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30 years ago I used to play the console game "The Digger" by Windmill Software. Using the arrow keys on the keyboard was so painful, I wished for a joystick. After being a Rip van Winkle for this long, I see the claim keyboard has an unfair advantage and am shocked by it.

People are largely downloading recent movies, games, and music

BluRIAA version of Star Trek, Pink Floyd Remastered in FLAC. Digger PS3 Online edition.

Anyone play Digger? I used to love it as a kid, and its been reverse engineered and ported to many OSes......it still works pretty well. http://www.digger.org/

Switching to Linux is worth it just to escape the insane world of Windows shareware where people seriously expect you to pay $50 for the crapy semi functional app they spent 2 hours in VB on.

But you know what? There is a lot of that "Windows Shareware" which simply isn't available on Linux, free or otherwise. And it's those crappy shareware applications which are often the stumbling blocks for end users to switch to anything.

In particular, card games. Yes, Linux has Solataire in all its variations down pat pretty good, but it's hard to find a decent version of Euchre, Cribbage, Hearts, or all other sorts of such games. Linux just doesn't have them.

And trust me -- I hear about it all the time. Several years ago my mother decided to upgrade her old OS/2 based machine. She's exactly the type of user we're talking about here -- she doesn't know diddly about much of anything other than how to turn the computer on, use the mouse, and type stuff on the keyboard. She wouldn't know a compiler or even a command prompt from the Sultan of Brunei.

As she doesn't even know how to maintain a machine, and as she always calls on me to fix her system or even install new software for her (she won't do it herself -- downloading new wallpapers is as risque as she gets when it comes to the computer), Linux was a natural fit: it was cheap (as in free), is very easy to maintain remotely (her old OS/2 system needed a somewhat slow remote desktop solution so I could save an hours drive if she needed help), and is something she would have a hard time screwing up (as she doesn't have root access, of course).

(It helped that all she really ever does is surf the web and play some really basic games, with the occassional glance at her e-mail (once a month maybe...). She ran Mozilla on OS/2, so switching to Linux didn't mean having to learn a big pile of new software, and she didn't have any documents to speak of that needed a specific Office suite, so switching was pretty painless for her overall).

Her system runs beautifully, and requires very little maintenance. And yet at least once a week I hear her moans of derision that Linux doesn't have any "good games". And in her parlance, we're not talking about FPS's and RTS's. We're talking Hearts. And Cribbage. And Euchre.

She does have Majohngg, and Digger, and some solataire games -- but every week for the past several years since switching her to Linux I get asked "So son, have any new card games come out for Linux yet?". Ugh.

And it doesn't exactly help that a friend of hers up at the family cottage is always talking about how he plays cards online on his Windows machine (fortunately, Mom is forced to use a very poorly thought out Windows-based system at her office, and hates Windows with a passion. Way to go, Mom! ;) ). She hasn't asked for me to switch her to Windows at all, but she has been talking about buying a Mac for the sole purpose of being able to play all sorts of crappy card games.

(And no, for some reason she doesn't like playing such games online. She wants to play against the computer. I think she dislikes the lag when playing with clueless people who take three minutes to figure out which of the two remaining cards in their hand to play next :) ).

Okay -- it's late and I'm rambling. But the point remains: many of those Shareware applications you call "crappy" are exactly the sorts of applications your typical know-nothing end user wants. Mom could care less that Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is available for Linux. She just wants a Euchre, Hearts, and Cribbage with some decent graphics and gameplay.

(If I just had more time between the half dozen OSS projects I'm already working on, I'd start one to write a pile of card games for Linux, just so Mom would stop asking, and hopefully to remove one more barrier preventing the unwashed masses from switching to Linux).

Yaz.

Level editors? Pah! You n00bs have it so easy these days...

phozz

My first computer; A Commodore PC-10 III IBM PC XT compatible. 8088 CPU running at 3 speeds (standard @ 1.5Khz, double @ 3.0Khz, and turbo @ 4.0Khz). Dual 5.25" 360K floppy drives, 640KB RAM, MDA/CGA/Hercules/Plantronics ColorPlus onboard display and a 14" Datatrain CGA monitor. Came with MS-DOS 3.2 and GW Basic.

Souped it up several years back just for kicks with an old internal 8-bit ISA 19200 ATI modem and a 20MB XT IDE hard drive loaded with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.0 installed. It's currently connected to my LAN via a PLIP link to my Linux box, although I obviously don't turn it on much anymore. It's really only good for playing classic games like Shit Digger and Paratrooper.

Then check out digger. Originally written in 1984 by a now defunct game company, this guy disassembled the game and rewrote it. I can't find any differences in the game play (I played it all the time as a kid on my 8088 *memories*). The person who rewrote the game tried to find the original writers of the game but came up with nothing.

He motivated me to rewrite another one of my old favorite games, Pango... though I haven't got very far

-dk

Amazing feat. It's completely rewritten in C to gain exactly the same functionality as the original code, with only the binary / dissassembled machine code to work with.

i spent many hours back in the 80's playing tapper, also another favourite was digger, a great modernish port was made and can be found here

no no no, it's all about Styx and Digger

-dk

no no no, it's all about Styx and Digger

-dk

Try this. Digger remade to play as the original, but run on modern pc's.

Altough almost 20 years old, Digger! is still one of the best games, IMHO. You can compile it with SDL (or SVGAlib, IIRC) or on FreeBSD, just install it from the ports collection :-)

There's a version of the game Digger here (which is more or less the same, or?). This is the original version reverse-engineered and re-engineered to work on modern computers. There's also a version of the game Styx on this site.

I was forced for a long time to use browsers which lagged a long way behind the state of the art. This made me sympathetic to the needs of other people who are stuck with older technology. There's nothing quite so frustrating as trying to find a piece of information only to continually run into dead ends in the form of messages like "Sorry, you need a frames/javascript capable browser to view this page".

Okay, so many animated GIFs are really unnecessary but sometimes a bit of animation can really make a site. Check out http://www.digger.org for example. When creating this animation, I looked at many ways of doing it and picked the way which would download fastest and work best of the widest range of browsers.

I know many people dislike GIFs for ideological reasons (i.e. the Unisys patent) but for those of us that don't live in the USA - we don't care! Algorithms can't be patented in the UK so I'll use GIFs on my web pages for as long as they can be viewed by the greatest proportion of web users.