then, once I'm done, I'll install a bunch of stuff like Wing Commander, Ultima 7 (I have the entire Ultima series, one through eight, on a compilation CD somewhere and would dearly love to get a copy of nine from someone...), and Betrayal at Krondor (I have the CD version with the voices that I picked up at a thrift store), not to mention a ton of other oldie-but-goodies.
In the meantime, I'm going back to cleaning up. I'm finally making some progress now we've cleared up some of the basement and I can do the laundry at home. My goal is to clean our bedroom up enough that I can take pictures of
wooisme without having to worry about clutter. Wish me luck!