Year: 2019
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Some DOS Games for the IBM PC
The early IBM PC was not really all that good at playing games, it was after all primarily designed for businesses. Despite this many developers did make games for them, although they were typically very limited by the capabilities of the PC. I didn’t get to play any of these…
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Anniversary and some random thoughts
It’s amazing how fast time flies by, but yet another year has flown by! This month marks the 8th year of my blog, which seems like an awfully long time to be writing about anything at all really. I think part of the reason I keep it up is the…
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Old Tech: The AccessGrid
Today I’d like to talk about an old technology that has mostly died off and I used to use rather extensively in my job. The AccessGrid as it was known was an advanced teleconferencing system used world-wide for remote teaching and academic collaboration. Rather than being one single technology such…
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Skunny: Wild West for DOS
Having already looked at three of the Skunny games you’d think I would have learned my lesson and avoided today’s game Wild West, featuring our not so favourite Skunny Hardnut. This entry in the Skunny series of games came out in 1994 and was made and published by Copysoft. With…
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Teac USB Floppy drive FD 05PUB
Recently I bought a new Ryzen based PC, which has a distinct lack of legacy support and even lacks optical drives. This is hardly surprising as this is the logical conclusion of what has been an increasing trend of storing and transferring data with flash drives, on the “cloud” or…
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Epson EX 1000 Dot Matrix Printer
As is usual for this time of year I’ve come to my parents place for a visit. Some of our old computer hardware is still in storage here, some of which I’ve already documented. Today we’re going to take a quick look at our old printer, an Epson EX 1000.…
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Silly Knight for DOS
Today I’m looking at a small home brew game named Silly Knight made by Petr “AfBu” Kratina in 2017. It was made for a DOS game creation competition hosted at high-voltage.cz. It uses a special CGA text mode for drawing at 160×100 resolution with 16 colours by using code developed…
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Paganitzu: Romancing the Rose for DOS
Whilst Apogee were better known for publishing action games they also had some puzzle games in their catalog. Todays game, Paganitzu is one of those puzzles games, having some features in common with Sokoban. I’m just playing the shareware episode, but you can still buy Paganitzu on steam or through…
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Modern BASIC: PCBasic and QB64
Last month I had intended to make the next Sparcstation desktop post, but unfortunately have been having trouble getting the software I had intended to cover to build. So that’s still in the works and today we’re going to look at something else interesting: modern implementations of old BASIC Languages.…
sparcie 