I had a few reasons, when I tried tackling RE of a DOS-era game a number of years ago. I wanted to document the file formats, look through the data and find unused media, identify and fix some of the more egregious bugs in the game, build modding tools for it, understand the techniques used to build something that was memorable from my childhood, reduce the friction of running it on a modern system, make available optional improvements like higher resolution, texture replacement, and so on.
It ended up being more than I had the patience to finish. It might be doable for me now.
A lot. Often a couple dozen for pages that are currently queued up to read, with pages further to the left being older and often forgotten (or they're pages that I would like to have read, but don't want to take the time to read, and I haven't accepted that distinction yet). Another window might have reference material for whatever I'm working on. If I've only got one page open there, it usually means that I'm not deep into the process.
The aspect that I especially like is covering the 3-state aspect of the logic. Studying CS, it was kind of vaguely mentioned, and we skipped over to doing logic diagrams with gates and the assumption of 2-state logic really quickly...and it seems like most games do that kind of skip too. Working at the transistor level grounds it better to the actual components.
I went from a 19" CRT capable of 1600x1200@75Hz to a 17" LCD capable of 1280x1024@60Hz, basically because that CRT would've taken up a huge chunk of desk real estate in my dorm.
My first impressions were that the screen was bright as hell, sharp (but I was torn on whether that was good or bad, given the blockiness that it introduced), thin and light (awesome!), and sucked to run at anything but the native resolution. After a few hours, I realized that my eyes weren't getting tired looking at it, and that it was nice not to have the subtle hum around anymore.
The CRT was a decent screen (for 1999), and the LCD was a decent screen (for 2003). Of course, I just got used to the differences, since the LCD was much more practical in my life. I still have it in storage right now.
I definitely only care about a handful. I've got categories like "beaten", "in-progress", "maybe someday", and "meh". You accumulate a lot of free stuff over the years, things you got because they were in a cheap bundle with what you wanted, the thing you bought to play with a friend and did exactly once, etc.
GOG's similar. I've got so many things that I bought for $0.80, got for free, or bought for the memories and haven't actually picked up.
That's just on PC. I have a lot of physical media for a lot of different game systems. I think I'd probably have enough games on hand for the rest of my life if Steam and GOG both disappeared tomorrow.
> ANYWAY, people have lost the ability to write in cursive, or even write in print neatly.
By 2nd grade, I had good, clean print handwriting. Third grade is when they started teaching (and requiring us to use) D'Nealian cursive. My cursive never has been attractive, but its influence crapped up my print too. I do my best to slow down just a bit if I think someone else will have to read it.
> a) Memorize Times Tables.
My kid was taught the tables last year. They went up to 12x12. They also did a bunch of multiplying numbers specifically by 2, but I'm not sure exactly how high. Maybe 2^15, or so?
Wow. Your old PC is more powerful than any computer I own. Faster version of my CPU, double the RAM, newer generation GPU. A fraction of the storage, though. I built it in 2020 to replace the desktop that I built in 2008.
There was one "Walking through the graveyard at midnight" ("stitching up some zombies" ?) or something, with a necromancer collecting zombie parts. To the tune of "walking in a winter wonderland".
Since friction in creating a new account is so low, the only real signal about the controller of the account is their behavior on the platform. Bots trying to sell things are rampant. Advertising (including self-promotion) is seen as a kind of spam by most of Reddit.
That being said, anyone can start a subreddit. You start your own and post whatever you want, or you spend some time in the individual communities, learn their norms, learn what each one considers acceptable to post. Something completely normal in one subreddit will be completely unacceptable in another.
I remember getting "The Complete Ultima VII" on CD and never figuring out how to get it running. I think I've still got the box, but I think the disc has been missing for years. I bought it on GOG some time ago, though.
I went from Ubuntu to Mint around the same time on my laptop. I took my desktop from Ubuntu to Fedora. A later laptop followed it, because I was tired of the little differences.
Ubuntu is completely off my radar too. So many dumb things that often lasted a few releases. Like ads for their cloud services, Unity for a while, window controls on the left for a while...
My biggest problem with Mint was that upgrading the OS became a hassle if I put it off for too long (which I started doing after a not-so-smooth upgrade experience, one release).
While Exult basically matches the graphics of the original game, this is closer to "3D Ultima VII", with rotatable views and more interactivity in the game. It gives it what looks like a kind of voxel-ish look, mixing in original sprites with newly-modeled 3D objects.
I'm not quite old enough to have needed to use this while writing my own software. But I've come back to it repeatedly while learning enough about the operation of DOS PCs to try my hand at reverse-engineering some games. That was at least 10 years ago. (It became clear that I'd bitten off more than I could chew, so no full game RE, but I documented a couple more file formats, wrote some file viewers, and learned a lot).
"Video card" was the more general word. "VGA" is one of the IBM video cards for PCs that later became a de facto standard, as its behavior was cloned by other companies. It's sometimes used descriptively to talk about the 640x480 resolution, or the DE-15 connector that remained a standard connection for analog video output on personal computers for a long time.
I've got a desktop that I built in 2008 that I only replaced in 2020 because I wanted to play newer games. That 2020 desktop is still going strong. My laptop was produced in 2016. I bought it for about $80 to replace my previous 2016-vintage laptop when its display started to fail. The last computer that I replaced due to performance in everyday tasks was a 2009 netbook.
In the 90s, it was easy to build/buy a machine that would be thoroughly limiting in its capabilities 2-3 years later. Now? I've got a 9-year-old laptop, 5-year-old desktop, and a 2-year-old workstation-class work laptop, and there's very little practical difference in power between them. The newer computer just has some conveniences like USB-C ports+charging.
I was recently working on some x86 emulation code. This is one of the best links that I found to summarize how it works, skipping the giant Intel instruction set references.
Algorithmically-generated remasters? No. That sort of thing (e.g. upscaling algorithms) was really cool when I was first getting into emulation, but I'm pretty much over it. Even handmade remakes often dampen the magic of the original.
It ended up being more than I had the patience to finish. It might be doable for me now.