A while ago I wrote that I wanted the occasional play of my favorite strategy game VGA Planets. The other night I was clearing out old corners of my home directory and found my registered copy and the remains of my attempts to run it.
I’m not sure why I overlooked it then, but I decided to try the current release of DOSBox, an open source 286/386 emulator specializing in compatibility for these old games. Amazingly, it works. The PC-speaker sound works. The odd-ball video mode that VPA uses works. It all works.
I’m happy.
Nathan has been mimicking us, reaching and drooling when we eat. He’s not responding just to the excitement of our huffing meals in split five-minute shifts. I’ve read that it can take a dozen attempts before an infant will accept solid food. It took one try. The score so far:
- Rice cereal for babies. Refused. No, not just refused but furious, howling refused. I tasted it, the flavor is as flat as the box it came out of. Maybe we can use it to thicken soup.
- Banana. Mashed over-ripe fruit with a little formula to thin it. Liked this quite a bit.
- Pear. Peeled, mashed in its own juice. Really liked this. First prize in the clean plate club.
- Ice cream. Vanilla, liked it.
- Ice cream. Chocolate, oh, hell yeah!
Tomorrow he gets sweet potato. I’m predicting more gustatorial success.
Filladapt mode is good but the Perl module Text::Autoformat is better at reflowing text for email. I cobbled together the following elisp to make that easy.
(defun rel-autoformatter (begin end rightmargin)
"Run Text::Autoformat on region"
(shell-command-on-region begin end
(format "perl -MText::Autoformat -e 'autoformat({all=>1,right=>%d})'" rightmargin) t t )
(message "done."))
(defun rel-autoformat (begin end)
Text::Autoformat on region, RFC recommended right margin of 72"
(interactive "r")
(rel-autoformatter begin end 72))
(defun rel-autoformat-quote (begin end)
"Text::Autoformat on region, right margin of 60, suitable for quoting replies"
(interactive "r")
(rel-autoformatter begin end 60))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c f f") 'rel-autoformat)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c f q") 'rel-autoformat-quote)
It might be nice to handle parameters other than right margin- and do it in a cleaner way than explicitly specifying them. I doubt I’ll get around to it since Text::Autoformat usually does the right thing for me with just the margin hint.
Decided I didn’t like seeing high cpu loads, mostly when the bots come trolling through. Now I have caching.
