Terminally Incoherent

They don’t make the games like the way they used to in the past… Remember all these awesome games from the way back? I was especially fond of the point & click adventure games. They don’t seem to make many of these lately, don’t they?

I mentioned this website before, but I really think the Scummvm project is worth mentioning. Scummvm team wrote an emulator engine which seeks to resurect old LucasArts classics such as Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Islad, Sam & Max and etc… And the best part is that scummvm engine allows you to play these old DOS/Windows classics under linux!

So far the software supports maybe 20 odd games which use the LucasArts SCUMM engine, as well as few other popular non LucasArts games like Simon the Sorcerer. The work is still in progress and new games are frequently added in. I must say this is one of the best emulators for old games I have seen in a while – it integrates with the games engine seemlesly and works like a dream. And it is also great in windows environment, allowing you to run the old dos based games on systems with winXP which do not have real DOS backbone.

Also, scummvm comes with two awesome games which were open sourced by their authors especially for this project: Beneth a Steal Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen. Both are excelent adventure games, and alot of fun to play. They are avaliable from the scummvm website…

Of course sometimes you would also like to play other old games – for that there is another solution: DosBox. This is also a multi-platform solution that allows you to use old DOS based software in non DOS environment – be it XP or MDK It’s not as smooth as scummvm and sometimes you need to tweek the CPU cycles and Frameskip rate to prevent the game from crawling at a less than satisfactory speed – but, most importantly it works

You might ask where to do I get these old games. Well, for me the best place is Underdogs website. Probably the biggest collection of abandonware and freeware games in existence. Happy hunting…

Btw – not all old games are abandonware. Simon, Samd & Max and Tentacle for example are still copyrighted and freely distributed version are considered WAREZ not Abandonware. underdogs dont have any warez, but other sites do so check before you download

After a short break, I’m here to pick up blogging once again. Incoherent as always, but then again, would you expect anything else from me?

I made the switch and now I’m a fully fledged Linux user. This was a great learning experience so here are few pointers for people who are just preparing to undertake this journey:

For me the first hurdle was partitioning my hard drive. The recent versions of windows use NTFS which preaty much sucks. Why? Because it’s not an open standard, and Open Source Comminity and it is not supported by the standard partitioning tools shipped with most of the current stable Linux distributions. Mandrake 9.2 installer could not touch my NTFS partition even though it was compleately defragmented. The Knoppix tools also could not resize it – and I got the most recent version avaliable…

I was recomended to use Partition Magic made by Symantec – it seems to be hell of a tool actually. It however has one major drawback – it is freekishly expensive. The price ranges from more than $80 to little bellow $40, but it seems that all the low range prices were offered by some very shady internet dealers. I think buying a tool that I will not be using very often, for more than my operating system is absolutely ridiculus (MDK Discovery costs 50 bucks! And since I downloaded set of iso’s my OS costed me exactly $0)!

Fortunately there is a free alternative which works just as well as Partition Magic. I found out that the newest GNU Parted can actually work with NTFS quite well. Of course you have to get the release which is more recent than the one included in Knoppix. Ideally we would want it on some live distro, just like good old knopp – and such an ideal solution does exist. Recent release of SystemRescueCD includes an up to date version of QTParted which is a great GUI app based on Parted. It resized my NTFS partition without any problems whatsoever. I highly recomend getting SRCD even if you do not need to do the partitioning excercise like me, because of all the cool features it includes. I think Knopp and SRCD should be in every emergency cd case out there

Now, QTParted partition and format your free space into any linux file system – ext2, ext3, swap – etc… I didn’t do that though – I left the space free and allowed MDK installer to do the job and autoallocate the resources for me. I must say that this distribution fully lived up to it’s reputation as one having the most friendly installer software ever! I must say that most windows installs I did in my life haven’t gone half that smoothly! 90% of my hardware was autodetected and configured correctly. Only my scanner didn’t quite make it, but out of laziness I haven’t even attempted to correct that yet.

Now here is an important tip to anyone still using dialup like me – double check your modem! If you have an internal PCI modem then you are preaty much screwed just like me. These things are not really modems – they are simple phone interface cards. All the modem functions are implemented in software – and most of the software drivers are only avaliable for windows… There are drivers out there but they often need work to install and configure correctly. If you are lucky, you will just need to download a package and installit… If you are less lucky you will need to compile it from source… If you do not even know what luck is (like me) you might need to recompile your kernel… Check the linmodems site for details on how to go about getting a winmodem to work on linux…

I just need to do few more things and I will be able to do leave the d0ze world behind… Right now I’m still in the process of backing up all my data (in case instal craps out). Btw, I just noticed that winrar actually packages stuff in 700 MB rarfiles. I’m preaty sure I didnt set that up so it must be a built in feature. That will grately speed up my backup – I’ll just tell winrar to save everything from here, to there and go to sleep

Next step is to make sure I can recover fom a shitfall during the boot manager instalation… If we crap out at that stage I will be going nuts!

I think I might burn another copy of mandrake just in case mine got some crazy burn-time errors. I really want this to go smoothly, and knowing my luck bad shit allways happens to me in situations like that one.

Hmmm… I wonder if 9.2 comes with any kind of java support? Cause that is the first thing I need there. I’m writing this from Knoppix and it actually has gcj here…

And lets face it, I’m going to be on a dual boot. I still need XP for the newer games, for little .NET projects and to fidle around with AGS – unless I can find a replacement for this, or if I can run AGS from WINE…