Tales from the Computery Nonsense folder

SNOOPY, Dumb (C:), and Dumber (D:)

Last modified: 09212024

This page kinda serves as me rambling on about things that happened on Scratch and other computery tomfoolery that I did when I was really young.

The Specs of Machine #1

Dell Dimension 4550

Intel Northwood Pentium 4 SL6S2 @2524 MHz (CPU-World Page)

1 GB of RAM

60 GB hard disk space

250 GB Secondary drive

Windows XP Professional 5.1.2600 Service Pack 3 Build 2600

NVIDIA GeForce 6200

SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS

and an outdated version of Firefox

The machine's nickname was SNOOPY.

This was my primary machine up to late 2014, and it definitely was not good for flash programs.

Eventually I used a 32-bit Linux distribution running off of a USB drive to make a complete backup of the 60 GB drive, which took around 12 hours to complete, finishing at around 2:20 AM. That image was eventually copied to a home server, taking ANOTHER 12 hours, where it resides to this day.

BeyBlade

One of the earlier games I played on that machine was that online BeyBlade game by Hasbro. Remember BeyBlades??

It's a small footnote, just deserved to be mentioned.

Fisher-Price EasyLink

This was when I was really young. My mother had bought me a Fisher-Price EasyLink, which was this children's toy that connected to a Windows PC, this machine be a Windows XP laptop from Dell.

This toy had a bunch of figurines of Disney PlayHouse and PBS Kids characters, such as Arthur, Elmo, or Mickey Mouse.

I don't remember many details about the software, I'm going off of what I remember.

So, what I believed happened was there was this sort of hub that the parent would launch that a child couldn't escape with ease. The child would place one of the figures onto the green slot, reading what I think was an NFC tag or similar. The hub software would then either open a browser to play the associated game, or it had a built-in version of Adobe Flash in order to play these games.

I only remember one game being played on it, and that was the Arthur game, titled Alien: Assembly Required.

It's like a very primitive version of Nintendo's amiibo.

Perhaps I should track one down and mess with it one day.

Dig Dug on Fupa

When I was much younger, I played a lot of Dig Dug on Xbox Live Arcade, and eventually, I convinced my mother to find a version on the internet.

It was on a site called "Fupa."

Only recently did I realize that version was the Nintendo Game Boy version running in a Flash-based emulator named PlayR.

ChromaDepth 3D

The Nintendo 3DS is what kickstarted the obsession with 3D that eight-year-old me had. After that. At some point, my mother found some glasses that gave the illusion of 3D depending on the color.

Like, the depth of the object depended on the color of it, it was super cool. To this day it's still kinda cool.

I also hung up 3D anaglyph Minecraft screenshots all around my room. Ha.

The Beginning of Scratch

I first started Scratch in late July (I think it was 28?) of 2014, when I was 10 years old. My mother had just bought me a book called Help Your Kids With Computer Coding. I had always wanted to make games of my own but never knew where to start.

The first thing I did was copy the project Monkey Mayhem.

Every day I would make changes to it and some friends from school would play it and think it was cool.

Eventually this escalated to me using Scratch for school projects, but that's getting a little ahead of ourselves.

The Disappearing Data Bug

Ah yes, finally an explanation for why my Monkey Mayhem description is this:

Essentially what happened was whenever I made a change to that project, the secondary costume for the Monkey would be completely deleted.

I eventually made a forum thread about this, entitled Missing Costumes?

The users on there basically told me that Firefox has problems with Scratch and that the Scratch Team was working on it.

The engoodening of eggman15

Basically I found this project and wanted to help the user who went by eggman15.

You can find the beginning of the remix chain here.

Super Block Jump and Plagiarism

Oh boy. Literally the first 20 or so stages were ripped directly from another Scratch game called Mustache Kitty.

Literally that's what the first few prototypes were. Just a clone of Mustache Kitty.

I eventually made more original levels, but what do you want of me, I was 10.

Even the physics engine was copied verbatim. And the Game Boy Advance port used that script as a reference!

The Specs of Machine #2

Lenovo ThinkPad T410

Intel Core i5-520M @2.4GHz

4 GB RAM (later upgraded to 6, then 8)

NVIDIA NVS 3100M

250GB HDD, later upgraded to 500GB then 1TB because of hard drive failures

Windows 7, later upgraded to Windows 10

Super Block Jump Wiki

Yeah, that happened. Not much of it survives today except for very few screenshots and a very incomplete Wayback Machine crawl, which is probably for the better.

The Forest Cafe or something

In 6th grade Social Studies, we had a project where we had to design a restaurant. We were to make a drawing and a menu, and I chose to make the drawing in Microsoft 3D builder.

This was back in January of 2016, and I had next to no experience in 3D modelling.

What ended up happening was I made the entire building out of cubes

By the end, there were so many cubes that my NVS 3100M struggled to render it, there were opject priority issues and Z-Fighting all over it.

The file no longer survives, but I still have screenshots.

Nesbox Emulator (UWP)

Back in early 2016, I did some experiments in emulation. More specifically, Game Boy emulation through Nesbox Emulator that was on the Microsoft Store at one point.

Nowadays, I know that Nesbox Emulator is hot garbage but what can I say, I didn't know very much.

I played games from 5 or so years before such as Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World, Hardcore Pinball, and Franklin's Great Adventures.

In fact, around the same time, there was an influx of classmates installing emulators on their Chromebooks, there were some available through the Chrome Web Store.

Funny story, so my teacher in one class, was watching me play Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island, and then asked me, "Where do you get these games?"

I kinda hesitated for a minute and said "I don't know."

Zorin Linux, Wine, and Tag: The Power of Paint

When I was 10 or so, I often played a little PC game called Tag: The Power of Paint. It released in 2008 and laid the groundwork for the gels in Portal 2.

I had a "copy" of it on a USB drive that I took to school

At school, we had these HP Mini 5102 (they might've been 5103s but whatevs) netbooks that ran Zorin OS, a flavor of Ubuntu Linux designed around emulating the Windows UI/UX.

I was in math class and when I was done with all my work for that class I tried to play Tag on one of them.

Keyword being tried.

But at that time, I didn't that the concept of appication binary interfaces (ABIs) and I didn't know what the crap Wine was, much less how to use it.

And that "copy" of Tag was really just a .lnk file copied from the desktop on my T410 and nothing else.

EZ-Flash IV Haribo

This photo, taken on June 16, 2017, is something that I thought I had lost forever, but no actually, I've had it this whole time. It's a photo of when I first got my EZ-Flash IV, and the vendor on Amazon that we bought it from also shipped us a little packet of Haribo gummy bears for some reason. The cartridge didn't come in an EZ-Flash branded box, just a little cardboard sleeve with the cartrdige, the bears, and the microSD reader.

And yes, the bears were pretty okay. I remember them being a tad stale though, but that could just be a fuzzy memory speaking.

The Screwed Up Frontlight

I first frontlit my Game Boy Advance not too long after I got the EZ-Flash IV. I was terrible at it. My mom also insisted that we leave the entire unit soldered together on the old concrete wall as it cured, and I was anxious it was going to blow away as it was rather windy that day. I ended up getting a little bit of the LOCA on the front of the plastic panel, and I spent a good deal trying to goo-gone it off. I think that only made things worse, as the goo gone might have seeped into the sides of the screen-frontlight sandwhich and started eating away at the LOCA, causing a the most dramatic spidering effect I've ever seen. It even led up to the plastic becoming brittle and pieces were breaking off of it.

Later on, I swapped out the screen with an AGS-001 screen and later, an AGS-101 panel.