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#netrek

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Replied to R.L. Dane :Debian: :OpenBSD: 🍵

@rl_dane @dfloyd888

> I started doing an experiment to play with an Amiga 500 in an emulator and pretend I got that in Dec 1989, rather than a Macintosh SE, but I abandoned the experiment because it didn't seem quite as well made for productivity work, even though the OS was amazing and lovely.

sounds like a lot of fun. related, have you tried the olde computer challenge? a lot of the people at merveilles.town and i think bsd.cafe have done this. likely not as significant as going back to an amiga500 but it's a good time. i do this on the weekends on an ancient thinkpad.

> Was it the handspring visor with the phone cartridge-like thing? The VisorPhone? That thing was LEGIT.

that's it. it was a lot of fun to use. i remember when i first got it i was at a birthday party in a high-rise and people thought i was some sort of spy with this thing.

> I had a "backpack" device that was basically an acoustic coupler for my #Palm IIIx. It came with an app for email so I could read and reply to emails on the go, and then grab the backpack device out of my bag, hold it up to the office handset, and then it would sync my email.

this sounds somewhat like the sharp device that pocketmail sold. which was a little pda-like device that had a literal acoustic coupler modem to send/receive email. i had one of these myself and it was $19/mo for email service (remember when email addresses were important?)

> That was insane. The FREEDOM! lol

i think technically we still have it, but the current state of software, hardware, and the internet is messy imho.

> I got to enjoy the SparcStations at UT Austin along with @dfloyd888 in the summer and fall of '92. Great fun, sweet machines, and I failed all my classes because of #Netrek!!!! lol

i fell into them at berkeley around the same time. netrek was fun. in many ways it reminds me of bolo on mac if you remember that one.

> Mac OS X was a dream unix OS for a while, but I don't relate to it anymore. It's been so iOSified. Hard pass.

before it was officially osx there was the "osx project" where apple was working to make this happen. i remember seeing cabinets at level3 dc in the region i worked in dedicated to this. who knew it would be come a thing. back then i tried using it and it was okay for me. now macos feels like a culture statement.

> Have you tried the BSDs? They have a lot of sweet classic BSD feels, especially Open and Net. FreeBSD is great, but it's more of a manual effort to get XOrg running, but the handbook is great.

typing to you from an openbsd machine. also have freebsd in the mix. on the linux side i tend to focus on alpine since i have this really bad minimalism quirk. but when not running that i'll use debian.

Replied to Δж➂ 🇨🇳

@ax3

I started doing an experiment to play with an Amiga 500 in an emulator and pretend I got that in Dec 1989, rather than a Macintosh SE, but I abandoned the experiment because it didn't seem quite as well made for productivity work, even though the OS was amazing and lovely.

Was it the handspring visor with the phone cartridge-like thing? The VisorPhone? That thing was LEGIT.

I had a "backpack" device that was basically an acoustic coupler for my #Palm IIIx. It came with an app for email so I could read and reply to emails on the go, and then grab the backpack device out of my bag, hold it up to the office handset, and then it would sync my email.

That was insane. The FREEDOM! lol

I got to enjoy the SparcStations at UT Austin along with @dfloyd888 in the summer and fall of '92. Great fun, sweet machines, and I failed all my classes because of #Netrek!!!! lol

Mac OS X was a dream unix OS for a while, but I don't relate to it anymore. It's been so iOSified. Hard pass.

Have you tried the BSDs? They have a lot of sweet classic BSD feels, especially Open and Net. FreeBSD is great, but it's more of a manual effort to get XOrg running, but the handbook is great.

Replied in thread

@amin @ivan @sotolf @dm

Debian also keeps a lot of old software alive that doesn't seem to exist elsewhere except as source.

#Netrek is a great example of this.

I really wish other people played it. I'm literally the only one using that hashtag, last I checked. Oh, one other person, who I think was replying to me ;)

It was the first online multiplayer game, and it's still a lot of fun.

Replied to Michael Rawdon

@mrawdon

Wow, I was never that serious about it, lol

I know there's a windows client, but I don't think any of the clients have been touched in years.

The X client is pretty long in the tooth, and actually runs a little better if you run it through the 'cpulimit' utility. It doesn't know how to deal with all the free CPU cycles. It just flickers a ton.

Desperately needs an SDL rewrite, which would be cross-platform, to boot.

I'd love to see a revival <3

Replied to R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:

@RL_Dane #Netrek is the one game where I took a systematic approach to improving my skills. I spent about 4-6 months playing only the transport ship. Once I’d gotten pretty good at fighting most other ships with the transport (as well as cloaking and transporting armies), I went back to playing the heavy cruiser and I felt just about invincible.

* Wardriving (Wargames)
* Lord of the Pings
* The Lion, The Witch, and the Server Closet
* II: The Wrath of Ogg
* The Matrix Server
* IP Wars I: The Copyright Menace
* IP Wars II: Attack of the Patent Trolls
* IP Wars III: Revenge of the MPAA
* IP Wars IV: A Torrent Hope
* IP Wars V: The Lawyers Strike Back
* IP Wars VI: Return of the Copyleft
* Tron and Troff
* Raiders of the Lost PARC
* Carmack Jones and the Temple of DOOM


...

Replied in thread

@kumachan @saidsoftly@retro.social

Ok. :D

You're the first person who's ever mentioned doing assembly on SPARC, although I can't say I've met a lot of people who've worked with SPARC.

I played around with them in university 30 years ago, but mainly just for and XD

Man, I'm literally the only person who's mention (by hashtag) in all of the fediverse for at least the past six months?

Sad. :(

I don't want Netrek to be forgotten. It was the first great network group-play video game.