a broken mold

Running DOS games is hardcore. Not, admittedly, as hardcore as text-based games, but up there. Unfortunately, in the last several iterations of the Windows operating system, DOS support has been provided only by emulation, and not at all on 64-bit systems.¹ Your hardware configuration also determines how choppy/way-too-fast your game will render. How then, shall we play DOS games? Enter DOSBox.

You can check it out and get the link from our Recommended Software List. Once you’ve installed it, this is to help you how to customize DOSBox so it doesn’t have an annoying console window running in the background, and set it up for your DOS games folder, so you don’t have to mount it every time.

Simply create a shortcut to the .exe file, and then right-click on the shortcut, select ‘Properties,’ and edit the end of the ‘Target’ entry to include -noconsole -c “mount c ‘c:\DOS Games\’”. Replace C:\DOS Games with whatever directory is your games folder.

Note that you will still need to mount C: first by typing “C:” without quotes and hitting Enter. It should already be in your DOS directory due to our above hack. To install a game, open the zip archive or folder and run setup.exe or any other setup file if there is one. If everything is already extracted and ready to rock, you can simply navigate to that folder from within DOSBox, and run the game executable (e.g. keen4.exe).

To control the game speed, Ctrl+F7/8 lowers and raises the Cpu Cycles, and Ctrl+F11/12 lowers and raises the Frameskip. For more help getting things running and learning commands, type “intro” without quotes into the prompt and hit Enter.

Happy DOS gaming!

We are looking for a few more writers to join us. One or two right now would be great.

Our goal is to pick up the publication pace a bit—hopefully eventually up to at least one post a week (more would be cool, too). I think taking on a couple more writers would ease this task, but I also think Matthew and I would need to step up contributing a bit, too (which may become easier in the summer after I’ve graduated high school). In the long run, our goal is to get some notice. Not really to get famous, but more to have conversations and a small community and also just to get out what comes out of our fingers and toes. It’s also a personal blog, and I want it to stay that way. It’s just some friends who like to write.

So, on to the meat of the thing. Seriously, we don’t mind people that are different than us, in fact having someone who differs somewhat from our opinions might be quite cool. We do have a few basic requirements, though:

• You are a true Christian; you believe the Gospel and don’t have any beliefs that altogether contradict it
• You are a competent writer; you don’t have to be extra stupendous, just able and willing to be creative
• You don’t mind our particular Christian beliefs, like Covenant theology
• You are willing and able to contribute regularly (take a look at the dates of previous posts to get an idea of what ‘regularly’ is right now)
• You are currently between 12 and 32 years of age. It’s not that we don’t like you if you’re older than that, it’s just that we want to run a blog written by young men and women.

Interested? Contact us. Tell us a bit about yourself if we don’t really know you. After that, probably as long as you meet the requirements and we’re all comfortable, you join us. If it’s all good after a month-and-a-half, you’re official. Think of it as an internship (LOL).

Six months after you’re officially on, you can become a partial blog administrator, if you so wish (and we’ll leave the opportunity open for any time). After maybe, say, a year and a half, we might offer you full adminship, which gives you a whole lot of power, which means we trust you a whole lot. And if you don’t want to become an admin, that’s fine too. Just offering.

March 20, 2010: We are no longer seeking new writers but we leave the possibility open for the future. And… we have three new writers! Anna Hurley has already introduced herself and I’m guessing the others will follow suit in due time. Thanks, ladies and gentleman.

Yeah, I know frequent short to medium sized posts about your life have a great potential to be boring. But I wasn’t quite considering that. Rather, I’m becoming rather enamored of short to medium sized posts that just throw a thought, question, or reflection out. It’s a form that rather compliments honesty.

I want to say my inspiration comes from Jason Kottke and Seth Godin. There’s probably some other stuff in there, too. I know Jason’s mostly an editor now in the sense that he doesn’t create most of his content, but rather points it out and comments on it. But some of his earlier stuff was more personal. And he points out such interesting stuff.

Seth Godin is a marketer. A genius, I’d say. He seems to spout a continuous stream of good stuff on his blog. And it’s not cheesy. I don’t know that he’s a Christian, but he has an ethic that really appeals to me as a Christian: hard work, innovation, courage, and that sort of thing. And his posts usually aren’t all that long.

So, I think I have some stuff to say worth saying here that I could put in a somewhat similar format. The question is, with Matthew not posting an equivalent amount (not necessarily a bad thing), am I going to be posting too much? (For what? Fairness? Equality? My own good?). That’s the question I wish to ask Matthew and all you who read this.

What say you?