techThursday, October 28, 2004
got a new(to me) pentium
yes, that's "pentium", not "Pentium 4" or even "Pentium 3". It's a 200 Mhz P1. 32 Mb RAM. No Harddrive.
I plan to stick a 8 gig HD in there and maybe use it for a router or something. Or just play some old DOS games on it. I'll need to get the DOS drivers for the integrated audio though - which means that I'll have to figure out what the audio chipset is and all that.
I already have all the dos games setup on a 400mb HD that I picked up a while ago. I'd setup a 100Mhz Pentium with a bunch of old games and given it to my brother. I put 2 hd's in there a 500 and a 400, but all the games don't come close to filling the 500, so I copied them all over to the 400 and kept it.
I stuck the 400 in a non-outdated computer and burned all the games along with dosbox to a cd for playing on faster computers. It works pretty well. A lot of the stuff will even run directly from the cd - no need to copy it to the hd first.
While setting up the hd's with all the games and trying to copy large directories in DOS on a 100Mhz Pentium (and probably ATA-33 HD), I was reminded that MS-DOS really is a piece of junk operating system. Much of my command line work has been in linux lately, so I really miss some of the features which DOS is lacking of - like the ability to recursively copy several directories without typing a seperate command for each one or instead writing a very long "for ... in ... do ..." command and wanting to kill the fool who came up with the syntax (for copy, xcopy, and for/in/do)
And what is with dos's copy command.... it can't handle recursive copies at all. Is the operating system so poorly designed that they have to have a seperate program (xcopy is a seperate executable) just to offer recursive copying? And if you think the copy command is bad, just take a look at the move command - what a worthless piece of junk that is. It's barely more functional than rename - I think it may be just another alias for rename in fact.
I'll have to see if DOSEmu can handle soundblaster emulation very well.
I plan to stick a 8 gig HD in there and maybe use it for a router or something. Or just play some old DOS games on it. I'll need to get the DOS drivers for the integrated audio though - which means that I'll have to figure out what the audio chipset is and all that.
I already have all the dos games setup on a 400mb HD that I picked up a while ago. I'd setup a 100Mhz Pentium with a bunch of old games and given it to my brother. I put 2 hd's in there a 500 and a 400, but all the games don't come close to filling the 500, so I copied them all over to the 400 and kept it.
I stuck the 400 in a non-outdated computer and burned all the games along with dosbox to a cd for playing on faster computers. It works pretty well. A lot of the stuff will even run directly from the cd - no need to copy it to the hd first.
While setting up the hd's with all the games and trying to copy large directories in DOS on a 100Mhz Pentium (and probably ATA-33 HD), I was reminded that MS-DOS really is a piece of junk operating system. Much of my command line work has been in linux lately, so I really miss some of the features which DOS is lacking of - like the ability to recursively copy several directories without typing a seperate command for each one or instead writing a very long "for ... in ... do ..." command and wanting to kill the fool who came up with the syntax (for copy, xcopy, and for/in/do)
And what is with dos's copy command.... it can't handle recursive copies at all. Is the operating system so poorly designed that they have to have a seperate program (xcopy is a seperate executable) just to offer recursive copying? And if you think the copy command is bad, just take a look at the move command - what a worthless piece of junk that is. It's barely more functional than rename - I think it may be just another alias for rename in fact.
I'll have to see if DOSEmu can handle soundblaster emulation very well.
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Here is some junk I discovered
A bunch of random junk.
QuickTime and RealPlayer Alternatives: Don't use those annoying players anymore. Get some alternatives from this site.
Mplayer: This is an opensource media player which will play any format video, but probably isn't as user friendly as the above ones. It's open source. If you don't like the windows version from mplayerhq.hu, then you can just do a google search for other windows builds of it. There are some with nice GUI's.
1-4a Rename: an intelligent file renaming program. Fix all those bad/inconsistent mp3 filenames - And other filetypes as well (jpg's, etc)
HooverDesk: A windows desktop replacement - there are alternatives to the MS Windows look and feel.
RegSeeker: A nice windows registry editor/checker/etc. From the HoverDesk People - also with other freeware on the same page.
Adobe Reader Speed-Up: Tired of waiting for Acrobat Reader to load - this'll speed things up.
None of these things are open source as far as I know, but they're all usefull and free little programs. Most of them are found in the October '04 issue of PC World
QuickTime and RealPlayer Alternatives: Don't use those annoying players anymore. Get some alternatives from this site.
Mplayer: This is an opensource media player which will play any format video, but probably isn't as user friendly as the above ones. It's open source. If you don't like the windows version from mplayerhq.hu, then you can just do a google search for other windows builds of it. There are some with nice GUI's.
1-4a Rename: an intelligent file renaming program. Fix all those bad/inconsistent mp3 filenames - And other filetypes as well (jpg's, etc)
HooverDesk: A windows desktop replacement - there are alternatives to the MS Windows look and feel.
RegSeeker: A nice windows registry editor/checker/etc. From the HoverDesk People - also with other freeware on the same page.
Adobe Reader Speed-Up: Tired of waiting for Acrobat Reader to load - this'll speed things up.
None of these things are open source as far as I know, but they're all usefull and free little programs. Most of them are found in the October '04 issue of PC World