• 8 Posts
  • 678 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It is.

    And honestly, remembering the stuff I had to do to play the original Doom at a LAN party back in the day.

    • Buy a sound card (some PCs came with, mine didn’t)
    • Install the sound card drivers correctly
    • Edit the computer’s config.sys file to assure the operating system drivers were loaded in such an order as to allow enough of Bill Gates’ 640 kb RAM available to load a game
    • Borrow (!) a network card from my dad’s computer, and open up the PC to jam it in there
    • Install network drivers
    • Path the physical coaxial network cables through all PCs and terminate them correctly
    • Configure the game to know which direct memory address (bank 1) and hardware interrupt request id (5) it needed to talk to the sound card
    • Yes hello also find a smaller mouse driver and load it correctly because by now all the networking and audio stuff is making those 640kb tight

    We all did that back then!

    If someone was a “gamer” they were not afraid to do this because they either knew how or knew a friend who was happy to help.

    Compare that to what I do today that most gamers consider “mind-numbingly super nerd impossible bullshit lol linux sux”, running GNU GUIX:

    • Find a channel for the nvidia drivers. Add it to my system config, 2 lines.
    • Find a channel for Steam. Add it to my system config, 2 lines.
    • Oh no I had to add 2 more lines for nvidia by following clear documentation.

    O hey everything just works. Proton kicks in automatically.













  • I feel weird about this. Like it’s his second death or something.

    He used to be someone who was just giving welcome comic relief to office workers, and came off as reflected and humble.

    Then he got a stroke and …opinions. How related they were I don’t know, and how latent his cruel opinions were I honestly don’t know.

    Whether he always was utterly evil but it just didn’t surface, or he just broke someway, it felt like a person died back then. I still miss who I thought he was.

    And now he is dead again.