The Robot Dating Game

I’ve made another video on Go!Animate.  This one is split into two parts because it was too long.  Meh.  This one was actually scripted out in my mind beforehand, and it’s a lot more complex than the first two videos.  But I’m quite pleased with the results.

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Upgrades at CyberFem Park

So I’ve made another animation over at Go!Animate.  After exhausting all of the possible female Anime characters in the last videos I did, I switched to another set.  I also caved in and gave the site $18 so I could even make more than another minute of video and have access to more characters, sets, objects and voices.

I like the results of this one, even though I don’t quite like the way this particular set of characters “jumps” around so much.  I guess that feature is to make them look less robotic.  Ha!  That works against me and only me I bet with these animations.

So here it is.  Enjoy.

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Natsumi and Aimi: Cyberfem Agents

I am not the world’s biggest Anime fan.

FUCK ANIME

But I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the art form is devoid of good things.  I just don’t like all the squeaky voices and crying girls.  The many, many, many crying girls.

But before I turn this into a “WTF, Japan?” rant, allow me to share a very short “Anime” animation that I have just mashed together on the website Go!Animate.  All this was done entirely for free, and I made the story up as I went along.   I used only a small fraction of the functionality available for making animations too, so if I had wanted to spend more than a couple of hours learning and making these animations, they would have turned out a lot more polished.


There are more characters and sets available for free and way more options available if you pay.  I’m really intrigued by the possibilities of this right now, and I can’t say enough good things about the website’s interface.  It’s extremely well-designed and easy to learn and use.  And of course, I’m digging the female robot voices.

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File this under “Autocorrect Disaster”

I’m not much of a fan of silent autocorrect.  That is to say, I like spellcheck and all, but I don’t like the silent and automatic bullshit that has crept into word processors and other software over the years because most people are either too lazy or too stupid to use the tools on their own.  Apple software is particularly bad at this, and I can usually tell that something has been written on a mac because it contains bizarre word replacements for no other apparent reason.  Sadly, most software is happily following suit because this appears to be what most people want.

But this is an example of what can happen when this madness goes too far.  The gist of it is that some gene names which resemble dates were automatically and silently changed by Microsoft Excel because damnit, Excel knows better than us what we wanted in those databases.

Clippy bastard

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t use a very modern word processor to do my writing.  For the longest time, I used a program called Cetus C Word Pad.  This program was basically WordPad for Windows 95 hacked with a spellcheck utility.  I’ve since upgraded slightly to the word processor that came with Microsoft Works version 7.  But even that program silently autocorrects, and I have to rely on my text-to-speech program to catch the shit it changes on me.  I may bitch about being inconvenienced, but reading about gene names being changed is just inexcusable.  Why would they use Excel for this in the future?  Wouldn’t they scrap that and find another program better suited for not fucking up data in such a horrible way?

I’m baffled by the entrenchment that Microsoft has in the business world.  For all their talk about taking risks, it looks to me that corporate types are some of the most diffident people out there when it comes to assessing the benefits of technological systems.

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How Amiga computer games got me listening to KISS again.

The other day I was creating configuration files for my Amiga emulator. You see, the Amiga emulator is rather complex. Not only must you select which disk image or images you’d like your emulated system to run, but you must also choose which version of the Kickstart rom, which chipset, which RAM configuration, which CPU, and which floppy drive setting you’d like to emulate as well. Shit’s complicated, yo.

So it’s much easier to just save a configuration file and launch that to launch the game. And it was while I was creating a configuration file for a puzzle game for a game called “Psycho Squares” that I absent-mindedly started singing a cheesy KISS song called “Psycho Circus”.

And I got to thinking about my like-dislike relationship with KISS.

KISS can be a rather divisive band. Some find their brand of rock and roll music to be trite, while others find it to be trite and dull. I find it to be trite, while at times dull and at times worthy of attention. I also can not stand some of their product.

So I started reading up about KISS on Wikipedia. And I dug out the KISS albums I have – the only ones that matter. These are Alive and Alive II. But you can listen to pretty much every KISS album on YouTube because people have uploaded every damn KISS album in their entirety and I find this fucking hilarious simply because it must infuriate Gene Simmons to no end.

You see, I have a respect-disrespect relationship with Gene Simmons. I do have a lot of respect for his chutzpah and showmanship. And hell, that battle-axe bass guitar he has is way fucking cool. Plus he wrote my favourite KISS song “Love It Loud”. But he has said some really ignorant things about people who download music for free from the internet.

Meh. I’m also listening to a lot of Neil Young right now. I don’t think that there are two musical entities with artistic aims as diametrically opposed as KISS and Neil Young. One makes music as a byproduct of the way it does business. One makes business as a byproduct of the way it does art. It’s fascinating to juxtapose the careers of the two.

Incidentally, there are some songs by Neil Young that I don’t… uh… appreciate so much either. I wonder if he ever wore makeup on stage.

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Robotman’s Comics: B-Sides, Outtakes and Rarities

Since 2008 when I started commissioning fembot comics from some great artists, I’ve collected many images and sketches related to those projects.  I was digging through my archives recently and found some nice artwork that I think others might like to see.

So here’s my version of scraping the barrel to release stuff that was never meant to be released.  And unlike an expensive CD box set or a deluxe digital download, I won’t charge you any money for it!

The Robots of Love

This was the first comic I had produced, but not actually the first story I had written with the intent to be made into a comic.  And digging through some email archives just now, I remembered that I wanted to make this comic much longer than it came out:

Most of the comic then shows the fun Vida has playing and having sex with dozens of beautiful, voluptuous female androids.  At the end she is sent out with two of them to continue her adventures by visiting more Robot Control sites around the world.

I should commission a sequel some time in the future to complete the story then.

Here are some of the initial sketches that first came back from the artist Predator.  Click the thumbnail to see the full image.

I also made some crude diagrams in MS Paint so that Predator could better understand some of the things I was trying to describe.

And as the sketches came in, I was able to see his inking without the colouring done.

There was also an instance where the fembot character Sara had been drawn with her facemask on when it should have been off.  This was fixed in the final version.

And of course, I had to mock the U.S.’s “Comics Code Authority” on the cover.

Sexdroids in Space

The second comic to be produced was actually the first story I had written specifically to be made into a comic.  I am still quite proud of this story, because there is actually quite an interesting statement about the nature of AI behind all the sexy fembot art.

There were of course my crude diagrams for this one too.

Here’s an early character sketch for Betty.  She was originally styled after the HRP-4C robot, but was later changed to look more like a Sorayama-style robot.

There were also some inked but not coloured pages.  Some of them show things slightly different than they would appear in the finished comic.  Note the seated fembots around the “computer” on the bridge.

I also had a change made to the scene where Brea lifts Tiffany and puts her on a table in the Robot Lab.  Originally, Brea carried Tiffany in a human-like way.

Future F.A.I.T.

For the third comic, I also made diagrams.  I designed Candace’s outer-space fembot costume myself too, as well as the Droid-O-Matic Automatic Android Making Machine™.

There were also some pages coloured in a way that didn’t match my plans for the look of Oscilla’s spaceship.  And later on, there were 4 silver fembots drawn on the spaceship.  Oscilla only had three of these robots made before she made Candace.

Shemale Android Sex Sirens

For this comic drawn and coloured by AB Lust, I made a diagram of the front cover and Amanda’s penthouse at S.A.S.S. Headquarters.

There were also some lovely character sketches and inked pages.

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… or I’ll do to you what I did to Internet Explorer!

I imagine some suit at Microsoft sneering this line after emasculating poor Microsoft Security Essentials for Christmas laughs late last year.

This info is a little old now, but since I’m on a “write about Microsoft products” kick on this here crappy blog, I thought I’d mention it anyway.

According to a computer lab filled with serious German scientists, (from this source and this source), it would seem that Microsoft’s very own anti-malware tool is kind of useless compared to what other companies have released.  Again, I don’t use MSE, so I really don’t care a whole lot.  I also use Linux for most of what I do on the internet, and comparing Linux to Windows for internet security is like comparing a sirloin steak to a moldy bag of peanuts that has roaches and ants in it and also somehow gonorrhea .  I also don’t know if these glaring failures have been reversed.  But here are some graphs which I shamelessly stole from one of these articles:

msefail1 msefail2

Were I one of the millions of users of Microsoft Security Essentials, I would be freaking out right about now.  Actually, I would have freaked out months ago when I first read this, but that’s beside the point.

Speaking of point, I should get on with mine.  This makes me think of the way that Microsoft handled their ill-gotten victory in the late 90s browser wars.  One they had used their monopoly in PC operating systems to spread their browser Internet Exploiter Explorer, and once they had left poor scrappy Netscrape Netscape Navigator in a pool of its own blood and broken teeth, progress on IE stalled.

There was no need for Microsoft to “waste” resources on improving it after IE6 came out.  They had a massive majority in the browser market, and at the time they had “won” it, IE6 was technically a more capable browser than Navigator.

But you might remember the massive security hole that IE6 was and still is.  ActiveX controls?  Let websites control certain functions of your computer?  What a great fucking idea!  That wasn’t the only security vulnerability.  Back then, Microsoft was just synonymous with terrible security.

Back to my point.  Microsoft let IE6 basically rot.  It took Firefox rising from Netscape’s ashes to get them to, you know, compete in the browser market again.  The more that MS got scared that they would lose market share, the more they desperately applied lipstick to the pig that is IE.

Can you see where I’m going with this?  I know, it’s like watching Ray Charles driving a nitro-burning funny car, but bear with me.  I’m thinking that this is what’s going on with Microsoft Security Essentials now.  (The IE thing, not the Ray Charles thing.)

MSE took market share from all the other antivirus/anti-malware programs out there because it was fast and lean.  It still is much faster and leaner because it doesn’t quite work in the same way as those other programs do.  And I guess it turns out that it doesn’t quite work.

But after gaining that market lead, why would Microsoft waste resources by innovating or improving MSE?  Why not let it rot?  That seems to be what they do between applying fresh coats of lipstick on their various pigs.

Okay, Ray Charles is changing lanes now.  I use Windows XP in a virtual machine on my Linux computer.  The virtual XP has an internet connection, so I have to protect it.  Using a Windows PC operating system is like dropping the soap in jail while singing showtunes.  So I have antivirus (Avast), anti-spyware (SpyBot) and a firewall (ZoneAlarm) running to keep the wee beasties out.

Ray Charles is being flagged to come in for a pit stop, but he can’t see the flag.  Is that how racing works?  I don’t know, I’ve never watched it.  It’s all just a whole bunch of left turns anyway.  What’s so exciting about that?

Ahem.  Avast seems to be regarded as the best free antivirus.  But damn, has the latest version ever decided that it’s all my virtual XP was made to do.  Light and lithe it ain’t.  But I read about the new features that this latest version has, and I can see why it’s taking up my VM’s allotted processor cycles so much.  I guess I don’t mind then.  It beats being like MSE and, you know, not working very well.

I’m Ray Charles and you’ve been fabulous!  Goodnight!

Ray-Charles-Photo1

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Recycling bad ideas

Have I made fun of Microsoft Bob before on this blog?  I don’t believe I have.  Well, if you’ve ever heard about MS Bob before, you probably didn’t hear anything good.

Read that link above to find out what the fuck was going on.  To this day, I don’t think anyone really knows why the fuck they thought that a graphical representation of a house to replace a regular GUI was a good idea.

Then again, people have really fucking stupid ideas about GUIs to this day.

But back to Bob.  Because I’m playing around with a virtual Windows 98 installation on one of my laptops, I’ve been going slightly overboard with installing old, old software along with it.  Hell, I even installed MS Works, Picture It! and Encarta 98 just because I could.  And all of those applications are thoroughly obsolete now.  Though Encarta 98 has a quiz/maze game that I stumbled upon today.  That might be good for taking up a quarter hour.

So I can party like it’s 1998 now if I want to.  And I invited Bob along too.  Good old MS Bob, with it’s mind-boggling insistence to link all email functionality to someone’s MCI account.  What’s MCI?  Oh right, that company doesn’t exist any more.  But Bob hit store shelves clearance bins in 1995, and maybe they thought that the AOL style “do it with us or not at all” business model was good business.

There’s not much else to say about MS Bob other than what is written in the article at the very top.  You should read the whole site if you are geeky for GUIs like me and want to kill some time.  That site’s author hates Microsoft even more than I did!  Be mindful of the rants against MS if you visit that site.  Wear goggles.

Anyway, here’s a sample of what you can create with MS freaking Bob.  This is a screenshot from the letter writer program:

MSBOB screenshot
I don’t believe I have any other word processor at my disposal that will put fucking palm trees of adjustable size around the border.

And there’s actually a quiz game part of the interface that, if I remember right, would be mildly entertaining for a kid.  In fact, if I had such a kid around that I wanted to mollify while I did grown up stuff, I might give him a netbook with MS Bob loaded on it.  It would be hours of fun.  Not much more than that though.

I guess MS Bob could also be fun if you like having your computer screen look like a colourful cluttered mess of crap and advertising that you don’t want and that hides most of the functionality from you and forces you to re-learn how to use your own computer because it’s moved everything way the fuck around and doesn’t respond consistently to input by the user.

If you really want such an experience, I have just the thing for you!

vomit

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Pharaoh and the Pirate

I’ve been having a delightful time playing old PC video games on my Windows 98 laptop.  As described below, it’s a fairly new cheap laptop that runs Lubuntu as its OS and runs Windows 98 in Virtualbox.

So I decided to fill up the massive 10GB hard drive I gave it in VB by installing some of Sierra‘s city-building games on it.  I already had Caesar II installed, so I busted out my game CDs that I bought more than 10 years ago and installed Caesar 3, Pharaoh and Cleopatra, Zeus and Poseidon, and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom.

I never really learned how to play these games properly, but I’m playing through the beginner/tutorial missions in Pharaoh right now.  Here’s what the third round looks like.

Pharaoh
I can’t seem to get enough figs.  Before I started this mission, I was told that farms don’t need road access.  Then when I started, I found out that farms need road access.  I was lied to!

Here’s a pic from later in the game I snagged from the interwebs.

Pharaoh_profilelarge
Very cool looking game, and as with a lot of Sierra’s games, the music is phenomenal too.  I have actually taken music from this game and Emperor and listened to them as albums on my mp3 player a few times before, it’s that good.

But back to the installations.  All but the last of these city-building games installed for me without a hitch, and I’m able to run them in my virtual Windows 98 in glorious 1024 x 768 screen resolution.  Emperor however, is a problem.

emperor5
No, not that Emperor.

9FU3
Close, but not quite.

Emperor-Rise of the Middle Kingdom 4
emperor_rise_of_the_middle_kingdom_pc_7
That’s the one.

After I installed it, I couldn’t get it to run.  I got an error message stating “wrong disc” or some such.  This is “bollocks” (to borrow a proper English term) as I bought the original actual fucking game disc.  I can’t get it to run even on my XP computer.  This really fucking pisses me off because the reason I can’t get it to run is likely some fucking DRM bullshit that got included in it.

So I pirated the fuck out of it.  Yep, I downloaded a working version of the game I already bought just so I could actually play it.  Pretty sad.

Also pretty sad to think what happened to the once mighty Sierra publishing house.  They used to make great games.  Now, they don’t really exist.  Guess DRM doesn’t save businesses as much as putting out quality products.

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SimCity

If you were to redefine clusterfuck, how would you go about doing it?

About three weeks ago, EA – The Worst Company in America – released a long awaited sequel to one of the best-loved video games of all time.

Now, you may already know what SimCity is, and you may have already heard about the “problematic” game launch.  But a little background is in order because I like to type.

The original SimCity game came out in 1989 and was pretty unique in its concept.  It gave you a blank slate and some tools and let you build a virtual city on your computer screen from scratch.  You could watch it grow, and the simulation would react much like a real city would to various events.

SimCity

The game was so well done that it sold shitloads.  Metric shitloads.  A sequel came out, then another, then another.  This year saw the fifth official iteration… supposedly.

I’m going to digress now to tell my story with SimCity.  Back in 1998 when I got my first PC, one of the things I was most excited about was the free game I’d be getting with it.  That game was SimCity 2000, the sequel to the original.

CalebopolisX

SimCity 2000

I never did learn how to play it though.  SimCity is hard.  SimCity is complex and you have to spend a lot of time learning how to play it to get a functioning city going.  And as much as I like cerebral strategy games, I just couldn’t figure it out.

I would load it up every now and then, but I couldn’t seem to get it.  I even got SimCity 3000, but I couldn’t seem to make sense out of that one either.

Then I pretty much forgot about that until just now when SimCity 5, or SimCity 2013 came out.  EA calls it SimCity and is trying to pass it off as a “reboot” of the franchise.  Fuck them.

SimCity is a single player game.  And EA insists on crippling every game they sell with “always-online” DRM.  That means you have to have an internet connection with their servers at all times in order to play the game.  And in a few years when they don’t feel like supporting a game any more, you can’t play it any more.  Too bad for you.

So fuck EA.  For them to automatically treat every one of their customers as if that customer is a thief is unacceptable if you ask me.

But that’s not even the worst part about all of this.  No.  The worst part is that EA and the once respectable Maxis have flat-out lied to their customers about the features of the new SimCity.  They lied about what the game could do.  They lied about bugs being fixed that weren’t.  And the worst one of all is that they lied about the game needing to be played online.

All these have been proven to be lies and EA and Maxis don’t even have the decency to acknowledge that.  Fuck them.

To top this all off, in some cases they are refusing to give refunds for this falsely advertised and pitifully broken game.  And if customers exercise their right to ask their credit card issuer for a charge-back, EA will ban the customer from EA’s Origin service.

Fuck EA.

I did not buy SimCity 5 and I will never be an EA customer again.  The last game I ever bought from EA was The Sims 2, and I kind of regret that because I never play it.  And it makes me sad that people let themselves be ripped off by deceitful companies like EA and Maxis and then continue to buy and even preorder from them all over again when the next unfinished cookie-cutter game gets released.

But enough vitriol.  All the hubbub about SimCity has actually made me wish I had a decent video card so I could play SimCity 4.

simcity4_ss1

simcity4deluxepic1

But I do have the next best thing, and I’m teaching myself how to play SimCity 3000.

simcity3000 view

simcity3000

Damn, it’s hard.  But it’s engrossing.  And fascinating.  And those citizens are so demanding and I’m always on the brink of bankruptcy, but at least it’s not stupid fucking easy and broken like the latest version.

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Y2K Compliant Desktop Publishing on the Information Super-Highway!

With Microsoft Works 4.5 for Windows 95!

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The Joy of Windows 98 SE (part 2)

Since I run my shiny new (old) Windows 98 installation inside VirtualBox, there are some things that just don’t work.  Like I mentioned below, Midi is one of them.

But a lot of DOS functionality seems to be broken too.  I’ve noticed that whenever a DOS window opens, my screen goes black and all I can see are some messed up video artifacts that vaguely resemble some of the icons in my taskbar.  I can’t seem to click and point my way out of this, but thankfully keyboard shortcuts like ALT+F4 and the Windows key still work.  That’s at least allowed me to shut down or restart when this happens.

But as a result, I still cant install or play games like the original Settlers, Civilization, Caesar, Rome, the Kings Quest series, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and some others that I’m probably forgetting.  If I ever want to play those again, I will have to rely on the Amiga versions through Emulation or set up my first computer somewhere and go with that.

But there are two more games that I have installed in a virtual Windows 98 SE environment.  And for these I have actually created separate dedicated virtual machines in VirtualBox.

The first one runs The Sims.  This is the original version of the game, plus the first three expansion packs that I bought.  I rarely get a jonesing to play this game, but I suspect I will eventually again.  The reason I gave this game a separate installation of its own was to give it more video memory.  When I boot this virtual machine, it’s very bare compared to the main Win98 VM.  I only have The Sims and it’s expansion packs installed, plus that unofficial service pack I mentioned in the last post.

The Sims boots up automatically and takes advantage of a whopping 96MB of video memory (OH MY GOD!) and 768 MB of RAM.  And I’ve disabled the network connection completely, so I don’t have to worry about running antivirus or firewall programs at all.

I have another dedicated VM set up like this that only plays Colonization.  The reason for this separation from the main Win98 VM is that the version of Colonization for Windows that I… uh… acquired is packed with a virus.  Oh noes!

So that would have actually been bad if I had installed that on my Windows 98 VM.  God knows (and virus writers too I guess) what that malware would have done with the internet connection there – firewall or not.  So this VM is set up with no network connection, 24 MB of video memory and 512 MB of RAM.  And Colonization boots automatically, and that virus gives me no grief.  And it can’t infect anything else, because it has no way of doing so.

I even went and customized the appearance of the Colonization VM.  Here’s what it looks like running Colonization:

Colonization virtualization 1
And here’s the desktop:

Colonization virtualization 2
I also went so far as to use my skills in editing sound to combine five sound clips from the “Leonardo da Vinci” Windows theme that was included in the Plus! pack for Windows 98.

Here is a clip featuring the original sounds as I sequenced them.

Now here is the startup sound after I fully tweaked them.

Now tell me how much of a geek I am.  That’s what the comments are for.  I’ll be busy learning how to play Colonization because it’s a lot harder than Civilization.

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The Joy of Windows 98 SE (part 1)

Okay, I’m 15 years late in celebrating this operating system.  And I think I can only celebrate anything Microsoft or Windows at all because it fills a particular niche for me.

This is odd for me to like Windows 98 so much, because it was Windows 95 and Windows 98 that taught me to hate Microsoft and proprietary software so much.  Does anyone remember the Browser Wars of the late 90s?

That was when I learned that some software companies think it’s okay to completely control the behaviour of your computer in order to stop you from using software made by their competitors.  Microsoft did this in spades, which is why I switched to using free open source software and eventually Linux.

But now that I’m no longer susceptible to Microsoft’s vendor lock-in, I can sit back and comfortably enjoy what’s actually pretty good about their products.  I still use Windows XP every day.  I have it installed natively as the OS on my gaming computer that runs my video game console emulators and most of my games.  And I run it daily as a virtual OS on my Linux desktop because I prefer some Windows applications over their Linux counterparts.

All this having been said, I need to mention that I’ve dug through my CD-R archived software and found the Unofficial Windows 98 SE Service Pack 2.1a that someone had compiled.  This contains all of the security updates and hotfixes that Microsoft released as part of Windows Update.  One of those updates fixes the “512MB” RAM bug that stopped more than that amount from being used without causing errors.  The service pack also contains the latest version of Tweak UI for Windows 98 and some other OS enhancements.

Since installing it, I’ve been able to up my RAM memory on that virtual OS to 768.  That seems to be the max that both Windows 98 and all my installed apps are happy with.

So now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ll talk about the games I run on my snazzy new Windows 98 gaming laptop.

Anno 1602
This is a city-building and resource-managing strategy game from Germany.  The graphics are absolutely lovely for its time, and its gameplay is engrossing.  It has spawned 3 sequels and is still quite a popular series.

But the original 1602 just won’t run on Windows XP.  I remember having to play it on my very first computer with its slow 266 MHz Pentium 2 and (at the time) 160MB of RAM.  Not a good gaming experience, especially when factoring in the very dark and faded CRT monitor I was still using at the time.  On the new laptop, everything is crisp, bright and responsive.

Caesar II
Another city-building game.  This one will technically run on Windows XP, but there are some glitches and bugs when it does.  It also is restricted to a rather small-sized window, so it’s a better fit for the Windows 98 laptop anyway.

Settlers II
Another city-building strategy game.  This one is DOS-based, so I suppose I could run it in DOSBox.  I actually haven’t figured out how to do that yet though, and believe me, I have way more fun with installing an entire operating system anyway.  Yes, I’m weird.

SimTower
A hotel-building simulation game that is actually way more fun than the concept sounds.  This one runs just fine on XP actually.  But because of the tiny window (like Caesar II above) it’s a better fit on the laptop.

I’ve also installed Age of Empires, Civilization II, SimCity, SimCity 2000, and SimCity 3000 on this thing.  All of those actually work better on my Windows XP computer because they require MIDI support.  My virtual Win98 computer doesn’t emulate a hardware MIDI device, so I won’t ever hear MIDI music playing from it.  Also, a higher resolution and much larger monitor make for a better gaming experience on the XP computer.

That leaves a few more old games that I will talk about in the next post.  Some I had success with, some I did not.

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My current favourite OS

I like to try out different operating systems.  This is mainly because I am a geek.  I like to see what some group of developers has done with a kernel and a desktop environment and a software ecosystem.

Linux is a good example of this.  I should actually say GNU-Linux.  Technically (those of you who have heard the spiel can skip to the next paragraph) Linux is just the kernel.  Most of the applications and other software that get bundled together to form a usable operating system are part of the GNU project.

Okay, now that I’ve made Richard Stallman’s birthday celebrations that much more groovy, I’m going to shock all my Linux pals and cohorts when I reveal the identity of my current favourite OS.

Windows 98.

OMG!!!  WTF!!!  Some explanation is clearly needed.  Please, put the pitchforks down.

This is a story about how I have a half dozen or so old video games that I can’t play on my gaming PC.  That computer runs Windows XP, and games that require a lot of DOS or 16-bit code just won’t work.

I used to keep my very first PC – a vintage HP 8260 from 1998 – up and running just for such a purpose.  I’ve written about that beast on this blog too.  I still have the thing… I can’t bear to get rid of it.  And it still works, and I still have Windows 98 and (now) Lubuntu installed on it.

But it’s not set up, so I haven’t been able to play those old games for a while.

But then I decided to try Windows 98 in VirtualBox again.  For this, I chose my newest computer – a cheap Acer laptop I got from Walmart for $500 last year.  Since I take good care of machines, even that flimsy shitty keyboard is still working properly.  And it’s a decent computer with a quad core AMD processor and 6GB of RAM.

I was basically only using it as my music editing computer now, and the HD has lots and lots of room to play around with VirtualBox.  So last week I dug out my old Windows 98 Second Edition CD and created a 20 GB virtual HD to install it on.

Now you may or may not be aware of this, but Windows 98 is old.  It’s not supported any more by Microsoft in any way, shape or form, and it’s certainly not officially supported by Oracle as far as VirtualBox goes.  So there is no “Guest Additions” software pack to install on a Windows 98 guest OS like there is for Windows XP, Vista, 7 and (I presume) 8.

I will stop my verbal babble momentarily to give you three YouTube links.  This man has recorded a thorough step-by-step process of what needs to be done to get Windows 98 installed and usable in VirtualBox.  Some of the links he mentions don’t work, so do some Googling, and you will find the drivers and other files he’s talking about:

Here’s a condensed version:

The first problem that you’ll hit after a successful install of Windows 98 is that the virtual machine is using all of the assigned processor core 100% of the time.  This is fixed by installing a CPU cooling program called Rain 2.0.  I won’t link to it, but again, Google is your friend.  Oh, and get 7-zip.  It’s free and it’s an indispensable tool.

Restart after installing Rain.  In fact, restart after each separate program you install.  Restart after changing the appearance of icons too.  Hell, restart if you looked at Windows 98 funny, because Windows 98 needs to be restarted like you wouldn’t believe.  The Second Edition is much improved in this regard, but it’s still basically a glorified 32-bit shell running on DOS after all.

After Rain, you’ll notice that you only have 256 colours and a screen resolution of 640 x 480.  This isn’t good enough, so you’ll need to install the correct video driver.  It took me a long damn time to find it, and thankfully I didn’t have to futz about with installing that Display Doctor program that is mentioned in the video.  If you are genuinely interested in installing your copy of Windows 98 in VirtualBox, send me an email or leave a comment here and I’ll email you the driver.

After another restart, your system should be good to go.  Mine has 512MB RAM, 32MB of video memory, and of course the guest OS has full use of my video hardware and 1 core of my AMD quad core to use.  This makes it BY FAR the best and fastest Windows 98 machine I have ever operated.

Just so you don’t get carried away, 512MB is pretty much the max for RAM (any more and there may be errors popping up) and 32MB of video memory is more than enough to run any applications intended to run on Windows 98.  My actual computer that runs Windows 98 has a video card with 2MB.  And don’t make the virtual hard drive any larger than 32GB.  Windows 98 can’t handle such a massive, massive size!

Now if you want to move files to and from your virtual Windows 98 installation, you can’t do it the usual VirtualBox way.  There are no shared folders with a Windows 98 guest.  I’ve read about solutions like Samba and FTP, but this is what I did:

  1. For files small enough to email: email
  2. For larger files: create an ISO image and use a flash drive to transfer them to the host computer.  Mount that ISO as a CD for the guest to read

This can be time consuming, but it’s not like I’m constantly moving files.  And using email meant that I had to enable the network connection for Windows 98 at all – which I was reluctant to do.

You may remember – or have heard – how insecure Windows was before Windows XP Service Pack 2 and later service packs and versions.  Well, for starters I have no personal data on this OS.  If it is ever compromised, nothing of value will be lost.  All I’d have to do is install the OS and games again.

Second, since I am a digital pack-rat, I have saved damn near every version of every program that I have ever downloaded and installed for use on my Windows computers.  So all I had to do was a little bit of research to find a version of Avast Antivirus that still supports Windows 98 (version 4.8) and an old version of ZoneAlarm Firewall that does too (version 3.1).

Again, there are probably holes in those versions, but there is nothing of value to protect even if they are breached.

So with Avast running and ZoneAlarm locking down all internet connectivity except when I specifically need to email files, things are as secure as I need them to be.

I stuck to Outlook Express for email, because I use it so infrequently that I couldn’t be bothered to install Eudora like I used to use.  Anyone else remember Eudora?

Win98 desktop
Oh and of course I’ve tweaked and customized the interface to look a lot better, I think.  Yes, that’s Mr. Burns serving as the icon for My Documents.  He has since 1998.

Next post, I will talk about the games I installed – and how I did some workarounds to fix some problems I had.

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Bodhi Linux

I’ve recently been playing around with a new-ish distro called Bodhi Linux.  It’s a light-weight distro, and since I’m a cheap bastard who likes to spend not much money on underpowered hardware, I like to get the most I can out of my OS.

That’s why I use primarily Xubuntu and Lubuntu, and even Puppy Linux on another machine. And that’s why I still stick with old Windows XP for games on another computer.  Don’t worry, the games are all so old that I don’t need any newer software than that.

But back to Bodhi.  It’s another Ubuntu-based distro.  I’ve tried to get away from Ubuntu because of what I see to be a bad direction that things are headed with that project.  But sadly, most other distros don’t go out of their way to make things easy for the end user like Ubuntu.  Except for Mint, and you can read about my failed attempts at getting Mint to work below.

But I gave Bodhi a try as a live CD on a few of my computers.  And I was seriously impressed.  It was the fastest booting of any live CD I had ever tried, and all of the compositing and animation effects never lagged, even on this here 9-year old laptop that really shouldn’t have handled it.

This is because of the wonderful window manager known as Enlightenment.  E17, to be exact.  Bodhi is built around it, and after a lightening quick install, it also booted in record time too.

Now that’s when my disappointment started.  I’m a customization junkie with computers and operating systems.  If I can’t tweak it, I won’t use it.  And it’s not that Bodhi and E17 can’t be tweaked, it’s just that they can’t quite be tweaked enough.

Deal-breaker #1 was the mouse cursor “jumping” automatically to a new open window or dialogue box.  Hells no.  I remember the first time I saw this kind of thing back in Windows 98.  I think my hair spontaneously caught fire, I began to shriek, and I fell down 4 flights of stairs trying to figure out how to turn it off.

But I couldn’t figure that out in Bodhi.  Meh.

Deal Breaker #2.  Newly installed apps like Firefox and VirtualBox don’t get launchers added to the applications menu.

Okay, I realize that it’s trendy now for nobody to want to have icons and menus any more.  Nobody uses a mouse with a computer apparently.  But damn it, I still do.  The only way I could figure out how to get Firefox to start was to do a “run” command.  Fuck that.

Rather than try to research on the Bodhi wiki on whether or not I even could create custom launchers, I decided to go back to good old Lubuntu.  And in the time it’s taken me to type this out, it’s installed and updated.  Yay.

Sad thing is, I had a complete, updated and customized Lubuntu 12.04 installation up and running before I wiped it to try Bodhi on that computer this morning.

Sigh.

Anyway, I know you’re on the edge of sanity your seat wondering why I’m mucking about with all this OS installing business, and I shall reveal all in the next post!

SCIENCE!!!

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