Virtual Thread

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Zeor
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Virtual Thread

Post by Zeor » Tue Jun 02, 2015 4:33 am

Lately I was having an escalating itch to play an old puzzle game I liked. Uz 3.0. It came off of one of those 93,488 Games for Windows discs you used to get from grandmas. It was challenging and fun and was tied together with colorful visuals and an outstanding midi soundtrack. It was pretty much the first game I ever really played and enjoyed on my own computer... lots of fond memories of sitting with my new Windows 98 computer in a chilly basement and bringing in the wonders offered by this state-of-the-art computer box.

Ol' Uz doesn't work too happily on the modern computer.

So what could I do? I know. Resurrect the dead. I grabbed VirtualBox and fired up Windows 98. Kind of. Well I got it working pretty easily in a strictly academic sense, but it was stuck on a matchbox-sized resolution at 16 colors, and wouldn't play midi. I was able to get the graphics working for a minute using some... program... thing. Visual Doctor something. But then that ruined the mouse. Couldn't goshdarn win.

One suggestion I saw while looking around about this was "just install Windows 2000 instead." Well, that's still a grade below XP, so maybe it'll sit up and bark enough like 98. Wow, that was painless. Install from ISO, then use an ISO included with VirtualBox to install a bunch of other stuff, and you're off to the races.

Huge success!
Image

It's so beautiful. I didn't realize how much I missed this delightfully ancient environment. Look at all these square windows that I decorated with hokey themed colors! And so many crappy little games to install. Sadly, another favorite of mine didn't work, but hell, maybe that'd work in compatibility mode for all I know. The important one's there, and I'm jazzed.

So of course, now I'm wondering what else I can do with this! There must be some other awesome cheesy old games I can play. There is this: http://www.myabandonware.com/ and I've been browsing aimlessly through that. And oh holy crap I just discovered https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive . Guess that'll keep me busy for a minute.

Just figured I'd spread this around a bit and see if any of youse guys fondly remembered anything from around this time period that I should check out. Which is impossible because I'm The Only One Here, but you know. Worth a shot.
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Xinos
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Re: Virtual Thread

Post by Xinos » Thu Jun 04, 2015 10:34 pm

I was browsing archive.org on-site emulation of old DOS games just yesterday with some coworkers. But I think you want to emulate locally as it doesn't seem to save your progress and the key mapping was random for every game. My very first games I could remember were some lame Windows (Pre 3.1) that were basically interactive screen savers. Then I joined a computer class called Futurekids and earned enough Megabyte stickers to get The Incredible Machine 2, which was my first real favorite game and I played that for years.
I also had one of those CD's. It was 117 games, a few of them were for Win 95, like the Doom demo. But one of my favorites on that disk was Microman. Definitely a terrible game but I had fun with it.

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Re: Virtual Thread

Post by Zeor » Fri Jun 05, 2015 1:17 am

Xinos wrote: But one of my favorites on that disk was Microman. Definitely a terrible game but I had fun with it.
Ahaha, that looks like just the right kind of terrible.

e: Oh hey, I found the disc Uz came on. https://archive.org/details/cdrom-bearwarecd

Not much else on there is any good, though. Mostly it's slot machines and crap.
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Re: Virtual Thread

Post by Bloopy » Tue Jun 09, 2015 7:04 am

For some reason one of the first games that came to my mind was Goosebumps: Escape From Horrorland. Or how about Beavis And Butthead in Virtual Stupidity. I only played the demo of that.

I alos have fond memories of this pack, particularly Mixed Genetics, Rat Poker and Lineup:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_ ... Collection
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Re: Virtual Thread

Post by Zeor » Tue Jun 09, 2015 11:45 pm

Bloopy wrote:Or how about Beavis And Butthead in Virtual Stupidity. I only played the demo of that.
Oh man, yes, I vaguely remember a couple of minutes of that. I might have to see if I can dig that up.

Definitely some good material here to crack into. By the way, Uz gets hard.

edit: oh my COW why did I only just remember this: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Secre ... y_The_1992
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