Game Companies are Morons.
POSTED BY: FREMDFIRMA
UPDATED: Monday, August 31, 2026 15:48
VIEWED: 31112
PAGE 7 of 34
DOS-Box, you say?
My 1st computer was an Apple/// (3), 1980. Thankfully, it was free.
My baby brother worked for Apple for several years & they gave him a new computer
every year. So the 2nd year, when he got a new Apple II, he gave his old one to sis
Lyn; she was quite computer literate as much of her work had been in computer
programming on Mainframes. She had a gift for it. ... the next year, bro was given
an Apple ///, which was taking gas in the market place. It was meant to be a small
business computer; thus it was the forerunner of the Mac. Sis didn't want it & told
him to give it to me. I often fed it an instruction to emulate the Apple II, tho it could
only do 8 kilobytes of that. But it was enough for the Apple II games at that time.
My bro never switched; he's still using Mac's as does my baby sister.
I switched. I don't recall why. It took a while, but I finally got an IBM.
In those days, they were progressing so fast, most of us got a new
computer every 2-3 years.
Not old games -- but Olde games. SSI's 1993 Stronghold.
Minimum system requirements: 2 MB RAM, VGA graphics, MS-Dos 5 or 6,
Microsoft compatible mouse, color monitor, hard drive.
I've still got a Stronghold game going on this computer. There's a desktop
icon of 2 gears: Dos-Box? When I click it, it takes me back down into DOS &
opens my olde game. To make the icon go all the way into the game, I had to
relearn a bit of DOS ... which I then forget instantly.
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
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Hehehe, I still play Stronghold - primarily the economics campaign.
Damn those bunnies!!
-Frem
I do not serve The Blind God
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Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
DOS-Box, you say?
My 1st computer was an Apple/// (3), 1980. Thankfully, it was free.
My baby brother worked for Apple for several years & they gave him a new computer
every year. So the 2nd year, when he got a new Apple II, he gave his old one to sis
Lyn; she was quite computer literate as much of her work had been in computer
programming on Mainframes. She had a gift for it. ... the next year, bro was given
an Apple ///, which was taking gas in the market place. It was meant to be a small
business computer; thus it was the forerunner of the Mac. Sis didn't want it & told
him to give it to me. I often fed it an instruction to emulate the Apple II, tho it could
only do 8 kilobytes of that. But it was enough for the Apple II games at that time.
My bro never switched; he's still using Mac's as does my baby sister.
I switched. I don't recall why. It took a while, but I finally got an IBM.
In those days, they were progressing so fast, most of us got a new
computer every 2-3 years.
Not old games -- but Olde games. SSI's 1993 Stronghold.
Minimum system requirements: 2 MB RAM, VGA graphics, MS-Dos 5 or 6,
Microsoft compatible mouse, color monitor, hard drive.
I've still got a Stronghold game going on this computer. There's a desktop
icon of 2 gears: Dos-Box? When I click it, it takes me back down into DOS &
opens my olde game. To make the icon go all the way into the game, I had to
relearn a bit of DOS ... which I then forget instantly.
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
Yeah... Not sure what the icon with the two gears are. It's probably some other DOS emulator. I'm sure there is more than one. It could also be a front-end for DOSBox, which makes it a lot easier to use. I personally use the d-Fend Reloaded front-end with it. Whatever it's doing, it has to be emulating DOS though since DOS hasn't been a part of Windows since '98. (You could do some DOS-like commands in Windows from then on in the CMD prompt, but it was no longer an actual DOS.
I actually wrote some batch programs that will automatically carry over old save games and characters from the old SSI Gold Box games after you beat them (like the Savage Frontier and Pools of Radiance games).
You can emulate the Apple III with MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator), although I've never done it before. I have used an emulator called Kegs to emulate an Apple IIgs on the XBox to some limited success, but I've never really messed much with it since the only Apple I ever used as a kid was the Apple IIe and only a few times.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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MAME is pretty awesome, I run it for arcade machine emulation, and some of those ROMs I actually scored myself by tracking down machines in the junkyard.
I have over 667 ROMs for the damn thing, all the classics and some real rarities as well.
If you need a particular ROM, just give a shout, and its likely I have it around.
-Frem
I do not serve The Blind God
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Quote:
Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:
MAME is pretty awesome, I run it for arcade machine emulation, and some of those ROMs I actually scored myself by tracking down machines in the junkyard.
I have over 667 ROMs for the damn thing, all the classics and some real rarities as well.
If you need a particular ROM, just give a shout, and its likely I have it around.
-Frem
I do not serve The Blind God
Wow... you've actually dumped some roms yourself? That's sweet. You don't have any that aren't in 0.192, do you? You might have your hands on something that the community has been looking for or isn't even aware exists.
Polybius, maybe?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by G:
Awesome shot Kwicko - did the hair on your neck stand up when you saw the moon "so close?" Be honest, did you look extra hard to see if anything was moving on the surface?
Nah - the first thing that occurred to me was "Holy crap! I need a tripod!" :D
I was reading an article on why we can't see the flag on the Moon, or the landers, or rovers, or any of that stuff. Seems even our best telescopes can only resolve things about about 43 feet in size (this includes Hubble, by the way) at that distance. I thought, "Hell, why not point a Keyhole spy satellite that direction? They resolve stuff the size of a man, at least!" - and then I realized that that resolution was on the surface of the Earth, from low Earth orbit...
[quote
Yes, digital is amazing. While I fully embraced the cameras from early on (still have an old Agfa in a box somewhere) it basically ended my printing - shame.
Funny - my first film camera was a 1950s-era Agfa Super Silette. Funnier still - I still have it!
Quote:
"Earth rotating" - I would never have thought that would ever be a problem! I imagine you have already thought about any observatories in your neighborhood and getting some 'sky time' with them. Good luck with your shooting!
Yeah, of all the things I thought I'd have to deal with in taking night sky pictures, the planet's rotation was definitely not high on the list. I'll be looking into an equatorial mount soon to deal with the motion and track the stars in their nightly procession across the sky.
I'll leave the serious observatory 'scope time to the professionals (or at least the grad students); I'm having too much fun with what I've got, although I confess I have been shopping a nice 8" or larger telescope. I want pictures of Jupiter and its red spot; I want pictures of the ice caps on Mars. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Wow... you've actually dumped some roms yourself?
Hell yes, in order to get UN Squadron I hadda drive all the way up north to Copper Lake, but in a stroke of luck there was a busted Gun Dealer machine next to it so I got a twofer on that one.
Basically ANY old arcade classic I am pretty much guaranteed to have, and even newer ones like Roadblasters or Toobin.
And it would probably amuse you all the more that in order to get to those two ROMs in Copper Lake, I hadda use a reciprocal saw to cut those bastards open so I could get to em.
-Frem
I do not serve The Blind God
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Quote:
Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Wow... you've actually dumped some roms yourself?
Hell yes, in order to get UN Squadron I hadda drive all the way up north to Copper Lake, but in a stroke of luck there was a busted Gun Dealer machine next to it so I got a twofer on that one.
Basically ANY old arcade classic I am pretty much guaranteed to have, and even newer ones like Roadblasters or Toobin.
And it would probably amuse you all the more that in order to get to those two ROMs in Copper Lake, I hadda use a reciprocal saw to cut those bastards open so I could get to em.
-Frem
I do not serve The Blind God
Hah! Reciprocal saws are one of the best inventions ever made. I didn't know how to edge my curbs even if I could get extension cords out that far, but my old man told me that he had just visited my brother in Baltimore and he used a cordless Ryobi to get the job done. Works a charm.
I've never acutally dumped any roms myself, but over the years I've done extensive testing of them on the XBox and now on the Raspberry Pi as well.
The XBox is GREAT at emulating almost every arcade up to the year 2000. Between MAME and FBL, it plays over 2,000 arcade games (no clones). If you're ever interested in learning how to mod one (assuming you haven't already), let me know.
Eventually I want to build an arcade machine from scratch and put one in there, although I'm thinking that with the power of the Raspberry Pi 3 and its built-in wireless capabilities, I'm probably going to use that instead, although it takes a ton more setup than the XBox did on the software end. Plus, I'll eventually have to re-build an entire MAME set and re-test it since they use different MAME versions.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Eventually I want to build an arcade machine from scratch and put one in there, although I'm thinking that with the power of the Raspberry Pi 3 and its built-in wireless capabilities, I'm probably going to use that instead, although it takes a ton more setup than the XBox did on the software end. Plus, I'll eventually have to re-build an entire MAME set and re-test it since they use different MAME versions.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Yeah, the Pi is definately the way to go with that - building the casing ain't so hard neither, the tricky part will be the control setup, I would reccommend finding an old SNES Advantage and stripping that for the necessary parts, as it has enough buttons for the purpose.
http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Super_Advantage
If you need a software go-between for that, the CH products drivers should do well enough, they had enough versitility to handle just about anything.
-Frem
I do not serve The Blind God
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Yeah. We had video previews as well as a lot of other things for a ton of games spanning over a dozen consoles and handhelds on the XBox, but getting that all to work on the Pi is no easy feat. I'm working with a "Linux guy" on a script that should automate that for me, but it's been months in the making so far.
It's really cool what they've done, but it's just a shame that we can't "port" the XBox setup to the Raspberry Pi instead of the Libretro/EmulationStation setup that is used now. (It couldn't be too hard since XBMC was the pre-cursor to Kodi). For consoles and handhelds that pre-date the N64/PSX generation, the emulators that XBox uses are far better for the most part than on the Pi. The Pi wins those and more advanced arcade games by default because of the sheer power thrown at them though.
I think I'll have to go with the Pi 3 or whatever new version comes out just because of that.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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