I would like to try this, but I'm very worried about it not working. Once before Windows corrupted itself and it took me weeks to get it back as it was - I did have backups of the windows directory, but it didn't help and I didn't understand why (I just copied the Windows files back from a CD).
So, what do I need to backup and can I use Microsoft Backup to do it? I was thinking of just selecting the Windows directory and the files in the root of C: Is this enough? What about open files? If it went completely wrong would I be able to re-run in safe mode and restore everything as it was?
Is there something better that is free? I don't have Norton Ghost which I am sure is probably the best thing to use.
I have a DVD Burner, so I would use that to make the backup, allthough I do have space on another drive.
I find it VERY difficult to believe anyone would re-install everything once a month.
About 2 years ago, Windows got corrupted on my PC (for no apparent reason). I was so determined not to re-install that I spent about 5 or 6 nights trying to restore from backups and repair it. It just wouldn't work and in the end to my complete dismay I re-installed (not re-formatted) over the corrupt one. Windows was back, but then I spent about 2 weeks getting everything re-installed and working again. It was the biggest nightmare I have ever had on any computer I have owned.
All I can think is that this person has almost nothing on his PC. My Program Files directory has 135 main directories off it. That doesn't count the subdirectories (one of which has my games - so no games are counted in that 135).
If he doesn't have any software on it, why is he doing that every month? What could possibly be the reason? HOW could anything go wrong with such a sparse setup?
I'll just shake my head in disbelief and stop typing...
I also picked up on the "In the early '80s, while the American home console business almost ceased to exist" part.
Until about 5 years ago I had never heard of this. I am British and here in England the 80's were some of the best times for games. I got a C64 about 1984 and the games were good (and plentiful) and got better and better. Before that they weren't as good, but that was because the hardware wasn't up to the task (Vic 20's and Atari 2600's couldn't do as much as C64's and Spectrums).
The way I remember it, games started to become really popular after Elite and Manic Miner came out (they were even on the news, which was very unusual at the time). I don't remember a time when the games "almost ceased to exist" because before about 1983/4 there were only a few computers about (like ZX81's, 2600's, Vic-20's and BBC's) so there wasn't much there at that time anyway.
This is my English viewpoint. Maybe other people remember it differently. Probably in other countries it was different as in the 80's the U.K. dominated the games market.
I think that the review method in Zzap was the best I have ever seen. They would give it a % rating for several categories and an overall rating, then if they thought it was worth buying by most people, it got a Silver medal. If you didn't like that type of game then maybe you still wouldn't like it, but the very best games got a Gold medal. These ones should be at least looked at by everyone. The best bit though, was the boxes that had the other members of staff commenting on the game. This meant that you got three or four different opinions on each game. That made their review method the best in my opinion.
Once I was writing a game and I needed to work out the gravity formula for my cannon ball. I went to the toilet and suddenly it was so clear! I was worried that I would forget it before I wrote it down, but I managed to get it on paper and when I coded it it worked!
My first job was to look after a Novell server and a network of 30+ machines with no training apart from what I could pick up along the way and from my experience with PC's. Another job I was looking after a Unix box for the first time and didn't know how to do much.
Recently I got a free label printing program from a web site for my Mother to use at work (she was hand writing 100's of addresses on envelopes that were printed from a computer!) The "computer guy" at the company said they couldn't do labels (even though they use Word) so I go her this free one. I had to explain to him how to find a directory on the PC! They do have a network and the main computer guy who set it up was in another country, but they had put this other person in charge of the PC's and he didn't know anything about them. Another time I had to tell him how to find the size of a hard drive...
I hate it when people call C64 or Amiga games ROMS. Those are not from a cartridge (except for a couple here and there), but are disk images or tape files etc.
I do think it is right to call arcade machine ROM dumps as ROM's though.
I used to work at a small local engineering company and they would say "We need a reporting program that takes the data from this Unix box and prints out nice reports in colour with plenty of options so we can select what prints." etc.
I just started to knock-up a screen with a few tabs and buttons and we would take it from there. Changing bits here and there. Adding new options when we wanted them. It was great:-) I could add things if I wanted to without asking anyone, and change the way that it worked, or re-write whole chunks of code if it was getting messy. As long as it did what they wanted and they had no objections I was free.
Now I am supporting a large mainframe system and it can take days to get approval to change 1 character of data!
My worst one was when I was on a work placement. I wasn't getting paid and I was given this nightmare job of converting a large Fortran program into QBasic (I think. It was a while ago). It had been started by someone else and was in a bit of a mess. I was working on this for a few months non-stop and it drove me nuts.
They've never broken for me. My PS & PS2 have worked without fault since the day I got them. I even have an old Walkman from the 80's that still works although I obviously don't still use it now.
Yeah, I hope it's back soon. I still have to get round to making my own collections of some RKO stuff for the car. I only have the Back In Time discs on CD. Monty on the Run from BIT 1 is my favourite remix ever. I saw MotR played live by a violinist or fiddler (not sure which) in London a few years ago. I thought he was going to explode near the end! It's quite fast:-)
I learnt to program on a PET. What a fantastic machine it was. Our computer room had about 8 or 9 of them. Some had big screens, some small. Some had tape decks in them, some had external ones. Some had a funny white flat keyboard, some had a proper keyboard. All were amazing:-)
We probably had the strangest computer room in England as well. I think it used to be a drama room, and the floor had a sort of pit in the middle with wooden steps up to the edge. The PET's were dangerously balanced around the room and in the pit.
Me and a few friends used to arrive at school early and play on the PET's and also on our teachers VIC-20 (and later his C64). He made a game which we would play (and I later re-wrote on my Amiga 500 for fun).
I feel honoured to have been around at the golden age of computing. It's not the same these days, and the magic has gone. I remember getting really excited when I managed to make my initials in three large sprites move around the screen with the joystick:-) I can still remember some of the C64 Pokes - Poke 53280/1 for the screen colours and the classic SYS 64738 to reset!
The keyboard characters were brilliant as well. Without those it would have been totally different. Those characters allowed you to make almost anything you could imagine (like the Enterprise out of a club!).
The Frankie game was a normally released game. It was very good. By Denton Designs if I remember correctly. It had a really good version of Welcome to the Pleasuredome playing in the background (on the C64 version at least).
I have promised myself that I *WILL* finish that game sometime. It's quite tricky.
Almost all games on the C64 took between 3-5 minutes to load from tape. I did have a copy of Boulderdash that took 11 seconds to load from tape! Oh, and I remember Racing Destruction Set to be the worst game ever to play from tape.
The only things that would usually take longer than 5 minutes would be things you saved yourself with no compression, but everyone had turbo loader software or an Action Replay cartridge to save the memory to a fast loading file. This was back in the days when people bought Action Replay cartridges to be able to save loading screens to print out on out dot-matrix printers or change the graphics on International Soccer to have droids from another game etc. The main reason was to load games from tape then freeze the memory and save it to a fast loading disk image.
Of course, everyone with a C64 should have had a 5.25" disk drive. Life was much better with my trusty 1541:-)
This is good news. I have never been able to play old games on emulators without using a proper joystick. If WinUAE works with this I will get one straight away for WinUAE and MAME. Hopefully C64 emulators will support it as well.
My personal choice of joystick is probably the most popular joystick used with the Amiga. I present... The Zipstick:
I live in England and I voted for UFO: Enemy Unknown in the Amiga category. I think America called the game X-Com (after the organisation you are part of).
I always play demos of PC games (after the fiasco I had with Morrowind) because of the high probability that it isn't going to work properly.
I was planning on getting Halo for the PC so I downloaded the demo and it crashed about 1 second after the menu screen appeared! The sound looped and I had to do a hard reset. How can something so simple crash? It's just a picture with a few bits of text that you highlight! If they can't get that right what must the rest of it be like?
So there is no way I will buy the game bacause the real thing will probably do the same and there is no way for me to try it to see if it will even play at a reasonable speed on my 850Mhz processor.
Slashdot Mirror
I decided to re-read that about a month ago from my Zzap!64's I still have. Those were great times.
Cannon Fodder was a brilliant game and the title music was very funny.
I have e-mailed exactly two people in my whole life who had AOL addresses and both just disappeared. No bounced mail and no e-mail got to them.
It's like the post office not delivering your letters to towns they don't like!
I would like to try this, but I'm very worried about it not working. Once before Windows corrupted itself and it took me weeks to get it back as it was - I did have backups of the windows directory, but it didn't help and I didn't understand why (I just copied the Windows files back from a CD).
So, what do I need to backup and can I use Microsoft Backup to do it? I was thinking of just selecting the Windows directory and the files in the root of C: Is this enough? What about open files? If it went completely wrong would I be able to re-run in safe mode and restore everything as it was?
Is there something better that is free? I don't have Norton Ghost which I am sure is probably the best thing to use.
I have a DVD Burner, so I would use that to make the backup, allthough I do have space on another drive.
I find it VERY difficult to believe anyone would re-install everything once a month.
About 2 years ago, Windows got corrupted on my PC (for no apparent reason). I was so determined not to re-install that I spent about 5 or 6 nights trying to restore from backups and repair it. It just wouldn't work and in the end to my complete dismay I re-installed (not re-formatted) over the corrupt one. Windows was back, but then I spent about 2 weeks getting everything re-installed and working again. It was the biggest nightmare I have ever had on any computer I have owned.
All I can think is that this person has almost nothing on his PC. My Program Files directory has 135 main directories off it. That doesn't count the subdirectories (one of which has my games - so no games are counted in that 135).
If he doesn't have any software on it, why is he doing that every month? What could possibly be the reason? HOW could anything go wrong with such a sparse setup?
I'll just shake my head in disbelief and stop typing...
I also picked up on the "In the early '80s, while the American home console business almost ceased to exist" part.
Until about 5 years ago I had never heard of this. I am British and here in England the 80's were some of the best times for games. I got a C64 about 1984 and the games were good (and plentiful) and got better and better. Before that they weren't as good, but that was because the hardware wasn't up to the task (Vic 20's and Atari 2600's couldn't do as much as C64's and Spectrums).
The way I remember it, games started to become really popular after Elite and Manic Miner came out (they were even on the news, which was very unusual at the time). I don't remember a time when the games "almost ceased to exist" because before about 1983/4 there were only a few computers about (like ZX81's, 2600's, Vic-20's and BBC's) so there wasn't much there at that time anyway.
This is my English viewpoint. Maybe other people remember it differently. Probably in other countries it was different as in the 80's the U.K. dominated the games market.
I think that the review method in Zzap was the best I have ever seen. They would give it a % rating for several categories and an overall rating, then if they thought it was worth buying by most people, it got a Silver medal. If you didn't like that type of game then maybe you still wouldn't like it, but the very best games got a Gold medal. These ones should be at least looked at by everyone. The best bit though, was the boxes that had the other members of staff commenting on the game. This meant that you got three or four different opinions on each game. That made their review method the best in my opinion.
On the toilet sometimes works for me :-)
Once I was writing a game and I needed to work out the gravity formula for my cannon ball. I went to the toilet and suddenly it was so clear! I was worried that I would forget it before I wrote it down, but I managed to get it on paper and when I coded it it worked!
Agreed.
My first job was to look after a Novell server and a network of 30+ machines with no training apart from what I could pick up along the way and from my experience with PC's. Another job I was looking after a Unix box for the first time and didn't know how to do much.
Recently I got a free label printing program from a web site for my Mother to use at work (she was hand writing 100's of addresses on envelopes that were printed from a computer!) The "computer guy" at the company said they couldn't do labels (even though they use Word) so I go her this free one. I had to explain to him how to find a directory on the PC! They do have a network and the main computer guy who set it up was in another country, but they had put this other person in charge of the PC's and he didn't know anything about them. Another time I had to tell him how to find the size of a hard drive...
I hate it when people call C64 or Amiga games ROMS. Those are not from a cartridge (except for a couple here and there), but are disk images or tape files etc.
I do think it is right to call arcade machine ROM dumps as ROM's though.
Yep, sounds familiar.
:-) I could add things if I wanted to without asking anyone, and change the way that it worked, or re-write whole chunks of code if it was getting messy. As long as it did what they wanted and they had no objections I was free.
I used to work at a small local engineering company and they would say "We need a reporting program that takes the data from this Unix box and prints out nice reports in colour with plenty of options so we can select what prints." etc.
I just started to knock-up a screen with a few tabs and buttons and we would take it from there. Changing bits here and there. Adding new options when we wanted them. It was great
Now I am supporting a large mainframe system and it can take days to get approval to change 1 character of data!
My worst one was when I was on a work placement. I wasn't getting paid and I was given this nightmare job of converting a large Fortran program into QBasic (I think. It was a while ago). It had been started by someone else and was in a bit of a mess. I was working on this for a few months non-stop and it drove me nuts.
They've never broken for me. My PS & PS2 have worked without fault since the day I got them. I even have an old Walkman from the 80's that still works although I obviously don't still use it now.
I like Sony. They have never done anything to annoy me or to make me dislike what they are doing.
When they bring out the PS3 I will almost definitely get one.
Yeah, I hope it's back soon. I still have to get round to making my own collections of some RKO stuff for the car. I only have the Back In Time discs on CD. Monty on the Run from BIT 1 is my favourite remix ever. I saw MotR played live by a violinist or fiddler (not sure which) in London a few years ago. I thought he was going to explode near the end! It's quite fast :-)
I didn't say I play on it all the time, I just mentioned it since the original post mentioned Amigas.
I have a PS2 for games.
If someone was to PAY me to have one, it would still be too much.
:-)
I wouldn't have an X-Box on principal. I have NEVER bought ANYTHING with Micro$oft on it and I never will.
My Amigas also still work
I learnt to program on a PET. What a fantastic machine it was. Our computer room had about 8 or 9 of them. Some had big screens, some small. Some had tape decks in them, some had external ones. Some had a funny white flat keyboard, some had a proper keyboard. All were amazing :-)
:-) I can still remember some of the C64 Pokes - Poke 53280/1 for the screen colours and the classic SYS 64738 to reset!
We probably had the strangest computer room in England as well. I think it used to be a drama room, and the floor had a sort of pit in the middle with wooden steps up to the edge. The PET's were dangerously balanced around the room and in the pit.
Me and a few friends used to arrive at school early and play on the PET's and also on our teachers VIC-20 (and later his C64). He made a game which we would play (and I later re-wrote on my Amiga 500 for fun).
I feel honoured to have been around at the golden age of computing. It's not the same these days, and the magic has gone. I remember getting really excited when I managed to make my initials in three large sprites move around the screen with the joystick
The keyboard characters were brilliant as well. Without those it would have been totally different. Those characters allowed you to make almost anything you could imagine (like the Enterprise out of a club!).
Atari 2600 -> Vic-20 -> C64 -> Amiga 500 -> Amiga 1200 -> PC
The Commodore years were the best (and Zzap!64 was the best magazine I have ever read).
Paul.
(who, believe it or not, was listening to C64 remixes on the way to work in his car this morning)
In England we had that as well. A friend of mine used to back up his Amiga hard drive to VHS.
Yep, see "Frankie!!!" thread up there ^
The Frankie game was a normally released game. It was very good. By Denton Designs if I remember correctly. It had a really good version of Welcome to the Pleasuredome playing in the background (on the C64 version at least).
I have promised myself that I *WILL* finish that game sometime. It's quite tricky.
Almost all games on the C64 took between 3-5 minutes to load from tape. I did have a copy of Boulderdash that took 11 seconds to load from tape! Oh, and I remember Racing Destruction Set to be the worst game ever to play from tape.
:-)
The only things that would usually take longer than 5 minutes would be things you saved yourself with no compression, but everyone had turbo loader software or an Action Replay cartridge to save the memory to a fast loading file. This was back in the days when people bought Action Replay cartridges to be able to save loading screens to print out on out dot-matrix printers or change the graphics on International Soccer to have droids from another game etc. The main reason was to load games from tape then freeze the memory and save it to a fast loading disk image.
Of course, everyone with a C64 should have had a 5.25" disk drive. Life was much better with my trusty 1541
My personal choice of joystick is probably the most popular joystick used with the Amiga. I present... The Zipstick:
See this eBay search for pics
Roadkill has tornados, which are quite good. They suck you up into the air if you get too close and the ground shakes.
For me, Roadkill is filling the hole left by not having GTA5 last October/November.
I live in England and I voted for UFO: Enemy Unknown in the Amiga category. I think America called the game X-Com (after the organisation you are part of).
I always play demos of PC games (after the fiasco I had with Morrowind) because of the high probability that it isn't going to work properly.
I was planning on getting Halo for the PC so I downloaded the demo and it crashed about 1 second after the menu screen appeared! The sound looped and I had to do a hard reset. How can something so simple crash? It's just a picture with a few bits of text that you highlight! If they can't get that right what must the rest of it be like?
So there is no way I will buy the game bacause the real thing will probably do the same and there is no way for me to try it to see if it will even play at a reasonable speed on my 850Mhz processor.