Yeo Kheng Meng decides to try something silly – can he get DOS 6.22 running natively on his 2020 Thinkpad?
He writes all about the headaches and hurdles he ran into while trying this retro feat – including networking and thunderbolt.
PRGE is a great convention that meets each year in Portland, OR. They get a lot of surprisingly big names in retro gaming: people from Atari, Sierra, Nintendo, etc. Over the years, they’ve had some pretty big folks show up.
They used to sell DVD’s of the sessions, but now you can catch videos of the talks on their Youtube channel.
LGR had a recent video about the PC game Hyperbowl. They brought up the fact it started life as an arcade game at Sony’s Metreon Entertainment Center in downtown San Francisco.
The game came in several forms, but the one I remember is the one above. There was a giant bowling ball mounted as a trackball style controller that let you steer the ball down the course. There was a mock ball return and a set of bowling alley style seats while waiting your turn.
What’s more interesting is I met the developers of this game around 1999 and visited their studio in California – which I believe included Terence Bordelon. I remember seeing physical mockups of the arcade system setting around the studio – which was really just a big room with black painted walls, black curtains to hide different parts, and no windows. Secrecy was definitely a thing. There were various full-size mockups of what would become the official arcade machines sitting around. The trackball bowling ball controller was on a stand, There was the ball return mock in 2 pieces, and one of the stand-up arcade verisons. What I do remember is that the stand-up arcade version had a standard Windows mini-tower PC bolted into the arcade cabinet. I believe when they booted it I saw the logo for a 3DFX card in it.
This was the late 1990’s, and it was that awkward time where arcade games stopped using custom hardware and started using off the shelf PC hardware. It was much cheaper, much faster to develop on, and meant you already had your game ported to a PC platform – which opened selling the game on two fronts. Now games are written on engines that let you ship on 4 and even more platforms simultaneously. Video games were always about 5 years ahead of other software development when it came to maximizing sales.
LGR’s video reminded me of this wonderful bit of history. It’s amazing how far the industry has developed in 25 years…
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Being required to connect to the internet while installing Windows 11 has been one, in a long line of reasons, why many users refuse to update to the new OS, even though it has been out for 4 years (since Nov 2021). After finally reaching an adoption rate of just over 50%, it has since dropped to 49.08%
The most popular bypass to having to log in with an internet connected Microsoft account was to use “oobe\bypassnro” which, when typed into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience, would enable a button that let you skip connecting to the internet
Unfortunately, Microsoft is removing that trick, but user @witherornot1337 on X found that typing “start ms-cxh:localonly” into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience will allow you to create a local account directly without needing to skip connecting to the internet first.
Or you could, you know, actually give customers what they want instead of the kind of backwards thinking that gave us the universally hated Windows 8.
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Compressed sensing is an image/signal processing algorithm that allows you to re-construct an image/signal even when you’ve lost up to 95% of the samples. It’s so good that it can even be cranked up to restore images even above what would normally be the Nyquist limit.
Applied Science walks through using an X-ray backscatter device to reconstruct images as near to x-ray vision as you can get at low doses.
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PurpleMind goes over the Miller-Rabin Primality Test that can determine primes very quickly – but only with a non-100% probability. This test, combined with other prime principles, are how modern huge prime numbers are generated.
IBM has a good video on what vector databases are and how they’re used by AI systems.
Windows Developer does a decent job of covering different Windows UI frameworks such as WinUI, WPF, WinForms, .NET MAUI, Uno Platform, Avalonia, React Native, and Progressive Web Apps.
Nathan Baggs wanted to play a retro version of Jurassic Park, but found it was busted due to DRM. He then proceeds to walk through how to hack it with a debugger and binary/disassembly tools such as Ghidra, x64dbg, CFF Explorer, and PE Bear.
It’s a great video on how people go about hacking old programs.
I wrote previously about Acerolas ASCII shader, here’s another method by Useless Game Dev.