Random thoughts for 2014 Nov 25
TL;DR: Living in the future with spreadsheets and DOS games.
Hello world. I've not gotten any better at keeping these posts going.
A reminder that we're living in the future:
A powerful spreadsheet package is available online, free to use.
It offers the ability to fill in cells with live data queried from services all over the world.
- This is serious gee-whiz stuff. I seem to remember first getting fired up by the potential after reading Practical Internet Groupware by Jon Udell, circa 1999.
Oh, and I mainly use it to plan business activities in a video game.
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.