Windows95

[Eck]

Yeah, The Matrix was great.

And Hayden Christensen's style was perhaps what George Lucas wanted? Whatever. I won't argue. The films work and Lucas has gazillions to prove it.

Star Trek TOS and movies and Star Trek TNG and movies are great stuff, and even Deep Space 9 and the last season of Enterprise are quality sci-fi, but not quite Roddenberry's Star Trek. I wonder what the movies and child series would have been like if Gene would have still been young enough to want to force his continued creative control? We saw some of it in Star Trek The Motion Picture and the first season to STTNG. Those were actually more like the original series than anything that followed, but out modern society enjoys more militeristic violence and sex in their entertainment than folks who grew up in Roddenberry's era preferred. Although Gene never discouraged Bill Thiess's costumes (what costumes?) on the guest actresses on TOS!

Alright, enough of this before we get put into a home for sci-fi, computer nerds. Besides, have you seen the starwars.com forums? Plenty of stuff there for this kind of thing.

Back to gadget, software tinkering!

[jack99]

i hear tie fighters are powered by windows 95 ...

[MDGx]

TIE fighters sound decent only in THX surround [Dolby Digital 5.1 required]

Yeah, I remember... the good ol' TV shows some of us still love and cherish:

http://www.mdgx.com/scifi.htm

TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT [+ 10 Star Trek theatre films]

Babylon 5 TV series [5 seasons] + 4 TV films + Crusade TV series spinoff + The Legend of The Rangers 2 hr TV miniseries spinoff

and some not so well known or not so popular TV shows:

Farscape series [5 seasons] + Peacekeeper Wars 4 hr miniseries [2004]

SeaQuest DSV [1st season] + SeaQuest 2032 [2nd season] = by Steven Spielberg

Space Above & Beyond

Space Rangers

Earth II

Andromeda = Gene Roddenberry's early work

Earth Final Conflict = Gene Roddenberry's early work

Battlestar Galactica [old TV series (1978)] + new 4 hr TV miniseries [2003] + new TV series season 1 [2004-2005]

Space 1999

V

SG-1 TV series [stargate film (1994) spinoff]

Stargate Atlantis TV series [sG-1 spinoff]

Oddyssey 5

Sliders

Dark Angel

Firefly

Alien Nation (1989) TV series [original film (1988) spinoff] + 4 more TV films

The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones TV series [a.k.a. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles] = Indiana Jones films spinoff

Jeremiah

Highlander [films spinoff]

Planet of The Apes old films [1st film 1967] TV series spinoff [1974] + new theatre film [2001]

Dune 6 hr TV miniseries [2001] + Children of Dune 4 hr TV miniseries spinoff [2002]

Riverworld 2 hr TV miniseries

Earthsea 2 hr TV miniseries

The Lost World 2 hr TV miniseries + TV series [4 seasons]

Code Name Eternity

Lexx 3 TV films [a.k.a. Tales from a Parallel Universe (1996)] + Lexx TV series spinoff [4 seasons]

Smallville

ok, I'm gonna stop now.

[Eck]

You're going to laugh but I actually printed that out. You sure are thorough, no matter the subject! Now I've got a checklist of good stuff to check out. Thanks!

I'll see how many Netflix has available. (No, you don't need to make another guide for that. I can handle searching Netflix. I'm trying to save you some work here.)

[azagahl]

I don't know. Between Lord Of the Rings and Star Wars I hardly feel the urge to watch anything else! (Is there anything else?)

Just kidding. But these 2 masterpieces are hard to beat.

What do u mean?

The Matrix rulez! [the 1st one anyway]

There's no need to argue about LOTR / Star Wars / The Matrix. The decisive winner has already been pointed out:

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/film/trilogy.html

[jack99]

unga bunga welcome to starwars forum . my fav movie is pigs in space.

[erpdude8]

yea Win95 was something back in the late 90s. there were also addons/tools to make Win3.x look almost like Win95.

best star wars episode to me is ep 6 - return of the jedi ; luke does bring his father out of the 'dark' side in the end.

[azagahl]

luke does bring his father out of the 'dark' side in the end.

omg, he does!?? I've only seen episodes 1 - 5 so far!

[Rhelic]

Actually installing Windows 95 helped me live an entirely new philosophy when it comes to technology.

I upgraded my Dos 6.x setup (486DX2-100mhz 8megs ram) to Win95. I actually disliked the interface and re-installed Dos 6.x.

3 Months later I knew I couldn't avoid the changeover so I reinstalled Win95 and poked around with it until I discovered the BOOTGUI=1 option in the msdos.sys file. Considering I knew the previous DOS versions of this file contained binary daat, and now this file contained text, I realized it was a secret setting.

In fact on a tangent, I had to take my PC for repair and when the tech saw what I did he flipped out saying I hacked Win95 (hardly). This was of course long before it was common knowledge on the Internet that this setting existed, in fact I never read about it until a full year later.

I was proud to run what I considered Dos 7 and if I choose to use, Win95, I simply typed WIN in dos. Although Win95 performance wasn't acceptable until I upgraded my PC to a total of 16megs of ram.

It was that 3 months of avoiding Win95 when I told myself I would never alienate new techonolgy again (that replaces old technology) as I don't want to be the kind of person to avoid something new just because it's different. I realized oneday you HAVE to upgrade (ok well all you 98 SP2 guys will disagree with me) so I'd rather be an early adopter and be ahead of the crowd than the last guy in the race. It gives me an advantage over my fellow IT workers imho.

This means I'm willing to apply Service Packs the day of release, I often install RC1 as my home OS for whatever new MS OS is coming out, I always try to upgrade any server I touch to whatever is newest (now-a-days this means Win 2003 SP1) and am in general, an upgrade junkie.

I'm such an upgrade junkie I have about 10 sites I visit almost daily keeping an eye out for updates on various key products I use. I even get involved with a couple products to help steer authors for certain things. Just recently I nagged the 7-Zip author to release 4.x as final since every 4.x version has been beta, and the last "final" release was 2yrs ago for 3.x

[Rhelic]

there were addons/tools to make Win3.x look almost like Win95.

Actually this one appears impressively good, I never used it but it seems it was still being worked on only a couple years ago.

It has a fully cloned Start button, the task bar, the quick links and the systray, amazing.

Review /w screenshots: http://toastytech.com/guis/cal.html

Homepage: http://www.calmira.de/

[Eck]

Heh, heh. I'm the opposite. I find old stuff I wasn't even a part of when it was out and have fun getting it to work today.

I used that Calmira desktop back when I took my HD and partitioned it to 2G for Dos/Win3.1 and the rest for, at the time, the new Windows XP. I thought it was cool to apply what I learned from getting dos games to work on 98 to setting up an MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 partition. I used an SBLive with its dos drivers and found that I couldn't get Windows 3.1 to cooperate (or even install, or even boot after it was running if I did install the SBLive driver). I tried an SB16AWE card but I couldn't get the stupid Creative drivers to install. (Lot's of folks have felt that pain, even today!) I also had a Radeon 7500 at the time and found I couldn't get more than standard VGA out of it (no Win3.1 driver, the ones that came with Win3.1 didn't work with it). But I got Netscape 4.08 and Trumpet Winsock and an ISA modem (Abit KT7A had an ISA slot), and actually browsed around a bit on the net with it. I realized that wasn't the safest without a virusscanner or firewall, plus it looked crappy with the resolution and ancient browser. I also decided that 98 and its Dos, or XP with vdmsound and Dosbox, ran what I had for dos (games) better, so I nixed the partition.

But hey, just recently I saw that the later CVS versions of Dosbox could run Windows 3.1. And I was able to download the actual S3 drivers for the videocard that Dosbox emulates, so I installed it and got nice 800x600 SVGA graphics! I tried installing Win3.1 Quicktime to get the old Carmen Sandiego game working, but something kept making it error out so it couldn't run. Both the Dos version and the newer Win3.1 version run in XP natively, so that's okay. The slightly newer 95 version is less annoying as it lets you advance without referring to an encyclopedia that comes with the old game and which I don't have. I had installed the Creative Soundblaster Pro drivers, software, and updates. I got the Microsoft Media stuff installed and was able to play cd's, wave's and midi's! Of course all my dos game stuff worked (that's what Dosbox does best). But I couldn't get Works 2.0 or 3.0 to install. It would error out when trying to copy the first file on the 2nd floppy. I tried copying the floppy's to a folder and installing from there but got the same problem. I just wanted to see what the old program looked like. I didn't bother with the net. Hey, I was doing this all on Windows XP. For the net I could close Dosbox and open my browser! Why bother? Plus, I don't think they have networking worked out for it.

I didn't want Calmira that time since it was the first I'd seen of the actual Windows 3.1 desktop in all its SVGA glory and wanted to use that. However, after messing around in there I tried it just to see the new version of it. Pretty cool.

I obviously have a blast with this 2nd Edition Service Pack and 98SE2ME stuff! I get amazed that many problems 98 gave me and everybody else for the years of its mass use now are solved with these 3rd party programs. I'm currently doing a project that'll take some time here on my XP box (probably a month), but I can't wait to get back to my 98 box and install Windows Media Player 10 on it! And perhaps I'll even fire up my SiS5598 board to see what WorksSuite 99 is like (I recently bought an OEM sealed and never used package with it). Since I have Suite 2005 and it's installed, I won't be putting that on these newer boxes but this way I can mess around with other old stuff on there and not fubar my current systems. The last time I messed around with my SiS5598 board I worked on getting DVD's to play using both a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI and a G-Force 2 MX400 32MB PCI. Well, they played but I wouldn't want to watch movies like that. I couldn't get them to play all in synch with sound and video. It tried, but it was struggling. The 366 MHz AMD K6-2 processor, 256MB SDRAM, and the 66MHz locked bus speed couldn't keep up. But it was fun trying. The older the player the better the movies looked. I went from PowerDVD6 to 5 to 4 and the best was 3.0! I wonder if I tried the WinDVD1.0 that I got free by mail by buying my Voodoo 3 3000PCI years ago whether that would have actually made the movies watchable. I didn't want to risk WinDVD installing a bunch of old system files that might reck the system. PowerDVD 3.0 was the oldest I wanted to go. It couldn't run them smooth. I didn't try the WinDVD 3.0 or 5.0 which came with the G-Force either. (I just like PowerDVD. I'm used to it, and have heard it uses less resources to run than WinDVD.) I also tried different video driver versions for the G-Force but that made no difference. The Voodoo 5 did it better (it has 64MB which probably helped), but not good enough. Older games played nicely though!

See? The latest and newest stuff turns some folks on, and historical research works for others. Too bad work gets in the way! Not enough time to play.

[MDGx]

yea Win95 was something back in the late 90s.  there were also addons/tools to make Win3.x look almost like Win95.

best star wars episode to me is ep 6 - return of the jedi ; luke does bring his father out of the 'dark' side in the end.

1. You mean Caldera II 3.3:

http://www.calmira.net/

and Calmira XP 3.33:

http://users.pandora.be/azone/calmira/calxp333.htm

2. The Force is strong with this one. B)

I've only seen episodes 1 - 5 so far!

omg... you have to watch ep 6, it's the best imho.