past
I used to be a Renegade nut...That's a BBS software, for everyone who has no idea (I'm sure there are a lot of you)...I did all kinds of modifications to Renegade, and I did them all by hand...a friend of mine (who got too damned religious) and I wrote a flawless fix for the %UN lockup bug in QuickBasic (and all the other %?? lockups), another friend of mine (who was supposed to be best man at my wedding, but didn't show up, and then gave me an excuse three weeks later about being in jail for the past two weeks (?? you do the math)) found the key piece of data in the OVR to take out for a lightbarred file/message/mail-browsing menu, and I wrote QB to generate a smooth sliding spotlight filebar in RG pipecodes and dumb-terminal control characters, with 0% ANSi, and helped with the menus...it was a bitch, but it was sweet as fuck the way we set it up, (fast & fluid on a modem up to 33.6kbps thanks to a ramdrive for the .ASC's and highly optimized work on my part) and it was the FIRST lightbarred file-browsing menu in the history of 10-05...
Anyway, without further ado, I present you with a small list of things that are in danger of extinction, and which I feel ought to be preserved for the good of computer historians. I loved them once, you should too.
Two of the best art groups from the olden days
Insane Creator's Enterprises | Ansi Creators In Demand
EDIT.EXE from MS-DOS 6.22 Possibly the best editor ever written.
Renegade 10-05 Full Install Package by Cott Lang -- Reconstructed from pieces I could find. Quite possibly the only copy in the world.
Renegade 10-05 Complete Documentation I lost my quick reference, and unfortunately, I seriously doubt that I'll ever bother writing it again.
The above program was written in a (rather archaic, in computer time) version of Turbo or Borland Pascal that had a rather nasty design flaw. Seems they didn't expect computers to get much faster than 350Mhz, and flubbed their delay loop calibration.
It seems Borland (now Inprise) has no interest in solving this, but luckily, hackers rarely fail to fix their own shit, and thus banged out some solutions on their own. So here's a link to help you out if you happen to have a nice 400Mhz box that you want to use to fuck around with them.
Bugfix for crap old Pascal code I recommend TpPatch myself.
A little more recently I got over my DOS fetish and decided, with the help of my friend barkode, that since Windows had done nothing but treat me bad since 3.11 went the way of the dinosaur, that I would run some unix flavor instead... FreeBSD never really agreed with me, what with having to patch the hell out of the source to get the system interfaces to be consistent, so I eventually settled on the Slackware flavor of GNU/Linux. after running linux for about, oh, six months, I suppose, I wound up playing with OpenBSD, hating that even more than FreeBSD, and eventually obtained my BrainBench certification in Linux system administration...
Just a little bit ago my friend Sakui sent me time.mod, one of my all-time favorite four-track tracked modules, and reminded me of my past after Renegade, but before I really coded for it, when I got all my interesting files from my friends via sneakernet, because my internet experience was still only a matter of logging on to a local BBS by the name of Oddysey Line Communications (since absorbed into the behemoth that is Earthlink via JPSnet, I believe, but then I don't really pay attention) and using their shell server and various custom doors (programs called by the BBS software to take over control of the FOSSIL driver [modem control API, don't ask, yes I am old] to perform various interactive tasks with or for the dialing-in user), to gopher and FTP and IRC, when I was very into demos and tracked music, so I've been revisiting old pages, and downloading old favorites, and discovering new ones, and I thought I'd be a generous host and be so kind as to give you some of the links here...
- bonus indispensable links!
- Scene.org
- The Mod Archive
- Orange Juice
- Pouët
- ASSEMBLY
- The Gathering
- The Party
- Dreamhack
- Mekka Symposium
- Scene Event
- Performance
- Escape
Those were the days...when a 486dx4@100Mhz was mammoth, and 32MB of RAM was more than anyone knew what to do with.