Category Archives: Computers

The very stones themselves are burning

Inkedwork, Dwarven Fortress

Why the hell aren’t you playing Dwarf Fortress? Seriously. What the hell?

“But there’s a learning curve!” you complain. Use the wiki.

“But what’s with the ASCII art?” you whine. Well, when I was a kid we didn’t have fancy bump-mapping and realistic lighting techniques. Take your ASCII art and like it, or if you just don’t have the stones, try one of the tile sets.

“What the heck is this all about?” you bleat. It’s about mining. And booze. And craftng. And fighting. And beards. And murderous elephants. Good stout-hearted Dwarf stuff.

Dwarf Fortress. What can I say about this wonderful, horrible game? Well, it’s free. That’s an important point.

It’s an economics / strategy simulation game. People have called it a RPG, but that’s because there are Dwarves and the occasional goblin siege, not because there’s any actual role-playing going on. It’s also an adventure game, but I find the fun to lie with building and managing a settlement.

It’s also ugly. Very ugly. That horrible picture atop this post is a screenshot of the first floor of my current project. I understand that some of the weaker-stomached folk out there don’t remember Rogue and NetHack and the eyestrain-inducing splendor of staying up all night playing video games on a green monochrome monitor. Such people are weak. Beneath my consideration, unworthy of even my disdain.

It’s also tremendously deep. Not deep as in “the Dwarves delved too deep and worked the accursed adamantine veins” — though that happens too — but deep as in many-layered, characterized by nuance and complexity. Dwarf Fortress is a wondrous sandbox for you to play in, unconstrained by a set scoring system or victory condition. There’s no wrong way to play Dwarf Fortress, and no right way. You can build your settlement above ground or dig deep into a mountainside. You can erect self-aggrandizing monuments to your own genius or establish a humble community of poor dirt-farmers. You can erect stout defenses and staff them with expertly-trained axedwarves and marksdwarves, or you can take a more pacifistic route. The pacifistic route can result in genocide by goblins, but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach. Just because there’s no right way to play doesn’t mean the game won’t exert some pressure on your bustling little community.

If you can bear with the learning curve for, say, an hour, and you can suspend your desire for 21st-century computer graphics for the duration, Dwarf Fortress is a tremendously rewarding game. Go get it; it’s not even six megabytes, and runs on Windows and Macintosh.

How ADSL Filters Work

Circuit diagram for ADSL line filter

I ran into an excellent, thorough explanation of how ADSL line filters work today at epanorama. Contents include an increasingly in-depth description of the theoretical and practical purpose of such devices, photographs of disassembled filters, and what really caught my attention: a circuit diagram.

Truxton Competition

Truxton II

A few years back, my gracious employer bought an Ultracade machine with a couple dozen games on it ranging from Frogger to Street Fighter, with several classics and many games that I simply had never heard of before. At the generous rate of four credits per quarter, I’ve dug through and found several outdated games that are really quite good. My habit has been to play a game several times, generally until I’ve filled up the high-score board. On some games (e.g. Donkey Kong), I’ve had a competitor or two exchanging places on the top-score list back and forth until we lost interest. On others (e.g. Robotron or Joust), others in the building surpass my skill so greatly that a high-score run is simply unthinkable. On several, there simply hasn’t been any competition. Nobody else plays these games. Truxton II is one of these. Penguin-kun Wars is another.

After months of having no back-and-forth competition for the high score on any of the games, a challenger as finally appeared. One of my coworkers started playing Truxton II recently. Apparently he used to play it when it was new (1992, I gather). He quickly knocked the rust off his game and got all the way to the second boss fight. I’ve never seen anything past the second boss, having never defeated the thing. In doing so he beat my high score by six thousand points, somewhere in the neighborhood of 355,000 total to my 349,000. That’s a pretty close margin, so it’s time to roll up my sleeves and have another go at it.

Anybody with tips on how to make the best use of the blue, red, and green power-ups at various stages of the game, please let me know. I’ve found that the blue auto-aim guns work great on the 1st level, and the red rolling-thunder guns work very well in the mid-to-late 2nd level, but have never found a compelling use for the green scatter-gun.