Miscellaneous Links

This page contains a variety of amusing and/or informative links, including general ruminations on the computer industry. It is divided in two sections:

• Game Links
• Other Links

Game Links

• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is my favorite Roguelike game. Based on the abandoned Dungeon Crawl, Stone Soup adds an unusually good interface and help system, as well as integrated tile support.
• Game Rankings collects and averages reviews for PC and console games. Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes perform the same service for games as well as other media, such as films.
• GameFAQs hosts thousands of fan-written walkthroughs, puzzle solutions, story outlines, guides to secrets, and whatever else you might want to know about a given computer or console game.
• Chuck Pliske’s website, The Genie’s Lamp, provides oodles of information on the classic strategy game series Heroes of Might and Magic. Chuck graciously offered to host my Manual Addenda for the third and fourth game in the series, so you can find them there as well.
• Infocom created a number of classic text adventures in the early 1980s, then collapsed after pumping their resources into an ill-fated business product. The Story of Infocom (9.04 MB, PDF) analyzes the company’s rise and fall, and tells a fascinating story about the dawn of commercial computer games. – The Interactive Fiction Archive also offers many other resources related to text adventures, so browse around a bit.
• Mainframe Games for DOS provides executables and/or source code for really old computer games such as Adventure. Classic Empire and Empire for Windows specialize in one of the earliest computer-only strategy games. And Icemark attempts to recreate and enhance the famous Lords of Midnight series.
• MobyGames hosts titles, release dates, developers, publishers, short descriptions, and box shots for just about any game every commercially released on any platform that has ever existed.
• Want to enjoy a typical computer role-playing game without the tedium of actually having to control your characters? Download Progress Quest and get all the gameplay of critically acclaimed CRPGs such as EverQuest or Dungeon Siege – for free!
• Sloperama Productions is the website of Tom Sloper, a game designer with over 20 years of experience. Tom provides lots of very valuable (if somewhat sobering) advice for wannabe game developers. Definitely check it out if you think about entering this industry.
• Phil Steinmeyer, founder of PopTop, is another professional game developer who maintains a blog with many helpful tips. Phil has also compiled a number of business statistics about the game industry.

Other Links

• Gibson Research Corporation is the slightly wacky website of Steve Gibson’s one-man operation. Don’t let the screaming font compositions scare you away, there’s some great stuff to be found, including an explanation and demonstration of the ClearType font rendering technology and the Shields Up! page featuring a test of how visible your machine is to hackers on the Internet.
• The sixteen multi-megabyte GLOBE Project Data Tiles contain geographical data for the entire land surface of the earth, at a grid spacing of 1 km (planar) by 1 m (vertical). They were assembled from satellite photographs and put up for free download by America’s National Geophysical Data Center. You can also order the whole package on CD-ROM, but the price of US$350 makes this option more expensive than even a modem download on a metered analog connection.
• MicroType offers consulting and training for Adobe Acrobat and FrameMaker, but founder Shlomo Perets has also created a number of extremely useful FrameMaker accessories, including several quick reference guides, how-to articles, a list of known bugs, and a complete UI enhancement package. You can find them in the “Resources” section of the MicroType website.
• Visit the Obsolete Computer Museum for information and pictures of the computing behemoths of yore, from archaic Altairs to “luggable” CP/M machines and the popular home computers of the 80s. Great fun if you remember fighting the flimsy ZX-81 keyboard.
• John C. Dvorak’s Personal Portal is a compact text page full of links, including a list of all major search engines. But the real purpose of this page is to save it to your hard disk (it’s just a single HTML file) and set it as your browser’s home page. This provides a handy table of links without having to wait for a remote page to load up.
• Stefan Münz’ SelfHTML (German only) is a virtual encyclopædia on website design. Incredibly exhaustive and very well presented, this website tells you everything you need to know about building a web presence, whether on your own server or on a provider’s web space.
• Silent PC Review offers lots of product reviews and background information for anyone trying to build a fast PC that doesn’t sound like a vacuum cleaner. Of particular interest is the article Power Supply Fundamentals and Recommendations which sheds light on this notoriously misunderstood subject.
• The Unix-Haters Handbook (ed. Garfinkel, Weise & Strassmann) is an enormously entertaining collection of true stories about an “Un-Operating System: unreliable, unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered. Little is more frustrating than trying to force Unix to do something useful and nontrivial.” The book was originally published by IDG Books in 1994 but is now available as a free download. While outdated and intentionally exaggerated, it still contains many truths about the state of Unix (and C++) just before Windows took over.
• Zinio is an online subscription service for print magazines. Whenever a new issue is published, subscribers can download a copy in a modified Adobe Acrobat format. While not as convenient as a real paper copy, this service is a great option for those trying to obtain American magazines outside the USA.