Year: 2009

Yep – I’ve got bored with the new games again and gone back to a few golden oldies 🙂

The three classics are : Freelancer, Master of Orion 2 (no3 was appalling) and Master of Magic. Freelancer is one of the various spiritual successors to the genre creating Elite. Master of Orion 2 (Moo2) is Civ in space, while Master of Magic (MoM) is Civ again but set in 2 worlds with a huge injection of magic. It also gives Civ a tactical layer to join the strategic layer. Civ 4’s a decent game but MoM will be a long time classic due to the magic and the tactical battles.

Freelancer’s fairly recent and Moo2 just got released when Windows 95 came around … Yep – this is RETRO Zone 🙂 MoM on the other hand needs special treatment. It’s a DOS only game (remember those ? so last century) but one of the hardest programs to accommodate on machines of its day. The key problem is memory – it needs 576kbytes of Conventional Ram and 2.7Mb of Expanded Memory. It’s extremely tough to manage that on anything but an ancient DOS machine.

At least, not without additional software help …

What’s the secret ? A little application called Dosbox is the key. It’s a program that creates a computer within a computer. You run it on your Windows desktop and you have a virtual Retro style PC that should handle what you want to throw at it. Magic 🙂 Here’s a link to the home of Dosbox. It pretends to be an old machine, running Dos while emulating the sound and graphics of the day.

That’s not really what I wanted to talk about though today … Elite hit the news this week because it’s just turned 25 years old as a game. It was huge in its day, it did things with the BBC Microcomputer that should really have been impossible. The program itself was less than 22kbytes, the last email I sent was 15kbytes. There’s more memory in the cache of my desktop PC than there was in the whole of the BBC Micro.

I smell an attack of Numbers ?

Elite – 22kbytes.
BBC Micro – 64kbytes on board
Modern Desktop CPU (Athlon X2-3800+) – 64kbytes of Data and Code cache. And there’s two of these … And that’s just the bit on the processor that makes it go fast.
Speed of a BBC Micro 6502 processor – 1MHz
Variance in speed of desktop cpu – well, it’s been hunting between 2001 and 2006MHz.

How about this Master of Magic game ?
Needs 574kB Conventional Ram, 2.7MB Expanded
(problem is getting all the Convention Ram, plus getting Expanded at all in XP)
I had that running originally on a machine with 408MB hard disc hooked up to a 80486 processor going at 66MHz, with 4MB of system memory to play with. Oh, it was a DX too, which meant it had a maths coprocessor. Can’t remember what graphics it had, probably just a 1MB “I can make lines and circles” thing.

My current desktop has on its processor : 4x 64kB Data & Code cache, another 2x 512kB cache. That’s a total of 1.25MB just to make it work properly. The hard discs have around 8MB cache each, or double what was available to the whole machine for the 15 year old box.

The desktop’s memory runs at 200MHz, or 3 times the speed of the 80486 processor. That 200MHz is then multiplied by 10 to get the chip speed. And the ante from the maths coprocessor is well and truly upped by there being two full processors on the chip.

HUGE boost in numbers already. And that’s before you realise that there is more memory for just the graphics board (512MB) than there was on that 15 year old hard disc …

Processor – 66MHz up to 2000MHz
Memory – 4MB system to 2GB system
Hard disc – 408MB to 74+250GB
(the Windows folder footprint on my desktop would take 15 of those 408MB drives …)
Graphics – “I can draw lines” to photo realistic 3d environment

Things have moved on a lot in the past 15 years of me owning PCs. They’re a lot more capable now, although the software has bloated to make them just as responsive (“far less responsive” is more the term when we grapple with work’s PCs). The games takes advantage of the new hardware but …

I’m still playing 15 year old games ! Has nothing significantly better come out in the past few years ? There’s some good (looking forward to Dragon Age), some appalling but there’s no substitute for the excellence in design and simplicity that we used to see in our games.

Long live Moo2, Long live MoM 🙂
And a very big thank you to the open source developers of DosBox for making it possible for us to still enjoy these old classics.

PS It could be much worse for the Retro machine … My laptop beats my 3 year old desktop on everything except hard disc and graphics 🙂

P.S. My email is danyelle6974"at"gmail"dot"com if you do wanna help me out.

Thanks for the reply!

No I emailed them already and got no response.

Been after this for ages. Left comments and requests on various forums/fanpages and you are the only guy who has the disc who has replied!

Is there any chance I can get a copy from you? I'm in the UK and would cover postage. It's not that I don't want to buy it, I'd send the £15 off if I thought they were still selling them. 🙁

It's just for my own listening. I'm no scammer or anything. Used to be an AA fan back when I was a teenager (bought all their albums back then) and picked up my interest in them again last year but I can't find this disc on amazon, ebay or any cd seller at all. 🙁

Hi Danyelle 🙂

I got my copy from Ebay but it looks like Pam Poole isn't selling it there at the moment :-(. However …

Try :
http://www.inspiracy.com/alisha/fanclub/vaults.html
(if that doesn't come up as a link – search Google for "alisha's attic vault" – no1 result)

That site looks a bit old though, so it might be worth giving the Contact Us email a try before sending the £15/£16 to the postal address …

Hey there, Found your blog as I was loking for infor on AA. Do you have Alisha's Attics Vaults as I am a massive fan but can't get hold of a copy. Help?!

Hmm. For it to be speed bumps kinda suggests I'm going over them too fast 🙁

Rain – England just avoided losing a series 7-0 to Australia by winning the final match. Just thought – that means we've had 7 rain free days to get all the games in 🙂

Yey for the new car 🙂 Hope it keeps you rolling for a while 🙂

that's the ticket, blame the speed bumps 😉

I always blame the rain
something must be wet somewhere

I did finally need to get a new(er) car – 2006 for a 1995
moving on up 😉

Cars have personalities … They really do.

One element of that is their feelings, you can hurt a car’s feelings and they do sulk. Honest ! This is a certified (hey ! who said “certifiable” ?) MEng Electronic Engineer talking.

Do Not Upset The Ghost In The Machine !

Ok ok, enough ramble, time for the “what is an Orange Light Of Impending Doom ?” answer. Since they kicked out the old mechanical solution for keeping an engine working right, there’s been a light that tells you when the Engine Management Unit isn’t happy. There can be any number of explanations for that, from loose connections to broken bits to sensors that are lying.

The Orange Light Of Impending Doom started coming on (when it shouldn’t) on Tuesday. No discernable difference in the car’s performance and all the dials are in the midline, looked and sounded ok under the bonnet too. So I let it go for a day or so to see if it would go away on its own. No such luck Wednesday, no such luck Thursday. Which, with my driving profile (about 10 miles a day), isn’t too much of a risk with a possibly failing engine.

Thursday evening was when I got off my backside to start getting active on sorting out warranty stuff, although I started ringing a bit too late cos the warranty people had gone home. Probably a good thing because Orange Light Of Impending Doom was a no-show today.

Huzzah !

How about this Car Personality thing then ?

I’ve been getting bored with this car for a while now. After the Puma, it’s bigger, heavier and about the same power to weight. Which means the Go Power is about the same but bigger and heavier means it’s not so good at going round corners. Ho hum. Probably a bad choice to go for another performance car after the original one, maybe there’s a good reason why I always go Cushy – Fast – Cushy – Fast.

My mistake this time was to mention the boredom while in the car … Car’s have ears, if they feel unloved they’ll let you know.

How did I fix it ? There’s the olde philosophical superstition argument here too 🙂 I was checking out how much it would cost me to change car last night. The Prius I’d go for is the T4 model, about £20,000 new. Toyota’s site says their finance stuff would be looking for a £7,000 deposit and £200 a month over 3 years. Guaranteed Future Value thing would mean a further payment of £9,000 after the 3 years (or you start again on another new one).

Very curious 🙂 Although with 20 months left on my car loan, it would cost a couple of hundred pounds more to pay off the loan than I’d get in part exchange. And it would also throw away the guaranteed servicing deal and warranty I have. So I keep my current car for another year and a half, which gets me more time to get more Green Stuff and more time for Prius Mk3’s new now to get older and cheaper.

Hopefully the Orange Light Of Impending Doom (OLOID ?) will stay away for the 8 months to the next service.

PS I reckon it was Speed Bumps upsetting something. Cos the schools are back, I’ve been forced to divert to Plan B route to get to work, which in infested with speed bumps.

Not sure there with motorway cat – if I remember right, he'd have had to roam a bit to get on to the motorway …

Could have been another white-furred (or white due to headlights) feline looking creature, it was after something that had been whacked earlier …

Yikes Pete!

Glad you and the cat are both okay, not to mention an intact set of bumpers lol.

We've had a few of those kind of near misses and they always freak me out!

Though it does intrigue me … what was the cat doing on the motorway in the first place??