I oddly enough do have a working floppy drive, but that doesn’t seem like a solid solution lol.

Interesting, I never saw either Thexder or Socerian in local stores at the time, nor I had even heard of them. It doesn’t look like GOG has them listed, but I’ll keep an eye out so I can possibly give them a try.

Come to think of it, I think it was parallax scrolling that Id Software figured out that hadn’t been done properly before. I had never encountered any of the Japanese DOS games in the DOS days. I imagine there just wasn’t distribution of then in the US I guess. I would have loved to see some Nihon Falcom games.

I loved both for what they were. There were a bunch of great arcade games ported to NES they were just totally different, but awesome games and both Ninja Gaiden and Double Dragon are on that list. Strider was a notable one too, where the NES was great, but so hard most people couldn’t get to see much of it.

I don’t feel that those ports, or this Ninja Gaiden one, were horrible or “mistakes” (I owned this game and Megaman 3 for DOS). The PCs at the time didn’t have the specialized hardware to do smooth side scrolling, and John Carmack and crew’s novel way to do it without the hardware was still their secret. It was honestly the best side scrolling game you’d find on PC despite the jank.

My dog is part of this elitist crew.

I have to admit, the GBA SP was pretty hot. I still have mine.

Quod Libet can do all of these things to my knowledge. It is currently my favorite linux music player.

Another commenter appears to have had the same issue, so it could just be some manufacturing issues. I’ll just consider myself lucky since I’d be pretty annoyed if I had to get to work soldering a hotswap board that I purchased specifically to avoid soldering.

Wow, I’ve never seen someone push in switches so hard it broke the hotswap sockets, that’s wild. I have definitely bent switch pins.

I made so many mods for Civ 1 and Civ 2. Civ 2 is also my second favorite (4 being my favorite)

A 33MHz DX 486was great. If you got stuck with a slower SX CPU, things were frequently not so hot.

I’ve had great luck using Intel NUCs as home servers and HTPC boxes. Since those are now gone, I have found that Beelink is the most cost effective replacement when I needed to revamp the setup. My biggest complaint on them is that the cooling fans on them are not super reliable and it is not easy to find compatible replacements. I had to order them direct from China and there are a few wiring incompatible variants. I ended up with one of them being the wrong type and I had to resolder the leads to match the existing broken fan.

I bought one last year and when I need to replace a TV, I will do it again.

I would never consider that BS, so I forgot about that heh

Your description of flying is still accurate.

The only thing that changed in that time frame is almost everyone, including Fairphone, got on boards screwing over everyone that wanted wired headphones. So, I guess they are modern and up to date after all.

This isn’t necessarily accurate and probably depends on the model of open backed headphones. You can definitely hear music from many open back headphones when they are playing music if you are close, even at normal listening levels. My wife used to constantly complains about it when my office was in our bedroom and I had to switch to my closed back over ears that isolated well.

I found that I can’t just start and stop reading and get anything out of it in the same way that I can’t just start and stop a game, but that’s good that you can.

While I definitely have less time for things like that, I still find time to play some games usually by giving up a little sleep and playing after the kids are asleep and tons of chores have been done. I can’t imagine that you still don’t need some downtime, you can’t just be “on” all the time without it heavily affecting your mental health. I hope that you have simply found other pursuits that do that for you.