January 2009 – Steve Dougherty's Blog

Slay the Mighty Dragon!

Dad found an old floppy of Slay the Mighty Dragon. It’s a text-based adventure game he and I coded in BASIC when I was little. I’ve made the game and a BASIC interpreter available for download here. I would suggest DOSBox to run it. It’ll work in XP, but the sound or a text setting in the ending might not work correctly. If you don’t want to use DOSBox, decompress somewhere, double-click on prog.com and skip down a paragraph.

To start with DOSBox, download, install, and run it. Decompress the zip somewhere, the root of a drive would probably be easiest, or somewhere with short folder names without spaces. Apparently DOS, and DOSBox by extension, has trouble handling spaces or names longer than eight characters. I’ll assume you’ve decompressed it to C:\mightydragon. In the DOSBox prompt, enter mount c: c:\mightydragon, then c:. You should now be at a C:\> prompt. To start the BASIC interpreter, enter prog.com.

You should now be in the BASIC interpreter. Press F3 or type LOAD”, then game.bas. Press F2 to run it. If you’re running with plain ol’ XP DOS emulation, the sounds will probably try to use the PC Speaker on your motherboard, which may or may not work. If you’re using DOSBox, the sound will use your speakers. If you finish the game you’ll probably just have to close the window. I can’t figure out how to exit the BASIC interpreter. Have fun!

Left 4 Dead and Finals

The timing for the snow day was awesome. I was glad for the break. Four-day weekend! ^^

I played Left 4 Dead Versus and got ground into a fine powder. However, I knew it was a game, didn’t ragequit, and asked for advice when we finished and went back to the lobby:

Smoker or Hunter: try to attack the last one to go over a one-way ledge, the others probably won’t be able to stage a rescue.
You are not so much a team of four as two teams of two. Never let someone go off alone. Stick together.
The two in front crouch, the two in back shoot over their heads.
Talk. Coordinate. As Infected, wait for someone to stray, or plan an overwhelming Boomer, then Hunters and Smoker ambush.
As Tank, it is very bad for you in the open. A survivor running backwards can outrun a Tank, provided the Survivor doesn’t run into anything.
As Tank, bash physics objects around. Movable objects have a red outline when you look at them. Hitting a Survivor with one is devastating.
“Four in a bad situation is better than two in a good one.”

I’m halfheartedly working on Chemistry studying. I hope Monday will prove to be productive.

RAM

I installed the 1GB DDR 400 RAM I bought from newegg for $24.98 after shipping. That’s why I had 2 cents left on one of the Visa gift cards, which I then couldn’t add to PayPal. The machine initially wouldn’t POST, but I moved it to the other open slot and it worked. I haven’t found the time to run memtest on it, but it decreased my Linux boot time by 2 seconds. I hope I don’t understand bootvis, because it seemed to increase my Windows boot time by 3 seconds! Framerates were unaffected in Lost Coast and CSS stress tests at recommended settings. The framerate went up by .5 for Lost Coast, and went down 1.4 for CSS, and because I only ran each test once, I guess it’s statistically nothing. Hopefully this will help with slowdown during memory-intensive things.

Networking Wierdness

I moved a machine from Dad’s to Mom’s, and updated the static IP configuration. First I realized I spelled gateway wrong. Then I realized I put the wrong IP under network. I still couldn’t contact hostnames. I went DHCP, and it started working, and continued working when I switched back to static. It wasn’t fun to be doing this over SSH and absently running network stops instead of restarts. I guess I’m used to messing with networking locally.

Credit Cards

I was given two Visa gift cards for christmas, and now that I’ve used them, I can’t help but feel that not only is Visa happy about the 2 cents on one of the cards I am seemingly unable to spend, but now that I’ve spent almost $50 with credit cards, I am clearer than ever on how to use them. Easy step from the gift card to the card, right? It’s disturbing.

EDIT: Not to mention it’s an inconvenient gift for shopping, much more for online than brick-and-mortar. I can spend up to $25, and I can’t spend more than that even if I add more of my own money, at least online.

Dr. Horrible and VirtualBox

I downloaded the Dr. Horrible soundtrack on Amazon. I had to use the Amazon MP3 downloader to buy an album as a single unit, and the Ubuntu version was for 7.10. (Old!) They had one for Debian Etch, so, being stubborn and not using XP, I brought up a VirtualBox Etch instance and downloaded the album from there. To get the shared folders to work I had to do the Install Additions thing. The install additions button mounts a disk image of the installers. The Linux version was a bash script and required the GNU compiler(s? I just installed both and it was fine) and kernel headers. It installed a kernel module, necessitating a reboot, and then I could successfully mount my shared folder as described in the manual. (Link is pdf.) Hooray stubbornness!