• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Thirty years old!

E

Eric the Viking

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I've just been setting up a new PC. It's running Linux Mint, and since it has a flashy new graphics card, etc, I thought I'd see how some vintage games looked.

So I pulled out my box of Quake software, including several home-made CDs. All of them read perfectly, including one Dysan (blue aniline dye) and several HP "Surestore CD-R" disks (light green/gold). I noticed a date I'd written on one - 1996!

I think at the time I was using a (very expensive) Plextor CD-writer, but that was because it was one of the few that could properly master CDs themselves, not because it was particularly good at actual writing. There wasn't anything special about the actual discs, although they've been in a box for many years so not exposed to light.

Anyway,I'm very pleasantly surprised by the longevity. And I got Quake to run, too.

E.
 
@ fuse: Yes, but I am now using the Codeweavers commercial fork of Wine, "Crossover". It's fixed an issue in installing SketchUp 2017 to do with axes and guidelines not co-existing on-screen, and that install seems flawless so far.

Both SU and Quake were installed from local copies (I actually used Winquake). You can have a net install of Quake via Crossover (a graphical version of Winetricks I suppose), but that version also requires Steam and 7.99 UKP, so I opted for my old, genuine CD.

I have one other specialist piece of Windozery I need (Pano2VR, by Garden Gnome SW (a German company), It allows me to complete 360VR panoramas, and should be fine, as it's basically a set of mathematical algorithms for number-crunching TIFFs (occasionally PNGs or JPEGs). I haven't found a native Linux substitute yet.

Whilst grabbing Quake from my son's bookshelf I also saw my original copies of Descent and Descent 2, which I might try (purely out of idle curiosity, you understand), but TBH I've got too much on presently, and the new box is still under the dining room table, losing me brownie points with each passing second... <sigh>
 
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I loved Quake when it came out (and predecessors DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D !). In my first job I installed Descent on the Win 95 lab computers and me and the lads would compete after work. Good times.

If only I had the time and inclination to look into setting up a machine to play those again now...
 
TrimTheKing said:
I loved Quake when it came out (and predecessors DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D !). In my first job I installed Descent on the Win 95 lab computers and me and the lads would compete after work. Good times.
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My story is similar. We had departmental teams in the factory I worked in (at a well-known computer manufacturer), and we'd conference the phones together for lunchtime Quake sessions (one conf. per team). It was huge fun.

We have three children, so (inevitably?), I set up a Quake server at home for four of us (two eMacs, one iMac and a Windows PC). Littlest is quite a bit younger than her siblings (and had the slower iMac), so she used to mostly hide in a corner... my then-teenage son got many brownie points with friends, as nobody else had their own, private Quake multiplayer setup at home.

But I don't think I ever vanquished the huge monster-robot thing at the end of Descent 2, even after researching all the cheats on the web!

TrimTheKing said:
If only I had the time and inclination to look into setting up a machine to play those again now...
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Me too, really. This recent thing was just an experiment (and I had entirely forgotten Quake had an ultra-high-res screen mode, too - which works very well in Crossover).

Is Crossover better than ordinary Wine? It seems to be. I never previously got Sketchup 2017 to run properly (xubuntu+Wine). My fallback was SU2015, but now '17 seems fine, which is nice as it's got a better interface.

Silly data point: I recently have been trying to get on top of a rather old and poorly designed digital audio mixer (Roland M200i). It belongs to a local church, who don't have trained people to operate it (which it really needs, as it's far from intuitive). The audio side works OK but it has an abysmal user interface.

It's chief competitor (and what I wish they'd bought instead) is the Behringer X32. That's ergonomically far better, and I recently saw a YouTube video of a very clever German programmer hacking an X32, replacing its proprietary code with open source. He finished off by showing Doom running on the X32's little control panel!

I'm feeling very old these days!
 
If you’re playing Descent & Quake, can I recommend Heretic from the same era as another fun one. You probably won’t notice it in multiplayer, but the sound is really good - atmospheric, ominous - in single player. Haven’t played that game for 30 years, but good memories.
 
Windows said:
If you’re playing Descent & Quake, can I recommend Heretic from the same era as another fun one. You probably won’t notice it in multiplayer, but the sound is really good - atmospheric, ominous - in single player. Haven’t played that game for 30 years, but good memories.
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Yep I used to play Heretic too. Even today, 50 years later, I still remember casting 'Morph Ovum' and turning opponents into an egg! 🤣
 
My interest in computer games began and ended with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards played at work (circa late 80s) but then I never owned a computer before 2006.
 
Descent was my favourite first-person-shooter type thing in my teenage years, but mostly I was hooked on the Ultima series and played most of them (up to VIII and Underworld 2) through to completion. Ultima IX was too fancy for my computer to cope with the graphics and came a bit late (I was nearing the end of my first degree) for me to really get into it. I dread to think how many hours I must have put into Ultima VII and its various expansion packs.

I haven't really played any computer games (unless you count things like Loopy) since starting university.
 
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