Grans & Technology
I regail you with tails of woe of a grandmother (sadly, now departed), and a Pentium 75 (not so sadly departed).

I was 15, and my grandad (who is also sadly departed) bought me my first PC, the afformented P75. Although getting on a bit even then, my Grandad was born a number of years before he should've been, as he taught me how to code HTML, helping me immensely in a career as a web developer.

Gran on the other hand, was a saint in that she could see the positive side of anything, but she wasn't good with computers (except for a radar computer in the WWII, which we as a nation are enterally greatful for). I loved her to bits, but

Back then, computers went in & out of fashion at an alarming rate, but whilst nowadays most PC Games work on most Windows systems fine, back then you had the wonders of DOS which allowed most games to be run.

Cue the release of Theme Park, which to get it running on a P75, meant you had to do the following:-

- Create an MS-DOS boot disk
- Restart the computer into MS-DOS
- Open autoexec.bat file in a text editor
- Find the mouse drivers, the speaker drivers, the midi sound board drivers & the CD ROM Drivers
- Copy the lines that called the drivers from the C:/ drive from the autoexec.bat file on the C:/ drive to the one on the A:/ drive
- Restart the machine
- Play the game

Misty eyed brilliance yet, but for a hormonal 15 year old, was an absolute nightmare. Seeing my lack of Theme Park game playing rage, my gran observed the following.

"If things you bought worked straight away, you wouldn't have as much fun with it!"

Different time guys, different time
(rhyswynne - on every social network mullarkey known to man, Thu 20 May 2010, 16:08, 2 replies)

eh?
Surely you mean "if something you bought _worked_ straight away you wouldn't have as much fun with it"...?
( sanityclause is waiting until, Thu 20 May 2010, 16:19, closed)

You're Quite Right
Corrected
(rhyswynne - on every social network mullarkey known to man, Thu 20 May 2010, 16:39, closed)

Curious
I ran Theme Park and Magic Carpet on a 486 running w3.1 and I remember having to change autoexec.bat (possibly something in config.sys as well, not sure) to get them to work but I never had to create a disc. I guess that must have been a different apprach to the same problem....it was a while back and is a bit hazy now.
(cmouse is pondering about life in other jobs, Fri 21 May 2010, 9:32, closed)