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Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer

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Re: Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer

#51

Post by osigurdson »

krumpet wrote: post #5
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #3

I remember when I was 6 and my dad brought home an Osbourne for me to play with. Just using CPM felt like dungeon diving to this weird world where you might find a loot in the form of a game or something.

I completely agree with this comment. I could have spent all day on my C64 without even having a game to play or knowing how to code beyond PRINT and GOTO. Hacking around on a computer back in the 80s made me feel like I was part of a secret club and that, at any moment, I was going to live out War Games or some such (especially once we had a modem). The possibilities seemed limitless!

One thing that modern computing has never been able to replicate is instant on. Literally press power button - thing is running. Nothing like having part of your memory address space mapped directly to ROM. No updates and no second chances!

Re: Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer

#52

Post by I_Am_Nous »

thot_experiment wrote: post #30
antx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that seems like the ideal candidate for a RAM drive, doesn't it?

Ramdisks are extremely slept on, there is a lot of stuff you can kludge with a ramdisk in a pinch. I had to do some video stream processing the other day and I didn't have time. So I just made a ramdisk and read/wrote jpegs at 30fps, yeah it's stupid as hell, but it worked when I needed it to and that's what matters.

When my SSD was failing (ran out of writes) I used a RAMdisk to edit audio for something. It worked great for that since I couldn't do it otherwise!

Re: Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer

#53

Post by dylan604 »

ikari_pl wrote: post #43
krumpet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried conveying the same to my teen children. It went over like a lead zeppelin.

so it IS only in our heads? on the other hand, nobody would read a manual these days anymore...

i wouldn't say in our heads like we made it up, but it's just an experience that you cannot replicate if you've already experienced modern computing. growing up and experiencing the changes from analog to digital, dial-up to always on gigabit, 8bit to 64bit address space, 8bit color to 32bit, 8bit audio to 24bit, is all different because we have that frame of reference so it means more to us.

also, i didn't read manuals back then. i didn't know where they were. closest to a manual i had were Byte magazines

Re: Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer

#54

Post by dylan604 »

System 7 used to have a 99 level limit on nested folders. as bored teens, we'd do stupid things like nest folders to that 99 deep limit. in the bottom folder, create an apple script file that would force the user to okay/cancel a silly comment. "Click Okay/Accept If you agree dylan604 is the greatest" kind of stupid. Clicking cancel would do nothing, so that you had to click okay to continue. We'd then make this as a startup item. We'd then use an app to make the apple script file hidden, then go up a folder to make the folder hidden, go up a level and make the folder hidden, x99 kind of thing. i can't remember if there was something about the folders being hidden that prevented just nuking the stack from the upper level, or if it really was that simple to clear.

Re: Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer

#55

Post by schoen »

dylan604 wrote: post #54

System 7 used to have a 99 level limit on nested folders. as bored teens, we'd do stupid things like nest folders to that 99 deep limit. in the bottom folder, create an apple script file that would force the user to okay/cancel a silly comment. "Click Okay/Accept If you agree dylan604 is the greatest" kind of stupid. Clicking cancel would do nothing, so that you had to click okay to continue. We'd then make this as a…

I think you might not have been able to drag such a stack into the Trash, as the Trash was actually a folder and that would have been 100 levels deep (temporarily, before emptying the Trash).

Re: Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer

#58

Post by wsc981 »

sudobash1 wrote: post #37
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #3

I remember when I was 6 and my dad brought home an Osbourne for me to play with. Just using CPM felt like dungeon diving to this weird world where you might find a loot in the form of a game or something.

When I got my first PC (a Linux Eee PC netbook), I remember opening an xterm and typing each letter of the alphabet, one at a time and hitting TAB-TAB to see all the commands that start with that letter. Not an efficient way to learn how to use bash, but it was exciting. The biggest hurdle for me was figuring out "how do I open a file?" I could cd around and ls, but what if I wanted to open a .doc in openoffice? Ther…

A nice thing about Apple’s Terminal is the open [0] command. I miss that in Windows Powershell and would likely miss it in Linux as well.

———

[0]: https://scriptingosx.com/2017/02/the-macos-open-command/

Re: Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer

#59

Post by ivolimmen »

wsc981 wrote: post #58
sudobash1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got my first PC (a Linux Eee PC netbook), I remember opening an xterm and typing each letter of the alphabet, one at a time and hitting TAB-TAB to see all the commands that start with that letter. Not an efficient way to learn how to use bash, but it was exciting. The biggest hurdle for me was figuring out "how do I open a file?" I could cd around and ls, but what if I wanted to open a .doc in openoffice? Ther…

A nice thing about Apple’s Terminal is the open [0] command. I miss that in Windows Powershell and would likely miss it in Linux as well. ——— [0]: https://scriptingosx.com/2017/02/the-macos-open-command/

Linux and windows also have this command. Under windows it is called start. Under Linux it is called open as well.

Re: Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer

#60

Post by rkagerer »

osigurdson wrote: post #51
krumpet wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with this comment. I could have spent all day on my C64 without even having a game to play or knowing how to code beyond PRINT and GOTO. Hacking around on a computer back in the 80s made me feel like I was part of a secret club and that, at any moment, I was going to live out War Games or some such (especially once we had a modem). The possibilities seemed limitless!

One thing that modern computing has never been able to replicate is instant on. Literally press power button - thing is running. Nothing like having part of your memory address space mapped directly to ROM. No updates and no second chances!

I'd love to reinvent computing from scratch and fix this. There's no good reason it should take so (comparatively) long for modern PC's to boot. It's a symptom of all the complexity grafted on over the decades.
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