Distractions from WoW

Twice, I've come close to going out and getting that WoW game card. But I think I've got it down what to do with myself for the last two or three weeks left of The Slowest Summer Evar.

First, I found interactive logic puzzles online. Particularly, I've fallen in love with the Link-a-Pix ones. I've done all the mega ones, and I wish they had more. :/ This will keep me occupied for hours on end.

Second, I'm finally getting to do some more stuff on the hexapedal robot I've been working on. I finished constructing the body, legs, and electronics of the beast, but have been stone-walled for a week or so regarding the programming.

Yeah...the programming. Me, stuck on programming. Huh.

Well, actually, I haven't touched the programming yet. It's getting the software to work that's the trouble. First, the university lab computer wouldn't let the software stay installed, because it would wipe the C:\ drive every time you restart the computer, and one of the two pieces of software requires you to restart the computer in order for the computer to recognize it. Oops. Second try, we figure I can install the software on my laptop and program that way. Well, turns out that while my laptop has a monitor port on it, it doesn't have the required COM port that would connect the robot hardware to software programming. Great. Third try is the old G-school connections for a USB-to-Serial cord. Apparently there is no such thing that we know of. But we did find a laptop with a serial port.

It's a Windows 98 machine. The remark was that my cell phone probably has more memory than this relic.

It was another piece of adventure to install the software on the 98 machine. It has a USB port, but it doesn't know how to use it. Had to go look up the driver for the particular flash drive I was using--but how to get it on the machine?

I swear it's been over a decade since I last touched a 3.5" Floppy. We thought about using floppies to install the software, but we forgot that relics like these don't hold much memory. The total installation was 8.40 Mb--a floppy carries 1.44Mb. Not to mention that one of the files in one of the applications was over 1.44Mb, so we ditched that plan in favor of the USB driver. Though, I would point out that the 98 was the oldest version of the USB driver we could download--good thing it wasn't a 95.

But no worries, we got the software on the machine, and even better--the 98 can, in fact, run the software which normally runs on XP!!

In other news, I want to hijack this little artifact so I can play Might & Magic IV-V: World of Xeen again without buying a simulator. Now that I look it up, Xeen was released in 1992--it's MSDOS, not even Windows 95! Holy crap!