I'm one of those weirdos that likes to play with old OSes (especially ones that were too expensive new or before my time) just for fun. My fiancee thinks it's weird when I point at my screen and say things like "I finally got 256 colors in NT 3.1!" but she's used to my oddities. I actually quite like Program Manager just as a program launcher. It allows easy grouping with nice access to things. I suppose you'd get a similar effect by launching %userprofile%\Start Menu\Programs, or folders of shortcuts on the desktop, but it's not quite the same. In the end, I rarely use my Start menu for anything other than shutting down or opening rarely-launched programs. Everything I use frequently is either on my quicklaunch bar, a keyboard shortcut, or in Linux (in similar places). However, I never cared for Winfile for file management. I'll grant the early, pre-web-integration Explorers were an improvement over Winfile.
Or maybe I'm just an old fogey by computer standards and want XP's Explorer off my lawn:)
Eh, I ended up with a spare 2 gig laptop drive from a friend's laptop that was destroyed in several interesting ways, all accidental, so I stuck NT4 on it just for kicks and giggles. Nothing on the main drive dual booting Gentoo and XP I'd hate to lose either.
Unfortunately, it ended up fairly unexciting. Apparently MS did something with ordinal number 510 (or was it 512?) in shell32.dll since NT4. I don't have the inclination to mess with trying to swap out shell32s or try to hack the ordinal back in there, so I'll probably leave it at that:) The lack of the knowledge to fiddle with ordinals (or even what the things are... my primary coding experience consists mostly of perl) might have something to do with it. Perhaps I'll revisit it someday - NT 4's interface really flies on this laptop (Dell Latitude C610) compared to XP's. Even my company's crappy ActiveX web-based CRM runs faster on NT 4's standalone IE6 than XP's. Funny how that works out. Just tonight I also got USB working in some usable fashion for thumb drives and HIDs, which surprised me since I'd always been told NT4 just plain couldn't do USB. Only thing left keeping me from just leaving this laptop on NT4 for work is the wireless - I don't think anyone ever made ipw2200 drivers for NT 4.
Interesting links on the appendix. I haven't done much (any?) biology since high school, and that's what we were always told. ISTR someone in the class asking why, if it was useless and caused problems when burst, it wasn't just removed at birth and the teacher didn't really have an answer. Gov't schools ftw I suppose:P
I'd say gaining complexity is perhaps the definition of evolution, perhaps even including bloat and complexity (even biological systems aren't immune. Lots of complex animals have useless bits left over weighing them down. Appendix, etc).
I think the argument is better made that GUIs have evolved too much for their own good. I wonder what would happen if you launched NT 4's explorer.exe in WinXP.... I think i'm gonna go try it...
This is one reason why I bought and spend a good portion of my down-time gaming on a GB Micro with a flash card and a few dozen NES games. They're quick, easy, and with save states I can save and quit anytime. So many games these days require large investments of time to make even minor progress takes a good long while. Both my fiancee and I took forever to get through SMA 3: Yoshi's Island because the levels are so dang long and don't have any kind of in-level save.
That said, I do love the occasional marathon gaming session with HL2 and similar. It's just most of my gaming time comes in short bursts.
It's not quite Nethack, but there's http://calcrogue.jimrandomh.org/ available for a few calcs. It's more than just Rogue as well with some nice extras. I've enjoyed it a lot (at least when I had time to play. I don't use my calc that much anymore and have better and more interesting things to do than play games on one)
I bought a lot of 10 identical 40 gig laptop drives from an eBay seller for some teeny pittance (I want to say something like $10 shipped) that were explicitly sold as non-working. Of the bunch, most of them didn't do a thing. However, there were 2 that had some broken pins, and a few that read fine but had massive data errors. I had no trouble swapping the controller boards from the ones with broken pins from one of the data error ones and ended up with 2 good 40 gig drives for $10. Wasn't too shabby I thought.
My dad had a stroke two years ago. It was relatively minor as strokes went, but he still had a lot of coordination problems. His left side was far worse than his right. His recovery process was slow until they let him go home and he got back into trying to racing simulations he loved to play (Grand Prix Legends mostly. Awesome game but a heck of a learning curve). All of a sudden he did hugely better and pretty quickly was driving himself for real again. I mentioned it to the physical therapists but they didn't quite seem to understand. It's a shame, I bet there's plenty of untapped potential there. Whether it's actual video games or just something similar like this Xbox setup.
Granted it's a single-source and I haven't tried to verify it, but http://www.aa1car.com/library/trtu796.htm would seem to indicate that the ban was overturned and it's still used in a few things.
Wrong issue, though. It's not so much an issue of "cheating" AI that are given information a player wouldn't, but a player using the AI info on their computer in ways they shouldn't. For example, on a game that has map exploration like a RTS game, imagine being able to tap into the AI's viewport and gaining all the exploration knowledge they have. Or a FPS with radar showing enemy locations, you could tap into the AI to either use it's radar too if it's supposed to be a friendly AI. Or, if the AI is on an enemy team, it's info might well have the locations of all the enemies on the team.
This is all data that any legit player would have, but it can be dangerous to have this info sent to clients that aren't that player. The classic Aimbot is what can happen when you trust client data more than you should, not to mention wallhacks and similar. It would be conceivable that it could be encrypted or tagged somehow, but we all know how well that sort of thing works.
I was doing ISP tech support for a major ISP when AOL 5 came out. We got absolutely flooded by calls from AOL users who either used our service with AOL, or did the BYOA plan. AOL 5 replaced Windows DUN with its own version, which conveniently only worked with AOL. It was nearly impossible to rip it out and replace it with the original DUN. We had to turn tons of customers back to Microsoft or their computer vendor to reinstall Windows.
Fortunately, most people were already unhappy with AOL so it didn't take too much to convince them it wasn't our fault. I bet we gained a few users from that. I think they called it the "Evil Connectoid" bug.
Most interior "locks" I've seen are of the push and twist variety. They don't take anything more than a paperclip or other similar thing to open. I'd say they're expressly designed to keep kids out of places they shouldn't be and prevent accidents, and not at all about security.
The ones in the house I grew up in even had the endcap easily popped off, allowing direct access to the plunger.
The trunk one is a bit more surprising since that should be a proper key, but I've often wondered just how effective car locks are. I remember I discovered my old '83 Firebird's door key would start a friend's GM truck (remember GM cars at the time had two keys, door and ignition). She got a kick out of it but it made me wonder.
Yeah, 6th palace is a doozy. 5th palace isn't all that hard, but it's a bit of a maze. Both the 6th palace and Golden Palace are some of the best examples of NES level design I've seen.
In the last few years I've tried beating Z2 in various interesting ways. Probably the hardest was when I limited myself to the four magic and heart containers that Link comes with. The game itself wasn't hard, but there's one of the final bosses that you have to use all four magic containers on to even make it vulnerable, and it kills you on the second hit. So, no Life. I spent probably two months just trying to beat that guy, but I did finally make it. Next I'm thinking about using some emu's built-in cheat device to lock the exp levels at 1. Does it still count as cheating if you make it harder?:)
Dunno, maybe I'm an oddball, but my favorite two Zelda games are the two black sheep: Zelda 2 and Majora's Mask.
I think my main concern with Wii (and, for that matter, more immersive stuff up to Holodeck-like things) is the learning curve. With, say, Legend of Zelda all I have to know to execute complex sword techniques is how to press a button, perhaps holding it for awhile or combining with another button or stick move. Assuming 100% unassisted mode with a Wiimote or other controller, I'd then have to learn swordfighting to stand a chance since I'd have taken over the sword itself. Likewise with sports games - rather than a button to swing and maybe a stick to move the bat angle up and down, I'd have to learn how to be a major league hitter. On some level this might well be a lot of fun, but I'd see it possibly turning off casual gamers who weren't particular into the game's particular idiom. I still think there's a good-sized market for it, I just see most games having varying levels of reliance on the Wiimote or similar.
Amazing what you find lurking around the dark corners of roms. Shame you need a GS to do it on the real thing (pain to put all the codes in, I've done it and it works but eh) but still fun with an emu.
Sadly, mine hasn't had much of an interest in Zelda. She did just get herself addicted to WoW though, which is sorta-kinda Zeldaish. So maybe she'll give it another try. She always claims she doesn't have the coordination for it, but she's managing Wow fine.
For me, Zelda 2 was the first NES game I ever played, with LoZ not too far behind. Good times, those were. Good times.
When I first heard they were going to make a separate GC and Wii version, and not just have the GC version work on the Wii, I was concerned they wouldn't make full use of the Wii's capabilities since they wouldn't want the games too different. It sounds like they are going to use the Wii controls well, but I wonder whether there will be much graphical difference. Even if it's a particularly nice-looking GC game, I'd hate to think it was held back by the requirement to run on the GC.
Some of the earlier games used sprite-flipping for certain directions, so it was hard to tell which hand was "official". The Zelda 2 manual makes reference to the left-handedness, and the 3D games have always had Link left-handed.
Actually, even though I'm right handed, I've played so much Zelda that the few times I've had the occasion to do it, I've automatically picked up swords with my left hand.
Yeah, I'm a Zelda geek. Proud of it too:) My fiancee gets sick of listening to the music though.
My parents got my sister a cell phone when she was 16 and started driving on her own a few places. She did take over some of the payments when she got a part-time job the next year, but they always made sure she had it. They wanted to make sure she always had a way to reach someone in an emergency.
Of course, they didn't think I needed anything like that. But then I didn't go out much;)
Both the Wal Mart and the Kroger near me have signs, I think the Wal Mart's is 15 items and the Kroger 10. Much like the X item express lanes, however, I've never actually seen it enforced and I've seen plenty of people doing whole cartloads themselves. I don't recall one at Home Depot and... some other grocery store I was recently.
Incidentally, Kroger's is great. Minimal delays in the "Please place the item in the bag" portion and rarely gets stuck anywhere. Wal Mart's is usually a huge pain, though they've revamped it lately so it's not so bad. I still avoid them when I can though, or if there's much of a line. Not worth the trouble. I haven't used Home Depot's much since I'm usually the guy with six individual washers with matching nuts and bolts and I don't really feel like messing with those in the self checkout (if you even can?).
As for the last comment, I don't know that union enters into it. Dunno if it's still the case but Publix used to get slammed all the time for hiring non-union and I've tended to have pleasant shopping experiences there. I think the whole need for self-checkout is due to stores' poor planning and training of checkers as often don't have enough lanes open and/or the ones that are open are manned by slowpokes.
And, I'll agree with the previous posts: It's extremely frustrating when you're waiting on some idiot who can't figure the system out. I'll usually give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to slightly technical things, but when there's all of 4 or 5 buttons, the big one being "DEBIT" and they still have to ask the helper-person how to use their debit card it just frustrates me.
Yeah, my MR2 has it under the spare tire in the front hood while the engine is in the back.
The aforementioned Firebird's was in the corner under the hood, and the mental image of someone scrabbling around under the car trying to get the battery unhooked before raising the hood amused me.
Although, even needing to have a "raise the hood" step strikes me as a bit odd, but then I've always been one that needs minimal instruction.
My favorite mistake was in the Chilton's manual I had for my '83 Firebird years back. The process for changing the wiper motor had step 1 as "disconnect the battery cable at the negative terminal" and step 2 was "raise the hood". Still makes me smile all these years later.
I'm one of those weirdos who loves betas of games and such. I love seeing the features that never worked out, the levels that were cut, etc. It'd be awesome if Nintendo (or any company really) released a disc full of the various betas, demos, and preleases of major games. I think it'd be cool.
I bought a gameshark just to play with the stuff in Zelda 64. Who'd a thunk there was a fully-functional arwing enemy left in there that cirlces and takes potshots at Link.
With most corporate environments, the users are screwed anyway if the network is down. Where I work we depend on a CRM, e-mail, and several internal websites to do our work so if the network is gone we might as well be on thin clients. About the only advantage we have having desktops is it means we can play Solitaire until the network's back.
Thankfully, total network outages are pretty rare here so far.
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I'm one of those weirdos that likes to play with old OSes (especially ones that were too expensive new or before my time) just for fun. My fiancee thinks it's weird when I point at my screen and say things like "I finally got 256 colors in NT 3.1!" but she's used to my oddities. I actually quite like Program Manager just as a program launcher. It allows easy grouping with nice access to things. I suppose you'd get a similar effect by launching %userprofile%\Start Menu\Programs, or folders of shortcuts on the desktop, but it's not quite the same. In the end, I rarely use my Start menu for anything other than shutting down or opening rarely-launched programs. Everything I use frequently is either on my quicklaunch bar, a keyboard shortcut, or in Linux (in similar places). However, I never cared for Winfile for file management. I'll grant the early, pre-web-integration Explorers were an improvement over Winfile.
:)
Or maybe I'm just an old fogey by computer standards and want XP's Explorer off my lawn
Eh, I ended up with a spare 2 gig laptop drive from a friend's laptop that was destroyed in several interesting ways, all accidental, so I stuck NT4 on it just for kicks and giggles. Nothing on the main drive dual booting Gentoo and XP I'd hate to lose either.
:) The lack of the knowledge to fiddle with ordinals (or even what the things are... my primary coding experience consists mostly of perl) might have something to do with it. Perhaps I'll revisit it someday - NT 4's interface really flies on this laptop (Dell Latitude C610) compared to XP's. Even my company's crappy ActiveX web-based CRM runs faster on NT 4's standalone IE6 than XP's. Funny how that works out. Just tonight I also got USB working in some usable fashion for thumb drives and HIDs, which surprised me since I'd always been told NT4 just plain couldn't do USB. Only thing left keeping me from just leaving this laptop on NT4 for work is the wireless - I don't think anyone ever made ipw2200 drivers for NT 4.
:P
Unfortunately, it ended up fairly unexciting. Apparently MS did something with ordinal number 510 (or was it 512?) in shell32.dll since NT4. I don't have the inclination to mess with trying to swap out shell32s or try to hack the ordinal back in there, so I'll probably leave it at that
Interesting links on the appendix. I haven't done much (any?) biology since high school, and that's what we were always told. ISTR someone in the class asking why, if it was useless and caused problems when burst, it wasn't just removed at birth and the teacher didn't really have an answer. Gov't schools ftw I suppose
I'd say gaining complexity is perhaps the definition of evolution, perhaps even including bloat and complexity (even biological systems aren't immune. Lots of complex animals have useless bits left over weighing them down. Appendix, etc).
I think the argument is better made that GUIs have evolved too much for their own good. I wonder what would happen if you launched NT 4's explorer.exe in WinXP.... I think i'm gonna go try it...
This is one reason why I bought and spend a good portion of my down-time gaming on a GB Micro with a flash card and a few dozen NES games. They're quick, easy, and with save states I can save and quit anytime. So many games these days require large investments of time to make even minor progress takes a good long while. Both my fiancee and I took forever to get through SMA 3: Yoshi's Island because the levels are so dang long and don't have any kind of in-level save.
That said, I do love the occasional marathon gaming session with HL2 and similar. It's just most of my gaming time comes in short bursts.
It's not quite Nethack, but there's http://calcrogue.jimrandomh.org/ available for a few calcs. It's more than just Rogue as well with some nice extras. I've enjoyed it a lot (at least when I had time to play. I don't use my calc that much anymore and have better and more interesting things to do than play games on one)
I bought a lot of 10 identical 40 gig laptop drives from an eBay seller for some teeny pittance (I want to say something like $10 shipped) that were explicitly sold as non-working. Of the bunch, most of them didn't do a thing. However, there were 2 that had some broken pins, and a few that read fine but had massive data errors. I had no trouble swapping the controller boards from the ones with broken pins from one of the data error ones and ended up with 2 good 40 gig drives for $10. Wasn't too shabby I thought.
My dad had a stroke two years ago. It was relatively minor as strokes went, but he still had a lot of coordination problems. His left side was far worse than his right. His recovery process was slow until they let him go home and he got back into trying to racing simulations he loved to play (Grand Prix Legends mostly. Awesome game but a heck of a learning curve). All of a sudden he did hugely better and pretty quickly was driving himself for real again. I mentioned it to the physical therapists but they didn't quite seem to understand. It's a shame, I bet there's plenty of untapped potential there. Whether it's actual video games or just something similar like this Xbox setup.
Granted it's a single-source and I haven't tried to verify it, but http://www.aa1car.com/library/trtu796.htm would seem to indicate that the ban was overturned and it's still used in a few things.
Wrong issue, though. It's not so much an issue of "cheating" AI that are given information a player wouldn't, but a player using the AI info on their computer in ways they shouldn't. For example, on a game that has map exploration like a RTS game, imagine being able to tap into the AI's viewport and gaining all the exploration knowledge they have. Or a FPS with radar showing enemy locations, you could tap into the AI to either use it's radar too if it's supposed to be a friendly AI. Or, if the AI is on an enemy team, it's info might well have the locations of all the enemies on the team.
This is all data that any legit player would have, but it can be dangerous to have this info sent to clients that aren't that player. The classic Aimbot is what can happen when you trust client data more than you should, not to mention wallhacks and similar. It would be conceivable that it could be encrypted or tagged somehow, but we all know how well that sort of thing works.
I was doing ISP tech support for a major ISP when AOL 5 came out. We got absolutely flooded by calls from AOL users who either used our service with AOL, or did the BYOA plan. AOL 5 replaced Windows DUN with its own version, which conveniently only worked with AOL. It was nearly impossible to rip it out and replace it with the original DUN. We had to turn tons of customers back to Microsoft or their computer vendor to reinstall Windows.
Fortunately, most people were already unhappy with AOL so it didn't take too much to convince them it wasn't our fault. I bet we gained a few users from that. I think they called it the "Evil Connectoid" bug.
Ah, memories...
Most interior "locks" I've seen are of the push and twist variety. They don't take anything more than a paperclip or other similar thing to open. I'd say they're expressly designed to keep kids out of places they shouldn't be and prevent accidents, and not at all about security.
The ones in the house I grew up in even had the endcap easily popped off, allowing direct access to the plunger.
The trunk one is a bit more surprising since that should be a proper key, but I've often wondered just how effective car locks are. I remember I discovered my old '83 Firebird's door key would start a friend's GM truck (remember GM cars at the time had two keys, door and ignition). She got a kick out of it but it made me wonder.
Yeah, 6th palace is a doozy. 5th palace isn't all that hard, but it's a bit of a maze. Both the 6th palace and Golden Palace are some of the best examples of NES level design I've seen.
:)
In the last few years I've tried beating Z2 in various interesting ways. Probably the hardest was when I limited myself to the four magic and heart containers that Link comes with. The game itself wasn't hard, but there's one of the final bosses that you have to use all four magic containers on to even make it vulnerable, and it kills you on the second hit. So, no Life. I spent probably two months just trying to beat that guy, but I did finally make it. Next I'm thinking about using some emu's built-in cheat device to lock the exp levels at 1. Does it still count as cheating if you make it harder?
Dunno, maybe I'm an oddball, but my favorite two Zelda games are the two black sheep: Zelda 2 and Majora's Mask.
I think my main concern with Wii (and, for that matter, more immersive stuff up to Holodeck-like things) is the learning curve. With, say, Legend of Zelda all I have to know to execute complex sword techniques is how to press a button, perhaps holding it for awhile or combining with another button or stick move. Assuming 100% unassisted mode with a Wiimote or other controller, I'd then have to learn swordfighting to stand a chance since I'd have taken over the sword itself. Likewise with sports games - rather than a button to swing and maybe a stick to move the bat angle up and down, I'd have to learn how to be a major league hitter. On some level this might well be a lot of fun, but I'd see it possibly turning off casual gamers who weren't particular into the game's particular idiom. I still think there's a good-sized market for it, I just see most games having varying levels of reliance on the Wiimote or similar.
If you haven't looked around OoT in awhile, you'll probably get a kick out of this:
9
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6573
Amazing what you find lurking around the dark corners of roms. Shame you need a GS to do it on the real thing (pain to put all the codes in, I've done it and it works but eh) but still fun with an emu.
Sadly, mine hasn't had much of an interest in Zelda. She did just get herself addicted to WoW though, which is sorta-kinda Zeldaish. So maybe she'll give it another try. She always claims she doesn't have the coordination for it, but she's managing Wow fine.
For me, Zelda 2 was the first NES game I ever played, with LoZ not too far behind. Good times, those were. Good times.
"Ask Error about the palace"
Well, there's always the old OoT glitch that lets you play anything like the ocarina:
http://www.jaytheham.com/zc/oot.php?page=ootmc018
Apparently Link plays a mean bow.
When I first heard they were going to make a separate GC and Wii version, and not just have the GC version work on the Wii, I was concerned they wouldn't make full use of the Wii's capabilities since they wouldn't want the games too different. It sounds like they are going to use the Wii controls well, but I wonder whether there will be much graphical difference. Even if it's a particularly nice-looking GC game, I'd hate to think it was held back by the requirement to run on the GC.
Some of the earlier games used sprite-flipping for certain directions, so it was hard to tell which hand was "official". The Zelda 2 manual makes reference to the left-handedness, and the 3D games have always had Link left-handed.
:) My fiancee gets sick of listening to the music though.
Actually, even though I'm right handed, I've played so much Zelda that the few times I've had the occasion to do it, I've automatically picked up swords with my left hand.
Yeah, I'm a Zelda geek. Proud of it too
Actually, I got engaged in May. So I managed to get out now and then :)
My parents got my sister a cell phone when she was 16 and started driving on her own a few places. She did take over some of the payments when she got a part-time job the next year, but they always made sure she had it. They wanted to make sure she always had a way to reach someone in an emergency.
;)
Of course, they didn't think I needed anything like that. But then I didn't go out much
Both the Wal Mart and the Kroger near me have signs, I think the Wal Mart's is 15 items and the Kroger 10. Much like the X item express lanes, however, I've never actually seen it enforced and I've seen plenty of people doing whole cartloads themselves. I don't recall one at Home Depot and... some other grocery store I was recently.
Incidentally, Kroger's is great. Minimal delays in the "Please place the item in the bag" portion and rarely gets stuck anywhere. Wal Mart's is usually a huge pain, though they've revamped it lately so it's not so bad. I still avoid them when I can though, or if there's much of a line. Not worth the trouble. I haven't used Home Depot's much since I'm usually the guy with six individual washers with matching nuts and bolts and I don't really feel like messing with those in the self checkout (if you even can?).
As for the last comment, I don't know that union enters into it. Dunno if it's still the case but Publix used to get slammed all the time for hiring non-union and I've tended to have pleasant shopping experiences there. I think the whole need for self-checkout is due to stores' poor planning and training of checkers as often don't have enough lanes open and/or the ones that are open are manned by slowpokes.
And, I'll agree with the previous posts: It's extremely frustrating when you're waiting on some idiot who can't figure the system out. I'll usually give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to slightly technical things, but when there's all of 4 or 5 buttons, the big one being "DEBIT" and they still have to ask the helper-person how to use their debit card it just frustrates me.
Yeah, my MR2 has it under the spare tire in the front hood while the engine is in the back. The aforementioned Firebird's was in the corner under the hood, and the mental image of someone scrabbling around under the car trying to get the battery unhooked before raising the hood amused me. Although, even needing to have a "raise the hood" step strikes me as a bit odd, but then I've always been one that needs minimal instruction.
My favorite mistake was in the Chilton's manual I had for my '83 Firebird years back. The process for changing the wiper motor had step 1 as "disconnect the battery cable at the negative terminal" and step 2 was "raise the hood". Still makes me smile all these years later.
I'm one of those weirdos who loves betas of games and such. I love seeing the features that never worked out, the levels that were cut, etc. It'd be awesome if Nintendo (or any company really) released a disc full of the various betas, demos, and preleases of major games. I think it'd be cool.
I bought a gameshark just to play with the stuff in Zelda 64. Who'd a thunk there was a fully-functional arwing enemy left in there that cirlces and takes potshots at Link.
With most corporate environments, the users are screwed anyway if the network is down. Where I work we depend on a CRM, e-mail, and several internal websites to do our work so if the network is gone we might as well be on thin clients. About the only advantage we have having desktops is it means we can play Solitaire until the network's back.
Thankfully, total network outages are pretty rare here so far.