Ask HN: What software do you miss that no longer runs on modern hardware?
114 comments
Hypercard.
It started from a-drag-and-drop equivalent of today's PowerPoint and scaled all the way up to creating the game Myst, all with no bumps or steep sections on the learning curve. I used to teach it to middle schoolers and the things they could do with it were amazing; students were teaching themselves programming because it was a simple, obvious step forward.
It started from a-drag-and-drop equivalent of today's PowerPoint and scaled all the way up to creating the game Myst, all with no bumps or steep sections on the learning curve. I used to teach it to middle schoolers and the things they could do with it were amazing; students were teaching themselves programming because it was a simple, obvious step forward.
I can't emphasize this point enough. Hypercard was an amazing tool, in the same class of evolutionary steps forward as the spreadsheet. It's unfortunate that nothing's come along to replace it. (I still have fond memories of Hypercard class in high school)
Relatedly, although it still exists, Apple Numbers is one of the few pieces of software that I really miss since my move to Linux. It has lots of subtle design choices that gently nudge you towards good data organization habits (e.g., If you keep an index column and title row for each dataset, you get rewarded with readable cell references).
Relatedly, although it still exists, Apple Numbers is one of the few pieces of software that I really miss since my move to Linux. It has lots of subtle design choices that gently nudge you towards good data organization habits (e.g., If you keep an index column and title row for each dataset, you get rewarded with readable cell references).
A classmate when I was at Harvey Mudd created an Adventure-type game called “Escape from Harvey Mudd” that got sufficient popularity that the administration requested he rename it and it became “Escape from Grid Tech.”
Wow, you've mentioned something that almost doesn't exist on the Web. The only hit on Google [1] says that dev is named Matthew Ford. I kinda enjoy these style of games - I wonder if there's any chance of it seeing the light of day again?
[1]: https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,6...
[1]: https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,6...
I’d guess close to zero. A few years after graduation, I bought the card game he created not knowing it was his work until I was back at my hotel room and looking through the manual and recognized the logo on the back page of the manual as the same logo he used on the Escape from Harvey Mudd.
(Fun trivia, neither Matt nor I actually graduated from Mudd. He ended up getting his degree from Pomona College and I got mine from Pitzer.)
(Fun trivia, neither Matt nor I actually graduated from Mudd. He ended up getting his degree from Pomona College and I got mine from Pitzer.)
(I also find myself thinking about so much software that has vanished over the years—my DVI previewer for VM/CMS plus the VAX/VMS change files for all the TeX software that I maintained in the 80s. There’s got to be a lot of even more interesting software where the only copies have almost certainly long since vanished.)
Back when it was free, I used to use LiveCode[1] for smaller projects. It's heavily inspired by HyperCard. You could run the same source code on many platforms including iOS and Android. Not sure about the state of development now, as the Community Edition has been discontinued and it seems they only offer paid plans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
If only they had open sourced it, it could have lived on.
Yeah the old windows defrag visualization was cool. Probably inspired some people to dig deeper.
Coding in VB 1.0 was cool. I think I made a rapid color changing thing in it. Like a modern stuck pixel exerciser, but probably way too fast to work. Not sure.
Mac OS X in the early versions (until like .7 maybe?) had a feel and look that’s definitely been lost. Probably mostly for the better but not exclusively.
Definitely wish modern OSes would take some time to make user interfaces as fast to respond as possible and reliable enough to basically never lock up. Just give an error indicator if something’s locked up under the hood (aka background/off thread).
Definitely wish modern websites were more text based.
Coding in VB 1.0 was cool. I think I made a rapid color changing thing in it. Like a modern stuck pixel exerciser, but probably way too fast to work. Not sure.
Mac OS X in the early versions (until like .7 maybe?) had a feel and look that’s definitely been lost. Probably mostly for the better but not exclusively.
Definitely wish modern OSes would take some time to make user interfaces as fast to respond as possible and reliable enough to basically never lock up. Just give an error indicator if something’s locked up under the hood (aka background/off thread).
Definitely wish modern websites were more text based.
>Mac OS X
MacOS. X means ten in Roman numbers.
MacOS. X means ten in Roman numbers.
Which is appropriate since OS 9 immediately preceded it and was indeed the meaning of it. They rebranded it to “macOS” with Big Sur I think, or later. In the early days which I referred to it absolutely was “Mac OS X”.
That people here don’t know it was called OSX for a long time makes me feel old. It was a stupid name but still.
Felt that more than a little too. I try to remember time didn’t start the day I turned 18, and likewise have at least learned all manner of things out of date or lesser used before my time (os2/warp comes to mind) out of just general interest. Even dos qualifies here.
I started collecting some legacy hardware in 2018 because I missed the touch and feel of playing Digger, Popcorn, Lemmings... on real hardware (not attracted by emulators).
Problem with such hardware is that when you look for a piece, you find it cheaper in a batch than alone. I've ended up so far with a nice collection 10-12 PCs from the eighties. Nicest ones are the IBM 5150, 5160 and 5162, the Compaq Deskpro 386-20 (in the original huge Compaq form factor), the original Compaq Portable 386, a pair of IBM PS/2 8530-286...
I can play my old games, run Turbo Pascal programs I wrote in 1988-1990, play with x86 Assembler programming, play MOD files on PC bipper and Sound Blaster 2. In addition I can run Area5150, 8088MPH... Recent software that only run on very specific and very old hardware.
No regret, it is mostly fun!
Problem with such hardware is that when you look for a piece, you find it cheaper in a batch than alone. I've ended up so far with a nice collection 10-12 PCs from the eighties. Nicest ones are the IBM 5150, 5160 and 5162, the Compaq Deskpro 386-20 (in the original huge Compaq form factor), the original Compaq Portable 386, a pair of IBM PS/2 8530-286...
I can play my old games, run Turbo Pascal programs I wrote in 1988-1990, play with x86 Assembler programming, play MOD files on PC bipper and Sound Blaster 2. In addition I can run Area5150, 8088MPH... Recent software that only run on very specific and very old hardware.
No regret, it is mostly fun!
Oh, Lemmings of course! I remember playing a black and white version on an old Mac I think (and never being able to beat the nessy level).
You can play it in your browser: https://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/
Whoa, crazy. At first I thought they just made some sort of JS VM with a canvas output. Nope. Each individual lemming is its own HTML div that moves around the DOM on top of the background image... someone took a lot of time to rewrite this whole thing into basic HTML. Nutty and brilliant, lol.
It's actually a much nicer experience than trying to play it in a Dosbox emulator on the web: https://classicreload.com/lemmings.html
It's actually a much nicer experience than trying to play it in a Dosbox emulator on the web: https://classicreload.com/lemmings.html
If you are interested in details, the author has a blog:
https://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer...
https://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer...
For the opposite experience, get lemmings from the windows store (or whatever that's called nowadays).
The most cynical, half-assed, unwinable, borderline unplayable pile of crap that is trying to be passed off as lemmings. It's like they gave a first year programing student two screen shots and a bad description of the game and then ran that through even worse machine translation and the result was shipped directly to end users.
The most cynical, half-assed, unwinable, borderline unplayable pile of crap that is trying to be passed off as lemmings. It's like they gave a first year programing student two screen shots and a bad description of the game and then ran that through even worse machine translation and the result was shipped directly to end users.
Macromedia / Adobe Fireworks, which stopped working on Macs with Catalina.
By the time I'd used Fireworks alongside Photoshop and Illustrator in the mid-2000s, it started seeming ludicrous to me that Photoshop was anywhere near as prevalent as it was for screen design. Raster layers were a poor primitive, semi-parameterized raster features bolted on weren't a lot better. Fireworks was simply better as a melding of vector and bitmap capabilities from the start, and made dozens of little better tooling decisions along the way.
Mobile's rise and frustration with Adobe's pricing/ownership model probably helped the industry shake off the idea that Photoshop was THE approach, so we got Sketch and Figma and others and even Adobe figured it out with specific screen-design tooling. But Fireworks got it right a lot earlier.
Since Apple's hostile to even virtualizing its old environments, I've considered buying a windows license for Fw and using it that way, though I'm also getting to know Affinity's products too. Not convinced they or anything else are a true replacement yet, though.
By the time I'd used Fireworks alongside Photoshop and Illustrator in the mid-2000s, it started seeming ludicrous to me that Photoshop was anywhere near as prevalent as it was for screen design. Raster layers were a poor primitive, semi-parameterized raster features bolted on weren't a lot better. Fireworks was simply better as a melding of vector and bitmap capabilities from the start, and made dozens of little better tooling decisions along the way.
Mobile's rise and frustration with Adobe's pricing/ownership model probably helped the industry shake off the idea that Photoshop was THE approach, so we got Sketch and Figma and others and even Adobe figured it out with specific screen-design tooling. But Fireworks got it right a lot earlier.
Since Apple's hostile to even virtualizing its old environments, I've considered buying a windows license for Fw and using it that way, though I'm also getting to know Affinity's products too. Not convinced they or anything else are a true replacement yet, though.
Fireworks nailed it. I was astonished how many professional designers said "what's that" when I asked if they ever used fireworks.
Fireworks was extensible with Javascript. Extensibility is something lacking from all the newer replacements.
Fireworks was extensible with Javascript. Extensibility is something lacking from all the newer replacements.
With upgrade to Catalina I have lost contact with Adobe in general.
Back in the '80s there was a NORAD supercomputer called the WOPR that had cool games written specifically for it, like "Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare", and "Global Thermonuclear War." Now that the Russians are hostile again it would be nice to use those to game out current conditions. Likely there's still no winning move but we should check.
Google Picasa. Its ability to find local images was magical.
The combination of Hello and Picasa was a productivity drug.
You had your deck of cards, a computer full of perfectly organized images, the opponent had his own deck. You would show some art work or photos, they would give their opinion about it, each round you would show x more works that you thought more suitable for their taste. The other player would take their turn whenever they felt like it. What they showed allowed further fine tuning the following selection until eventually you arrived at wanting to show works you didn't get to make. You debated the plan of action and the opponent waited impatiently for days, weeks or months for the follow up session.
It's weird that people still call it Google Picasa and Google Hello as google contributed nothing besides freezing it and shutting it down.
You had your deck of cards, a computer full of perfectly organized images, the opponent had his own deck. You would show some art work or photos, they would give their opinion about it, each round you would show x more works that you thought more suitable for their taste. The other player would take their turn whenever they felt like it. What they showed allowed further fine tuning the following selection until eventually you arrived at wanting to show works you didn't get to make. You debated the plan of action and the opponent waited impatiently for days, weeks or months for the follow up session.
It's weird that people still call it Google Picasa and Google Hello as google contributed nothing besides freezing it and shutting it down.
Seconded. I haven't still haven't done anything that does face identification and grouping as well.
Picasa was incredible. It would provide instant search based on the filename, folder name and metadata on all images.
Images purchased as stock have a lot of metadata in them.
So Picasa was able to act as a cheap folder and metadata based digital asset management system.
Images purchased as stock have a lot of metadata in them.
So Picasa was able to act as a cheap folder and metadata based digital asset management system.
It still works though.
Reason, Sony Vegas (with some mic emulation plugin, can't remember it) made me a good chunk of cash doing CD-ROM soundtracks back in the day, and I wish I still had that setup set up here in Linux.
I also wish I could have kept my TurboCAD license for Linux somehow when I moved away from Mac OS. It would have been fun to keep learning.
(Actually I admit that what frightens me is: I get those running under Wine somehow and am off and away, and just never find the time to use them again :-/)
I also miss running some WinAmp 5.x skins in Linux, not sure if these are supported now. I also liked the ~2003 era internet radio stations list that came with it, in a themed window. So I use qmmp and 3.x skins.
In vintage Linux software I really miss that I could do icon scaling & free icon layout in Gnome back around 2009. Not sure if that's still possible but I use XFCE now most of the time anyway.
You could scale individual icons in two clicks, and turn icons into a sort of functional, interactive desktop wallpaper design that was more interesting than the standard grid.
I also wish I could have kept my TurboCAD license for Linux somehow when I moved away from Mac OS. It would have been fun to keep learning.
(Actually I admit that what frightens me is: I get those running under Wine somehow and am off and away, and just never find the time to use them again :-/)
I also miss running some WinAmp 5.x skins in Linux, not sure if these are supported now. I also liked the ~2003 era internet radio stations list that came with it, in a themed window. So I use qmmp and 3.x skins.
In vintage Linux software I really miss that I could do icon scaling & free icon layout in Gnome back around 2009. Not sure if that's still possible but I use XFCE now most of the time anyway.
You could scale individual icons in two clicks, and turn icons into a sort of functional, interactive desktop wallpaper design that was more interesting than the standard grid.
Festival 1.96 text to speech. Festival 2.x available in modern distros does not support the 1.9 voices and the Festival 2.0 voices are far inferior. There are no comparable replacements for native text to speech on linux. Just a bunch of cloud stuff and bleeding edge things that require nvidia GPUs, etc. If an OS can't run Festival 1.96 then it can't be my main desktop.
imgSeek. It requires python 2.4 among other things. It allowed me to draw crude MS Paint style images and then use them to search for similar colored/shaped images on my hard drive. There's no good replacement for it's ability and porting is non-trivial. https://sourceforge.net/projects/imgseek/
Also, the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2224/ My solution for this is to keep my old computers running old OSes and software. I build a new computer with all the new software once every 5-10 years when I'm finding I can no longer compile things.
imgSeek. It requires python 2.4 among other things. It allowed me to draw crude MS Paint style images and then use them to search for similar colored/shaped images on my hard drive. There's no good replacement for it's ability and porting is non-trivial. https://sourceforge.net/projects/imgseek/
Also, the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2224/ My solution for this is to keep my old computers running old OSes and software. I build a new computer with all the new software once every 5-10 years when I'm finding I can no longer compile things.
Native/performant applications
Borland Sidekick, you could pop up a text editor anywhere in the days of MS-DOS
Borland Delphi 5, it was the peak of productive windows programming
debug - the DOS command, you could write small programs on the fly.
list - an incredibly fast file viewer by Vernon D. Buerg.
Borland Delphi 5, it was the peak of productive windows programming
debug - the DOS command, you could write small programs on the fly.
list - an incredibly fast file viewer by Vernon D. Buerg.
- Debug
OpenBSD bundles Clang (and Perl better for small software) in base to do that in a safer way.
OpenBSD bundles Clang (and Perl better for small software) in base to do that in a safer way.
In MS-DOS you always do an INT 21h with the function in AH.
09h is print string pointed to by DX, $ terminated
4ch is terminate program, with error code in AL
So you could build hello.com in short order.
In Linux, the function numbers are effectively random[1], I don't see how you could build a binary and save it without a lot more work.
[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...
09h is print string pointed to by DX, $ terminated
4ch is terminate program, with error code in AL
So you could build hello.com in short order.
In Linux, the function numbers are effectively random[1], I don't see how you could build a binary and save it without a lot more work.
[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...
Old games around the 2000's like Battlezone 1998 (give it up for OG Activision).
I feel like there are so many old games from those years that people have a strong attachment to that will gradually become harder and harder to run or find. I fear for the day when no amount of debugging and compatibility flagging and messing about will get these games to run on modern hardware. Battlezone may not be a great example because it's popular enough to have a good scene around it, but some games aren't.
To illustrate such strong attachments, and also to just tell an interesting story, my father purchased Battlezone 1998 when it came out because he needed something to keep occupied while on baby-minding duties. with me. I was the baby!. He kept it for years. And years. And finally, one day, when I was an older-yet-still-very-young child, I'm helping with some cleaning or something (I don't exactly remember) and I find the game in clear transparent box! I show my father, and I remember him getting excited and firing it up on our one family's laptop. We gamed for a while and then he let me continue. I remember constantly killing myself or getting the base killed because my infantile brain couldn't understand how those damn scavengers and turrets worked. I remember that day to this day, around 15 years later. I remember grinding it for days just to get to the second stage - Mars.
Wouldn't it be a shame if such software is lost to time!
P.S. If anyone is on HN who was even remotely involved in that game, please know that you are a really awesome person
I feel like there are so many old games from those years that people have a strong attachment to that will gradually become harder and harder to run or find. I fear for the day when no amount of debugging and compatibility flagging and messing about will get these games to run on modern hardware. Battlezone may not be a great example because it's popular enough to have a good scene around it, but some games aren't.
To illustrate such strong attachments, and also to just tell an interesting story, my father purchased Battlezone 1998 when it came out because he needed something to keep occupied while on baby-minding duties. with me. I was the baby!. He kept it for years. And years. And finally, one day, when I was an older-yet-still-very-young child, I'm helping with some cleaning or something (I don't exactly remember) and I find the game in clear transparent box! I show my father, and I remember him getting excited and firing it up on our one family's laptop. We gamed for a while and then he let me continue. I remember constantly killing myself or getting the base killed because my infantile brain couldn't understand how those damn scavengers and turrets worked. I remember that day to this day, around 15 years later. I remember grinding it for days just to get to the second stage - Mars.
Wouldn't it be a shame if such software is lost to time!
P.S. If anyone is on HN who was even remotely involved in that game, please know that you are a really awesome person
Softice hacking environment backed by a hardware button: On the C64 there was an extension cartridge "module" called "Action Replay MK5" which would put the whole system into a REPL debug mode similar to gdb.
You could inspect any memory and disassembly and write plus patch any machine code while the system was paused. There also was a diff mechanism to see which memory changed (e.g. if you lost a life).
You could inspect any memory and disassembly and write plus patch any machine code while the system was paused. There also was a diff mechanism to see which memory changed (e.g. if you lost a life).
I think the similar one I had was the Super Snapshot cartridge, and it was quite magical. If a game could fit in RAM, you could dump the works to an executable file, and then the cartridge had a speed-loader that made the drive much faster as well. And a drop-in debugger, as you mentioned. It really changed the way I thought of interacting with software at the time.
I'm not sure if can or not, but Visual FoxPro is not that far from the revolutionary aspect of HyperCard/SmallTalk.
This is the thing I wish to make myself (https://tablam.org) to, in part, being able to run it on mobile/cloud. And Mac/Linux (Fox long ago run on Mac but that die with MS).
This is the thing I wish to make myself (https://tablam.org) to, in part, being able to run it on mobile/cloud. And Mac/Linux (Fox long ago run on Mac but that die with MS).
Pretty much everything.
As far as I can tell, there is a significant gap in modern software: there is a large catalogue of software that is intended to be easy to use but is inflexible, and a decent selection of software that is flexible yet is incredibly complex to use. A lot of software of the 1990's was both flexible yet not overwhelming to use.
As far as I can tell, there is a significant gap in modern software: there is a large catalogue of software that is intended to be easy to use but is inflexible, and a decent selection of software that is flexible yet is incredibly complex to use. A lot of software of the 1990's was both flexible yet not overwhelming to use.
I kind of agree with that. I think the UX field got lost in the way of being mixed with marketing for conversion and keeping engagement instead of real usage. Everything ends up with a dumbed down inefficient eye pleasing UI. I find it hard to find UX designers that want to invest in taking the time to really learn and understand expert usage instead of just seeing everything as websites to be optimised.
In the 90's there was a huge amount of software. I can count zillions of multimedia CD-ROMs even in Spanish.
Now that work it's better done from a web for a lot of culture/hobbies/information related software.
Now that work it's better done from a web for a lot of culture/hobbies/information related software.
Being able to directly access sectors of a floppy disk on Windows. You could to this and read floppies with different file systems. Went away somewhere around Windows 2000 and modern external USB floppy disk drives just implement mass storage device class and you can’t access sectors or differently formatted drives.
Hmm. Sure about that? There may be a mixup in terminology. The mass storage device class is what USB sticks for example also uses, and that supports sector level access. In fact that's what's used, as the OS contains the file system implementation, not the device itself.
This is in contrast to the "Media Transfer Protocol" that a lot of smartphones use, for example, where the filesystem implementation is abstracted away in the device, and you essentially have commands to transfer files.
But there were some ways to effectively redefine the sectors themselves, e.g. formatting floppy disks with higher (or lower) capacity, independently of the file system that would sit on top (you'd still access sectors, but now there would be more or less of them). I don't know if USB floppy drivers still support that. And I also don't know whether Windows started to prevent sector-level access.
This is in contrast to the "Media Transfer Protocol" that a lot of smartphones use, for example, where the filesystem implementation is abstracted away in the device, and you essentially have commands to transfer files.
But there were some ways to effectively redefine the sectors themselves, e.g. formatting floppy disks with higher (or lower) capacity, independently of the file system that would sit on top (you'd still access sectors, but now there would be more or less of them). I don't know if USB floppy drivers still support that. And I also don't know whether Windows started to prevent sector-level access.
Clipper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)
It pretend to be xBase language but actually close to C.
It pretend to be xBase language but actually close to C.
I’m going contrarian and will say I really don’t miss the CRT and how it burned my eyes after hours of use on a daily basis making pixel perfect web design at 1024x768 and using some of the things I see discussed on this post.
Gnome Do.
It had fuzzy file and application search, but where it really stood out was the application plugin system. Wanted to send a quick message to a coworker? Summon Gnome do with a shortcut, type message a space and then fuzzy complete on the coworkers name. Then just type the message right there and get back to what you were doing.
It was kinda like Alfred, but just much more powerful. It got destroyed during the transition to Unity, and was never made to work again, and now that all the apps are webapps there aren't any halfway decent plugins so it wouldn't matter much.
It had fuzzy file and application search, but where it really stood out was the application plugin system. Wanted to send a quick message to a coworker? Summon Gnome do with a shortcut, type message a space and then fuzzy complete on the coworkers name. Then just type the message right there and get back to what you were doing.
It was kinda like Alfred, but just much more powerful. It got destroyed during the transition to Unity, and was never made to work again, and now that all the apps are webapps there aren't any halfway decent plugins so it wouldn't matter much.
PrintShop. I had it for the Apple II and had tons of fun making signs and banners to hang around the house.
Technically you can still run it in an emulator, but without a dot matrix printer, it wouldn't be the same.
Technically you can still run it in an emulator, but without a dot matrix printer, it wouldn't be the same.
MSN Messenger. Compact and I still like the emoji.... ah, smileys that it came with.
Mainly I miss the free time and the lack of social networks. Content sucks, I think. Posts and statuses were definitely a mistake.
Mainly I miss the free time and the lack of social networks. Content sucks, I think. Posts and statuses were definitely a mistake.
> Posts and statuses were definitely a mistake.
Definitely. Posts and statuses led to the current 'we are all influencers' plague.
Definitely. Posts and statuses led to the current 'we are all influencers' plague.
The game Gruntz. Amazing puzzle game from the 90s, long forgotten. It was made by the studio that went on to make F.E.A.R., the hit horror FPS for which they are better known these days.
- Opera 12. I know, propietary. But Otter is not as fast as Opera 12 was, not even close. By comparison, it should be screaming lightweight too under a 2007 netbook.
I miss the original sim games. Simtower being my favorite.
Glyder 2. It was a magnificent mobile game that stopped working quite a few android versions ago. I keep meaning to dig up an old phone and sideload it.
I stuck to Mojave for essentially the same reason. Then I found out you could provision another volume, install Mojave on it, and treat the Mac like a dual-boot machine. When I need to run any of my 32-bit apps (mostly games, but there are others), I change the startup disk to that volume. I switch back to run in Monterey (still deciding on Ventura).
I don’t miss it, but I remember the strangest thing. It was a Back to the Future themed interactive screensaver. I think it may have been internal use to some company - maybe AT&T was involved - and installed from a floppy disc. I remember getting stuck in it. I wonder what I actually remember of it, and tried to Google it, but found nothing. Anyone ever encounter it?
Adobe Flex Builder and AIR runtime.
Building desktop apps and hybrid desktop/web apps in the same language that could talk to each other for the first? time was so much fun. I built some cool apps.
Have been dying to build a desktop app again and dig into what the js or other world has to offer but haven’t had time.
Building desktop apps and hybrid desktop/web apps in the same language that could talk to each other for the first? time was so much fun. I built some cool apps.
Have been dying to build a desktop app again and dig into what the js or other world has to offer but haven’t had time.
I forget their names but Firefox use to have 2 similar extensions. Both had a sortable table popup with filters one could apply. One extracted all tabs from the window and the other all links from the page. You could save it in various formats or copy it to clip board as links only, links with titles, bb code and html.
Sid Meyers Railroad Tycoon and Colonization
The DOS version of Railroad Tycoon runs fine on Dosbox. Unless the Amiga version or something is what you're after.
I've still played the PC version occasionally on Dosbox. Despite its faults and aging, the original still seems to have something unique to it that other newer transport business games lack. Some of that is probably nostalgia but I think there's something else to it as well.
Some of its bugs and limitations can be fairly annoying, and at some point I toyed with the idea of making a rewritten clone with those issues fixed kind of akin to what OpenXCom has done, but I was never able to gather the motivation to do the hard work of reverse engineering the gameplay mechanics etc.
I've still played the PC version occasionally on Dosbox. Despite its faults and aging, the original still seems to have something unique to it that other newer transport business games lack. Some of that is probably nostalgia but I think there's something else to it as well.
Some of its bugs and limitations can be fairly annoying, and at some point I toyed with the idea of making a rewritten clone with those issues fixed kind of akin to what OpenXCom has done, but I was never able to gather the motivation to do the hard work of reverse engineering the gameplay mechanics etc.
My favorite bug was taking out all the loans you could right away (I think it was $30,000,000). Then as you became more in debt (as interest accrued) eventually an overflow error (I assume) would occur and then magically you'd have roughly $30 million in funds to build with.
I don't think I ever found out about that particular one.
The ones that I've found more annoying than amusing are things such as:
- The maximum cash of 30M (10M or something in the deluxe edition), at which point you can no longer make a profit without jumping through hoops
- Not a bug, but the limits on the number of trains and stations combine poorly with the above
- If you have multiple rate wars at the same time, you only get the periodic status report on one of them, forcing you to play blind in the other ones
- In the deluxe edition, I'm pretty sure there's an overflow or some other kind of a bug in the final score calculation that has significantly dropped my final scores on multiple occasions
One that was more amusing was that I think if you bought control of two if the other companies, you were also able to access the third one (e.g. to transfer money to yourself) by using a bug in the broker menu.
The ones that I've found more annoying than amusing are things such as:
- The maximum cash of 30M (10M or something in the deluxe edition), at which point you can no longer make a profit without jumping through hoops
- Not a bug, but the limits on the number of trains and stations combine poorly with the above
- If you have multiple rate wars at the same time, you only get the periodic status report on one of them, forcing you to play blind in the other ones
- In the deluxe edition, I'm pretty sure there's an overflow or some other kind of a bug in the final score calculation that has significantly dropped my final scores on multiple occasions
One that was more amusing was that I think if you bought control of two if the other companies, you were also able to access the third one (e.g. to transfer money to yourself) by using a bug in the broker menu.
Get OpenRCT2.
The soundtrack to Railroad Tycoon II was amazing. I miss that game most. Second place might be Falcon 3.0 for Mac and 4.0 for PC. Third place Crystal Quest for the old Macs.
Microsoft Project. When will they have a natively compiled version for OSX?
That Disney roller coaster designing game from the early 90s. Also, pretty much all BBS door games. I’m sure there’s somewhere hosting them on the web, but it’s just not the same.
Wow I totally forgot about that Disney game. You could ride your creations in first person!
Trillian and Pidgin!
If you could talk to people, Trillian and/or Pidgin supported it.
On that note, I miss Google Talk and Google Voice via Talk.
I absolutely hate how siloed and protectionist chat platforms have become.
If you could talk to people, Trillian and/or Pidgin supported it.
On that note, I miss Google Talk and Google Voice via Talk.
I absolutely hate how siloed and protectionist chat platforms have become.
FTP itself mostly deprecated because not secure.
I spend most of my work time in a terminal shell connected to a Linux server, very similar to what I used 40 years ago.
I spend most of my work time in a terminal shell connected to a Linux server, very similar to what I used 40 years ago.
Many (most?) banking systems run on SFTP today.
They used FTP heavily at a point too. I remember transferring batch wire transfer instructions by exposing a tsv file on a particular FTP server. The only security was obfuscation, it could have been bad but never was so it felt secure.
Not using a MacOS desktop FTP client, which is what the OP misses.
Double space and drive space with 'transparent ' compression was cool. I wish there was something as ubiquitous for USB drives nowadays.
Disk space was scarce in that time, sustaining the usage of DoubleSpace... and write errors were common (chkdsk always found some FILE00XX.CHK lost data). When DoubleSpace was active, it was often a full partition crash instead.
I've lost so much data with DoubleSpace! Not something I miss :-)
I've lost so much data with DoubleSpace! Not something I miss :-)
The FILE00XX.CHK lost data may be less because of an actual error when writing, but more the result of a disk operation being interrupted. Losing power for example, or the OS crashing, resulting in "dangling" data. And in that case it's not rarely just temporary data that was meant to be free'd anyway.
OT a bit but what are you meant to do with those CHK files? Is there anything to show what they are or recover anything from them? Otherwise what's the point?
You could edit them and decide to delete them (most of the time) or rename them and get back some content (for text files at least).
Those files were created by chkdsk from orphan files (with no entry point in the directories) in the File Allocation Table (the table that gives the "FAT" name to the filesystem). After chkdsk, the filesystem was consistent again.
Such orphans appeared when the OS crashed or the system went off during file writing operations. Of course when that happened while writing on a compressed filesystem, the problem was not a lost file but a corruption. Sometimes the compressed filesystem was just entirely lost.
Those files were created by chkdsk from orphan files (with no entry point in the directories) in the File Allocation Table (the table that gives the "FAT" name to the filesystem). After chkdsk, the filesystem was consistent again.
Such orphans appeared when the OS crashed or the system went off during file writing operations. Of course when that happened while writing on a compressed filesystem, the problem was not a lost file but a corruption. Sometimes the compressed filesystem was just entirely lost.
Format drive with NTFS and you got compression
Stainless. It was a great browser that had each window as a separate instance. I really enjoy it because it was a no BS browser for Mac.
Quarantine, DOS. Required EMS, so you always had to EDIT AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to play.
No, you don't. Read help about MENUCONFIG, MENUITEM, SUBMENU.
What help? I had a DOS 5 book which was the only source of information available to me at the time, being pre-modem-acquisition and pre-internet. Perhaps you're confusing with later editions? This was 1994.
C:\DOS contains HELP.COM with all DOS commands, configurations, etc.
You can also search the net.
JiTouch. The only gesture library that let me draw characters on screen to open specific apps.
Aldus Freehand. Still the best!
Norton Commander. Still the best and most efficient way to access all your files.
Absolutely nothing. It can always be emulated, if you need it.
You speak about needs, the question is about what you miss. It is about nostalgia, about time-travel...
Emulation is good for just running software. But it has nothing to do with old sofware running on an old blowing PC, with a CRT monitor - sometimes green or orange -, with a clicky and heavy keyboard...
It is a complete experience that emulation misses.
Emulation is good for just running software. But it has nothing to do with old sofware running on an old blowing PC, with a CRT monitor - sometimes green or orange -, with a clicky and heavy keyboard...
It is a complete experience that emulation misses.
Try playing an original Star Wars arcade game or a Vectrex system; that's something you cannot really reproduce with an emulator at all.
Not if you want to apply it to the real world, e.g. softice for mac
Johnny Castaway.
Apple’s Aperture app.
Braid the MacOS game.
Chuckie Egg ;)
Google Reader.
I've moved to self-hosting a miniflux instance and have been pleased with the performance for the past several years. Highly recommend.
I'll check it out. Thanks!
Lotus Magellan
Eudora.
Xtree Pro
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I also oddly miss Norton Speed Disk. I got a certain OCD satisfaction from knowing that all the bytes on my hard drive were organized.
I was wondering what software other people miss being able to run.