Comment by illys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by illys | Hacker News Reader

I started collecting some legacy hardware in 2018 because I missed the touch and feel of playing Digger, Popcorn, Lemmings... on real hardware (not attracted by emulators).

Problem with such hardware is that when you look for a piece, you find it cheaper in a batch than alone. I've ended up so far with a nice collection 10-12 PCs from the eighties. Nicest ones are the IBM 5150, 5160 and 5162, the Compaq Deskpro 386-20 (in the original huge Compaq form factor), the original Compaq Portable 386, a pair of IBM PS/2 8530-286...

I can play my old games, run Turbo Pascal programs I wrote in 1988-1990, play with x86 Assembler programming, play MOD files on PC bipper and Sound Blaster 2. In addition I can run Area5150, 8088MPH... Recent software that only run on very specific and very old hardware.

No regret, it is mostly fun!

Oh, Lemmings of course! I remember playing a black and white version on an old Mac I think (and never being able to beat the nessy level).

You can play it in your browser: https://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

Whoa, crazy. At first I thought they just made some sort of JS VM with a canvas output. Nope. Each individual lemming is its own HTML div that moves around the DOM on top of the background image... someone took a lot of time to rewrite this whole thing into basic HTML. Nutty and brilliant, lol.

It's actually a much nicer experience than trying to play it in a Dosbox emulator on the web: https://classicreload.com/lemmings.html

If you are interested in details, the author has a blog:

https://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer...

For the opposite experience, get lemmings from the windows store (or whatever that's called nowadays).

The most cynical, half-assed, unwinable, borderline unplayable pile of crap that is trying to be passed off as lemmings. It's like they gave a first year programing student two screen shots and a bad description of the game and then ran that through even worse machine translation and the result was shipped directly to end users.

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