TL;DR: Living in the future with spreadsheets and DOS games.

  • Speaking of living in the future: bbs.decafbad.com lives again!

    • In a spasm of nostalgia-ception, I set up Synchronet with a handful of BBS DOOR games.

    • The last time I did this was back in 2002, on a little 70mhz PC rescued from a dumpster.

      • Holy crap over 12 years ago. So, there are like 2 layers of nostalgia going on here.
    • This time around, I first tried installing Synchronet on my couch gaming PC.

      • The BBS itself works. But, alas, Windows 8 has largely left the old DOS games behind. Also, and having this stuff going on this PC is annoying.
    • My second attempt was to try running Windows 98 in QEMU on my hobby Linux VM.

      • It was hilarious. But, it chewed up 100% CPU while running. After I slapped it with cpulimit, it performed about as well as that 2002 trash computer.
    • My third attempt saw me building the Linux port of Synchronet.

      • This involves wrestling with DOSEmu to run the old-school games. There are a few hitches, but the games are far more playable than I expected.

      • I expect this Linux-based install to be a lot easier to keep running, since it doesn't depend on hardware in my own house and I can mostly forget about it.