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Not a big update today, but I have cut the Chronological Game List, which was becoming rather huge, into three parts and added some comments to make it more of a history.
I bought an Atari 260ST on eBay, and it arrived today. While it is in perfect condition, including monitor, the system disk gave out when I first tried to boot it up, and the backup is physically damaged. So I won't be able to do anything with it until I get a replacement.
Added a page for Othello/Reversi. It is not dedicated to any special computer implementation, but I have added links where you can find several versions for DOS, 32-bit Windows, and the Macintosh. Added a screenshot to the Heretic page. Took Cleopatra out of the Pharaoh page and put a small screenshot on each page.
Nothing much new today. I rewrote part of the Duke Nukem 3D page, giving a little more room to the character of Duke and adding a link to a page that gives help with designing your own levels.
I put up a screenshot of Chip's Challenge, removed a broken link and added two new ones. I found out that a Macintosh version of this game exists, but only this bare fact. It does not seem to be available anywhere, nor could I find a screenshot.
For all my visitors who speak German: I have acquired some new webspace and am slowly moving all my long neglected German pages there, converting them to somewhat better HTML on the way. That's why it will probably take quite some time ;-)
There are two new game pages today. One is for Lemonade Tycoon. Someone was searching my site for it, and I thought it so funny that a game of that name should exist that I had to make a page about it. Besides, I am really interested in Lemonade Stand variations. It is a game for the Palm PC, to be ported to various cell phones, I have never played it and probably never will.
The other page is for McDoe!/McPop!. This is an "adult" arcade shareware game in several versions from 1989/90. Despite the fact that it is funny and well done it has never been properly described anywhere on the web. Mine is currently the only page devoted to it.
Some of you who are keen observers might notice that the McDoe!/McPop! page does not bear the "Valid HTML 4.01" button. This is correct. To ensure that no linebreaks ocurred within the dates in the version table, I had to insert a <nobr> tag here. And the W3C has as yet not deemed this tag worthy of validation.
Finally… finally I created a page for one of my favorite
games, Terranigma. Why does it always
take me so much longer to do this for the games I am really
interested in? To some of them I haven't gotten around as yet. Ah
yes, and there is now a page for Soko-Ban, too.
Both pages contain multiple screenshots, and then I noticed there was one game where I hadn't integrated a screenshot yet: Ultima IV. And since the Ultima page was already pretty large, I took it out. Of course I checked the links on both pages, and did some minor editing.
But since all is not fun and games, I have expanded the computer section a bit and added a page about the various types of (PC) RAM.
Since I've always liked Ganja Farmer, I downloaded and played Night Raid, the game that inspired it. Well, it's not quite as much fun, but fun it is.
I rewrote parts of the Wolfenstein 3D page, one of the oldest pages in the games section, and finally gave all the related pages, Castle Wolfenstein, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, Spear of Destiny, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, seperate pages. There's lots of new info for the first two games. Doing so, I hit my 10MB ceiling once again. Luckily I found there were still some old files on the server, so I did not have to remove anything actually part of the site.
Added a page for Yoot Tower. I have not played this game myself, so it is mainly quotes from and links to reviews.
Once again, there is a new game page: SimTower. I've been playing it for the last two weeks or so, and though it mainly tests your patience, it has me fascinated.
I updated the Browser Compatibility page, giving more detailed reviews of the different browsers. There are still reviews of DOS/Windows browsers only. I tried to transfer the site to my Performa 630 via a zip disk, otherwise a tested method, but was then unable to open the folder. Maybe it contained too many files. I got a glimpse of my page from other peoples' Macs using some newer version of Internet Explorer, and it looked more or less the same—that's all I can say at the moment.
As I was saying, I was researching Ethernet yesterday. As a result, I have put up a little Ethernet page, designed to just give you the basics of what you need to set up a simple Ethernet network using thin coax or twisted pair cabling.
I really started researching because I wanted to know whether you can connect two computers with just a twisted pair cable, without a hub: Yes, you can, if you use a special crossover cable. I found out things I didn't know, like that actually one, but only one, terminator should be grounded in a coax network.
And I found lots of interesting stuff that did not make it into this page yet, like descriptions of the original thick coax Ethernet, as it was developed by Xerox in the early 70s, or that nearly all of the extinct computer systems can be hooked up to Ethernet, too, with the maybe single exception of the Apple ][.
Just yesterday I updated—or created—the Commodore 64 page, then I did some web research about Ethernet—and found out that, since two weeks, there is an Ethernet adapter for the C64. I like that idea a lot. I added the link and changed the header from "But his Soul Goes Marching on" to "There's Life in the Old Bones yet". The C64 was a great little computer. It would deserve some sort of comeback.
I've decided to put the latest changelog entry, or the first paragraph if it is longer, right on my homepage. Don't know how it will work out, but I'll give it a try for a while.
I found some interesting and amusing Commodore 64-related links on the website of an Austrian newspaper. You can now use it to surf the web. A good occasion to finally set up a seperate Commodore 64 page. You will find the new links at the bottom of the page, under the header "But his Soul Goes Marching on".
I noticed that some of the new Apple pages, while I had already put the "HTML 4.01 Compliant" logo on them, actually weren't. This is fixed now.
A new gamepage for Drak, with two screenshots. I put the list of Tetris clones on a page of its own, checking all the links in the progress and adding one. Please note that the Keep is currently down, so many of the links on this page are broken. I will wait for a few more day before I do something about it, it has been down in the past (read about it on the Abandonware page). And I took the Japanese Games out of the Games by Country list and put them on a seperate page.
As I was saying, my Macintosh
collection is growing (latest addition is a LC), and I've been wanting to reorganize my Apple pages for
a while. What I really want to do is turn them into a subsite,
just like the one for the IBM PS/2
computers.
Well, I haven't done that yet, but I have moved them into a subfolder where they will remain. Thus, everything related to Apple and the Macintosh has now changed URLs, but will not change them again for quite a while. I tend to keep my URLs constant.
The former Apple page is now called Miscellaneous Apple Links, and I cut out some parts like Software, Emulation, and Old Macs and put them on seperate pages. Everything is still somewhat makeshift, and the navigation may be a bit confusing. Consider it a work in progress.
Added a page for Marathon, and quite a long one, too.
I updated the SimCity 2000 page, mainly adding more detailed system requirements, and put SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 on seperate pages. There is a small update on the Tetris page, I added a single link where some Mac versions are available for download. And there are a few new links on the Macintosh Games page.
Another minor change: For all the games where I have a screenshot or more, I have integrated one—or a thumbnail for it—into the game page itself. If you want to check them out, here they are:
I moved away from my policy of strictly seperating text and images and will be adding more screenshots and boxshots in the future.
I have added a page for Darwin's Dilemma, the first Macintosh-only game I have reviewed—the first Macintosh-only game I have played, in fact. The small screenshot on the page, BTW, is not really a thumbnail. It is the same image that you get when you click on it, just sized down via HTML code. Usually, this is a very dumb thing to do, because the point of a thumbnail is to create a smaller image to save bandwidth and loading time. In this case, the image file is so small that a real thumbnail would have been larger, as far as file size is concerned. I only sized it down for layout reasons.
Updated the pages for Genesis3D/Reality Factory, Crystal Space and 6DX.
Just a small update today. One of my formerly favorite online comics, Flem Comics, moved to keenspot, renaming each and every page in the process and losing some of them. I had been linking to several single strips from various pages, so I had some editing to do, mainly on the pages for Doom and Dungeons & Dragons. Of course I checked all the links on these pages, and I gave Mazes & Monsters a seperate page.
I guess that's it for today. Since my Macintosh collection has grown, and I am gathering more experience with them, I am working on a complete redo of the respective section, but this might still take a while.
