The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

The Utility of Old Boxes

"Huh?" you ask. But more on that later.

Firstly. It's been a boring enough week. Finished both Epic 32 and Epic 33. Reports will happen when the closing dates arrive. We may or may not see one for Epic 34, given that I'm now up for my second reign in the HRE MT:W game (You Tonto readers - read. Give comments!) and needing to work on the Redoran Mod.

So, over the weekend, we had relatives up from CA. Not sure what they are, cousins or something. Nice old couple. Talked geneology with Mom a lot. A generally sat around and finished Epic 32 and stayed out of their way. Totally unexciting, actually, except for Dad breaking out some of the old family stories. Those're cool.

Saw Dogma tonight with Laurent and Laura. Good flick, though I'm sure much of it flew over my head, and I'm not quite sure what I took away from the whole experience.

Anyway. The boxes. The vastly important news of the week, better than either Epic, better than relatives, better even than all that MW:DA goings on...

I got Ultima 7 to run.

For those of you that're like "WTF is this Ultima 7 thing and why on earth does he need to MAKE it run? He's got Windows XP, for chrissakes." I say unto you that U7 is one of the greatest computer RPGs ever made. From 1992. I literally grew up on this game. Played it a dozen or so times, played it into the ground. It is, to date, somewhere in my top 5 games. And Samson was nice enough to hook me up with a copy. The problem, of course, is that it's a DOS game with nonstandard memory management, and that the sound is all tweaky. But due to the vast wonders of the Internet, this has been solved.

"Ok, but why the boxes comment?"

I still have the boxes for U7, U7 Part 2, U8, and U9. That's saying something. The only other boxes I kept around were the ones for BG2, AoM, Diablo II (because it's Dad's game), MTW, Neverwinter Nights, and all three Morrowind boxes. Everything but the U7-8 boxes is less than 5 years old. At any rate, I still have the manuals, reference cards, the cloth map, the strat guides, everything. There's a pizza stain on the ref card, and it's yellowing, but I still have the damn thing.

Why does this matter? Copy protection. ;)

But for now, it's 1992 again, and I'm a very excited 12 y/o on a snowy winter morning wandering the snowy mountain peaks of Brittania to rescue the Time Lord. Life is good.

Posted by Dwip at August 5, 2003 3:41 AM