u/XenonOfArcticus — reddlx

▲ 167 r/dosgaming+4 crossposts

LAN-LOK: Living as a sysadmin at an isolated Antarctic research station in the early 90s [DOS game]

So, in the early 90s I was a PCTECH at McMurdo station, Antarctica and worked alongside a guy named Al Oxton. There was a game we (the InfoSys group) played for fun on DOS (we were all DOS + NetWare at the time) called LAN-LOK that Al had brought from Palmer station (the smallest US Antarctic base). He didn't write it, but he was the antagonist of the game.

I kept a copy on floppy for many years and later moved it to my archival hard drive and eventually noticed it on my NAS last year. I decided to try to reconstruct and document the known history of it, since it appears to be the holy grail of lost media -- lost POLAR media.

https://alphapixeldev.com/lan-lok-the-antarctic-dos-sabotage-game-lost-for-34-years-part-1/

I include the actual EXE and instructions for how to play it under DOSBox, so you can play today!

I contacted all the guilty parties (the original authors) and they no longer have the source or executable and gave me permission to do whatever I wished with it.

In the future, I'd like to decompile it, revise it so it can be played natively on modern platforms like Linux, Windows, Mac and maybe web, and open-source the results. Maybe put it on Steam as a free game for fun. Anyone wishing to participate in that, let me know.

I hope you enjoy it. The game is actually fun in the sense that it's very on-point for 90s LAN interaction (manually typing hostnames, costly typos, chaos).

u/XenonOfArcticus — 7 days ago

▲ 745 r/WRX

Ok, which of you was this? [Colorado]

Walk of shame.

Nice paint job.

Hope everybody was OK.

u/XenonOfArcticus — 9 days ago

▲ 212 r/JetLagTheGame

Visiting the historic landmarks of Edinburgh

Challenge completed successfully.

I feel like the gang should contact the current resident and put a qr code in the window for donations to the current occupant for pints at Greyfriars' Bobby pub around the other side.

u/XenonOfArcticus — 10 days ago

▲ 3 r/Solterra

Is there any trick to getting Evgo chargers to work ok (23 Solterra) ? We've got several with CCS charging up but couldn't get any to configure parameters and start charging.

Charepoint charger up the street worked instantly.

Seems like lots of Solterra people struggle with Evgo.

reddit.com

u/XenonOfArcticus — 18 days ago

▲ 24 r/GraphicsProgramming

Hey all,

I have a mentoring Discord and a few people had asked about learning low level graphics library/driver development. Also, a buddy of mine is writing a 3d driver for safety critical embedded environments using the Intel chipset.

So I decided to write up a lightweight graphics driver / library writing curriculum in my spare time. It's going to use mock graphics hardware emulated by a library and displaying in a OS window. This makes it easy to focus on the driver/library programming part and not the setting up and caring for an actual embedded embedded hardware environment.

I've written the first lesson, which uses my prewritten dumb frsmebuffer graphics hardware emulation and lets the student learn about what it's like writing to a dumb VGA 24bit framebuffer that has no real driver or library support. I use glfw or sdl3 to display the emulation output.

Later lessons will develop a 2d and maybe even primitive 3d software library, and then progress to working with an emulator that behaves like actual 2d assisted blitting and line draw/fill (I'm an old Amiga guy). Later we might add basic 3d GPU support like the early pre-shader cards like the Voodoo and s3 and such.

Eventually we might get to writing an actual basic Linux kernal graphics driver if I have the time and energy.

I'm looking for a few folks of varying experience levels to test lesson 1 (the dumb framebuffer exercises) on Windows, Linux and Mac (oh, should work on Rpi and other SBC machines too if they have graphics display somehow).

It will be all open source on Github (branch with lesson 1 is there already).

If you are interested, reply here and I'll pm you the Discord link. Not posting it publicly because I get knuckleheads when I do.

reddit.com

u/XenonOfArcticus — 19 days ago

▲ 9 r/whatisthiscar

I genuinely have no idea what this is. Hood badge didn't look familiar at all. Styling does not look American, but left had drive so not British.

Yeah, that's Sonic back behind it.

u/XenonOfArcticus — 21 days ago