Lmst

Time to highlight a #PC game! Here's #Freelancer, released in 2003. This game was an earlier attempt of Chris Roberts to bring his impressive vision to reality. #StarCitizen's interesting ancestry is interesting to revisit and explore, even today.
The game isn't for sale anymore, sadly, but it has been picked up by #Abandonware sites.
Do also check out the #DiscoveryFreelancer (https://discoverygc.com) and #LibreLancer (https://librelancer.net/) projects!
#RetroComputing #Gaming #RetroGaming

Photo showing the Freelancer main menu displayed on my Thinkpad X61, with the small physical game box standing next to the laptop. It's a carton box release but as with many games released in the early 2000s and onwards, the box sizes got smaller. This size is about the size of a typical DVD case, though it's twice as thick.

Photo of the opened "gatefold" cover of the physical game box, which shows game screenshots and text blurbs that read like personal diary entries from the in-game protagonist. At the top of the left pane it reads "Failure is not an option." At the bottom of the right pane it continues "But everything else is." The text blurbs are: Stardate 1287.02.13: "My ship is burnt pretty bad. Money is tight. But I picked up a contract to cart some ice to a Liverty Naval base near the Bretonia border. Hope things are turning my way." Stardate 1287.02.24: "A bad break. Got hit by an eco-terrorists group near New Florida. I almost limped to my destination, but pirates hit me again and took almost all my cargo. The Liberty Naval contract is dust." Stardate 1287.03.09: "Things are looking up. Though I've failed my last three Naval contracts, my mistakes have helped the local riff-raff. A group of smugglers in the quadrant offered me a huge contract to run some luxury goods to Rheinland. If I sell the ice I have left I can just repair my ship enough to do the job." Stardate 1287.03.15: "MAde it! Had to dodge the 234th Navy squad, but I flew some convoy protection with them last year so I knew their patterns. Got paid this morning and I'm looking for a better ship for this smuggling work. It is great to be the boss!" Additional text: Your reputation determines how the "living universe" reacts to you. Help out an independence movement and the local Navy will become hostile and vice versa.

On a related note; I took a tiny gamble and ordered this #USBC power dongle thingy and it's been working real nicely with the #X61. Since most of the devices I have use USBC it's really convenient to be able to charge the X61 with a USBC charger too.
I didn't want to actually modify the laptop to add USBC charging, but carrying a small dongle like this is easy enough. Neat!
(Not affiliated) link to where I got mine: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08331PF5R
#Thinkpad #Lenovo #IBM #RetroComputing #DongleLife

A top-down photo showing a USBC to DC charging dongle connected to my Thinkpad X61, with the laptop's power and battery indicator lights both on indicating that it's being powered by the power supply. It's a short dongle, maybe 10 centimeters long, and has the specific barrel plug type this laptop uses on one end, and a USBC female port on the other end.

New (OEM) 8-cell battery came in for the #Thinkpad #X61. I'm using the Lenovo software's built-in functionality to let it do a full charge-discharge-then-charge-again cycle to see what the battery thinks its capacity/health is like. It's a brand new battery so should be good, but it needs to figure that out by itself, so to speak.
It's pretty nice to have it do all this automatically. I can just leave the charger connected while it does its thing. Neat :).
#RetroComputing #Lenovo #IBM

You know what time it is. It's #Maxis time!
Here's a beautiful release filled to the brim with manuals so thick they would make Tolkien blush.
Sadly the disks are 800K Mac formatted so I can't actually read them on my Macs as they are "too modern." I think it's ok if I fetch an image from the Garden in this case 😄️
This was apparently a limited edition, though I don't know how limited it was.
#Macintosh #RetroComputing #ClassicMac #Gaming #RetroGaming #MARCHintosh #SimCity #SimLife #SimAnt

Photo of the big (and rather fat) box release of the "Maxis Collections 1," containing "SimCity Classic," "SimLife," and "SimAnt." The cover has three vector art drawings, each representing one of the games. A large ant, a cityscape with whirlwind behind it, and a bit of a hodgepodge of a bird-like animal with reptile-like tail and kangaroo-like body.

Photo of the back of the box which describes the games included in both English and French, along with one screenshot for each of the included games.

Photo of all the contents of the game box, from some installation related flyers to a quick start guide to three full manuals, one for each game. Sim Life is the thickest of all three. The SimCity manual as-well as all flyers are in black and white, but the manuals for SimAnt and SimLife are in color.

Photo of the "Maxis Collections 1 Limited Edition" certificate, which states that "This certifies that your copy of the SimClassics Collection forms part of a very special limited edition set." The certificate is signed (in print, not by hand) by Sam Poole ("President"), Will Write ("Living Legend"), and Jeff Braun ("CEO").

This came in this morning; a still new in box (shrink wrapped and all) copy of #Dynamix' Heart of China, for Macintosh. The embossed front really looks nice in person.
The box is positively *packed* with extra flyers and booklets. It's so fun when games (used to) come with a bunch of goodies.
I opened this one right away as I wanted to see if the 8 floppy disks the game on still read fine. Fortunately enough, they do!
#RetroGaming #Gaming #RetroComputing #Macintosh #ClassicMac #Sierra

Photo of the big box release of "Heart of China" for Macintosh, a 1991 adventure game developed by Dynamix. The game is still sealed.

Another angle of the front cover of the game box, showing how the main protagonist (Jake "Lucky" Masters) character design on the front cover is embossed.

Photo showing the 8 2.5 inch floppy disks laying on top of a stack of other contents the game comes with.

Photo showing the game being installed on my 15" G4 "Pixar Lamp" iMac

Flashback to last Friday where I had to burn *seven* discs to install a factory fresh XP installation on my "new" #Thinkpad #X61.
I had some trouble getting a generic #WindowsXP SP3 installation disc to work (it kept blue-screening), but as luck would have it some friendly archiver had put the official X61 XP SP2 restore discs on #InternetArchive. Score!
Not entirely sure why #Lenovo thought 6 discs was reasonable though. I guess all the bloatware had to be stored somewhere 😅️
#RetroComputing

Photo showing my Thinkpad X61 with its factory restore recovery progress on-screen. In front of the Thinkpad is one of the burned discs used to start this restore process. To the left of the laptop are two felt markers and some USB sticks, along with my Unihertz Titan Pocket phone that looks like a Blackberry with a hardware keyboard. On the right in the background you can spot part of a European Super Nintendo standing in a cabinet. All this put together kind of give this photo a strong retro vibe, as if it could've been taken sometime in the mid-2000s.

Photo of the seven CDs I had to burn stacked out like a spread out deck of cards. Each CD has "Thinkpad X61 XP Restore X of 6" written on it in felt, with the X being the numbers one through six. The first disc is sub-titled "boot" as it is not technically part of the XP restore set, but the rescue and restore boot environment Lenovo used at the time for these devices.

Progress update on my #Apple #iBook #G3 14" battery rebuild: I... might have actually succeeded? The house is still standing, at least.
I'm not seeing the total mAh numbers I was expecting, even after giving it two full charge-and-discharge cycles, but it does manage to run as long as I'd expect (about ~6.5 hours idling, screen on most of the time), with it reporting % seemingly correctly too.
So I think for now I'm going to call it a win?
#RetroComputing #ClassicMac #Macintosh #MARCHintosh

Photo of a rebuilt battery pack for the Apple iBook G3 900Mhz 14 inch version. The battery pack is still opened up, showing 8 new pink or purple-colored Samsung batteries installed, replacing the green-colored Panasonic ones that were originally installed and had started leaking (shown in the original post I am replying too)

Photo of the "Coconut Battery" application running on the iBook, reporting a maximum battery charge of 3744mAh.

Photo of the iBook G3 900Mhz 14 inch the first time I powered it on using the new battery, without it being connected to the charger.

It's experimenting time again 👀️

#Unihertz #Titan #Smartphone #DigitalMinimalism #DigitalDeclutter #Blackberry #Android

Photo of the Unihertz Titan Pocket laying on a wooden counter with its screen turned off. It's a mobile phone designed after the Blackberry phones of yesteryear, with a physical QWERTY keyboard underneath a square display.

With the surprise #snow we had overnight I really wanted to sit at the bar table today. It's nice to not always sit in the same spot.
The #Thinkpad #T480 running #Fedora #Linux is quite lovely. It handles everything I throw at it so far like a champ. I managed to get the fingerprint sensor to work, too, even though that whole setup felt super janky.
Combined with #1Password handling Git signing and SSH keys it really makes for a nice workflow though!
#WorkFromHome #Nature #Seoul #Korea #Photo

Photo of a Lenovo Thinkpad T480 sitting on a wooden counter top in front of a window. Through the windows you can see some remnants of snowy trees and mountains, though by this point in the afternoon much of the snow had already melted away. The Thinkpad's screen is on, showing an empty Fedora GNOME desktop as I flicked it over to an empty space as to not show my work contents.

Photo of the snowy view, as it was when we woke up this morning. Trees can be seen covered in a snowy layer, along with the ground underneath them.

It's been a little bit since I last shared a photo of our beautiful bear. Allow me to correct this horrible mistake.
#DogsOfMastodon #dog #dogs #photo #autumn

Photo of our doggo sitting on a wooden deck/path in the late afternoon sun, wearing a brown and gray scarf and a bright red leash.

#SimCity2000 is quite the challenging game. Or, for me it is, anyway. I sat down and tried to "not fail" for a little longer this past #Saturday. I didn't completely run out of money and my city didn't burn to the ground so far, so I suppose that's something. I do like the challenge of really trying to get the hang of how the game works, and (attempting to) learn(ing) how to balance out the needs and wants of the citizens.

#SimCity #ClassicMac #RetroComputing #RetroGaming #MacOS #MacOS9

Photo of a rather barren looking city in SimCity 2000, running on an iMac G4.

I'm either about to try something new that'll be enjoyable and educational, or I'm needlessly making things more difficult. Not sure which way this'll go..

#DVCAM #HDV #MiniDV #Sony #Camcorder

The #iMac G4 I got came with a basic CD drive, which made the whole idea of being able to watch some of my old favorite shows on it a bit more challenging. Using an USB DVD drive didn't work as it seems the DVD Player really only works with the internal (or first?) disc drive, at least under #MacOS9.

So I found a local seller with an old IDE Pioneer DVD drive, and took a bit of a gamble. Fortunately for me after swapping the drive it's working perfectly!

#ClassicMac #RetroComputing

Photo of the iMac G4 opened up, with the main body laying to the right, the bottom part laying up against the window frame, and the disc and "hard drive" caddy laying in front. There is no actual hard drive installed anymore, having been replaced by me with an IDE to mSATA adapter.

Photo showing the front of the "new" DVD drive with its front bezel still attached. This bezel needs to be removed in order for it to fit inside the iMac.

Photo showing the iMac G4 all put back together and its disc tray opened with a DVD of the HBO show Deadwood inside. The disc tray is black, which is different from the stock drive's white color, but it doesn't look out of place at all, with the other inside parts visible when the tray is open also being black, as-well as the keyboard keys being black too.

Photo showing the Deadwood intro sequence playing on-screen in the Apple DVD player application on MacOS 9.

I got unreasonably excited as I got a delivery notification for this disc organizer, and now I want to share this gorgeous piece of organizing joy with you all.

(Don't tell me it's already long past Y2K and all the world-ending, humanity destroying stuff that's going on. Let me live in blissful ignorance.)

#ClassicMac #ClassicMacOS #RetroGaming #RetroComputing #MacOS9

Photo of a CD organizer box with light teal (green-ish blue) colored see-through top half, and fifteen individual CD trays inside. Each tray can hold two CDs, one on its front side, the other on its back side. The bottom half of the organizer box is a typical light gray. Think "generic office equipment gray," though the top half really gives it an overall nice kind of look. Inside the organizer you can clearly see one disc (with just a few more to be found inside), which is a burned CD-R where you can just make out the hand-written text on the disc; SimCity 2000, MacOS.

And here it is. Monday evening the bar arrived. I always imagined a bar here in my home office to be able to sit and enjoy the mountains view, and the #iMac G4 was part of that dream. I'm really happy we were able to finally make this one come true.

I still need to fiddle a bit with exact placement of things as there's some constraints. But hey, look at this. Isn't it something :-).

So, uh, rate my #WorkFromHome setup, I guess?

#ClassicMac #ClassicMacOS #RetroComputing #Korea #Nature

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