The Tycoon
"I want to play 'Railroad Tycoon' again. Can you get it to run?"
My now Ex-Husband was completely serious about this. He loved an old DOS game that allowed you to run a railroading empire against the big business tycoons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It used to run on an ancient Mac Book, a so-called laptop that was the size of a dictionary. I sighed.
"I guess."
Hey, if he's playing that maybe he won't have time to make fun of me for playing Katamari.
I am more computer literate than some people, but I'm not a big-time hacker. I did all of my own maintenance and repairs on a G4 Macintosh, and got a crusty old Windows box up and running, so figuring out a way to make a DOS game run on ... well, one of the two computers shouldn't be too hard, right?
"So, did you figure out how to run 'Railroad Tycoon' yet?"
"I'm at work. I'll mess with it when I get home."
"The printer's not working, either."
"What's it doing?"
"It won't print."
I rubbed the corners of my eyes. I wanted to ask him what kind of not working. "Just reboot the entire system. Shut down the Mac, then the printer, and don't turn the printer back on until the Mac is booted up."
I have no idea why, but this solved the majority of my printer woes.
That evening and into the weekend, I spent most of my time on the "Railroad project." I downloaded more DOS emulators than I can remember, testing each one on the Windows computer with a copy of 'Tycoon' for Windows. I enjoyed visitng the abandonware sites looking for it - there were games available that I hadn't played in decades. And I wasn't going to get to play them again, because once this was running, he could basically lock up both computers at once.
I had my laptop, so that was something.
My now Ex-Husband was completely serious about this. He loved an old DOS game that allowed you to run a railroading empire against the big business tycoons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It used to run on an ancient Mac Book, a so-called laptop that was the size of a dictionary. I sighed.
"I guess."
Hey, if he's playing that maybe he won't have time to make fun of me for playing Katamari.
I am more computer literate than some people, but I'm not a big-time hacker. I did all of my own maintenance and repairs on a G4 Macintosh, and got a crusty old Windows box up and running, so figuring out a way to make a DOS game run on ... well, one of the two computers shouldn't be too hard, right?
"So, did you figure out how to run 'Railroad Tycoon' yet?"
"I'm at work. I'll mess with it when I get home."
"The printer's not working, either."
"What's it doing?"
"It won't print."
I rubbed the corners of my eyes. I wanted to ask him what kind of not working. "Just reboot the entire system. Shut down the Mac, then the printer, and don't turn the printer back on until the Mac is booted up."
I have no idea why, but this solved the majority of my printer woes.
That evening and into the weekend, I spent most of my time on the "Railroad project." I downloaded more DOS emulators than I can remember, testing each one on the Windows computer with a copy of 'Tycoon' for Windows. I enjoyed visitng the abandonware sites looking for it - there were games available that I hadn't played in decades. And I wasn't going to get to play them again, because once this was running, he could basically lock up both computers at once.
I had my laptop, so that was something.