February 5, 2009
I’m just having a look at Puppy Linux again as a solution for Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas. Positives are that its light and pretty (I chose the mac version)
Its strange that you have to set the network interface to work with DHCP to get started. Then there are all sorts of utilities that are confusing. I guess it takes some time to adapt from the Ubuntu way of doing things. But hey Ubuntu won’t run in 128 MB of RAM. Xubuntu just was too heavy for a number of the machines I was trying to keep running and Fluxbuntu was confusing for students.
Ideally I’m looking for a replacement for Win98 or 2000 that runs Office, Paint and an early version of Photoshop using 128MB of RAM
It’s easy to say you can create your own version and tweak distros, but in the end its much easier to go with a distro and accept defaults especially when you aren’ t around to fix it.
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Posted by richard
February 1, 2009
I managed to get Riven the 1997 Point and Click adventure game working today. It only works with Quicktime 2 so you have to mess about a bit getting it to work on XP.
Rather than waste the whole day playing, I did a little bit of reading on Riven and Myst (perhaps its more famous predecessor). Seems like recently the code has been open sourced. Makes sense because the nature of the game’s simple (but stunning) interface lends itself to online playing – you could almost program the game in Powerpoint, you move between a series of photographs the interactive pieces eg. levers and doors are very simple animations.
In 1997 on a 800×600 screen the photograph quality images and beautiful soundscapes were quite a thing.
Doing a Powerpoint version of the school was a project that I dreamed up a couple of years ago for the kids at school. Now we have the gifted and talented kids turning up on Thursday night, I might have to dust that plan off.
That and keeping my eye on development of independent Riven games based on the opens source code.
See 30 Second TV advert for Riven. This animation is actually an unusual part of the game like a video reward for when you beat a level and go up to the next one. The game play is more sedate.
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Posted by richard
