Recent content by ajrossnz

Hi all, I recently received my dream machine, the 5162 XT/286. I had the Intel AboveBoard lying around waiting for a home, so this seemed to be the perfect machine to try it out on. My 5162 has 640K onboard RAM, so when it starts up with the AboveBoard in it, the mem count gets to 1664KB. I...

Hi y'all. It's the last in the series of "The Top 10 DOS Games (of the first decade of the IBM PC)". I apologise in advance for cheating somewhat in some of the rundowns, there were just too many great games in there. Let me know if you want me to do a summary video that covers all 10 years...

Sorry for the cross-post but I thought that this might be of interest/relevant to this area too... I met with Ken Williams of Sierra On-Line fame for a fascinating chat about all things Sierra: From where it all began, with Ken finding a copy of a text adventure on a mainframe and Roberta being...

I met with Ken Williams of Sierra On-Line fame for a fascinating chat about all things Sierra: From where it all began, with Ken finding a copy of a text adventure on a mainframe and Roberta being obsessed by it. To how the company was nearly bankrupt and was rescued by IBM and Tandy. Ken talks...

These were the top 10 DOS games of the year 1990. Watch with me as I review them all and tell you why they are awesome! 1990 was a year of two halves to me. 256 Colour VGA was in, EGA, CGA and MDA felt like a thing of the past, almost overnight. FM Synth in Adlib was the norm and slicker...

For many years now, I've always fancied making an open source rogue-like game, but I want it to be multi-player, across the internet. Perhaps as a BBS Door too. I would have a centralised server that I host, and end users can either be 16-bit MS-DOS users, or Linux users (and probably by...

Hi folks, I had a problem where my IBM 5151 mono monitor was jumping around all over the place. One minute, the video was squeezed down in the middle, the next it would jump up to 'full size'. Here's a video of how I fixed it, as well as how to open it up, and safely discharge the...

I picked up a very lovely TVM MD-7E monitor which I believe to be an EGA one. When powered up, I hear the fan spinning up, so I know it's getting juice, however I don't see/hear any sign of life out of the tube itself. Does anyone know where I should start looking. A visual inspection looks...

Hi all, In Linux, this would be an easy task, but in DOS, not so simple for me (either because I may have forgotten how to do this sort of stuff, or because you can't do it with simple batch scripts). I have a text file, 5 columns: column 1 has a unique ID number, column 2 has the name of a...

Hi folks, I've been putting together a bunch of videos (almost every week), that documents the highlights of every year of the first decade of PC games. I review each of the games briefly (in approx 1 minute per game). I choose my 'top 10' after downloading all of the games I can find of each...

Hi Folks, For those of you who don't know me, I have a youtube channel - Als Geek Lab: (www.youtube.com/alsgeeklab). Very occasionally, I like to post some of my videos up here that I think may be of interest to some of you. Hope that's OK. I made this video a while back but I thought it...

Hi all, when I start up Windows 2 on my 286, I get the Microsoft blue logo, then a bunch of garbled text then it spits me back to the DOS prompt. I've seen this before, years ago, but I can't remember exactly how I fixed it. I seem to remember using setver to trick it into running, can anyone...

Hi all, I've mainly been lurking on the #vc irc channel for a while, but I haven't joined the forum, so firstly just wanted to say hi to everyone! I've been doing things with vintage computers since the '90s. When I lived in the UK I had my own museum of sorts, but since moving to NZ in 2010...