From the smoking ruins of The Silent Sorcerer's tower, Skullsword sends forth nonsensical artwork and useless gaming tools. He also likes to discuss RPGs, boardgames, miniatures painting, writing, movies, books, and whatever else strikes his fancy. Mostly though, his goal is to provide fun and goofy things to inspire others in their games. Enjoy!
Monday, February 18, 2019
The 8-bit Barbarian
So, I came across this article on CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/17/tech/30-year-old-apple-computer-work-trnd/index.html, and I thought, "This is news? I do this all the time!"
Why, just the other day, I was climbing down an old dry well, and at the bottom I spied a box, so I climbed down for a closer look. To my surprise I saw an old Commodore Vic-20 box! What a find! except it was surrounded by snakes... and fire. Fire snakes actually! As I got closer, the fire snakes were all like, "You shall not have this biz!" And I was all like, "Oh yes I shall!" So I climbed back up and got a bucket of water. Needless to say those fire snakes ran like crazy when they saw me coming back. I grabbed the box and climbed out before they got any more ideas. Fire snakes can be kind of dumb.
When I got out of the well I opened the box and to my surprise, there wasn't a Vic-20 in it at all, but rather a Commodore 64. It was pretty nasty too, having gotten all dirty and yellow sitting at the bottom of that well. So I took it home and cleaned it up. Even clean though, it was still all yellow from being in that stanky old well for who know how long.
Before I invested too much time in this thing though, I figured that I should check to see if it worked, so I plugged it in, powered it on, and got exactly nothing. Well, not quite nothing. The power light came on but the screen was blank. "Hmmmm", I though. "Seems like it might be a memory problem." So, I used the old tried and true, "feel the ram chips" method of testing, and sure enough, one of those chips was hotter than a fire snake! That usually means that the chip is bad. Breaking out my trusty soldering iron, I replaced the bad memory chip with one that I had lying around (yes, I have that sort of stuff lying around), and voila! I had a working Commodore 64.
After giving myself a few chemical burns while restoring the plastic to its original color, I was ready to play Temple of Apshai!
Take that, Attic Guy! (I'm just kidding. It was awesome that his apple was still working) Original Nerds, represent!;-)
So maybe the well was Ebay, and maybe the fire snakes were the people trying to outbid me, but the rest is fact. :-)
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