Welp... my computer parts arrived!

Behold:

1 mid-tower ATX case
1 430w Thermaltake dual-fan Power Supply
1 Kingston 512MB PC3200 RAM chip
1 Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB harddrive

...combined with...

1 Pentium IV 1.8ghz processor
1 Intel D865GBF motherbard
...and 3 FreeBSD installation diskettes!

Ahh. Server heaven. (At least for me.)

It compiled CircleMUD in about 30 seconds with no problems. But then I started delving into stuff that was over my head, and I decided to reformat since I'd inadvertantly installed a ton of apps and drivers that I really didn't mean to install. (Side-effects of trying to install Apache 2, PHP 5 and MySQL 5.)

At first, I'd partitioned the entire harddrive into a single partition, like I do for just about every computer I have. But then I read a few FAQs about "Why Partition?" and then decided, "hey! I should do this"... and so I did.

So, in a nutshell, you partition a Unix harddrive into several partitions: performance, crash protection, hack protection... rogue program protection... user stupidity protection, and just all around good housekeeping. So, without further ado, here's my partition layout:

Root partition ( / ): 1024MB, UFS2
Swap partition: 965MB
Var partition ( /var ): 20480MB, UFS2 + SoftUpdate
Tmp partition ( /tmp ): 1024MB, UFS2 + SoftUpdate
Usr partition ( /usr ): 52826MB, UFS2 + SoftUpdate

You probably couldn't care less about that... but it's more for me keeping track of what I did. So bleargh! Oh, also, somewhere along the installation process, it didn't quite figure out how big my harddrive was, so I had to look for factory specified "Harddrive Geometry"... which is, in case you were wondering: 16,383 cylinders, 16 read/write heads, and 63 sectors per track.

So yeah. For future reference on my part, too.

http://reallifecomics.com/archive/060502.html

Quoted for truth, man.

I used to watch aaaaall those shows.

Except Power Rangers. UGH.

I can't believe I forgot about this!

Knight Software... go visit. Now.

The link will take you to a section of their page that advertises something called "AdventureWare Games". In the archive you can download, there are five text-adventure games: Terror in the Ice Caverns, Island of Mystery, Haunted Mission Adventure, Crime Adventure, and Nuclear Submarine Adventure.

Five probably widely unknown games...

One has a very special place in my life, though... Terror in the Ice Caverns! The very first text-adventure game I'd ever played. Probably close to 1992 or so. We were over at a friend's house for a homeschooling meeting all those years ago... and he had this on his computer, along with Secret Agent, Battle Chess, and a game called Missile.

I spent all evening playing Terror... and finally stopped and copied it to disk before going home, where I toiled over it until I finished it! It was so awesome... I was instantly hooked, though absolutely nobody else in our homeschool group (including family) was ever interested in the least bit.

Now look where it's got me. I've written my own text games, played a whole assortment of MUDs, and am now experimenting with making a MUD of my own. I've also still got the manual for writing games using Infocom's interpreter engine. (The driving force behind Zork and the rest of their games!)

Wow... nostalgia extreme. I loved Terror. I even tried hacking the data file to figure out how things worked, heheh. (I broke it while trying to... but it was still fun!) I've also played the Nuclear Sub one, and the Mystery Island one. I found those two on a local dialup BBS, heehee. So yeah... get them. Now. Period. End of line.