It's hard to kill an old Dell laptop
May. 20th, 2024 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkSo I decided to rehabilitate this one (which is a mere 17 years old) to the point where it might be useful for Lena and/or The Boys. Lena would love to have her own computer, of course, but Amber was a little dubious when I offered her this one. It's heavy and the battery holds a charge barely long enough to carry it down a flight of stairs and plug it in again. But the wifi port works, provided you aren't too far from the hotspot. And if you're sitting by the router anyway, there's always Ethernet.
But this machine's superpower is that it is old enough to run Gearheads and Gubble, two of the finest all-ages action games ever made. Internet connectivity doesn't matter if you're just playing games from CD. And boy, do I have a lot of old games on CD! Which I have spent the last week trying to install and play. Installation and game controls were far from standardized in the mid-90s, so this has been quite a challenge. Some don't install, some install but won't run reliably, and some install and run fine but won't run the cut scenes (which are infrequent but crucial to games like Myst)
About half of them install and run just fine in WinXP Compatibility Mode.
And of the ones that work, there are some gems here that Thorin and I (and in some cases even Richard) remember with great fondness. High on the list: 3D Ultra Pinball and a very classy version of Tetris (both of which will even run without a disk in the drive!). A prettily animated version of Shanghai (Mahjong solitaire). A couple of Simpsons games that I find tedious but Lena and her father (HUGE Simpsons fans) might enjoy. Icebreaker (an animated version of one of those board games that uses sets of colored plastic pyramids). Shivers 2: Harvest of Souls. a spooky adventure game that was one of my favorites. And Woodruff & and the Schnibble, one of those cute cartoony Sierra adventure games that turns out to be way too hard to play without a walkthrough. Fortunately, old Internet walkthroughs never die either, so if Lena gets interested in it she can probably play it.
But this machine's superpower is that it is old enough to run Gearheads and Gubble, two of the finest all-ages action games ever made. Internet connectivity doesn't matter if you're just playing games from CD. And boy, do I have a lot of old games on CD! Which I have spent the last week trying to install and play. Installation and game controls were far from standardized in the mid-90s, so this has been quite a challenge. Some don't install, some install but won't run reliably, and some install and run fine but won't run the cut scenes (which are infrequent but crucial to games like Myst)
About half of them install and run just fine in WinXP Compatibility Mode.
And of the ones that work, there are some gems here that Thorin and I (and in some cases even Richard) remember with great fondness. High on the list: 3D Ultra Pinball and a very classy version of Tetris (both of which will even run without a disk in the drive!). A prettily animated version of Shanghai (Mahjong solitaire). A couple of Simpsons games that I find tedious but Lena and her father (HUGE Simpsons fans) might enjoy. Icebreaker (an animated version of one of those board games that uses sets of colored plastic pyramids). Shivers 2: Harvest of Souls. a spooky adventure game that was one of my favorites. And Woodruff & and the Schnibble, one of those cute cartoony Sierra adventure games that turns out to be way too hard to play without a walkthrough. Fortunately, old Internet walkthroughs never die either, so if Lena gets interested in it she can probably play it.
