Pixel graphics are an old school technique that where used in video games before game technology became heavily 3D based.
The difference between pixel graphics and modern Photoshop processed graphics are easy to see. Shades and pixels in Photoshop processed graphics are smooth and form a synthetic shape. It is the same phenomenon seen in movies that uses a lot of computer generated graphic effects, things look to clean and to perfect.
Running and setting up your own personal server is not difficult to do. But one should keep in mind that there are other aspects involved when setting up a computer intended to run all day, all year round.
A noisy computer can have a serious impact on the peaceful environment your home provides, so the server needs to be quiet. Having your server running every day of the year can have a negative impact on your electricity bill, so the server needs to be energy efficient.
My current PC
It is possible to buy a pre made system today that is as good and as cheap as any home assembled PC. But there are always factors that can not be edited when dealing with completed systems. My current PC is in a way my view of the perfect home computer that suits all my needs. From working with web design to surfing the web as I run an internet conference with five partners it fits my needs.
I had the opportunity to grow up with computers. During the eighties home computers were something that was not common, today almost everyone in Sweden has a computer and a connection to the net. I take pride in being one of the few who came from the 8-bit computers to the 16-bit wonder machines and then to the PC where we could turn our knowledge we learned from our hobby into something that could give us a job.
This is a chronological list from my first computer to my present.
Sprites are small moving graphics that are used in 2D games. Some sprites have reached cult status and are often used as avatars on Internet forums. A sprite can also be used in a design of a webpage, and in many other places.
There are tools that can go through a game file and look for the segment in the file where the sprite data is stored and then save a graphics file containing a dump of the sprites.
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII is the text you see on a webpage or in your MS-DOS prompt.
When bandwidth was low ASCII was used to form crude images or headers. Some people worked extra hard in trying to make ASCII images as nice as possible and they became ASCII artists. I am going to show how to write a nice text in ASCII, these techniques can be used to make a nice logon screen on a UNIX system or as a cool piece of graphics on a web template if converted to GIF or PNG.
You seem to think all hi end stuff is the latest to brag about when you realize even old stuff had the same dimension and properties as new hardware.
This is a 486 in a very small package. I think a 486 is a great computer. Maybe not so in these days of 1 TB harddrives and 2+ GHz quad-core CPU speeds but back in the day you could do almost anything with a 486 and 8 to 32 MB ram. Linux was no problem to run, it was more important to have lots of memory because otherwise virtual memory would trash your harddrive whenever you ran X. Windows 3.11 ran great on a 486, sadly not Windows 95 which was a huge disappointment on anything else than a Pentium 1 for me at least.
So I should perhaps w (more…)
During the last couple of years I have found out that it is getting increasingly hard to find older “noname” PC hardware such as 286, 386 and 486 systems. Even finding Pentium 1 Baby-AT systems is harder these days. It seems most owners of such systems have recycled their hardware long ago, and why would they keep old computer hardware anyways?
The Sinclair ZX-Spectrum like many other 8-bit computers where not designed to be able to use a harddrive or CD-rom, compact flash was out of the question. The storage medium of choice for the ZX-Spectrum and most other 8-bit home computer during the 80′ies was the cassette, a cheap and relatively reliable storage medium but also a very slow and inflexible solution. Sinclair knew about this and developed a storage medium called Microdrives but they never caught on and they were not that good in comparison with 5.25 inch floppy diskettes.
Norton Commander
Every operating system has a file manager. Microsoft Windows XP has Explorer which can be replaced with the excellent Total Commander, Commodore Amiga had Directory Opus and MS-DOS had Norton Commander. NC (short for Norton Commander) makes MS-DOS more flexible and easier to use for day to day tasks offering a basic graphical user interface for MS-DOS. NC was very popular once but the popularity decreased when Windows 95 was released. Even though the popularity of Norton Commander has shrunk there are still many popular clones of NC on a variety of operating systems. Midnight Commander is a popular clone of NC for Unix-like systems and Total Commander is a modern version of Norton Commander for Windows. Volkov Commander is a modern up to date MS-DOS compatible NC clone.
Cubic Player
Most operating system has a music player capable of playing classic music formats like MOD, S3M and XM. Cubic Player for MS-DOS is the music player to use for listening to classic sound formats in DOS.
Deluxe Paint 2
Graphic packages have changed a lot during the years. Graphic artists of today work in layers but when MS-DOS was popular graphic packages like Deluxe Paint 2 where the defacto standard when making pixel graphics. Deluxe Paint by Electronic Arts was a popular art package also available on Commodore Amiga and Atari ST , but only the Commodore Amiga got version 3, 4 and 5 because it had superior graphics than the competition. Even though the MS-DOS world only got the second version it is quite good for what it is and much better than Paint.
The Draw
The Draw was another art package for MS-DOS. But unlike Deluxe Paint it was used to draw ASCII and ANSI images. We agree that the demand for ASCII and ANSI art has shrunk a lot since the days of MS-DOS but if you want to make a nice login screen for you Linux server and do not want to use an automatic JPG to ASCII converter then The Draw is the paint package to use.
PKZIP/PKUNZIP
Since Windows XP the ZIP file compression system is integrated in the operating system. In MS-DOS PKZIP and PKUNZIP are used for these tasks. RAR is also available but most people remember PKZIP, ACE and ARJ. But do they remember the command line switches?
SEA
SEA was an excellent image viewer so that you could watch multicolor JPEG images in MS-DOS. SEA viewer had basic image conversion tools built in and was a really fast image viewer.
Terminate
Before the internet computer enthusiasts used to dial bulletin board systems, also called BBS. A BBS carried files which users could download and also had forums where users could post topics and discuss matters. To dial a BBS you needed a telephone modem and software to use for calling bulletin board systems. Terminate was regarded as the best terminal program amongst everyone I knew who dialed BBS systems.