What a lazy layabout I am. Also, I am a nerdy neerdowell, a silly scofflaw and a mischievous malcontent. And I have had a day of fun with my two very old computers.
One of these I have had since 1998. The other is a recent acquisition, courtesy of Uncle Furry. Thanks Uncle Furry!
First, I’ll tell you about what I did to my first PC, my HP2160. I know you are dying to know all about this, so please remain calm.
A couple of weeks ago I went searching for that “Powertoy” that was available for Windows 95 and Windows 98. This was available from Microsoft, and it’s called “TweakUI”. It has a twin of sorts available for Windows XP, and frankly I don’t care about Vista or Windows 7. People who like that shit shouldn’t be allowed to customize anything lest they break the fuck out of it.
In any case, I found “TweakUI” where I least expected it. It’s not available as a downloadable program, but as an option for the Windows Control Panel, installable from the Windows 98 CD. Huzzah!
So all one has to do to get TweakUI on a Windows 98 system is insert the Windows 98 CD, browse the CD in Explorer, navigate to tools\reskit\powertoy, right-click on “tweakui.inf” and install it. You’ll need to close the help files that open to proceed and finish the install. For some reason, TweakUI is on my standard Windows 98 CD and not my Windows 98SE CD. For shame!
But anyway, once I had gotten that installed, I did things like clean up my start menu and make some other things less annoying. I also used a freeware program called “ActivIcons” to change most of the systems icons to some I had made many years ago. Now that I think of it again, here are those icon files for download:
I really can’t see if anyone will have any use for these, as the icons in later versions of Windows past 98 have better resolution and would look quite crappy replaced by these. Don’t ask why Mr. Burns has always been the icon for “My Documents” in Windows. It just IS that way.
In Windows 98, these icons look really sharp. On XP, I only use a few.
Anyway, on to boring you with details about what I did to my 10 year old Laptop that I’ve had for about a month. I basically installed as many old games and emulators on it as I know it can handle. And some of those, sadly, it couldn’t.
But here’s what I now have installed:
- Age of Empires (with Rise of Rome expansion)
- Atari 2600 emulator
- Caesar II
- Civilization
- ColecoVision emulator
- Colonization
- Commodore 64 emulator
- Conquest of the New World
- Lords of the Realm II
- Sega Master System emulator
- Settlers II
- SimCity 2000
- SimTower
And I was even playing Colonization for a while before I fucked up my gold reserves by not understanding the interface fully yet. Meh.
Unfortunately, sound and fullscreen video on this laptop ain’t what they should be. But I got it for free, and it does run some of those games just great. I’m debating now whether I want to buy the little button battery that will prevent the BIOS from having a conniption fit every time I turn it on. Decisions decisions!