Only one of the group's members, Rio DiAngelo/Richard Ford, did not kill himself: weeks before the suicides, in December 1996, DiAngelo agreed with Applewhite to leave the group so he could ensure future dissemination of Heaven's Gate videos and literature. He videotaped the mansion in Rancho Santa Fe; however, the tape was not shown to police until 2002, five years after the event.
That's sort of the definition of abandonware - the publisher has apparently given up trying to make money off the thing but also not explicitly released it for free either.
What that doesn't mention is how much better the game looked when you ran it on something like a 3dfx Voodoo card. I remember when I upgraded from an S3 card to a Voodoo 3, the game suddenly had things like windshield glare and partially transparent water, and much higher texture resolutions.
Haha so true. I remember I had an S3 Virge DX back then, and it was actually slower to enable 3D 'acceleration' in the few games that supported the card, than using software rendering. It didn't add much if anything to the quality of the visuals either ;-)
I had a Pentium III with S3 savage, the thing ran anything, I remember being pleasantly surprised when I could play hardware accelerated Need For Speed 4 for example..
Now compare this with modern mobile devices which run slowly and can do a fraction of what PCs were able to do 15 years ago having 10x lower clock rates.
Are you saying that mobile devices aren't capable of playing games of the same graphical and technical complexity as a Windows 95 game? I assure you that isn't true.
No, what I'm saying is that you will never see an iPad displaying the same complex scene a 500W-PC with a double-SLI card has no problem of taking care of. There is and there will always be a large gap between what you can do in fixed based devices and mobile systems, because of their inherent design goals.
1. Compare apples to apples. What could something the size of a phone do in 1998?
2. The current resolution of the iPhone 5 is 1280 x 2272. The game ran on 800x600 with a fraction of the colors,
3. That game sold for what... 35 bucks? Are you comparing what two developers make in a month and a half, selling for 2 bucks with a AAA budget game? Yes, an HTML5 game is going to be slower, but compare one of the top games for the mobile systems and the mobile game today is more impressive. Perhaps 'Need For Speed: Most Wanted'?
4. Clock Rate Isn't Everything. It never has been. Further, the equivalent Pentium 133 laptop is lasting 1.5 hours max with a battery the size of a half dozen iphones. Power matters.
5. Could a mobile-sized device, sans phone (FCC issues) be created that is tuned for speed instead of battery, with a lower grade resolution (compromise for battery and speed), that was faster? Sure. Would anyone buy it? Probably not. Engineering is about compromises.
And yes, I'd like to be able to use my computer as a general purpose device, but nobody has stepped up to the plate yet. I mean, we could start with a Cyanogen mod and build up from there, but it's a bigger effort than it looks.
But I'll tell you what, let's put it on the backlog. ;)
Still doesn't change the fact that 15 years ago "we"(as in, programmers, industry, whatever) were much, much more efficient with limited resources than what we are now. Some people consider it a good thing, some of us consider it a bad thing.
1-2 gb of ram is insane luxury compared to say, the Amiga which typically had 1000 times less - 512k or 1mb of main ram and the same amount of 'chip' ram (for video/audio processing).
I'm not a mobile device expert, but programmers don't have to think that much about 512k on an iphone, do they? On an Amiga it was often all you had for the entire system including the OS.
Yeah but the Amiga drove 640x256 at 16 colors (4 bits), so around 80kb. Contrast that with the newest iPhone which drives 640x1136 at 24-bit color, so around 2.08mb. This is 26x the number of pixels. Keep in mind you also have a networking stack and lots of semi-realtime sensor data.
Not to mention that the demands on the system in terms of features and performance are so much higher.
26x the number of pixels, but you have over 200 times the ram available and that's assuming your app only gets 100mb (and that AmigaOS takes up zero resources). The default Amiga had an 8 MHz, 16 bit processor which again is less than 100 times what's available now on an average device. I just can't see modern devices being construed to be nearly as resource restrained as personal computers from the 80s.
Well I consider my time a limited resource. In trade for my developer time I can use an extra 8MB of ram for a little html web game I am making I think it is okay.
"were much, much more efficient with limited resources"
You are cherry picking which resources you care about. What about power consumption? What about heat? What about physical size? What about noise? I remember the fans in those old PC's, mine sounded like a jet taking off.
Drank the retina Koolaid? I couldn't believe it myself when I started doing the math. The Nexus 5 has 1.5x the detail for each screen point compared to a Retina iPhone. The iPhone's @2x retina assets are outclassed (somewhat) by the @3x assets of a 1080p phone...
Huh? My Galaxy S3 is noticeably more powerful than my Micron Pentium II system from 1998, in terms of specs as well as actual performance. The fact that it's running Android and not Win98 doesn't hurt.
Win9x is not a portable OS. Because of its DOS and Windows heritage, the underpinnings are very much tied to x86 and would be difficult to port to ARM. (Although not as difficult as OS/2, which uses the dreaded ring 1.)
Whereas Windows NT has always been portable. Except that Microsoft has already ported NT to ARM.
Indeed, I realize this. My comment was mainly facetious, I admit. Porting DOS/Win98 would be totally silly anyway unless you needed a blue screen generator.
Porting ReactOS would start to make sense, if anyone wanted that - say, there was a desire to run windows programs on modern mobile hardware without licensing fees (rendering farm? Most use cases I can imagine would be better served by Linux anyway). Otherwise... Emulation such has DOSBOX makes the most sense for anyone who desires to run legacy Win32 software.
A 28.8Kbps Internet Connection used to be considered fast!
Optional:
28.8 or higher baud modem for head-to-head play
For LAN play a local area network supporting either TCP/IP or IPX protocols is required
Internet access required for internet play; connect time charges may apply
Microphone for instantaneous voice communication during head-to-head play
Graphics accelerator card compatible with the Microsoft Direct3D® API (for Windows 95 only)
Compatibles:
Supports force feedback hardware compaticle with the Microsoft DirectInput® API (for Windows 95 only)
Supports MMX technology
Supports Pentium II processor platform with AGP
Um, yep. I remember being stuck on 14.4 back in the day.
Waiting for webpages to load... Well, it was like waiting for webpages to load on an edge connection. Waiting 2-3 min per page load, basically. 2 hours for a browser upgrade download, you know the ones chrome does in the background now... And it might not successfully download the first time. Ahh, those were the days. Napster could take 20min to download an MP3 and still corrupt it.
In a way, that modem might still be considered good: the head-to-head play meant that one player had their modem dial the other player's modem, so the link that was established was a direct 28.8k symmetric connection with no IP routers in between. As long as you weren't going long-distance, you would have sufficient bandwidth and latency that was good, not great, but very consistent because the PSTN cares about that in a way that ISPs don't.
I remember doing that but it was a shit. We didn't have mobile phones back then as a side channel so the outcome was basically designing a manual protocol in case of failure. This consisted of stuff like assigning who was responsible for calling who when it dropped and what to do when someone else in the house picked up a phone.
Probably because it's a few static HTML files that are stored with dozens (if not hundreds) of other single purpose sites, whose infrastructure is managed programmatically. (i.e. they have an intern run a script when they need to migrate it to a new cluster, and that's the extent of it)
A client of mine has a site with 4000+ individual pages, and no content management system.
In the corporate world, you just don't touch stuff if you don't need to. There's no time to go and find web pages that haven't changed in 10 years and figure out what to do about them.
It isn't so crazy. Imagine that 3900 of those 4000 files never change. Every few years there is a redesign on a section of the site, but some sections haven't changed in 7-8 years.
It's easy to manage a large site that only makes a few changes per week.
The first reason I ever set up a VPN connection was to play MCM with randos across the internet. The first version only supported multiplayer over LAN, so you had to configure a PPTP client and find a "server" to join that had others who were similarly interested in playing. This happened for other games, too (THPS2 for the PC was a big one for me), but I remember being blown away by how many people were essentially hacking around the LAN restriction.
Motocross Madness and Midtown Madness were both such fundamental pieces of my childhood. I wish I could convey the amount of nostalgia I have. Motocross Madness was the first time I actively tried to use a computer to 'do' something. I had to program my own tracks, and it was insanely hard at the time, but god were those the glory days.
I'm with you that game was amazing. The track designer was such fun. Really wish they would have continued the series. The track designer was really easy to learn I feel compared to the current modding tools that come with games. And it had enough stuff to keep me for a long while. Must have played that game for a few years.
Wow. Motocross Madness brings back some incredible memories. I had a force-feedback controller with it too. Loved that moving the controller actually moved the bike. Good times.
I basically know the geography of Chicago, having only been there in real life a handful of times, because of my time playing Midtown Madness and the various MS Flight Simulators.
I actually got a bit sad during a trip a few weeks ago when I saw that Meigs Field had been demolished.
I remember buying the steering wheel for Midtown Madness, which was larger than many desktop monitors today and required a near-bolting to your desk, and feeling like I was on the cutting edge of gaming.
When I read campaign stances on this site last year I was really surprised how socially moderate their campaign was. I'm glad the site is still around.
Bob Dole Will Protect the Constitutional Liberty of Internet Users
Bob Dole is concerned about children accessing unsuitable material when using the Internet. But strict censorship of the Internet is not the answer. Bob Dole believes that parents should take responsibility for the material that their children view, and he wants to encourage technology which allows those decisions to be made within each home.
Throughout his Senate career, Bob Dole has fought to protect the Constitutional liberty of Americans:
Bob Dole is a supporter of the Pro-CODE bill that limits the federal government's control of encryption and user keys. It permits the export of software that includes encryption if the software is easily available in this country.
Bob Dole strongly supports the observations made in the recent National Research Council report that widespread use of encryption to promote information security outweighs the difficulties encrypted communications place on law enforcement. Economic espionage from foreign countries and companies is a serious threat, and Bob Dole believes Americans should have the right to guard themselves using encryption.
Bob Dole supported the Senate hearings on Internet copyright laws. The hearings provided suggestions from information creators, Internet and on-line service providers, librarians and Internet users on developing compromises that balance the rights and needs of all participants.
Bob Dole fought for provisions in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that encourage parents to take responsibility for the Internet material which their children view.
Bob Dole helped pass the Bayh-Dole act of 1980 which helped create the biotechnology industry by allowing inventions from federal research dollars to be commercially developed.
As President, Bob Dole will:
Promote policies that ensure that the United States remains the world leader in technological innovation.
Reject heavy-handed big-government regulations of cyberspace.
Promote policies that preserve and advance the openness and decentralization of computer-based communications.
Preserve and protect American citizens' right to privacy and the need for secure communications.
> When I read campaign stances on this site last year I was really surprised how socially moderate their campaign was.
If you were surprised by Dole/Kemp from 1996, you should look at when Bob Dole ran for Vice President -- Ford/Dole in 1976.
The 1976 Republican platform [1] featured: Environmental protection, willingness to "negotiate differences" with foreign countries, "vigorous" antitrust enforcement, federally-funded child nutrition programs, support for the Equal Rights Amendment, better access for the disabled, urban development, railroad electrification, recycling, increased funding for the arts and humanities.
On the other hand, "The Republican Party opposes compulsory national health insurance." So that part isn't new. Also, the usual Republican stuff -- lower taxes, bigger military, opposition to abortion, etc.
Bill Clinton Wants to Put "Big Brother" in Your Computer
Bill Clinton believes in bureaucratic micro-management of
the information economy. Within his first 100 days as
President, Bill Clinton proposed the Clipper Chip -- a
secret government-controlled encryption algorithm -- and a
companion key escrow system where two government agencies
would hold a copy of the keys for every Clipper user. Since
then Bill Clinton has released updated versions of
encryption proposals which insist that the government hold
a key to individual's private data communications.
Yeah, I immediately thought of that too. I've been to that webpage in the past 1-2 years, it's a game I used to play with friends every once in a while.
Yup, came here to post this link. I literally was just playing the trial version hosted on this website YESTERDAY. It plays perfectly under WINE in Mac OS 10.9 on my MacBook Air.
It feels DOSsy, to force the file extension to bend to your 3-character limit rather than let it all hang out. Then again, it highlights how accustomed we are now to hiding our filenames with folders and web apps.
237 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] thread'Model Rocketry is fun and educational.' (http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/tunes/tunes.ht...)
'Oy, am I tired.' (http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/souvenirs/souv...)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven's_Gate_(religious_group)...
Only one of the group's members, Rio DiAngelo/Richard Ford, did not kill himself: weeks before the suicides, in December 1996, DiAngelo agreed with Applewhite to leave the group so he could ensure future dissemination of Heaven's Gate videos and literature. He videotaped the mansion in Rancho Santa Fe; however, the tape was not shown to police until 2002, five years after the event.
EDIT: I got an answer! And they are free! Just $3 for shipping.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/monstertruck20/Trial/...
http://vales.com/mtm2/
8 + 3 ftw!
* Multimedia PC with a Pentium 133 or higher processor
* Microsoft® Windows® 95 operating system or Windows NT® Workstation operating system version 4.0 with Service Pack 3
* 16 MB of RAM; 32MB recommended
* 30 MB of available hard-disk space; 110 MB recommended
* Quad-speed CD-ROM drive; 6x recommended
* Super VGA, 16-bit color monitor
* Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device; joystick or race car controller recommended
* Audio board with speakers or headphones
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=31881
What's the difference between gaming 3 years ago on the desktop, vs the mobile platform?
I don't even enjoy mobile games usually, but to me it seems like the signs are written in the sand for anyone to see.
Mobile gaming is ok for chopping ropes, throwing birds or cutting up fruit but I'd rather have a windows 95 game with a keyboard and a mouse myself.
1. Compare apples to apples. What could something the size of a phone do in 1998?
2. The current resolution of the iPhone 5 is 1280 x 2272. The game ran on 800x600 with a fraction of the colors,
3. That game sold for what... 35 bucks? Are you comparing what two developers make in a month and a half, selling for 2 bucks with a AAA budget game? Yes, an HTML5 game is going to be slower, but compare one of the top games for the mobile systems and the mobile game today is more impressive. Perhaps 'Need For Speed: Most Wanted'?
4. Clock Rate Isn't Everything. It never has been. Further, the equivalent Pentium 133 laptop is lasting 1.5 hours max with a battery the size of a half dozen iphones. Power matters.
5. Could a mobile-sized device, sans phone (FCC issues) be created that is tuned for speed instead of battery, with a lower grade resolution (compromise for battery and speed), that was faster? Sure. Would anyone buy it? Probably not. Engineering is about compromises.
And yes, I'd like to be able to use my computer as a general purpose device, but nobody has stepped up to the plate yet. I mean, we could start with a Cyanogen mod and build up from there, but it's a bigger effort than it looks.
But I'll tell you what, let's put it on the backlog. ;)
I'm not a mobile device expert, but programmers don't have to think that much about 512k on an iphone, do they? On an Amiga it was often all you had for the entire system including the OS.
Not to mention that the demands on the system in terms of features and performance are so much higher.
You are cherry picking which resources you care about. What about power consumption? What about heat? What about physical size? What about noise? I remember the fans in those old PC's, mine sounded like a jet taking off.
I was wondering if I had missed some amazing technological advancements. Still waiting for that resolution on standard widescreen lcd's.
There is nothing what so ever with that post.
It says "Now compare..." It is an instruction. You just followed it. So you proved that the post has nothing wrong with it.
Whereas Windows NT has always been portable. Except that Microsoft has already ported NT to ARM.
I raced cars and played footaball on the iPad. The experience is great.
>The system requirements are a bit steep, but if your computer can handle the game, you'll find this an extremely fun game to play.
[0]http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Monster-Truck-Madness-2-PC/p...
Optional: 28.8 or higher baud modem for head-to-head play For LAN play a local area network supporting either TCP/IP or IPX protocols is required Internet access required for internet play; connect time charges may apply Microphone for instantaneous voice communication during head-to-head play Graphics accelerator card compatible with the Microsoft Direct3D® API (for Windows 95 only)
Compatibles: Supports force feedback hardware compaticle with the Microsoft DirectInput® API (for Windows 95 only) Supports MMX technology Supports Pentium II processor platform with AGP
Waiting for webpages to load... Well, it was like waiting for webpages to load on an edge connection. Waiting 2-3 min per page load, basically. 2 hours for a browser upgrade download, you know the ones chrome does in the background now... And it might not successfully download the first time. Ahh, those were the days. Napster could take 20min to download an MP3 and still corrupt it.
http://chiliconvalley.online.fr/games/keuk/start.htm
It's probably way less effort to just leave it here. It's not like it's using a lot of space, or requires some beefy performance anyway.
In the corporate world, you just don't touch stuff if you don't need to. There's no time to go and find web pages that haven't changed in 10 years and figure out what to do about them.
Now I come to think of it I guess there may also be a need to keep it in place due to links from other parts of the site.
I'm going to go ahead and guess search-and-replace is their version of templating?
It's easy to manage a large site that only makes a few changes per week.
And this list wouldn't be complete without Midtown Madness (1?) http://www.microsoft.com/games/midtown/
[edit] I'm sure you can find a bunch of others by browsing through the wayback machine (http://web.archive.org/web/19980214201021/http://microsoft.c...), like http://www.microsoft.com/games/outwars/
I actually got a bit sad during a trip a few weeks ago when I saw that Meigs Field had been demolished.
And Microsoft Flight Simulator has also been cancelled. :-(
If you were surprised by Dole/Kemp from 1996, you should look at when Bob Dole ran for Vice President -- Ford/Dole in 1976.
The 1976 Republican platform [1] featured: Environmental protection, willingness to "negotiate differences" with foreign countries, "vigorous" antitrust enforcement, federally-funded child nutrition programs, support for the Equal Rights Amendment, better access for the disabled, urban development, railroad electrification, recycling, increased funding for the arts and humanities.
On the other hand, "The Republican Party opposes compulsory national health insurance." So that part isn't new. Also, the usual Republican stuff -- lower taxes, bigger military, opposition to abortion, etc.
[1] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25843
edit: Did some math, DPI rose by about 30% since then, which is surprisingly not much.
Age of empires
Such a fantastic game.
http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
Also kitschy, in same vein: http://bassnw.com/ -- a couple hundred feet from my office. Great folks.