leech

Haha, pretty sure that is the CD I have somewhere, though do not have the box. If it had all the maps and all the printed manuals and Ankhs it might be worth that. But knowing it is basically a box with a CD with everything on the disk... nope!

I own them all on multiple platforms, though sadly can only find my Ultima Online and Ultima 8 maps. Would love to own them all, but man that is a pricey collection!

Ha, for how old they are at this point, and considering you used to be able to get the CD with 1-6 (still have mine somewhere) I would think they should all be free or cheap.

Ha, the one who worked on that is floating around the forum.

Well, used to stand for Good Ol' Games. Basically a site that sells DRM free games. https://www.gog.com/

Has anyone attempted to do something like this? I haven't really had the time to poke, but if we could get native (or maybe 'port' Lutris / Proton) GOG support in AtariOS, it'd beef up the library a little bit, and make GOG have a bigger use for the plethora of games I've purchased there. How incredibly sexy would the VCS be, actually, if you could just put in your GOG credentials, and have it download games purchased from your library for play on the system? It kind of seems like a match made in heaven, right? CDProjekt should listen to my whims!

Yeah, it's an embedded style Linux distribution. From what I can tell of most of the games on the system, they're just Unity based. Not that I know of? I mean it doesn't look like it'd be terribly hard to figure out. My guess would be some xml / json files that define things like name, images, location on file system, etc. I've only gotten as far as booting on the Linux drive, copying off a game from the AtariOS storage, and then playing it under Linux, which seems to work just fine. So at least the few I tried seem to be DRM free. I haven't tried yet doing the opposite, except beyond spending like 5 minutes on it. It's structured so that it has some read-only partitions (so you can't muck with the OS from outside) and and there is a backup / snapshot made of the previous version (so recovery is possible). It's actually rather well done, considering expectations. Maybe if I get some time (unlikely) I'll poke around inside it to see if I can find any sort of file for getting things to show up in the launcher. Would be interesting to get something from Gog on there, for example.

So how the times fly... I thought it was only just a few years ago that Ultima IV was given away for free from Electronic Arts. But it was 10 years ago! https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/06/05/does-a-free-ultima-iv-herald-a-new-ultima-game.aspx Now the funny thing is, GOG still gives it away for free https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_4 But Origin charges 4.99??? https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/ultima/ultima-iv-quest-of-the-avatar I don't know about anyone else, but I find this hilarious! The dreams of that game informer article that there could be a new Ultima on the horizon... sadly even the 'Ultima Forever' link from that page is dead and now just redirects to ea.com. I need to have like 3 more of me so me and my clones could work on an Ultima IV (and others) remastered for the Atari 8bit.

Well I guess that depends on how you want to tackle that. My thought was that someone could release a game on a minimal Linux USB boot device that boots straight to a game. Either that or do one that you distribute however, but requires either a Linux or Mac or Windows install, or we need to figure out how to install something in AtariOS and get it into their launcher. I think that last bit would be the most useful (and fun).

Funny thing is, 4k streaming really isn't. You still need compression and since it is over UDP, you will still lose bytes here and there, and since it is constantly auto adjusting based on latency... 4k is more a marketing term for streaming of the potential you could have vs what you are actually getting. Also, actually trying to play 4k blurays turned out to be impossible for me. 1) PS4 Pro doesn't support them for some reason... 2) my standalone player is too old. 3) I couldn't figure out why as my hardware / software should have been able to play 4k blurays on my computer, but they refused. (Maybe now I have a 3080 RTX it will let me?) so yeah, 4k movies are a lie!

Haha, you're living in an age where people get their careers ruined for saying jokes on twitter... 10 years ago. Also, I quite enjoy Viking Metal myself! Though I am sure it is not the same, it should be! We really do live in weird times, which is probably why I have a tendency to reminisce more about older computers / consoles, while I can still enjoy modern stuff here and there, it definitely feels like too much of political nonsense has bled into the entertainment industry. And yeah, peoole needing some affirmation that it is okay to like something is really odd. But there are legitimately people who will only follow trends and one year will be enjoying some Motley Crue, then next year say it is stupid and be listening to Britney Spears...

Yeah with Antstream I can feel the lag on games. Also another thing I don't get is, while I live alone and don't have to share my bandwidth with anyone, most people don't. So how well does it work when you have one person streaming Netflix, another on a zoom call for work/school and you are trying to play something on Stadia? Ha, it will end up being like when I used a modem enough that I bought a separate land line for it... two internets is better than one, right?

In Utah it's pretty crap. Basically to the South in the Orem/Provo area you can get gigabit fibre. To the North in SLC, you can get gigabit. In the rural areas... not so much. At my old place I remember CenturyLink telling me they hoped to get gigabit within a year or two.. that was about 2010-11? And it never happened up to the 7 years later that I was there... They just don't have the incentive for some reason to upgrade residential areas enough. Or they have to get the cities to agree to it, and there's definitely cable lobbying going on there...

Not that I see people changing the VCS into a Workstation, but AlmaLinux 8.4 was released, and they fixed the secure boot issues as one of it's features. So you could start learning RHEL on the VCS if you were so inclined

Ha, yeah I Don think I would ever go to a VR arcade, someone sneezing into their hand and playing a normal arcade game is gross enough. Absorbing in someone's sweat from the face pads... when I first got my Vive I brought it to the office and one guy sweat profusely in the foam pad. We had to stop playing so we could wash / dry it out, so I ended up getting the pleather ones. Much easier to wipe off.