sparcie

Year: 2015

  • Mainboard: Generic Socket 3

    Today’s motherboard is a bit of a mystery as it doesn’t have any obvious markings that identify who made it or a model number. It is a late socket 3 board that supports fast 486 chips and the Pentium Overdrive. Socket 3 is interesting as it is where the CPU…

  • Huffman Coding

    Quite some time ago I did a short post about a compression technique called run-length encoding (or RLE), that was a commonly used compression method for graphic and level data. At the time I wrote and implemented it for the graphics and level data for my home-brew game Bobs Fury…

  • Snarf for DOS

    Today’s game is another one made by Everett Kaser, a shareware author who happens to still be making new games. I wrote about another of his games a short while ago, Hero’s heart. This one named Snarf was made in 1988 originally, released in 1990 and with updated versions of…

  • Motherboard: EPoX EP-MVP4A

    Just when you thought I had run out of Socket 7 boards here’s another one! Today’s mother board was made by the Taiwanese company EPoX who made value boards that were targeted towards the over-clocker and enthusiast market. Here’s an overview of the board. This board was made mid 1999,…

  • 4th Anniversary and site update

    Recently (about 10 days ago) my blog turned 4 years old, which is amazing in many ways. Unfortunately many projects have simply stalled, mostly due to lack of time on my part. I’m still interested in them, but with my kids getting older and demands on my time getting larger…

  • QBasic Gorillas

    Today I’m looking at the classic old artillery game Gorillas, it was an example program for the Qbasic interpreter that was packaged with MS-DOS 5.0 and later. Because it was so widespread, being on practically every machine of its time, it was widely played and loved by many. I first…

  • Squirmer for DOS

    I’ve started to recover from quite a nasty cold this week, so today we’re looking at another obscure MS-DOS game. It’s called Squirmer and was made by Stephen Lee Parker in 1990. It is an interesting take on the standard snake game that later became popular on feature phones. Squirmer…

  • Aldo’s Adventure for DOS

    Aldo’s Adventure is a obscure little platform game released for MS-DOS back in 1987 by David and Ben Ibach. It is based upon a much earlier game called Ladder originally released for the Kaypro C/PM systems in the early 80’s. They have used the levels from Ladder with permission, so…

  • Motherboard: ASUS SP97-V

    Today we’re looking at another socket 7, the ASUS SP97-V. This particular model was made around mid to late 1997 judging by date codes, putting it fairly later in the life of the socket 7 standard. Some notable features include dual power input and optional on-board video. Here is the…

  • Hero’s Heart for DOS

    Hero’s Heart is a puzzle game with elements similar to Boulder Dash and perhaps a little of Chips Challenge. It was made by Everett Kaser back in 1992, he is a one-man game company that made many DOS shareware games back in the day and is in fact still making…