yaaasss feddit.uk #5 spot come on lads get in

I was lucky enough to grow up on this system and there are some absolute bangers out there:

Mission: Shark (or Misja on the European continent): arguably one of the best games on the systems. Silky smooth animation, great gameplay loop, fantastic music. Janusz Pelc at his best.

Rescue on Fractalus: fantastic foray into faux-3D. You’ll never forget the first time you picked up your first “pilot”…

H.E.R.O: finely balanced, a great time killer.

Encounter: far beyond it’s years, the precursor to open world games

Fred: another J Pelc masterpiece. Great platformer.

Star Raiders II: beautiful shooter. The space shoot em’ ups of today can trace their combat gameplay directly back here.

Lode Runner: one of the best and smoothest implementations of this game, along with…

Chuckie Egg: the original and best.

Zybex: a competent shooter with some of the best chiptunes you’ll ever hear.

Blinky’s Scary School: bastard hard, but full of British humour.

Fort Apocalypse: fantastic shooter, with stunning graphics and a blue doppelganger helicopter that will give you nightmares.

Rally Speedway: takes the top down racer formula, tightens the controls, makes it prettier, and gives you a level editor too. Brilliant.

River Rescue: River Raid but better, and if you disagree then you’re entitled to your wrong opinion.

Have fun!

You’ve hit the nail on the head there.

I had a Flip3 as a way of trying to kick my QWERTY habit, and it was cool as fuck. It’s a great conversation starter (if you like starting conversations!), it’s a lovely form factor to carry in it’s folded state, and no matter what anyone says, it’s satisfying as fuck to end a particularly heated call by slamming the phone shut.

Other than that though… it’s just a decent phone. No better or worse than anything else aside from the irritating bloatware.

The hinge was weak as fuck and two of my devices suffered screen bleed from the hinge, but then that was nearly five generations of Flip ago.

“great start, now go for the lead!” 🏁

“knock knock”

“Who’s there”

“The interrupting cow”

“The interrupting cow wh…” “MOOOOOOO”

Fancy new Wet Ass Filter

I was (and still am really) shit with analogue sticks. I got fairly good at playing Quake II on PlayStation with the lookup/lockdown mapped to L1 and R1. Same as the original Quake on PC, never really used +mouselook coming from Doom, just mapped them to buttons near the firing keys.

The dual-stick setup is much more intuitive though in fairness.

whatcha gonna do

when lemmymania runs wild

on you?

Lotus WordPro or bust

Lubuntu brother reppin’

My poor 2011 laptop is begging for the sweet release of death, but not before Linux keeps performing CPR on it.

I’ll be honest, I used Windows XP fairly extensively then switched to Lubuntu while learning about Windows 7. My workplace moved from NT4 to Windows 7, and then to Windows 10 which is the only versions I’ve had serious exposure to.

My only real experience of Vista and 8 has been installing it on folk’s devices, patching them to a current state, and Ninite-ing them full of handy applications.

Nah I agree, but if every incremental release was included then you’d need a 55" monitor in portrait orientation to see them all!

I’ve not really thought about the Star Trek films. I enjoyed them all (even Nemesis!) with the exception of ST4: The Voyage Home.

I’m afraid I can’t speak authoritatively on the subject, however taking a step back - MS do have a record for driving hardware uptake with their system releases.

In theory it’s not a bad thing - Unreal and Quake II (among many) requiring 3D accelerator hardware largely drove PC gaming into the lead for cutting edge graphics - but the type of hardware MS have been requiring has always been a bit of a clusterfuck - a prime recent example being the supposed requirement of a TPM board in a Win11 computer.

My anecdotal experience is that Vista - while pretty - is a bit of a bloatfest regardless of what hardware you run it on.

Would it? If I’m already a user on a local device, surely my parental code would suffice and turn a ludicrous process into a one (and a half) step process?

Ah I remember upgrading from 98SE to Millennium Edition and it was just ass. That said, I reformatted and installed Me and used the 98 CD to pass the upgrade check, and I had very few issues with it. Shit like System Restore was gash - in fact, any of the new tools installed with Me were awful - but I just effectively used it as 98 Third Edition and it did the job nicely for me.

I agree that 95 was a big - if not monumental - step up in graphics interface driven OSes… but the first few releases were unstable as fuck. Whether it was horrendous shutdown issues because ACPI support was super flaky at the time, to trying to run com/com as a command to insta-bluescreen the system. The latter is so much of an edge case though that I almost cut myself typing it.

Jesus, my son wanted to add a classmate as a friend on Xbox Live last night. It should have been a two step process from a parent perspective: Authenticate, then authorise (though the lad was delegated the task of the latter technically).

When he tried to add the friend, I had to:

1. Enter my parental code (fair enough);
2. Enter my Microsoft Account password because it was apparently a transaction involving personal data;
3. Scan the QR code to do this on another device (admittedly optional);
4. Enter the email address of my MS account;
5. Enter the 2FA code emailed to me;
6. Stop the passkey creation process;
7. Confirm that I didn’t want a passkey;
8. Skip the age verification;
9. Turn off the personalised ads

Just so he could get to the point where he could select “add as a friend”, what the actual fuck

Yes… and no.

Microsoft’s operating systems have been very hit or miss - certainly their consumer operating systems - with the classic rule being “every other one is decent”:

• Windows ✅
• Windows 2.0 ❌
• Windows 3.11 ✅
• Windows 95 ❌ (but in fairness it was a good crack, OSR2 was decent)
• Windows 98 ✅
• Windows Me ❌ (unless it was a clean install, the upgrade was horrific)
• Windows XP ✅
• Windows Vista ❌
• Windows 7 ✅
• Windows 8 ❌
• Windows 10 ✅
• Windows 11❌

The more business focussed OS’s like Windows for Workgroups, NT4, and 2000 were rock solid in fairness.

Their business practices have always been shady as fuck too. Embrace, extend, extinguish is firmly burned into computer hobbyists minds.

The Passport was actually a really decent phone but the jokes did get old.

“When are you going to wall-mount your phone?”

“fucking hell that will kill someone if you drop it”

“you don’t need to send that text, that person can fucking read it from here!”

etc etc etc

I’m glad you mentioned the bugs. I was slowly leaning towards it but I’ve done my fair bit of… “unpaid beta testing” for one lifetime.

I miss my BlackBerry phones. The Titan range was cool but buggy as well. If they could just do a Nothing phone with a QWERTY keyboard, I would literally buy one overnight.

Get on. Love it. I’m pretty sure the quality and efficacy of cracks and warez were directly proportional to how hard the mad chiptunez hit.

It wasn’t a real crack unless your eardrums had been blown out by an impromptu 16-bit EDM sesh.