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silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
This was, for a significant amount of time, my crowning achievement in computing, because it was the machine that I had put together myself, from case to cards, and it was the computer that I had in my actual room. Still no widespread network connectivity, but there was a machine that had Internet access while this machine was in my room. Or this is the machine right before the one that I had in my room that would have network access. Either way, this machine is important in my life because it feels like one of the last machines where the primary operating system is MS-DOS with Windows layered on top of it instead of Windows with a DOS shell or very questionable DOS emulation. (They say, knowing now that Windows 95 and 98 will still both be Windows-over-DOS until Microsoft switches to the NT kernel with Windows 2000.)
This machine could also fairly comfortably play most of the games we had on hand at the time, whether they were for DOS or Windows, and with a pleasant color scheme associated. This was in the time period right on the cusp of storage switching from 1.44 MB 3.5" floppies to 700 MB optical discs as the primary mode of software delivery, which would open up all sorts of new concepts, including the use of full motion video clips in various software offerings. Early sprite-based games from companies like Sierra were getting remade in better graphics, some of them using stop-motion animation of digitized sculptures, and others taking advance of new graphics chips and color palettes to more faithfully reproduce some of the matte paintings produced for the backgrounds of these games. Things are getting prettier in graphics and in sound, and having a relatively recent video and sound expansion card allows for a much more pleasant experience of everything than before. and the Carmen Sandiego series live (with feelies like a copy of the World Almanac or Fodor's Guide as the way you look up the answers to clues on where to go next), And there's the edutainment space, where the Math/Word Blaster series along with interesting games like Headline Harry, where a journalist competes to file a historically accurate story before a sensationalist paper gets theirs out the door. Sierra has bought up Dynamix at this point, although they're still deep in the adventure game design where you have to remember randomly generated things (or write them down) so that you can progress after having spent a significant time away from when you first discovered it was the thing instead of following the LucasArts model of making it easy for someone to remember and to experiment without worries of a gruesome yet hilarious death, and The Incredible Machine is helping us all unleash our inner Rube Goldberg designs. Apogee is just about to become 3D Realms, and so all of that good shareware stuff (that we did eventually buy the rest of in the family) is going to be shelved from putting out new stuff. Epic has produced Jazz Jackrabbit, walkthrough I think I put more time into the various Epic Pinball titles than either Jazz game. It's a really good time for DOS gaming.
It's also a weird time for DOS gaming, in that I think I also played and finally won a Monty Python game that has been provided by a friend of my dad. The copy protection scheme for this game was that it would present a piece of cheese and ask the player to identify it from a list provided with the game. Once you had satisfied the game of your "curd and cheesy knowledge," the game went forth. It was composed of four stages, where the main character has to try and recover a part of their brain by collecting enough Spam cans in the level. I spent a lot of time not actually making progress in this game because it didn't come with a manual that said "Oh, and in addition to moving about, the character can fire fishes from their hands and/or mouth if you press the space bar." Once I discovered that there were projectiles, and those could be used to clear out enemies, obstacles, press buttons embedded in the stages, open secrets by punching holes in the level, then progress for made in a hurry. Not actually having seen Python anything, the aesthetic was strange, and the jokes that would intrude themselves on the game itself (like Tree Identification, No. 1: The Larch, or the giant foot stomping the character when they lost a life, or that at the end of each level, the character would deposit all of the food items they had collected in the level, which were eggs and Spam and beans and sausage and Spam and Spam...) didn't make any sense, but certainly lent themselves to the aesthetic. And because the game was still going on behind those jokes as they went on, I had to learn to trigger certain jokes early before I tried to do other things in the game, like collecting the Spam cans. At least 16 of them to get a brain piece in each stage. The game decided to make itself Nintendo Hard by only offering 16 cans of Spam in the third stage, many of them made much more tricky by autoscroller levels or having to advance far enough to expose the button without going so far as to move the Spam can off the screen, because like the original Super Mario Brothers, once the screen scrolled, it could not be brought back. Putting the exact number in stage three seemed to have been specifically designed to induce the greatest amount of rage in a player about which stage has to be perfect and what the player can look forward to if they don't achieve it. As it turned out, the good ending of getting all the brains back transforms the character into the lawyer they were before losing their brains, so the difficulty and aggravation was not exactly worth it (but I'll bet there's a cracker of a Python joke there that I was too young to understand at the time).
And, while I'm here, I should probably mention some of the copy protection schemes that games would get up to, proving that companies were always more concerned about people playing their games without paying for them (excepting the shareware episodes) than in providing a good experience for gameplay. Most of these schemes involved the Feelies that would come with the game, asking for a word from a specific page of the manual. You had to input the word to pass the copy protection, or the game would exit out immediately or otherwise prevent progress. Some games for a little more creative with this, like the cheese quiz for the Monty Python game. In the case of a whole lot of the Sierra adventure games, you'd have to use the manual to give yourself specific information that was not available elsewhere to solve one of the game's puzzles. Space Quest IV hung a lampshade on it by explicitly saying "here's the dumb copy protection screen," but other and later games in all of the series would integrate their copy protection schemes into the narrative of the game itself, usually by requiring the player to solve a game puzzle or input coordinates using information only found in the manual itself. The one for Space Quest VI is a mean one, requiring you to solve a logic grid puzzle in the manual so that you can do the neat trick of transforming your scanning device into a homing beacon that lets your ship beam you back up after you get into some trouble with the local toughs. The second Laura Bow game had three copy protection checks through the game. Falling the first one got you fired from the job you were hired for, an instant game over. Falling the second got you either dismissed from the party you were covering or arrested as a suspect in the murders that had happened to to that point. Falling the third had Laura proclaim she wasn't moving from where she was... right at the beginning of the sequence where Laura has to escape the murderer that is coming for her by making a string of very quick decisions in locations that she has never seen before. (It's also possible to have locked yourself into failing at this point by not examining everything you needed to in earlier parts of the game and not picking up all the objects you need to use to succeed at this sequence. Sierra games were not good at telling you when you had rendered the game unwinnable until well after the point that you had done it. They always recommended saving early and saving often specifically because something you didn't pick up in Act 1 would become necessary for your survival in Act 5.) Other games were not usually so stringent about their protection schemes, if they had them at all. That said, there were sometimes ways around those schemes for people who knew what they were doing. I was given a cracked copy of a racing game called Stunts by a friend, where the key was to run the .COM file, which would render the copy protection scheme useless and allow for any word to be input when the check came. Otherwise, your car involuntarily crashed after a few seconds because you didn't disable the alarm. (I had a lot of fun with Stunts, because there were some collision exploits you could do with the physics engine to make a car bounce into the air at max velocity and have it either spin or sail up into the air for minutes on end before it finally came crashing down.) It's annoying to look back and recognize that the DRM schemes of today and the copy protection schemes of yesteryear are equally effective at what they tried to do, but it's become a lot more illegal now to defeat even a paper-thin DRM scheme that's there just to stop someone from sharing something with others who will appreciate it and might buy their own copy if it didn't come with ridiculous copy protection attached.
Even though there's a lot of good stuff going on in games and software in these times (barring those copy protection schemes), this is also an era where memory management is, frankly, a pain in the ass. The limitations of the Intel 8086 family and DOS combined to make two barriers, one at 640KB, the other at 1MB, with specific addresses reserved for specific functions, and required a significant amount of juggling the memory around so that there would be enough memory available in the expected ranges for programs to run correctly while also keeping around the Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) programs happy and functioning so that device drivers, network connectivity, and optimization would also continue working on the system. Later versions of DOS provide ways of moving some of the TSRs out above the 640k line, and there are third-party programs meant to continue those optimizations and maximize the amount of available memory available below the 640k line. For people whose computing experiences are mostly in environments where memory is virtual and abstracted away, this kind of nonsense can seem exceedingly strange, but it was always something in the back of our head as we programmed and played. (I suspect even DOSBox and other emulators of its type handwave away much of that memory management nonsense in favor of providing a more seamless and easy to use environment.)
The most common method of juggling memory to play games, while DOS-based systems predominate, was to use a boot disk, usually a 3.5" floppy that had been marked as a bootable device, to load the minimum amount of TSRs necessary to get a game running properly, leaving the rest of the available memory for the program. It did mean that if a particularly memory-hungry game was something you wanted to play, you'd have to go through a complete reboot to set the environment up that allowed for it. Boot disks also contained the configuration necessary to set environment variables, the most common one being the BLASTER variable that would indicate what addresses, interrupts, and channels to use for a Sound Blaster or compatible sound card so as to get sound working out of the card. People of my age and gaming experience can probably type by memory something like "SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T1" that we had to figure out and set in all of our configurations to get our cards working properly. If we were afraid of the command line and driving into configuration files before this era began, by the end of it, we had probably modified more than a few AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files so as to achieve the necessary environment for what we wanted done. DOS could be forgiving, in that it you messed up the boot disk, it was just a failed boot, rather than a trashed environment.
Windows and the Graphical User Interface was something new and interesting for the time it was introduced, but it was about 3.1 and 3.11 that Windows started to be something you might use as your primary Interface with the computer, instead of everything still booting to DOS and then you making the choice about whether to them load Windows on top of that. The popularity of Windows came alongside a lot of games that used a "point and click" interface instead of a text parser, bringing mouse skills and visual spotting of things up toward the forefront of skills to have for adventure gaming. (Interactive fiction and completely text-based games don't go away, of course.) Other kinds of gaming still rely on good keybindings and the ability to blast or slash apart just about anything else that moves, skills that remain in their descendants to these days. Windows came with a couple of games, including a solitaire (where it's still satisfying to see bouncing cards from a full clear) and Minesweeper, the logic puzzle game that was supposedly destroying productivity in the same way that Doom deathmatches were also supposedly doing on school and corporate networks, but that was mostly it. Further games were sold as additional pieces of software, bundled up eventually into things called Windows Entertainment Packs, where we would get additional card games like Cruel, Golf, FreeCell, and TriPeaks (the names of the summits were Ahmadas, Gehaldi and Zackheer), an interesting set of screensavers called Idlewild, but also memorably interesting games like an updated version of Chip's Challenge, Tetris, WordZap! (A Boggle-like game played against the computer as a race to see who can complete a tower of words from a dozen titles. The problem is, if both players come up with the word, it's cleared from both of their towers so neither can use it for progress), Pegged (peg-jumping games), Klotski (piece-sliding puzzles), and a really interesting and silly game called SkiFree.
SkiFree had three possible modes, two slalom-type (where the point was to spend the least time navigating the skiier around the red and blue gates to the finish) and one freestyle mode, where the idea was to find ramps, jumps, and hills to launch off of to turn tricks and score points without crashing down. It's way more fun to watch the splat of the crashed skier instead of trying to play the game regularly, so our times and scores weren't that great, not that myself or any of my siblings really cared. The very best thing about SkiFree, though, was that after the event was completed, the player could ski freestyle and crash into whatever they liked for about one thousand meters as the game measured it and then a Yeti would come along and gobble the skiier up so as to get the player to restart the game. (The Yeti does an adorable jumping dance after eating the skiier.)
Nothing in the Windows Entertainment Packs were anything spectacular in terms of graphics or sound, and many of them had simple gameplay loops, but like earlier games and arcade favorites, simple was good, and many of those games still got hours put into them all the same. There were four packs, and then a "Best of" collection that took the most popular ones of all four and put them on one disk. For people raised on the current generation of games and Windows, these kinds of games might seem kitschy or crude, but they are pretty fun even now. (I had to play some of the TriPeaks, courtesy of the Internet Archive, to get the names of the three peaks.) The Internet Archive has the whole thing, as well as individual games that can be played online in the browser using DOSBox, so why not give them a little bit of a try?
It still comes back to knowing what really makes this machine special is that it's the one in my room, so I get to decide what games get played, I don't have to share the computer, and I can play when I would like to (within reason, since I still need sleep to make sure I keep doing well at my studies and because my parents will still want to see us and be social with us). There's a lot of great gaming of all sorts, there's some productivity and composition going on as well, although the family computer is usually the one that school assignments get written on, but it's mine. I built it, I'm maintaining it, I get to make the decisions about use and upgrading. And, to some degree, not that I want to break it, but if I do, it doesn't mean I've taken out the only computer in the house that everyone depends on. And that, to a really large degree, is freeing and means I might do something experimental to see if it will work. Usually for a game.
- CPU: Intel i486-compatible chip @ 100 MHz
- Memory: 4 or 8 MB of total RAM
- Graphics: Video Graphics Array (maybe, maybe using the new PCI bus standard), 640x480 to Super Video Graphics Array, 1024x768, Lots of colors
- Sound: Internal Speaker, Sound Blaster-compatible sound card with 3.5" jacks for output speakers and input microphones
- Inputs and Outputs: Keyboard (AT) and mouse (serial), additional serial and parallel port cards for printers of other devices (not attached)
- Storage: 512 MB hard drive, one 3.5" floppy disk drive
- OS: MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 3.1
This was, for a significant amount of time, my crowning achievement in computing, because it was the machine that I had put together myself, from case to cards, and it was the computer that I had in my actual room. Still no widespread network connectivity, but there was a machine that had Internet access while this machine was in my room. Or this is the machine right before the one that I had in my room that would have network access. Either way, this machine is important in my life because it feels like one of the last machines where the primary operating system is MS-DOS with Windows layered on top of it instead of Windows with a DOS shell or very questionable DOS emulation. (They say, knowing now that Windows 95 and 98 will still both be Windows-over-DOS until Microsoft switches to the NT kernel with Windows 2000.)
This machine could also fairly comfortably play most of the games we had on hand at the time, whether they were for DOS or Windows, and with a pleasant color scheme associated. This was in the time period right on the cusp of storage switching from 1.44 MB 3.5" floppies to 700 MB optical discs as the primary mode of software delivery, which would open up all sorts of new concepts, including the use of full motion video clips in various software offerings. Early sprite-based games from companies like Sierra were getting remade in better graphics, some of them using stop-motion animation of digitized sculptures, and others taking advance of new graphics chips and color palettes to more faithfully reproduce some of the matte paintings produced for the backgrounds of these games. Things are getting prettier in graphics and in sound, and having a relatively recent video and sound expansion card allows for a much more pleasant experience of everything than before. and the Carmen Sandiego series live (with feelies like a copy of the World Almanac or Fodor's Guide as the way you look up the answers to clues on where to go next), And there's the edutainment space, where the Math/Word Blaster series along with interesting games like Headline Harry, where a journalist competes to file a historically accurate story before a sensationalist paper gets theirs out the door. Sierra has bought up Dynamix at this point, although they're still deep in the adventure game design where you have to remember randomly generated things (or write them down) so that you can progress after having spent a significant time away from when you first discovered it was the thing instead of following the LucasArts model of making it easy for someone to remember and to experiment without worries of a gruesome yet hilarious death, and The Incredible Machine is helping us all unleash our inner Rube Goldberg designs. Apogee is just about to become 3D Realms, and so all of that good shareware stuff (that we did eventually buy the rest of in the family) is going to be shelved from putting out new stuff. Epic has produced Jazz Jackrabbit, walkthrough I think I put more time into the various Epic Pinball titles than either Jazz game. It's a really good time for DOS gaming.
It's also a weird time for DOS gaming, in that I think I also played and finally won a Monty Python game that has been provided by a friend of my dad. The copy protection scheme for this game was that it would present a piece of cheese and ask the player to identify it from a list provided with the game. Once you had satisfied the game of your "curd and cheesy knowledge," the game went forth. It was composed of four stages, where the main character has to try and recover a part of their brain by collecting enough Spam cans in the level. I spent a lot of time not actually making progress in this game because it didn't come with a manual that said "Oh, and in addition to moving about, the character can fire fishes from their hands and/or mouth if you press the space bar." Once I discovered that there were projectiles, and those could be used to clear out enemies, obstacles, press buttons embedded in the stages, open secrets by punching holes in the level, then progress for made in a hurry. Not actually having seen Python anything, the aesthetic was strange, and the jokes that would intrude themselves on the game itself (like Tree Identification, No. 1: The Larch, or the giant foot stomping the character when they lost a life, or that at the end of each level, the character would deposit all of the food items they had collected in the level, which were eggs and Spam and beans and sausage and Spam and Spam...) didn't make any sense, but certainly lent themselves to the aesthetic. And because the game was still going on behind those jokes as they went on, I had to learn to trigger certain jokes early before I tried to do other things in the game, like collecting the Spam cans. At least 16 of them to get a brain piece in each stage. The game decided to make itself Nintendo Hard by only offering 16 cans of Spam in the third stage, many of them made much more tricky by autoscroller levels or having to advance far enough to expose the button without going so far as to move the Spam can off the screen, because like the original Super Mario Brothers, once the screen scrolled, it could not be brought back. Putting the exact number in stage three seemed to have been specifically designed to induce the greatest amount of rage in a player about which stage has to be perfect and what the player can look forward to if they don't achieve it. As it turned out, the good ending of getting all the brains back transforms the character into the lawyer they were before losing their brains, so the difficulty and aggravation was not exactly worth it (but I'll bet there's a cracker of a Python joke there that I was too young to understand at the time).
And, while I'm here, I should probably mention some of the copy protection schemes that games would get up to, proving that companies were always more concerned about people playing their games without paying for them (excepting the shareware episodes) than in providing a good experience for gameplay. Most of these schemes involved the Feelies that would come with the game, asking for a word from a specific page of the manual. You had to input the word to pass the copy protection, or the game would exit out immediately or otherwise prevent progress. Some games for a little more creative with this, like the cheese quiz for the Monty Python game. In the case of a whole lot of the Sierra adventure games, you'd have to use the manual to give yourself specific information that was not available elsewhere to solve one of the game's puzzles. Space Quest IV hung a lampshade on it by explicitly saying "here's the dumb copy protection screen," but other and later games in all of the series would integrate their copy protection schemes into the narrative of the game itself, usually by requiring the player to solve a game puzzle or input coordinates using information only found in the manual itself. The one for Space Quest VI is a mean one, requiring you to solve a logic grid puzzle in the manual so that you can do the neat trick of transforming your scanning device into a homing beacon that lets your ship beam you back up after you get into some trouble with the local toughs. The second Laura Bow game had three copy protection checks through the game. Falling the first one got you fired from the job you were hired for, an instant game over. Falling the second got you either dismissed from the party you were covering or arrested as a suspect in the murders that had happened to to that point. Falling the third had Laura proclaim she wasn't moving from where she was... right at the beginning of the sequence where Laura has to escape the murderer that is coming for her by making a string of very quick decisions in locations that she has never seen before. (It's also possible to have locked yourself into failing at this point by not examining everything you needed to in earlier parts of the game and not picking up all the objects you need to use to succeed at this sequence. Sierra games were not good at telling you when you had rendered the game unwinnable until well after the point that you had done it. They always recommended saving early and saving often specifically because something you didn't pick up in Act 1 would become necessary for your survival in Act 5.) Other games were not usually so stringent about their protection schemes, if they had them at all. That said, there were sometimes ways around those schemes for people who knew what they were doing. I was given a cracked copy of a racing game called Stunts by a friend, where the key was to run the .COM file, which would render the copy protection scheme useless and allow for any word to be input when the check came. Otherwise, your car involuntarily crashed after a few seconds because you didn't disable the alarm. (I had a lot of fun with Stunts, because there were some collision exploits you could do with the physics engine to make a car bounce into the air at max velocity and have it either spin or sail up into the air for minutes on end before it finally came crashing down.) It's annoying to look back and recognize that the DRM schemes of today and the copy protection schemes of yesteryear are equally effective at what they tried to do, but it's become a lot more illegal now to defeat even a paper-thin DRM scheme that's there just to stop someone from sharing something with others who will appreciate it and might buy their own copy if it didn't come with ridiculous copy protection attached.
Even though there's a lot of good stuff going on in games and software in these times (barring those copy protection schemes), this is also an era where memory management is, frankly, a pain in the ass. The limitations of the Intel 8086 family and DOS combined to make two barriers, one at 640KB, the other at 1MB, with specific addresses reserved for specific functions, and required a significant amount of juggling the memory around so that there would be enough memory available in the expected ranges for programs to run correctly while also keeping around the Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) programs happy and functioning so that device drivers, network connectivity, and optimization would also continue working on the system. Later versions of DOS provide ways of moving some of the TSRs out above the 640k line, and there are third-party programs meant to continue those optimizations and maximize the amount of available memory available below the 640k line. For people whose computing experiences are mostly in environments where memory is virtual and abstracted away, this kind of nonsense can seem exceedingly strange, but it was always something in the back of our head as we programmed and played. (I suspect even DOSBox and other emulators of its type handwave away much of that memory management nonsense in favor of providing a more seamless and easy to use environment.)
The most common method of juggling memory to play games, while DOS-based systems predominate, was to use a boot disk, usually a 3.5" floppy that had been marked as a bootable device, to load the minimum amount of TSRs necessary to get a game running properly, leaving the rest of the available memory for the program. It did mean that if a particularly memory-hungry game was something you wanted to play, you'd have to go through a complete reboot to set the environment up that allowed for it. Boot disks also contained the configuration necessary to set environment variables, the most common one being the BLASTER variable that would indicate what addresses, interrupts, and channels to use for a Sound Blaster or compatible sound card so as to get sound working out of the card. People of my age and gaming experience can probably type by memory something like "SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T1" that we had to figure out and set in all of our configurations to get our cards working properly. If we were afraid of the command line and driving into configuration files before this era began, by the end of it, we had probably modified more than a few AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files so as to achieve the necessary environment for what we wanted done. DOS could be forgiving, in that it you messed up the boot disk, it was just a failed boot, rather than a trashed environment.
Windows and the Graphical User Interface was something new and interesting for the time it was introduced, but it was about 3.1 and 3.11 that Windows started to be something you might use as your primary Interface with the computer, instead of everything still booting to DOS and then you making the choice about whether to them load Windows on top of that. The popularity of Windows came alongside a lot of games that used a "point and click" interface instead of a text parser, bringing mouse skills and visual spotting of things up toward the forefront of skills to have for adventure gaming. (Interactive fiction and completely text-based games don't go away, of course.) Other kinds of gaming still rely on good keybindings and the ability to blast or slash apart just about anything else that moves, skills that remain in their descendants to these days. Windows came with a couple of games, including a solitaire (where it's still satisfying to see bouncing cards from a full clear) and Minesweeper, the logic puzzle game that was supposedly destroying productivity in the same way that Doom deathmatches were also supposedly doing on school and corporate networks, but that was mostly it. Further games were sold as additional pieces of software, bundled up eventually into things called Windows Entertainment Packs, where we would get additional card games like Cruel, Golf, FreeCell, and TriPeaks (the names of the summits were Ahmadas, Gehaldi and Zackheer), an interesting set of screensavers called Idlewild, but also memorably interesting games like an updated version of Chip's Challenge, Tetris, WordZap! (A Boggle-like game played against the computer as a race to see who can complete a tower of words from a dozen titles. The problem is, if both players come up with the word, it's cleared from both of their towers so neither can use it for progress), Pegged (peg-jumping games), Klotski (piece-sliding puzzles), and a really interesting and silly game called SkiFree.
SkiFree had three possible modes, two slalom-type (where the point was to spend the least time navigating the skiier around the red and blue gates to the finish) and one freestyle mode, where the idea was to find ramps, jumps, and hills to launch off of to turn tricks and score points without crashing down. It's way more fun to watch the splat of the crashed skier instead of trying to play the game regularly, so our times and scores weren't that great, not that myself or any of my siblings really cared. The very best thing about SkiFree, though, was that after the event was completed, the player could ski freestyle and crash into whatever they liked for about one thousand meters as the game measured it and then a Yeti would come along and gobble the skiier up so as to get the player to restart the game. (The Yeti does an adorable jumping dance after eating the skiier.)
Nothing in the Windows Entertainment Packs were anything spectacular in terms of graphics or sound, and many of them had simple gameplay loops, but like earlier games and arcade favorites, simple was good, and many of those games still got hours put into them all the same. There were four packs, and then a "Best of" collection that took the most popular ones of all four and put them on one disk. For people raised on the current generation of games and Windows, these kinds of games might seem kitschy or crude, but they are pretty fun even now. (I had to play some of the TriPeaks, courtesy of the Internet Archive, to get the names of the three peaks.) The Internet Archive has the whole thing, as well as individual games that can be played online in the browser using DOSBox, so why not give them a little bit of a try?
It still comes back to knowing what really makes this machine special is that it's the one in my room, so I get to decide what games get played, I don't have to share the computer, and I can play when I would like to (within reason, since I still need sleep to make sure I keep doing well at my studies and because my parents will still want to see us and be social with us). There's a lot of great gaming of all sorts, there's some productivity and composition going on as well, although the family computer is usually the one that school assignments get written on, but it's mine. I built it, I'm maintaining it, I get to make the decisions about use and upgrading. And, to some degree, not that I want to break it, but if I do, it doesn't mean I've taken out the only computer in the house that everyone depends on. And that, to a really large degree, is freeing and means I might do something experimental to see if it will work. Usually for a game.
