Felt a bit nostalgic, installed DOSbox, and went looking for some older games that I used to play.
Found Lemmings.
Lost time.
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As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy playing some of the games from my youth – Tyrian, Doom, Dune II and more. While doing some fiddling with my D-Fend Reloaded configuration today, I decided to look into the Gravis Ultrasound support in Tyrian 2000. A bit of poking around, and I found the required GUS drivers, stuck them in the right directory (for D-Fend Reloaded, it’s under Documents and Settings/user/D-Fend Reloaded/VirtualHD by default), and fired up the Tyrian 2000 setup and changed the configuration to use the GUS driver.
One word.
Wow.
The music for Tyrian is stunning when played via the DOSbox GUS driver. Time to see what other older games I have will support it! I’m annoyed that I didn’t know about the GUS when I was growing up.
Well, one of the things I expected to happen with the job change last year was the return of my energy to write code for random projects. After several years of coding for a living, any desire to pick up a keyboard and hack on either my own projects ( or public projects ) was pretty much non-existent.
I’ve spent quite a few hours over the past week or so cleaning up the Value Editor mod for the EVE Killboard, along with patches to the core code, such as implementing the ability to store raw mails and fixing the portrait grabbing code. I’ve also spent several hours providing support on the killboard forum for various other users of the software, and I have to say, I’m quite content now. There’s something about providing code (for free) that people find useful.
Not sure what I’ll tackle next (other than the value editor, it needs a few more tweaks) – perhaps the mod that shows ship fits as a graphic. One of the forum users has reported that it whacks their Apache installation load wise.
Yeah, I’ve let things lapse a bit more than I normally do. New job has me quite occupied, and I had a house guest for the past month. House guest has now gone home, and I’m back to being a lazy bachelor. Yes, this means I need to do the dishes in the sink. Perhaps tomorrow.
Work has thrown up an interesting project recently; I’ve had to learn a fair bit more about Asterisk, and some lingo for a totally different world than computing. The project has also given me more reason to knuckle down and get a distribution server up and running, using knowledge from the previous job. It’s certainly different working for a (slightly) larger company – in comparison to both the previous job and my work in academia post-degree. That said, I’m enjoying it thoroughly, and picking up more Windows administration skills than I will ever admit to knowing (like using VBScript + HTA + ODBC to make a 30 minute task take 1 minute).
On the EVE front, the corporation I’m in is back into Empire space, having grown tired of the antics of the alliance we were in. Three other corporations have ever so kindly declared war against us, so we’re having fun shooting them, not playing by their rules, and never talking to them in the chat channels. The ‘never talk’ one seems to really get their goat. Led a fleet operation on Saturday, and managed to lose no ships while destroying four of the enemy. Only four battleships though, we missed the heavy interdictor.
Also on the EVE front, I’m doing more work on the kill board software that we use to track our kills and losses. I wrote a value editor module for version 1.2 of the kill board, and have been keeping it compliant with 1.2, 1.3 and the latest 1.4 release. Also been contributing patches to fix other issues with the software, though mostly minor ones. Assuming no one reports problems with the value editor, I should be submitting a rather large patch to the KB folks to get the latest version included into 1.4 (they have an old version, and it confuses people!).
And just because I’m living in the UK: My, what strange weather for this time of year. Unseasonably warm. Frogs are spawning already.
Three random links for today.
The first is Neal Stephenson on the origins of the command line, and how Microsoft is actually a good thing. It was written pre-Apple-on-Intel, but it’s still an excellent read. He later remarked that with the advent of OS X, he switched and never looked back.
The second I found via Digg, and it discusses 8 things you can do to keep a geek happy at his place of employment. The author (rightly) doesn’t limit the view to computer geeks, though there is a bit of computer-geek focus in the article.
Finally, there’s an interview in Popular Science with Will Wright, on a game called Spore. Spore is his follow-up from Sim City, Sim Ant and The Sims, and attempts to encompass multiple layers of game play – from cellular level to space-faring race. Hopefully, it’ll be as good as the videos show.
One of my favourite DOS games from years ago is Tyrian – I forget how I found it, but I remember having great fun playing it. It turns out that the author made an updated version called Tyrian 2000, and released it to the world for free. Two downloads later, one for Tyrian 2000 and the other for DosBox, and I was in business. I’d really forgotten how much fun this game is – it can be frustrating too, the author follows the old-school method of just throwing more and more stuff at you, faster and faster. Works for me though.
Some screenshots – I’ve run from episode 1 to 5, and looped back around, so I’m in a nice beefy ship with everything maxed out (except shields).\
Bonus part about Tyrian (and Tyrian 2000) was typing ‘destruct’ at the main menu and getting a Scorched Earth clone! :)
Just a quick run-down on life in general I suppose.
Work is sending me to a 1-day conference in Leeds to learn about server and storage virtualisation (VMWare etc). We’re rapidly growing beyond our storage and processing capacity, so we need to find a long-term solution in the short-term – or something like that at least.
The garden is starting to recover from my mangling it – rain has delayed further log-roll installation (as has lack of stock at my choice of supplier), and removal of plants. The peas are doing well, more carrots are showing, and I can see chives! The compost didn’t compost very well last year, Mum reckons it was too wet. I’ve emptied the compost out, and will restart it next week I hope if the rain holds off.
Went to Mill Meece Pumping Station today to see the engines steamed up. Fred Dibnah was right, there’s something about the smell of coal-fired steam engines that’s just addictive. They’re a volunteer run organisation, and it’d be a shame to see them close down, so I’m pondering financial membership at least. The engines at Mill Meece are tandem compound rotary engines – what a mouthful. Apart from the clacking of (what I think was) a control rod release, the engines are pretty much silent. Wonderful sight to see them steamed up, and in the case of the 1928 engine, powering the pumping head outside (not pumping water though, two electric torpedoes do that).
Got the quote for installing my kitchen. Have to find out if it’s ex-VAT or inc-VAT, but even if it’s the former, it’s a darn good quote, and includes the CORGI work to move my gas pipes, and the electrician’s charges for new wiring in the kitchen.
Ran Illegal Activity in EVE this morning, and landed a bit of kit valued at 24M on the market, so promptly sold it and doubled my bank account. Pity I can’t do that in real life! And speaking of missions, for 1665 scordite (15K market value), I picked up an implant worth 10M (or 2 willpower). Considering the haul this morning, I’ll take the willpower, as it helps with ship skills.
And finally, we have an example of a local cat giving me a death glare, not realising that my legions (of one) of stone rabbits are about to pounce!
