do you know if your new sound card or other Asus Xonars come with MIDI support, would be very useful for Dosbox and old games. Soundblaster X-fi cards apparently still have it, but i'm not sure if i want to buy from that company again after reading about their terrible driver support and business practices (also: lol @ share price).

wing commander 2 and syndicate are great, the other two i thought were kind of awkward. i always had 600+ kb of conventional memory, even with cdrom drivers loaded, due to the power of Memmaker and various tips from pc magazines.

i have had one sound card in my whole life, a cheap Soundblaster 16 Vibra (ISA) which I used in three PCs from ~1995 until 2003. since then i have only had onboard audio. i have been thinking about getting an actual sound card again, but apparently soundblasters aren't so good anymore and they're overpriced, so if do buy one it will probably be an Asus Xonar of some kind.

it's about ownership and being able to touch something. it's about power and control. also authenticity. downloading and having a mass of stupid old files on your hard drive = lame.

for psychological reasons i don't torrent games and movies anymore, i buy them from ebay or amazon (marketplace). owning a physical cdrom just feels much better. then i emulate everything using dosbox, scummvm, uae or bochs. i don't use gog/steam/random appstore either.

i think you see where i'm going with this.

privateer 2 was great until the middle of the game when it became too difficult and i always got swarmed by enemies with no way to escape. iirc my copy of privateer 2 came with both dos and win95 executables. tie fighter was also great but then george lucas happened.

outpost had an interesting concept but they cut 1/3 of the features that were mentioned on the box and in the manual, then added them two years later with a patch (which i couldn't get because we had no internet in 1996). even if you patch it it's still buggy and has a shitty win 3.x interface and nothing ever happens.

i wish they would make more lemmings and simcity games. also space 4x/flight sim/trading games.

shareware > open source software

Watcom > gcc

i bought more old shareware magazines, also a collection of more than 200 amiga games on cdrom, a collection of more than 500 pc games (most of them arkanoid and tetris clones and such but also some good games like Privateer), etc.

i also bought Sim City 2000, Lemmings, Xmas Lemmings, Worms, Pirates!, Ascendancy and many other fine games for DOS. also Outpost which was a shitty game but which still fascinates me for some reason.

i need to acquire more M.U.L.E. clones and shareware astronomy programs for DOS.

i have decided to use yahoo from now on instead of that modern google nonsense.

i enjoy watching spaghetti westerns while eating actual spaghetti.

book recommendation: Crimes of Persuasion: Schemes, Scams, Frauds

i saw that article, it made me very sad. i hope it's a troll because i don't think i could bear living in a world with broken people such as this. also drupal.