nostalgia gone horribly okay

Partying like it’s 1998 (with Unreal)

Don’t shoot the Nali! Also, there are more colours in the game than brown, I swear.

After some chat about the olden days of gaming in Discord that include recollections of the original Unreal, released in 1998, I felt the silly urge to re-install the game–and did!

For other people who are thinking, perhaps unwisely, of giving in to their nostalgia, here is what I did:

  • Went to my gog.com library to install the game from there. It turns out I never got the game on gog.com. I then checked Steam. On both platforms I have:
    • Unreal Tournament
    • Unreal Tournament 2004
    • Unreal Tournament 3 (re: UT2007)
    • Unreal 2
    • No original Unreal. Sad face.
  • I pondered whether I wanted to buy a 25-year-old game, but the decision was made for me because Epic delisted the game on all digital stores last year (along with all the others I listed above).
  • I dug out my binders of game CDs (BOGs) to see if I had my original Unreal disc. I did!
  • I dug out my USB DVD drive and plugged it in
  • I inserted the CD and waited to see what would happen
  • I got a pop-up about compatibility mode, clicked OK and waited
  • The installer launched!
  • The game installed!

Amazingly, the unpatched original CD version actually worked. It defaulted to 800×600 resolution. I then applied the UnrealClassicPatch227i, a community-made patch that builds on the efforts of Epic to allow the game to work with modern renderers and fixes a few bugs and glitches. The patch is on the community site OldUnreal, found here.

I made the following change to the console in the unreal.ini file, found in the Unreal/System folder, under the [Engine.Engine] section. This enables the UT-style Umenu system, which gives access to some of the newer options (and makes changing keybinds easier, too):

Console=UMenu.UnrealConsole

The original line is Console=UBrowser.UBrowserConsole.

I set the resolution to the same as my monitor, 2560×1440, which looks fine, though the HUD shrinks to micro-sized. Apparently HUD scaling is coming to the 227j patch.

I originally chose OpenGL for the renderer, but it was too dark and changing brightness had no effect. I switched to the Direct3D 9 renderer and was able to change the brightness from Impenetrably Dark But Undoubtedly Moody to Moody But I Can Actually See Some Things Now.

Finally, I installed some high resolution textures, which look fine, though there’s a jarring difference when you see a fuzzy original texture next to a high-res one. You can fix most of these by also installing the HD Skins pack, available from the same link. HD Skins is actually a mutator, but the readme.txt file doesn’t note that you must start a new game to first enable the mutator. You can save the configuration so the mutator always runs after that.

The game itself plays great, of course. I could probably run it at 100,000 x 100,000 resolution and still get 140 FPS. Now we’ll see how long a 25-year-old first-person shooter can hold my interest.

Bonus shot:

Looking back at the crashed Vortex Rikers ship you escape from.

My vulgar youth

I have recently begun digging through my old creative stuff–sketches and stories from back in the olden days when I had hair and dreams. Now I just dream of having had hair.

One of the things I’ve noticed about some of the old short stories, dating back to the early 90s or even earlier–so some 30+ years ago, written when I was in my mid-20s or so, is how vulgar they are. Everyone curses, the guys are all leering monsters you wouldn’t let within 20 metres of a woman, or perhaps any other human. Everyone drinks or is drunk. I’d say I was repressed and letting it all hang out in my fiction, except:

  • I never drank other than an occasional beer, and never wanted more
  • I rarely swear in the flesh, feeling I can draw on more colourful metaphors to express myself than common cuss words
  • I have never leered at a woman, nor have wanted to

Also, a lot of stories revolve around death, which is also weird, because ruminations on mortality usually start when you’re, well, older. But I apparently had it on my mind a lot when I was 24 or 25 (this might partly be explained by my father dying when I was only 27, but that goes beyond the time when most of the referenced stories were written).

Anyway, no grand point here, just one of those things I noticed. That, and a lot of the writing is very first draft. I “finished” a lot of short stories that were never really done.

Gum Gum drag racing, before and after

First, the original pencil sketch, probably done back in the 90s:

And my modern interpretation of it:

And some miscellaneous notes and observations:

  • I tried to incorporate the ZOOM!! text but never liked the way it looked, so off it went
  • I originally resisted adding the reins to the bananas, because I don’t see the Gum Gum People needing them, but with their poses it looks a little better
  • If I redid this, I’d have them leaning forward, like they were riding motorcycles, without the reins
  • I removed the dialog because it is now canon that Gum Gum People do not speak
  • The motion lines/puffs don’t seem to convey the motion that well, probably again due to the posture of the racers
  • The shadows are iffy
  • I slightly reduced the size of the background GGP, but they still look too close together?
  • The GGP in the back has bigger feet, but, uh, it’s just a trick of perspective!

Drawing: Godzilla 1978

I was totally into dinosaurs as a kid, and Godzilla was a dinosaur. Or close enough. I watched all the Japanese Godzilla movies from the 1950s on the Tacoma station KSTW (channel 11). They aired as part of their Sunday noon SCI-FI THEATER. It was all the sci-fi schlock I could handle–and then some! So many terrible, yet amazing movies.

I drew a lot of dinosaurs, and in my 14-year-old mind, Godzilla would have absolutely been a tyrannosaurus rex if he had been a REAL dinosaur. So I drew him as such in 1978.

Below is a traced copy of the sketch. I tried to keep the line work as close to the original and I think I came pretty close, using the Narinder Pencil in Procreate, with an HB Pencil for the shading.

Why do this when I still have the original sketch? This was both an experiment and a nostalgic trip back to my hippie-haired youth. The nostalgia part is obvious, the experiment was to see how easily my hand could follow the lines I drew 45 (!) years ago, and, really, just to see what it felt like.

It felt weird. It felt weird not because it was dead simple to trace (it’s a pretty straightforward sketch), but because as I traced over it, the lines felt like mine, right down to giving Godzilla puny little arms that were still pretty ripped. And giving him a funny-looking snout that would probably work as the front end of a car.

And I still draw rocks pretty much the same way in 2023.

Anyway, it was an interesting way to reacquaint myself with some of my oldest surviving artwork.

And the original scan (this is not a great scan, I’ll probably redo it at some point):

I wonder if I should do a modern take on this…as an experiment.

Bonus: I tried to imagine how I might have coloured it back in the age of disco, and this is what I came up with. I think it’s pretty close:

If I could turn back time

First, I am not linking to a video of the Cher song.

OK, I totally am. Here you go:

But really, if I could travel back in time for only one day and not actually change history, just noodle around and take in the sights, and I was restricted to only visiting years during which I was alive (yes, this is an oddly specific set of restrictions), I’d go back to July 3 (nice weather) in the following years:

1973: I was 9 years old, so I actually remember a fair bit about 1973, but it would be groovy to walk around my hometown of Duncan as it was back then, when the world felt simpler and smaller (but I was also only 9 years old). Seeing it with adult eyes would be entertaining, if only for the fashions.

1993: 20 years later and I’m now 29 years old. Why this year? Because Vancouver has changed so much in the past 30 years. 1993 was pre-internet, pre-Windows 95 and yet still feels “modern” in my memory. I’d like to see how that would hold up to the reality. Plus, I could visit all those old computer stores I wrote about recently, and relive the last hurrah of computers that weren’t just IBM compatibles or Macs. And secretly invest in Apple stock. My runner-up choice would be summer 1986 or 1987 when Vancouver was the big new city, and I was taking my first initial steps into coming out to others and being part of a larger community. So much of what was back then is gone now. Actually, maybe I wouldn’t want to go back to those years, it would probably just make me sad. Although I’d totally take the time to check out Expo 86, which I really didn’t get to see much of when I worked there.

Computer ads (and stores) of yore

From the December 1997 issue of The Computer Paper, a free publication that was all over the place in Metro Vancouver way back when:

To me, a rotary phone is ancient tech, but I remember using them. And now we’ll have people who will remember ancient tech as having to buy software to get on the internet.

Actually, I guess that still includes me, because I actually did this myself (I went with iStar).

(BTW, netcom.ca is a broken link now, and www.netcom.ca has an expired certificate that has nothing to do with what the site was back in the days of parachute pants.)

While marvelling over having to install a browser just to get on the internet and then doing so at a maximum speed of 56 Kbps (I only ever have a 33.3 Kbps modem before going to broadband), I am mostly struck by the list of retailers at the bottom of the ad where this software (remember when software came in boxes?) was sold and how most are long-vanished, proof that even tech is not immune to getting steamrolled through evolving times:

  • Future Shop: Bought out by Best Buy, shuttered for good in 2015
  • RadioShack: Effectively killed in 2005 when it became The Source and turned into a kind of Best Buy Mini (it’s now owned by Bell, boo hiss)
  • London Drugs: Still going, but computers were only ever part of their business. Fun Fact: I worked in the computer department of LD from 1999 to 2001. I was there for the launch of Windows Me. We got free copies. I ran it on my home PC for two weeks before going back to Windows 2000.
  • Staples: Still going, will probably scrape by as long as the paperless office remains a fantasy
  • Doppler Computer Superstores: I had to check to see if they actually had more than one store (the one I know was in Vancouver, across from a Wendy’s that’s still there) and I think this was the only one. The building is long gone now, but you can see it in this reddit post. I bought my first two CD-ROM games there: Myst (of course) and a disc of shovelware games. I remember the spinning racks of shovelware. You might find a low budget gem if you looked long enough, but it was mostly junk. Still, CD-ROMs seemed very futuristic in the early 90s.
  • Computer City Canada: There were seven Computer city stores in Canada and more than 60 in the U.S. before the entire chain went kaput in 1998. Fun Fact: I worked at the brand-new Coquitlam store during the launch of Windows 95, which was a very big deal at the time. We had two Compaq PCs set up running Win95, one with 4 MB of ram and the other with 8 MB, to show how much better Windows 95 was with more memory (some things never change).

And while I’m waxing nostalgic, here are some of the other stores I used to haunt regularly when shopping for computers or software that are all gone now, and mostly forgotten:

  • CompuCentre: These were in malls, and they quietly vanished without me even noticing. I’d buy the odd game here.
  • ATIC Computers: Still around, actually! I bought multiple PCs from them in the 90s. They were cheap, which was the main appeal, as I was poor.
  • Wizard Computers: I mainly went here to get software for my Atari ST. I remember buying Dungeon Master at this store, which was on Fraser Street.
  • MicroConcept Systems: Like ATIC, but not as cheap. Ran huge, multipage ads, had a business division, then shuttered.
  • NCIX: Ho ho, the store that spawned Linus Tech Tips and is probably most famous (or infamous) for going bankrupt, then auctioning off a bunch of equipment that still contained user data. Oops. I bought stuff here for years and remember the early days of Linus making videos for them.
  • Egghead Software: I bought OS/2 at the Broadway store. I barely remember running OS/2. I was a Windows guy, ultimately.
  • Software Superstore: True to its name, this massive store in Richmond sold software for every major platform (this was when there were more than two). My biggest single-day haul was picking up both Populous and SimCity for my Amiga 500. At the time, this would have cost $100 and would be apparently about $180 today. Considering some games are now costing $90, it seems both weird that prices have pretty much stayed the same and also that $90 feels like way too much to pay for a single computer game (thank you, Steam sales and indie devs!)

On one hand, I miss picking up software from these stores, because there is something about getting something tangible, something physical, that can’t be replicated with downloads. But there’s no denying the way software works now is way better. Still, it would be fun to zap back in time for a day and be able to check all these places out circa 1992.

Things I miss from the 1970s

Me in 1977 (on the left). Stay classy.

I thought it would be fun to list things I miss from the 1970s. Then I realized I couldn’t think of any.

I went from 5 to 15 years old in the 70s. I can’t say I recall a lot from being 5, but what if I could go back to my 15-year-old body with my current adult mind? Wouldn’t that be fun? Or would it be horrifying? Maybe horrifyingly fun?

I will explore this in a future post.

For now, here are three things I miss from the 1970s, for real:

  • The price of everything. Hey, since 1970 we’ve had 53 years of inflation, it adds up.
  • The languid pace of childhood summers (I went from 5 to 15 in the 70s)
  • Lawn darts. Fun and stupidly dangerous, the perfect combination for kids!

And the music plays on (very briefly)…

Today I was feeling all nostalgic up in the hizzy and dug out two old music players, my 7th generation iPod nano and a Sansa Clip. Here they be:

iPod nano 7th generation and Sansa Clip

The Sansa Clip is the older of the two. It was the first MP3 player I got for running and it worked well, being extremely light, compact and having a clip that let you easily attach it to your shorts, shirt or gorgeously braided hair. I believe I got it in 2009, the same year I started jogging (I ended the year by doing my first 10K run and can’t imagine I would have done so without musical accompaniment). The one downside is the storage was a mere 2 GB, so it could only hold a hundred or so songs–enough for a run, but not a whole lot of variety.

The iPod nano I got in 2012 and replaced a 5th generation one. It featured some nice improvements:

  • Lightning port instead of the 30-pin connector
  • Bluetooth, although I never actually used it
  • Super light and thin, yet sturdy in construction
  • 16 GB of storage, which couldn’t hold my entire music collection at the time but got close enough that I felt I wasn’t really missing anything I’d like to listen to while on a run
  • Built-in Nike+ app that no longer needed a foot pod to track steps/runs
  • It looks like an adorable miniature iPhone (running iOS 6, though it didn’t actually run iOS)

I used the nano (which was the last one Apple made, discontinuing it in 2017) until I switched over to using a smartphone to track runs, the first being an iPhone 5c. I quite liked it, though the touchscreen would go wonky when it got wet, making it less than ideal for soggy runs (not to be confused with having the soggy runs–ew). To be fair, the Apple Watch I now use has the same issues in the rain, although you can turn off the touch to prevent phantom taps and such. In the nano’s favor, it could transfer music about a billion times faster from my PC vs. transferring music from my phone to the Watch, a task that takes so long I have given up on doing it.

I kind of miss these dedicated single-purpose devices. Because they only did one thing*, the UI and buttons were very focused on driving that experience. This was especially appreciated for activities like running where you don’t want to fiddle with multi-level menus and excessive clicks.

Both devices still power up, as you can see from my pic. The Sansa Clip battery appears to be almost completely dead, though. It only stays awake for a few moments before warning the battery is low, even after charging. The nano is better, but even it looks like it would only last a fraction of what it normally might. Not surprising for something 10 years old. I wonder if the battery can be replaced? Hmm.

* Technically the iPod nano could do more than play music, as you could listen to podcasts, watch videos or look at photos, I didn’t do any of these things with mine, however.

Diablo II: Resurrected thoughts and things

I played the recent open beta of Diablo II: Resurrected, the gussied-up version of the now 21- year old Blizzard game, and have some thoughts.

Note: I am not unaware that Blizzard as a company is a bit of a dumpster fire at the moment, with lots of stories coming out about a toxic work culture that has spawned multiple sexual harassment lawsuits. For this post I’m just sticking to the game (except at the very end).

First, D2 is surprisingly pretty. If you hit the G key in-game, it will toggle you between the original 800×600 graphics and the fancy new version:

The player characters and NPCs have all been redone as 3D models and look good. The druid and others no longer walk with a “I have to pee really badly!” animation. And as you can see above, the whole world has been lovingly redone with more detailed, higher-resolution textures.

The sound and music, always excellent, remain untouched.

A few modern updates to the game have been made–note the re-arrangement of the action bar into something more befitting a modern game. You can also choose to auto-pick up gold. There’s a generous shared stash that eliminates the need for mule characters.

But as I played the through the first few quests, the one thing that struck me the most–and what hasn’t changed from the original–is the tiny inventory. In the early game especially, gold is precious and you want to sell everything you don’t use, but your inventory fills up so quickly that you will need to portal (or walk) back to the rogue encampment multiple times to sell all the junk you’ve been carrying. This gets tedious really quickly and could have been solved by increasing the size of the inventory. It doesn’t need to be doubled or tripled, just enough that you could, say, do one quest and not have your inventory overflowing multiple times just getting to the quest. But the devs have drawn arbitrary lines in the sand on what they will and won’t change.

Also, there is the price, which is $54.99 Canadian. Again, despite the improvements, this is a 21 yar old game.

Just this week, another revised version of Myst came out. This one is on an entirely new engine (Unreal), offers a fully 3D world with free movement and also includes VR support. Myst is one of the best-selling games of all time. The new version is selling for $33.99.

Blizzard is grossly overvaluing Diablo II. Yes, some people–a lot of people–will buy it regardless of price. I’m not one of them. Given how stingy Blizzard is with sales, it will be a long time before it reaches what I consider a reasonable price–if ever.

And then there is the train wreck that the company is currently, and would I buy the game even if it was $33.99? And the answer is no, I wouldn’t. Not now. I’ll need a better price and evidence that Blizzard is changing its ways as a company before I give them more money.

But Diablo II: Resurrected is pretty. I’ll give them that.

More art from my days as a pre-adult: PLUTO

One of the most important things you learn in art class is using reference. To put it simply, copy stuff. In doing so, you learn how things connect and when your oranges come out as squares, maybe you need to look into that.

Here’s an example of copying from source material I did when I was probably about 10 or 11–the drawing is untitled, so I can’t say for sure, but I’m reasonably confident I was around that age, as it jibes with when I was reading Disney comics.

It’s actually a pretty good representation of Pluto, the odd dog pet of Goofy–odd, because Goofy was also a dog, of course. I’m intrigued by the fact that I did this using felt pens, as I have very few examples of felt pen art and the majority of my stuff was done in pencil or, to a lesser degree, pencil crayon.

PLUTO:

And for the sake of comparison, here’s the same with the wrinkly, yellowed sketchpad background removed:

It was 25 years ago today Windows 95 started to play

Yes, 25 years ago on this day, August 24, 1995, Windows 95 was released. This might be the only time in history that a computer operating system was a genuine media event.

I worked at Computer City in Coquitlam at the time–the chain disappeared within a few years, imploding after a large expansion across the US and into Canada–but at the time it was possible to go into a store entirely devoted to computer-related stuff. And it wasn’t like Future Shop where other electronics or appliances were sold, it was computer stuff only. Rows of software. Endless aisles of inkjet printers. Miles of parallel port cables ready for purchase.

We had huge stacks of copies of Windows 95 ready to go, in both CD-ROM format and floppy disk (13 floppies in total). We had a setup with two Compaq machines showing how Windows 95 worked with both 4 MB of ram and 8 MB of ram. All of this seems so quaint now (it ran much better with 8 MB, to no surprise. The 4 MB minimum was really meant to make windows 95 look less like a resource hog. Memory was not cheap back then).

Quaint as it seems now, at the time Windows 95 felt like a real breakthrough for Windows and the PC in particular. It ditched the Program and File Managers of Windows 3.1, added the Start button, task bar and system tray–all of which are still part of the Windows 10 UI in 2020. In reality, of course, it heavily mimicked the feel of the Mac’s OS, but had its own vibe, a weird sort of smooth-yet-clunky and sometimes backward compatible thing where it excelled in some regards and fumbled around a bit in others. You had Plug and Play and it sometimes even worked well, but USB support was not in the initial release. We still had mice with balls back then and they plugged into the serial port and speaking of serial ports, IRQ conflicts were still very much a thing with Windows 95. All of its DOS underpinnings couldn’t be entirely hidden (that really didn’t happen until Windows XP shipped six years later–or Windows 2000 the year before if you count it as a successor to 95).

But even though I have undoubtedly blocked memories of things not working right in Windows 95 (native gaming was a bit undeveloped, though it played a mean game of Solitaire), I look back on it fondly. I had just gotten a PC the year before and after a year of running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, Windows 95 truly felt like the future.

Here’s a shot from an emulator I downloaded today. You can quibble about it, but the UI still looks clean and simple to me–and better than some of the versions that followed (I always found XP a bit overdressed and Windows 8 was a spectacular misfire). Good times, as the kids say.

Book review: The Nostalgia Nerd’s Retro Tech

The Nostalgia Nerd’s Retro Tech: Computer, Consoles & Games by Peter Leigh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Retro Tech provides just what it says on the tin. Starting with systems in the early 1970s, it provides a summary of virtually every video game console and personal computer released up until the debut of the original Xbox in October 2001.

Each summary includes a generous number of photos, sometimes including controllers or oddball accessories, or more mundane things like the power supplies. Leigh offers both an historical overview and also his own personal assessment on each device, which at times stands in contrast to how I saw some of the systems, accounting for the differences in reception between the UK and North American (and in particular U.S.) audiences.

Each summary concludes with a look at three games from each system: The Must-See, the Must-Play, and the Must-Avoid. A lot of the Must-Avoids are typically obscure fare (no, E.T. did not make the list for the Atari 2600–though it does get mentioned alongside the “winner”).

Leigh keeps the writing light and at times droll, never being afraid to call out lemons and questionable marketing of years gone by.

I was struck by the sheer number of systems that came out in the 70s and early 80s. It seemed that nearly everyone tried to get a slice of the video game pie before the famous crash of 1983. While there are systems that never sold well here in Canada that I was aware of–like the MSX computers, there are many listed here that I was utterly unfamiliar with, even leaving aside the UK-specific machines that never made it over here.

For anyone who grew up when these machines were coming out (as I did), this is indeed a heady dose of nostalgia. For others, it serves as a brief and well-illustrated history of the early days of video games and personal computers. In fact, my only real knock on the book is that each write-up only amounts to a page or so. I would love to see a more in-depth look at the same topic. As it is, I was able to tear through the book all too quickly.

Still, this was an enjoyable look back and an easy recommendation for those who would enjoy seeing the sometimes wacky products that came out in the quest for the early gamer’s dollars (or pounds).

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