On Serf City

Sun, January 6, 2008 - 7:57 AM PST

I spent 3 hours yesterday playing my favorite old DOS game: Serf City. I used to play it back in high school but I haven't had an environment to run it in since then. I had tried a few times to get it running but always failed, until yesterday. My work-provided laptop runs it like a champ in dosbox, complete with midi emulation and SVGA graphics. It was great.

After that success, I decided that I'd rather play it at my desk with a real mouse so I decided to try my hand with compiling dosbox on Solaris/SPARC. This would be more of a trick, since the software wouldn't just be faking the game into thinking it was running in DOS, it would actually be doing that plus emulating an 80386 microprocessor. Well, it compiled fine, but dosbox apparently still has some kinks because when I pressed any keys on my keyboard, it was interpreted at some point as the wrong character. I dunno, maybe that was SDL's fault, but it sure wasn't working.

So back to the laptop I go.