Aquarionics

The personal computer market is about the same size as the total potato chip market. Next year it will be about half the size of the pet food market and is fast approaching the total worldwide sales of panty hose.
James Finke, President, Commodore International Ltd. (1982)

So, I’ve redone the commenting form for Epistula to reflect certian forthcoming technological efforts.

Ahh, I love the smell of a crowded new marketplace in the morning.

Smells like failure…

One: This week’s banner scares me.

Two: Feudal – my current project – only started working when I told it to log “FUCKING WORK YOU MOTHERBOARDFUCKING LUMP OF FUCKING SHIT FOR CODE” to syslog.

It never works if I ask nicely.

In order to comply with EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) regulations, and at a cost of about $5.2 million per ICBM, the rocket motors on 500 Minuteman III missiles will be replaced with new ones. These rockets will emit less toxic chemicals when used.
[...]
Thus, if the Minuteman III ICBMs have to be used in some future nuclear war, their rocket motors will not pollute the atmosphere.
(Strategy Page)

See? They _do_ care for the environment

Seven years is not a very long time, really.

Seven years ago a variety of things happened, one of which was the release of a game called “Constructor” for the PC. It was a good – though very hard – build-em-up game, with a host of evil things you could do to the other players, like send hippies in to squat in their empty houses, gangsters to rough up their foremen, ghosts, evil clowns, yobs. It was a nice game.

Well, not a nice game, but a fun game.

I own it. Though various reasons, I in fact own it twice. Once in it’s original CD edition, once in a budget DVD-box edition which I bought a couple of years back. So today I tried to install Constructor.

It took three hours, and still didn’t work right.

The installer for Constructor doesn’t like XP. It says, in fact, that Constructor requires Windows 95 or better. Whether WinXP is better than Win95 is left as an exercise for the reader, but for my purposes it was unhelpful. So, since I’m still on my 30 day trial of VMWare, I set up a Windows 98 virtual machine and installed it on that. So fine, so hoopy.

It didn’t run, though, because VMWare and DirectX don’t play nice, so I copied the install, and all registry settings, from the VM back to the main machine.

No dice.

Discovered the “Run as Windows 95” compatibility option.

Lack of d6.

It was a memory error of some kind. I gave up. Fortunately, Constructor is old enough to be a dual-OS DOS/Win95 game, and so I installed the DOS version under a command line. It installed. It detected my sound-card. It detected everything. It launched…

… No cuboids of any kind.

It refused to run without the CD - that it had just installed from – in the drive. Grr.

Eventually, I got it working under dosbox a Dos emulator designed for Linux and ported to Windows. Because it was emulating DOS, the game – seven years old, remember – barely ran on my 1.6Ghz machine. In fact, dosbox had the same problem as DOS did, in that it didn’t like the CD drive. So I had to find – and download – an abandonware version of Constructor (which – obviously – is hacked to make you able to run it without the CD) and use that.

I’ll repeat that. I’ve just downloaded a pirate version of a game I own because it’s lasted better than the original.