Taken from my DOSBox Livestream. The commentary has been stripped from the video for those who wish to enjoy this old screen saver in its original form.
MSDOS
Another Miniature “Console” Joins The Battle
Ok, this trend of miniature game consoles was cute when it first launched… but now it’s getting ridiculous.
Yes, this is real. On launch it will cost $99 and come with at least 30 games according to their Q&A. I seriously don’t know where to begin; to this day I still play games from the MSDOS era (Wolf3D being one of the more recent ones), and have even installed DOSBOX on my Amazon Fire for my own small amusement. Why would you spend almost $100 to get a tiny box that plays some of the oldest old school games that ever did old school, when you can do the same thing on hardware you already own? Including smartphones? If you do a search on ebay for a raspberry pi kit you’ll immediately see cheaper options for building your own.
You could also argue that people might want to buy these because they don’t have the time to build their own, or don’t have the knowledge of using a raspberry pi and installing operating systems and then configuring them to start/run accordingly. Normally I would agree, but most of the people that I knew growing up who liked to play MSDOS games were already people who tinkered with their PC’s, whereas with consoles you just plugged them in and inserted a cartridge/disc… done like dinner.
Can’t I just buy a Raspberry Pi, an enclosure, gamepad, keyboard, and mouse, 3D print a faceplate, install Armbian, buy 30+ games, build the source for ARM or install/configure in DOSBox for each and every game, create a menu system with game art, and tell everyone about it at parties?
No.
Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do! :zorak: I’ve actually been reading up more on Raspberry Pi’s and have contemplated getting some sort of kit… possibly of the portable variety. I’m just not sure what I would use it for. Perhaps make my own tablet if my Kindle catches fire?
My portable time machine
I laid out my virus prank this morning, and had interesting results. He wasn’t afraid of it, in fact it seems he wanted the hard drive to be wiped. He was bummed when I showed him that Windows was still available… and then I loaded Windows 3.11 and that still didn’t really phase him. It wasn’t until I pulled out Norton Commander that I began to hear terror in his voice.
He questioned what the purpose of said program served, and I had a fun time trying to tell him that in the old days this was a good program to do file transfers either between drives and floppies, or networking two computers together. Back in the early days of computing Windows didn’t quite take off yet, so it was either this or manually typing in each command to complete particular tasks. NC was also awesome for making a custom launch menu. I remember using this when I was younger to launch DOS games; it was this and Windows 3.1 (and eventually 3.11) that I switched between whenever I wanted to play something. You know, have to have my Skifree fix. :v:
On another note I also wore a poncho and a sombrero to work today on a dare; same co-worker said if I did so he’d give me a free lunch… I don’t think he remembered. I’ll have to remind him next time we work together. 😛
My Infected Imagination
During my spare time, when I haven’t been working, playing or anything I’ve been binge watching YouTube videos where people mess with tech support scammers, and more recently been watching old virus porn from the MSDOS to Win95 era. Then it hit me that it would be fun to play a prank on one of my co-workers using a little imagination, and a USB thumb drive with DOSBOX and a neutered virus just to see what his millennial ass will do when he encounters it… I’m a millennial, so I get to say that. 😛
I decided to download one of my favorite viruses from archive.org’s malware museum, a place where you can download and even see the effects of old viruses from a few decades ago. My favorite virus on the site is a fun one armed bandit game; in the old days if you ran this virus it would wipe your hard drive clean and store all of your data in RAM. You have a small chance of saving your data if you win the game, but if you fail you would lose all of your data and have to either rely on your old backups or have to start from scratch. In this current era the virus has been defanged and is completely harmless, all that remains is the threatening message and an addictive game… Oh! and a chance to troll my co-worker. :trollface:
I have it all setup on my thumb drive for tomorrow morning, looking forward to his reaction when he looks at the computer screen tomorrow morning. :trollface:
I also have to say this virus looks quite silly on my Amazon Fire 7 too. Yes, I have malware on my tablet… from the 90’s. :v: