Project Twentieth Century: Resurrection

There comes a time in every young man's life to remember his past. Though others may mock him and claim that it wasn't that long ago, he still holds it dear. It may even be desirable to reclaim relics of that past before they become lost, rare, or financially unavailable. And so it is.

If you listen to my podcast, you know about my obsession with backups. Software is incredibly easy to back up and preserve. Hardware is at least a magnitude harder. This is my experiment with backing up old games with the hardware they were meant to be played on.

Screenshot of the Windows 98 Second Edition desktop, showing evidence of a Pentium II 300MHz with 256MB RAM.

As it turned out, I seemed to have installed Windows 98 SE on Twentieth Century when I initially got it, then something must have blown up. I'm thinking that it was the RAM, since adding the PSU and video card didn't do anything. I was disappointed that the keyboard isn't a PS/2 one, though it has a PS/2 connector on it, presumably to connect a mouse. I was initially disappointed with the ethernet NIC not being detected, but I threw some better drivers at it, and it's fine. Up to then, it was air-gapped and I was moving files around a USB drive; not ideal, but workable and would be 'fine'.

This machine really likes the CMOS battery in the motherboard, because it won't boot without it! That little fact would have saved me two or three hours. Surprisingly after 15 years, the thing still has a charge!

After this ordeal, I'm really thankful that SATA doesn't mess around with jumpers on the drives. It's unfortunate that this motherboard doesn't like hard drives that hold more than 32 GB. I guess I'm stuck with the 2 GB drive that came with it. Oh well, it's not like I was planning on storing anything much on this system.

The only thing I have left to do is get a working sound card. I should be acquiring one within the week. Aside from that, this thing works like it should. It's a bit loud and a bit disassembled, but that's OK. I might get another, larger, maybe quieter, hard drive.

I was able to play a little StarCraft on it. I can appreciate the difference between playing it on a big 24" monitor and a small 15" CRT. Before I patched it, I exploited the best bug ever: having a drone abort an extractor, then fly over water.

You can't complain about this anymore. It's perfect!

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

So Few Monitors
It's been almost 5 years since I made any major changes to my main rig. I'm still rocking that Ryzen 1800x, and that surround sound system. I upgraded from 32 GB to 64 GB RAM soon after building it, so it's ready for serious server things, and playing with RAM drives is fun sometimes. I recently got a breathtaking MSI RX 6800 Gaming X Trio 16GB. My old Acer monitors were still going fine, but 4K is the hot new stuff. I have the mindset that if I'm computing but not looking at a monitor, I'm computing wrong, so monitors are important. (That's why I despise RGB LEDs on literally anything, why I use black monolithic computer cases, and why I use unlabeled, unlit keyboards.) So should I go 4K, or go high refresh rate? Why not both?
WarCraft III
Some time ago, I asked a friend if I could borrow a few games to play on Twentieth Century. Even though he was born in the latter 90s, he's a big fan of 90s games from id and Blizzard. He presented a few Quakes and WarCrafts. I tried playing WarCraft 1, but a few missions in, I got annoyed by the lack of build queues and a 4 unit select limit. I got a bit further in WarCraft 2, but sometimes ran out of resources before getting an army off the ground. Back in the bad old days, I had downloaded and played the WarCraft III demo quite a bit, and I remember liking it a lot better. While the base Reign of Chaos game installed and ran fine on Twentieth Century, the Frozen Throne expansion refused to install, complaining about hardware requirements, even though it ostensibly met them. So I installed these on my main rig, and this article is about the originals; not about the new Reforged remaster.
Fallout
And now for another game from Twentieth Century. Fallout is a fairly old game that every other game nerd seems to be continually high on. And by "old game", I mean "game franchise". I wonder how many of them have actually played the first one.
EarthSiege2
Twentieth Century is starting to show real returns on my investment. I can honestly say that I'm starting to enjoy it, and its being all that I wanted it to be. Unfortuantely, there seems to be a lack of USB ports. They tend to come in handy when I have all the ports used up and want to get a screenshot off it.
Papers, Please
Papers, Please is a bureaucrat simulator where you man a border checkpoint in a fictional totalitarian country during the late cold war. Gameplay mostly involves examining people's passports and other entry documents and calling 'gotcha' on them. Otherwise, you let them through if you can't find anything or you're lazy.
Project Twentieth Century: Planning