Here's a GPL'd one that that seems to work pretty well for those old games: Basilisk II
You'll need an OS, but Apple is giving one away for free use (apparantly): OS 7.5.3
So far, AFAIK, this is all legal (or at least uncontested). The tricky part is finding a ROM that works. The only way to get one is to rip it from your own mac - included is software to do that, though. You might be able to find one on the net if you look hard enough, though. (it won't be legal)
And then, of course, you need to find software for it if you don't already have some.
Another tricky thing is dealing with mac programs you download on the net. The mac filesystem has a concept that FAT/NTFS doesn't really have, which is each file has potentially two parts - resource and binary or something like that. I don't really understand it. But if you download an executable directly, then you probably will only get one part and it won't work, so you need to get them in BINHEX'd (HQX) mode, and then use something like HFVExplorer (Win32) to decode it properly when you copy it into your Mac disk image. It took me a while to figure out that HFVExplorer would do this for me, as I had a binhex'd version of Stuffit Expander, and I had no idea how to decode it once it was on the mac disk image, so I could decode other programs.
I've tried this a few times on Amazon before, ordering out of print, or special-order books, but It's *never* worked. They just wait a few months and then say they couldn't do it. In all of these cases, I found the book the next time I walked into a used book store.
One thing that really bugs me: when one book of a series goes out of print, but other books of the series haven't. Specifically when, say, the second book of a trilogy goes out of print, but the first and third books are still in print! What? How does that happen?
You're right, how could I be so ignorant of important PC issues of the day?! You've helped me to decide: I'm leaving computers and the software industry to take up a peaceful life of contemplation. Living off the land, pumping my own water, harvesting crops. I'm obviously a failure as a technologist, so I must find an ecosystem I can truly integrate with.
-If
PS: I USE the NET, and pay attention to it all the time, so I don't know what you are implying.
Hey, don't be talking smack about Westwood! (SSI just published EoB, Westwood developed it.) SURE it was a Dungeon Master-style game, but DM created a genre, you can't expect people to sit on their laurels and not be inspired by it to create their own. I'm surprised it's as small a genre as it is, there's only a handful games that I would say belong in this specific category. Err.. I guess the category would be: "party first-person real-time grid-based RPG"
Westwood later came out with a game called Lands of Lore (not based on AD&D at all, yay!) that, if you like these kinds of games, is well worth your time to try and find a copy to play. The sequels are decidedly less worth your time to try and find.
So how do these philosophies fit into the political parties of today? Both democrats and republicans seem happy to endorse removal of civil liberties (as anyone who reads slashdot is constantly reminded), but you said that most of America is pro-liberty.
I've never cared much for politics, being an engineer-type and focused on that. But now I find myself (and most people I know) pretty upset with what's going on these days in the political realm, specifically with regard to personal freedom.
No, anarchy is doing whatever you want REGARDLESS of it's effect on others.
He's talking about being able to do what you want, except for things that hurt others, or infringe on their rights. Murder is legal in anarchy, it's up to vigilantes to protect against that, but Murder would be just as illegal as it is now under Libertairanism (or conservatism?)
Well, we beat out dogs and cats and birds to dominate the planet. Maybe we'll all kill ourselves, but, in terms of the species, we've been pretty successful so far. We haven't found any ruins of ancient technology that surpasses ours, so we've probably come farther than any other race on the planet. So we win, for now.
Loaded up fast... universities kick ass. Man, when I was in college, I had to share a dual ISDN line with the whole building. Of course after I left the dorms, fiber was ubiquitous.
Well, you can't transmit a signal better than the normal 480i via coax. I don't know the technical reasons, unfortunately, but any HDTV that has both Component and Coax input is only going to support progressive or HD signals through the component input.
For your DVD player, this doesn't matter too much unless you have a progressive-scan DVD player as well as a TV capable of 480p. For a computer output, though, even running at 640x480 is going to look like crap through a coax, because it's going to be interlaced. It's probably fine for playing DVD's off your computer into your TV, if your TV does not support progressive scan.
So, this more expensive box is actually processing an HD signal, whereas anything that outputs to coax is probably just dealing with a normal TV signal.
I think my favorite is "asshat." I don't know what it means (You wear an ass on your hat? For your hat? Someone else uses your ass for a hat? Your ass is shaped like a hat?) But it makes me giggle.
-If
I just thought of something, it could be a compound of "as shat." I don't know what that would mean, either. It's as if you were shat out of someone else? It's as if you had just shat?
Well, it's one thing to be against a law or a practice, and it's another to pass legislation concerning it. America already has WAY too much legislation for it's own good. About everything.
Most laws, like this one, restrict freedom by requiring an entity either to do something (like file taxes or put labels on products), or not do something (murder, rape, pillage, etc). Many of these laws are good and neccessary, specifically the ones that are against one person directly harming another, or limiting their freedom. I'm glad murder is illegal.
But forcing people to put labels on things for this reason is going too far. It doesn't matter whether it's for explicit lyrics, or a particular copy-protection scheme, or whatever. Just because I personally think that "explicit lyrics" are okay and copy-protection schemes are bad doesn't make this law better than the other. They are both reducing freedoms further than neccessary, and the WRONG way to go about solving problems. Sure, it's the record companies' freedoms, not the consumers', but you can't have a double standard about these things, otherwise you look like a hypocrite.
This isn't nutritional information, it's not like people have allergies and could die if they don't have this information. This is like the helmet and seat-belt laws... Yes, it's a good idea to wear helmets and seat belts and not to smoke pot, but No the government shouldn't try to make everyone comply with their idea of good, especially since there's no clear way it hurts other people. You generally can return something if it's defective, or it offends you.
If you want to legislate something that will help, make a law that creates a allocates resources to increase awareness of these issues. Create a "COPY PROTECTION FREE" sticker that they can voluntairly put on their CDs, and an ad campaign that informs people about the crappiness of copy protection. These things are non-invasive, they don't force people to do or not to do anything, and they educate people, which is the RIGHT way to go about doing things. And this doesn't even require legislation, anyone could form an organization to do this.
Depending how far into the future you want to think, you shouldn't have to buy a new TV if you do not watch OTA/cable/sat until:
- one of your devices fails - some of your VCR/DVD media goes bad (or gets lost/damaged) and you want to replace it - you want anything that's newly released
In 2200, they aren't going to release "Lord of the Rings XX: Sauron's Return + Robots" on DVD or VHS (and I'm really looking forward to that one, I've heard good things).
At CES 2003, Zenith had a nice set of HDTVs with HD-DVRs built into them. I thought it was the best HD display at CES, and pretty much everyone was showing off their HD.
The funny thing was that most of the HD displays that I saw were not getting sent a good signal, so it looked like crap. Most of them were showing canned content, but it was low-res canned content!! Some of them were showing 4:3 canned content stretched to a 16:9 screen! Zenith had just used their DVR to record some HD TV (some show, probably from HBO, that had chicks in hot tubs), and used that as their demo, and it looked very nice (even without the girls in the hot tubs).
I thought the point was not so much getting MORE channels in the same bandwidth, but compressing the broadcast TV bandwidth so the FCC could sell off that bandwidth and make huge steaming, smelly piles of cash. Err... funding.
I have a question, does this affect cable, too? Are they supposed to convert entirely over to digital cable, or will they still be analog while over-the-air is completely converted over to digital?
You should be able to use any graphics card/HDTV, you just need a converter like this. They also have a magic box to go the other direction. A bit pricey, though. I'm sure there are a bunch of these kinds of gadgets being developed.
See, now that's a good capitalistic business model, wait for a huge crisis (OK, OK, maybe crisis is too strong a word), and come out with devices that solve the problems... or even just bandaid over the problems until a real solution arrives.
One set of, say, Monster component video cables can run upwards of $80. Even their coax cable is around $30. Length will add maybe $10 to the price, if they need to be long. When I got my TV, I decided to go the monster route and spent like $300 in cables getting everything hooked up. Probably was a total waste of money, but I had more money than I knew what to do with at the time.
Monster does have a sweet coax cable that's about 1/2 the thickness of normal coax, isn't stiff at all, and with right-angled connectors.
Well, the article mentions a converter box that will reduce an HD-signal so it displays on non-HD TVs. I don't know what the price point is, but you probably won't HAVE to buy a new TV. It can't be too high, otherwise people would just get new TVs.
They don't have to. They only need to provide it, by request, to people they have distributed it to, in order to be in compliance with the GPL. And they can charge for the media, too. The public internet is just an easy way to do that for GPL products that are ALSO free-as-in-beer.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmmmm.... Gyros...
-If
Quests, I think.
-If
Here's a GPL'd one that that seems to work pretty well for those old games: Basilisk II
You'll need an OS, but Apple is giving one away for free use (apparantly): OS 7.5.3
So far, AFAIK, this is all legal (or at least uncontested). The tricky part is finding a ROM that works. The only way to get one is to rip it from your own mac - included is software to do that, though. You might be able to find one on the net if you look hard enough, though. (it won't be legal)
And then, of course, you need to find software for it if you don't already have some.
Another tricky thing is dealing with mac programs you download on the net. The mac filesystem has a concept that FAT/NTFS doesn't really have, which is each file has potentially two parts - resource and binary or something like that. I don't really understand it. But if you download an executable directly, then you probably will only get one part and it won't work, so you need to get them in BINHEX'd (HQX) mode, and then use something like HFVExplorer (Win32) to decode it properly when you copy it into your Mac disk image. It took me a while to figure out that HFVExplorer would do this for me, as I had a binhex'd version of Stuffit Expander, and I had no idea how to decode it once it was on the mac disk image, so I could decode other programs.
Good luck!
-If
I've tried this a few times on Amazon before, ordering out of print, or special-order books, but It's *never* worked. They just wait a few months and then say they couldn't do it. In all of these cases, I found the book the next time I walked into a used book store.
One thing that really bugs me: when one book of a series goes out of print, but other books of the series haven't. Specifically when, say, the second book of a trilogy goes out of print, but the first and third books are still in print! What? How does that happen?
-If
You're right, how could I be so ignorant of important PC issues of the day?! You've helped me to decide: I'm leaving computers and the software industry to take up a peaceful life of contemplation. Living off the land, pumping my own water, harvesting crops. I'm obviously a failure as a technologist, so I must find an ecosystem I can truly integrate with.
-If
PS: I USE the NET, and pay attention to it all the time, so I don't know what you are implying.
I think it's: Strange Pandas Investigate Smelly Piles Of Panda Dung
-If
Hey, don't be talking smack about Westwood! (SSI just published EoB, Westwood developed it.) SURE it was a Dungeon Master-style game, but DM created a genre, you can't expect people to sit on their laurels and not be inspired by it to create their own. I'm surprised it's as small a genre as it is, there's only a handful games that I would say belong in this specific category. Err.. I guess the category would be: "party first-person real-time grid-based RPG"
Westwood later came out with a game called Lands of Lore (not based on AD&D at all, yay!) that, if you like these kinds of games, is well worth your time to try and find a copy to play. The sequels are decidedly less worth your time to try and find.
-If
So how do these philosophies fit into the political parties of today? Both democrats and republicans seem happy to endorse removal of civil liberties (as anyone who reads slashdot is constantly reminded), but you said that most of America is pro-liberty.
I've never cared much for politics, being an engineer-type and focused on that. But now I find myself (and most people I know) pretty upset with what's going on these days in the political realm, specifically with regard to personal freedom.
-If
No, anarchy is doing whatever you want REGARDLESS of it's effect on others.
He's talking about being able to do what you want, except for things that hurt others, or infringe on their rights. Murder is legal in anarchy, it's up to vigilantes to protect against that, but Murder would be just as illegal as it is now under Libertairanism (or conservatism?)
-If
"...the $1,371,546 mansion summer home..."
You left off a a digit at the end, there...
-If
"REAL conservative believe that you should be able to do anything you want as long as it doesnt adversely affect others."
I thought that was Libertarianism?
-If
Well, we beat out dogs and cats and birds to dominate the planet. Maybe we'll all kill ourselves, but, in terms of the species, we've been pretty successful so far. We haven't found any ruins of ancient technology that surpasses ours, so we've probably come farther than any other race on the planet. So we win, for now.
-If
Loaded up fast... universities kick ass. Man, when I was in college, I had to share a dual ISDN line with the whole building. Of course after I left the dorms, fiber was ubiquitous.
-If
Well, you can't transmit a signal better than the normal 480i via coax. I don't know the technical reasons, unfortunately, but any HDTV that has both Component and Coax input is only going to support progressive or HD signals through the component input.
For your DVD player, this doesn't matter too much unless you have a progressive-scan DVD player as well as a TV capable of 480p. For a computer output, though, even running at 640x480 is going to look like crap through a coax, because it's going to be interlaced. It's probably fine for playing DVD's off your computer into your TV, if your TV does not support progressive scan.
So, this more expensive box is actually processing an HD signal, whereas anything that outputs to coax is probably just dealing with a normal TV signal.
-If
I think my favorite is "asshat." I don't know what it means (You wear an ass on your hat? For your hat? Someone else uses your ass for a hat? Your ass is shaped like a hat?) But it makes me giggle.
-If
I just thought of something, it could be a compound of "as shat." I don't know what that would mean, either. It's as if you were shat out of someone else? It's as if you had just shat?
Ugh, my head is swimming.
Well, it's one thing to be against a law or a practice, and it's another to pass legislation concerning it. America already has WAY too much legislation for it's own good. About everything.
Most laws, like this one, restrict freedom by requiring an entity either to do something (like file taxes or put labels on products), or not do something (murder, rape, pillage, etc). Many of these laws are good and neccessary, specifically the ones that are against one person directly harming another, or limiting their freedom. I'm glad murder is illegal.
But forcing people to put labels on things for this reason is going too far. It doesn't matter whether it's for explicit lyrics, or a particular copy-protection scheme, or whatever. Just because I personally think that "explicit lyrics" are okay and copy-protection schemes are bad doesn't make this law better than the other. They are both reducing freedoms further than neccessary, and the WRONG way to go about solving problems. Sure, it's the record companies' freedoms, not the consumers', but you can't have a double standard about these things, otherwise you look like a hypocrite.
This isn't nutritional information, it's not like people have allergies and could die if they don't have this information. This is like the helmet and seat-belt laws... Yes, it's a good idea to wear helmets and seat belts and not to smoke pot, but No the government shouldn't try to make everyone comply with their idea of good, especially since there's no clear way it hurts other people. You generally can return something if it's defective, or it offends you.
If you want to legislate something that will help, make a law that creates a allocates resources to increase awareness of these issues. Create a "COPY PROTECTION FREE" sticker that they can voluntairly put on their CDs, and an ad campaign that informs people about the crappiness of copy protection. These things are non-invasive, they don't force people to do or not to do anything, and they educate people, which is the RIGHT way to go about doing things. And this doesn't even require legislation, anyone could form an organization to do this.
-If
In 2200, they aren't going to release "Lord of the Rings XX: Sauron's Return + Robots" on DVD or VHS (and I'm really looking forward to that one, I've heard good things).
-If
At CES 2003, Zenith had a nice set of HDTVs with HD-DVRs built into them. I thought it was the best HD display at CES, and pretty much everyone was showing off their HD.
The funny thing was that most of the HD displays that I saw were not getting sent a good signal, so it looked like crap. Most of them were showing canned content, but it was low-res canned content!! Some of them were showing 4:3 canned content stretched to a 16:9 screen! Zenith had just used their DVR to record some HD TV (some show, probably from HBO, that had chicks in hot tubs), and used that as their demo, and it looked very nice (even without the girls in the hot tubs).
-If
I thought the point was not so much getting MORE channels in the same bandwidth, but compressing the broadcast TV bandwidth so the FCC could sell off that bandwidth and make huge steaming, smelly piles of cash. Err... funding.
I have a question, does this affect cable, too? Are they supposed to convert entirely over to digital cable, or will they still be analog while over-the-air is completely converted over to digital?
I want digital Comedy Central!
-If
You should be able to use any graphics card/HDTV, you just need a converter like this. They also have a magic box to go the other direction. A bit pricey, though. I'm sure there are a bunch of these kinds of gadgets being developed.
See, now that's a good capitalistic business model, wait for a huge crisis (OK, OK, maybe crisis is too strong a word), and come out with devices that solve the problems... or even just bandaid over the problems until a real solution arrives.
-If
One set of, say, Monster component video cables can run upwards of $80. Even their coax cable is around $30. Length will add maybe $10 to the price, if they need to be long. When I got my TV, I decided to go the monster route and spent like $300 in cables getting everything hooked up. Probably was a total waste of money, but I had more money than I knew what to do with at the time.
Monster does have a sweet coax cable that's about 1/2 the thickness of normal coax, isn't stiff at all, and with right-angled connectors.
-If
Well, the article mentions a converter box that will reduce an HD-signal so it displays on non-HD TVs. I don't know what the price point is, but you probably won't HAVE to buy a new TV. It can't be too high, otherwise people would just get new TVs.
-If
I think people used for those page-widening posts you used to hear so much about.
-If
They don't have to. They only need to provide it, by request, to people they have distributed it to, in order to be in compliance with the GPL. And they can charge for the media, too. The public internet is just an easy way to do that for GPL products that are ALSO free-as-in-beer.
-If
Yeah, Shadow of Yserbius was on TSN. That was way before The Realm, and it was actually cool. Death Darts, baby!
Later they came out with an offline version of it.
-If