![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tales of the Restoration
I've been slowly restoring various programs to my home PC over the past few weeks; although the primary hard drive was not destroyed (as I originally feared), it became a slave drive and a new OS (Windows XP Home Edition) was installed. This killed a number of my installed programs.
Not Agent, fortunately. All of my email and addresses transferred perfectly. But Teri used Outlook, and lost everything.
I also lost the passwords and logins for a couple of websites that I administer - not my own sites, but for other people. I was able to recover those, but it took a while.
One project that was quite interesting was my digital camera. It's a cheap old Polaroid 640, and it uses PhotoMax software; I assumed (and hoped) that it would transfer over easily, but it didn't. In fact, it didn't work at all. I almost resigned myself to getting a new camera (which would inevitably have at least four times the resolution of the old one), but a little research made that unnecessary. Polaroid knew that PhotoMax didn't work correctly with XP, and had detailed information on a fix. I was quite impressed; I didn't know that XP actually had a wizard to help make programs work that were designed for older versions of Windows. It took me a little while, but after I was done I was able to download some five-month-old photos from my camera - including one I'll probably put up here soon.
Another aspect of the restoration was re-installing Diablo, Diablo 2 (and the LOD expansion), Warcraft 2, and Arcanum. I haven't bothered reinstalling Warcraft 3 and NeverWinter Nights because (to put it politely) they suck.
Diablo is always fun for playing around, and is relatively easy to beat; I haven't played it much yet, but I may get online with a friend or two some evening (and if anyone reading this is up for it, drop me a line - I mean it!).
But D2 and Arcanum are bigger games, so I've been playing both alternatively. It's an interesting experience, because although the games have many points in common (they're both anamorphic computer "RPGs" in an essentially fantasy genre), the tone of the games is remarkably different. Put simply, Diablo 2 gives me a lot of stress; I could even say that it scares me. Arcanum, on the other hand, is much lighter - though the tone is hardly comic.
Why? A large part of it is the way Save Game works. In Arcanum you choose when your game is saved, and you can save many different versions of it. When you restart, you're back exactly where you were at the moment you saved.
In D2 the game only saves when you quit, and what's saved is not the precise scene you left. Instead, your character begins at a safe base camp, basically in the same condition as when you quit (and with a lootable body lying nearby if s/he had died before quitting), but often there is a great deal of territory to re-explore. The maps are also completely re-populated with monsters which must be fought. There are waypoints that let you skip over different areas, but the areas are large and the waypoints are widely spaced - it can easily take a couple of hours of play to get from one waypoint to the next.
And that's what sucks about Diablo: you can get stuck playing it. The only time that it makes sense to quit is when you've just found a waypoint, because otherwise you'll have to re-conquer all of the terrain you passed since your last waypoint. Which is, frankly, a pain in the ass.
On other fronts: I'm strongly tempted to emulate![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
unquietsoul5 and start posting lots of photos on my site, now that I can. On the other hand, my photos won't be as good as his. For one thing, I'm a lousy photographer. For another, my camera is a primitive piece of junk. Still another reason is that he has Cambridge and Harvard Square to shoot in (although the Square is by no means as wonderful as it used to be, having been developed nearly to soul-death). I, on the other hand, have...Woonsocket. If you haven't been there, let me explain: a large portion of the population smokes and looks genetically defective (aka "shuggoths"). While Joe can take photos of attractive young people who don't at all mind being photographed (assuming that they are even aware of what he's doing, since their lives are so wonderful and absorbing), I would be photographing people who are A) bored, B) drunk or high, and C) looking for a fight. Oh yes, and D) incredibly stupid. Not everyone in Woonsocket is like that, but the majority of people who sit around in public areas are. I'm told there are a number of prostitutes, too, and no, I won't be looking for them.
So...maybe I'll take up photographing rocks and street signs in out-of-the-way places.
Not Agent, fortunately. All of my email and addresses transferred perfectly. But Teri used Outlook, and lost everything.
I also lost the passwords and logins for a couple of websites that I administer - not my own sites, but for other people. I was able to recover those, but it took a while.
One project that was quite interesting was my digital camera. It's a cheap old Polaroid 640, and it uses PhotoMax software; I assumed (and hoped) that it would transfer over easily, but it didn't. In fact, it didn't work at all. I almost resigned myself to getting a new camera (which would inevitably have at least four times the resolution of the old one), but a little research made that unnecessary. Polaroid knew that PhotoMax didn't work correctly with XP, and had detailed information on a fix. I was quite impressed; I didn't know that XP actually had a wizard to help make programs work that were designed for older versions of Windows. It took me a little while, but after I was done I was able to download some five-month-old photos from my camera - including one I'll probably put up here soon.
Another aspect of the restoration was re-installing Diablo, Diablo 2 (and the LOD expansion), Warcraft 2, and Arcanum. I haven't bothered reinstalling Warcraft 3 and NeverWinter Nights because (to put it politely) they suck.
Diablo is always fun for playing around, and is relatively easy to beat; I haven't played it much yet, but I may get online with a friend or two some evening (and if anyone reading this is up for it, drop me a line - I mean it!).
But D2 and Arcanum are bigger games, so I've been playing both alternatively. It's an interesting experience, because although the games have many points in common (they're both anamorphic computer "RPGs" in an essentially fantasy genre), the tone of the games is remarkably different. Put simply, Diablo 2 gives me a lot of stress; I could even say that it scares me. Arcanum, on the other hand, is much lighter - though the tone is hardly comic.
Why? A large part of it is the way Save Game works. In Arcanum you choose when your game is saved, and you can save many different versions of it. When you restart, you're back exactly where you were at the moment you saved.
In D2 the game only saves when you quit, and what's saved is not the precise scene you left. Instead, your character begins at a safe base camp, basically in the same condition as when you quit (and with a lootable body lying nearby if s/he had died before quitting), but often there is a great deal of territory to re-explore. The maps are also completely re-populated with monsters which must be fought. There are waypoints that let you skip over different areas, but the areas are large and the waypoints are widely spaced - it can easily take a couple of hours of play to get from one waypoint to the next.
And that's what sucks about Diablo: you can get stuck playing it. The only time that it makes sense to quit is when you've just found a waypoint, because otherwise you'll have to re-conquer all of the terrain you passed since your last waypoint. Which is, frankly, a pain in the ass.
On other fronts: I'm strongly tempted to emulate
unquietsoul5 and start posting lots of photos on my site, now that I can. On the other hand, my photos won't be as good as his. For one thing, I'm a lousy photographer. For another, my camera is a primitive piece of junk. Still another reason is that he has Cambridge and Harvard Square to shoot in (although the Square is by no means as wonderful as it used to be, having been developed nearly to soul-death). I, on the other hand, have...Woonsocket. If you haven't been there, let me explain: a large portion of the population smokes and looks genetically defective (aka "shuggoths"). While Joe can take photos of attractive young people who don't at all mind being photographed (assuming that they are even aware of what he's doing, since their lives are so wonderful and absorbing), I would be photographing people who are A) bored, B) drunk or high, and C) looking for a fight. Oh yes, and D) incredibly stupid. Not everyone in Woonsocket is like that, but the majority of people who sit around in public areas are. I'm told there are a number of prostitutes, too, and no, I won't be looking for them.So...maybe I'll take up photographing rocks and street signs in out-of-the-way places.