Well today I had a day off work (as did most people around the country since it is the 26th of January) and I decided that it was time to get out the old beast - yes yes, my first PC, the Osborne 486.
Now I know a lot of people had computers before the day of the 486 (1992/1993 in this case) but this is my story right! Dusted off the old beast which served us very well, and cost a lot (around $5000 I think). So all things considered (day off work - Australia/Invasion Day, didn't feel like doing much) I went about observing my inner-child.
So yes, the beast is a 486sx 25mhz with 8MB of RAM and a 160MB HDD, 2x CD-ROM and a soundcard! Fwoa! I think back then having a soundcard and a cd-rom were something quite amazing, considering most things fitted on a floppy disk. Unfortunately I couldn't find the soundcard we used to use, so therefore I couldn't use the old caddy-style cd-rom, so I decided an upgrade was worth it... so I chuck in my old Sound Blaster AWE32 - with 8MB of RAM for wavetable midi synthesis... Champion little card that it is, worked quite well despite being PnP and the old 486 not being PnP. Good stuff Creative Labs... pity they are all marketing these days.
Ahh yes so back to the story, I chucked in the chip we used to use in the machine (486 dx 100 - OVERDRIVE.. nahoi!) and put in a powersupply (had it lying around, of course) and the beast lives once again. Loaded up DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1 (took me a while to figure out how to do all of that, especially since I've never done it before) and it was alive. The soundcard was a bit tricky (had to download drivers) but otherwise after throwing out 2 dodgy floppy disks (man I hate them so much) the system has been built. I was planning on sticking it on the net... but I couldn't find a suitable network card so I just gave up on that one.
I put a couple of DOS games (Prince of Persia, and a few others) as well as a bit of old software we used to use, and I tell ya what... it boots faster than my computer. Ah well. All is good.
Apart from that, I slept a whole lot today and tried out Jazz Jackrabbit on my GP2x - is there anything that isn't ported yet for this thing? They've even tried Windows 95.... dang.... I'll never be able to catch up and re-develop some old game for it... because it will already be done. I mean, Commander Keen 1 to 3 has been done, but I really want Commander Keen 4... ahh I guess in a few more days it will be there. Yay.
Ah well, time for some sleep since it's back to work tomorrow... seems odd going to work for just one day then it's the weekend! I hope I can manage to get to Tank this weekend... it will be quite exciting and will give me a break from testing my powers of nerd.
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