Well, almost. I've gotten the Celeron 466 processor (PPGA on a Slot1 Bridge) which I'll install tonight. All I've got to acquire now would be the RAM. I don't know if this is good news or not, but the Celeron 466 runs only on a 66MHz Frontside Bus, so I can probably save money buying 66MHz RAM. However, I'd be bitten if I ever upgraded to a PIII which would require 100MHz RAM.

Still waiting on the compiler... But I've been reading alot about optimizing code. Unrolling loops, things like that, are fascinating as hell... to a techie at least.

Other than that, I've become an MP3 fiend. I'm proud to say that my personal MP3 collections has just broken 3GB. I've been grabbing them left and right (only of the albums I already own, honestly officer) and plan to run a shoutcast server sometime soon. Won't that be fun? I thought so.

Also pulled out some of my old-skool DOOR programs that I wrote. You guys remember DOOR games? You played them on BBSs. That's right kiddies, before the great and mighty Internet there were BBSs (Bulletin Board Services). Essentially, a BBS was a computer (usually a 386 or 486) that had a modem connected to it and was always accepting calls. It was like a club, you could leave messages and download files on yer whopping 14.4 or 28.8 connection. Life was good. Shame that many people have no idea what BBSs were.

But I digress! I wrote a few DOOR games. Namely, the first one I wrote was called Secret Society. A bold venture on my part, I'll spare you all the details of this game. But I'll say these two things: In this game you could play as either a Vampire, Wraith, Werewolf, or a Hunter (human). You would live secretly in town and fight other "Breeders" like yourself. You could go to the library and log onto the computer there. This computer was connected to other computers across the country on this massive network of computers that I called the "MultiNet".

This was before I'd ever heard of White Wolf's "Vampire", "Werewolf" and "Wraith" games. Also before I'd ever heard of the Internet. So there it is. Two major gaming revolutions that I predicted before they became popular. I'm a damn gaming prophet. After I heard about the Vampire game I converted my Secret Society game over to a Vampire game, but never got to finish it.

Sadly, when I brought those games here to work they wouldn't run. It appears that anything written in Turbo Pascal up to, and including, version 7.0 will crash on a machine sporting a processor faster than 233MHz. Apparently the timing loop in the code does a division based on the processor speed that (because of the high speeds) results in a number so small that it's rounded to zero. That number is then placed through another division, and of course division by zero is a big fat no-no.

I find that absolutely interesting as hell. So, Tiny