Archives for The Runes of Binaria

Return of the Underdogs!

Published on April 16, 2009

Up until February of this year, there was a cool Web site called Home of the Underdogs. It was a massive archive related to computer games of the 1980’s and 1990’s — the now-forgotten small-budget “underdog” games from before the Windows 95/98/XP era. I regard the early ’90’s as the Golden Age of computer games, when titles such as X-Com, Master of Orion, and Pool of Radiance occupied way too many of the hours I should have spent studying.

Home of the Underdogs featured reviews of those classic games, but I would say its primary purpose was to provide free downloads of games that were no longer available for sale — so-called “abandonware.”

Abandonware

Abandonware is software that is still protected by copyright, but whose copyright holder is no longer in business. The software is in a kind of legal limbo where no one can sell it. Downloading abandonware is very probably a violation of copyright law. Yet it was certainly possible to download abandonware from the old Home of the Underdogs Web site.

I do not recommend anyone go out and download a bunch of abandonware willy-nilly. It’s probably not legal. What I really think is that copyright laws should be changed so that once the copyright owner goes out of business, the copyright expires (unless it was sold or legally transferred).

Now, if you happened to have bought the software at one point, and lost or thrown away the original disks, it becomes a lot less clear-cut whether downloading a new copy is legal or not. Technically, it’s still against copyright law, and if the original publishers were still in business, they would tell you so. However, one could make a case that downloading a replacement copy falls under the doctrine of Fair Use. I’m not a legal expert, and I’m not aware of this ever being tested in court. Suffice to say, downloading a replacement copy is possibly legitimate — but if you get into legal trouble for doing so, don’t tell the judge I told you to do it!

New Life for Old Software

Why would anyone want to download 20-year-old games that run on MS-DOS? Simple: they’re fun, and there is a wonderful piece of software called DOSBox that lets you run classic games (or other programs) on a modern computer. Once I discovered DOSBox, I suddenly wished I hadn’t thrown out my old floppy disks for all those great games.

Son of the Underdog?

As I mentioned earlier, the original Home of the Underdogs site went permanently offline in February, 2009. But all is not lost! A new, replacement site is now online and growing. Its address is www.hotud.org.

Update: Legally Obtaining Classic Games

There is at least one company that still sells classic, 20th century computer games: www.gog.com. If you know of any others, please leave a comment.

Filed in Computer Games | No replies

Wizards of the Coasts Abruptly Suspends Sales of PDFs

Published on April 8, 2009

This morning, I received in my inbox a message from Paizo Publishing that Wizards of the Coast insists they immediately stop selling PDFs of D&D gaming supplements. Later in the day I discovered that RPGnow and other online game stores had received the same demand. Presumably this came without a lot of advance notice.

Wizards of the Coast is within their rights to do this, but I do not think it was a smart move. A lot of gamers rely heavily on PDF books and spend quite a bit of money on them. It seems unlikely that customers who were still buying Wizards of the Coast PDFs — all Third Edition — will take their gaming dollars and invest them in new 4E hardcover books instead. More likely, they will switch to buying non-WotC PDFs and/or unauthorized downloading of D&D books.

Let’s face it: D&D 4E is not the roaring success that 3E was. That is probably because it is not as good a game. Cutting off sales of a superior product to divert customers to an inferior product is never a good move. It reminds me of what Microsoft did to WIndows XP when Vista came out.

Like Microsoft, Wizards of the Coast is alienating once-loyal customers. Unlike Microsoft, its dominant position in the marketplace really is vulnerable. Instead of learning from the makes of TSR, Wizards of the Coast seems to be doing all it can to repeat them. It’s stumbling toward irrelevancy.

Filed in Roleplaying Games | No replies

Should You Buy a 64-Bit Computer? (version 2)

Published on April 5, 2009

Last week I posted an article about 64-bit computers but I don’t feel it was well-written. Here follows a second attempt to explain the important points without going into a lot of technical detail too early.

Should You Buy a 64-Bit Computer? (version 2) continued »

Filed in Computers | No replies

Should You Upgrade to a 64-bit Computer?

Published on March 28, 2009

Major PC makers, such as dell, now offer 64-bit computers. If you are getting ready for a new computer, you may wonder whether a 64-bit machine is for you.

Should You Upgrade to a 64-bit Computer? continued »

Filed in Computers | No replies

Sharing E-mail on a Dual Boot Machine

Published on January 31, 2009

I primarily use ubuntu linux on my home computer but I do have some Windows software that I still want to use (Medieval 2 Total War springs to mind). In Ubuntu it is easy to set up a computer in a dual-boot configuration, so whenever one turns it on, one can choose to boot either Linux or Windows.

One of the frustrations of the dual-boot configuration is that I often find myself in Windows, but all my saved e-mail is on the Linux part of the disk (which WIndows can’t see). There is a fairly easy way to fix this problem, though. This post explains how to share e-mail between Windows and Unix.

Sharing E-mail on a Dual Boot Machine continued »

Filed in Computers | No replies

Microsoft Applies for Patent on Pay-As-You-Go Computing

Published on December 30, 2008

I first read it on slashdot, but more mainstream media like cnn.com are now also reporting that Microsoft has applied for a patent on “Pay-As-You-Go” computing. At this point, it’s only a patent application, so the sky is not falling, yet.

The idea seems pretty straightforward. Instead of having software installed on your computer in your home or office, users will log into a Web site and run a word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail application, game, or whatever. That idea is not, in itself, new. Google Apps has been offering software-as-a-service for years now. What’s new in Microsoft’s patent application are two new ideas:

1. Microsoft will charge by the hour for this new software-as-a-service. And the charge will be significant: measured in dollars per hour, not pennies.
2. Much scarier, in my opinion, the patent also covers paying for the functionality of the hardware — CPU, graphics card, network interface — by the hour. The reason this is scary is that in order to do this, Microsoft will have to have total control of every component inside a user’s computer, and the power to turn that component off if the user doesn’t pay whatever fee Microsoft demands.

This is not (just) Microsoft-basing on my part. If any other company — Apple, IBM, Google, Joe’s Fast Software Company — had applied for a patent like this, I’d be worried. Here is the problem.

I can remember a time when if you bought something, you owned it. For instance, I have bought books, and I own them. I can re-sell those books on E-Bay if I want, or loan them to a friend, or donate them to a public library. Most importantly, I can read them again without having to pay again. Likewise, I bought audio CD’s (and audio cassettes and vinyl LP’s, for that matter), and I can play them in my house, on a Walkman, in my car, or wherever, whenever I want. All for one fee. Those times are rapidly slipping into the past.

Think of everything you use a computer for. Think of all the data you think you own and consider yours: your photos, your financial records, those embarrassing and highly personal e-mail messages from an ex-romantic interest that you’ve saved, your digital music, everything. Under this concept of computer “rental,” it won’t be yours. Your key to all that data, not to mention the world of communication and information that the Internet provides, will be in the hands of one company, and that company will be in a position to charge you an arm and a leg for that data. If you don’t pay the fee, they can deny you access. If you don’t pay the fee, they can, in effect, shut down your hard drive. That’s what this patent says. Your data will be hostage to the toll collector. If the price goes up, you’ll have to pay it, or say good-bye to your data.

Once this system comes into being, I guarantee you’ll be trapped forever if you sign up for it. The company will control the basic operations of your computer, so it can allow or deny permission to do certain things depending on what fees you’ve paid. Since the company has this level of control already, it is a simple matter for them to simply stop you from copying your files to another computer (one that doesn’t require metered usage).

Now, people might be OK with this concept if the fee is reasonable. But I’m not — not at any price. My work, my hobbies, my financial records, my video collection — they’re mine, dammit, and if anyone wants to lock me out of them, they’ll do it over my dead body. I am reminded of Richard Stallman’s story, The Right to Read. When Stallman published that story in 1997, a lot of people laughed at it.

Don’t laugh. It’s happening.

Filed in Computers | No replies

Best game-planning aid, ever

Published on December 11, 2008

What’s faster than a gaming Wiki? More powerful than a random dungeon generator? Able to help you plan entire game sessions in a single hour? Look! Out on the Web! It’s a game aid! It’s a presentation tool! It’s… IHMC CmapTools!

The Institute for and Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) is a research center that studies how computers can facilitate and empower the human thought process. I am working with IHMC on a joint research project at work, but I first heard of CmapTools from a completely different source: an old friend of mine who is a practicing psychiatrist.

CmapTools is a very interesting computer program that helps organize ideas and visually represent their inter-relationships. It’s simple on the surface — all it does is draw diagrams — but innovative in that these diagrams, called “concept maps,” are based on principles of cognitive psychology. A concept map is a natural learning aid because it organizes information in much the same way our brains naturally do. Contrast this with (for example) Microsoft Powerpoint.

I’ve used CmapTools at work for software design. But I use it more frequently at home, for game planning. It’s a great “sandbox” for figuring out how the characters, scenes, and events in a game session connect together to create a meaningful plot.

Here is an example of a very simple concept map. This concept map is a quick-and-dirty replacement for a section of dungeon map.

Concept maps illustrate the essential inter-relationships between arbitrary concepts

Example concept map applied to D&D

Notice how the concept map puts emphasis on the relationships between rooms, rather than the size and shape of each. When planning a game on a tight schedule, I find it’s more important to get the overall flow of the adventure figured out, rather than worry about the size and shape of each individual room.

Concept maps have an unlimited number of uses. For instance, they would probably be a great way to capture player’s notes after a game session. They have non-gaming uses as well: imagine mapping a menu of meals for the week and the ingredients each requires, to make a grocery list. Concept maps are an abstract, general-purpose aid to recording, learning, and experimenting with complex relationships.

Filed in Computers,Roleplaying Games | No replies

Morgana, Bane of Ubuntu

Published on September 1, 2008

About a year ago I switched to using Ubuntu Linux as my primary operating system. I like Ubuntu a lot, and I’ll probably write more about it later. There is, however, one oddity about Ubuntu, which I can’t explain. It seems to be incompatible with my cat Morgana.

The Linux-Destroying Cat

Morgana sleeping on top of the computer desk. She only looks innocent.

The first incident came within a couple weeks after we adopted Morgana (and her brother, Merlin).  Morgana pranced across my keyboard as kittens are wont to do, and somehow hit a keystroke combination that changed the input language to Tamil.  So I would type a Roman letter on the keyboard and a Tamil character would appear on the screen.  It turns out this was quite a pain in the neck to fix because I had to search the Web to find how to reset the language, yet I couldn’t type readable English into the search engine.

Well, Morgana has done it again.  Last night she scampered across my keyboard, and immediately my monitor looked like this:

Morgana shifted my root window nine inches to the left. How!?

Notice how half the monitor is blank, and only half of the desktop is visible — and, I would point out, the wrong half! The half with the menu on it that opens up settings I could change to fix this problem? That’s the half that’s off the edge of the screen. Moving the mouse did not cause the screen to scroll to the left so I could get at those menus.

I am at a complete loss to explain how she did this. I’m using the KDE desktop (from the kubutu version of Ubuntu) with compiz as my window manager and the Emerald theme manager. There are a lot of keyboard controls for compiz but I would never have imagined one that does that.

Even worse — KDE was set up to preserve all changes to my desktop settings, so logging out and logging back in didn’t fix the problem. My desktop was permanently skewed 50% to the left, courtesy of Morgana.

The solution was simple, but only because the problem occurred on Linux. Almost all Linux applications are configured via text files. KDE is a Linux application and follows that convention. Therefore, I was able to log in via a failsafe terminal session (which doesn’t launch the KDE desktop) and edit the text files containing Morgana’s configuration change. If I were really a KDE whiz, no doubt I could have found and reversed the one change she made. As it was, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time or effort on this, so I simply backed up and then deleted the configuration files. Sure enough, when I started KDE again after that, the desktop session manager didn’t find any saved configurations, so it automatically created new ones and saved them for me.

Technically, I lost all my personalized settings such as my desktop wallpaper and menu customizations. But those settings are not really lost because they’re in the backups of those text-formatted configuration files that I made. If I wanted to spend the time and effort, I could use Linux text-searching tools like grep and diff to find what Morgana had changed in my old files, undo that, and then restore my old settings. I happen to think it will be quicker and easier to re-create my custom settings than to try to make sense out of those configuration files, but the point is that I have a choice.

The principle that Linux uses text files to configure applications may seem simple, perhaps even quaint to a modern user who’s familiar with configuration wizards and graphical control panels. When that principle is applied consistently throughout the thousands of configuration files on the computer, though, the benefits are huge. Configuration information is exposed to the user; it’s easy to search, easy to back up, and easy to change even if there’s something seriously wrong with the desktop display (for example). That’s one of the reasons I prefer Linux.

Filed in Cats,Computers | No replies

Thoughts on the Boston Subway Hack

Published on August 26, 2008

This happened while I was on vacation, so by now it is rather old news. That won’t stop me from sounding off about it, though.

A couple of weeks ago, now, there was a national news story about a group of MIT students who “hacked the subway system” in Boston. Basically they took a hard look at the electronic “smart” cards (where the word “smart” is defined very loosely) that the Boston transit system uses in lieu of old-fashioned subway tokens. Smart students that they are, they found several ways to tamper with the cards so that one could get through the turnstiles without paying a fare. They wrote a report on their work and wanted to present that report at a computer-security conference. They never got a chance to do that, because the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) sued for an injunction to stop them publicizing their results.

Thoughts on the Boston Subway Hack continued »

Filed in Computer Security | No replies

A Cat Photo

Published on July 31, 2008

Merlin's playful face

I am just recovering from a major re-organization of my computer’s hard drive and I don’t have my full cornucopia of cat photos on disk yet (they’re on a backup DVD).  But this one was on my camera.  This is Merlin demonstrating his trademark “playful face.”

Filed in Cats | No replies