You are going to be trapped in a room for 12 hours with a mid 2000s office desktop with no internet connection and an external hard drive; what are you putting on the hard drive?

Corroded@leminal.space to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 117 points –

I've got some DOOM WADs I have been meaning to play so I would probably grab Trench Foot, Total Chaos, and the sequel to Ashes 2063, Ashes: Afterglow with a portable install of GZDoom to play them.

After that I'd probably bring Star Trek TOS and a MOBI copy of Neuromancer by William Gibson combined with a portable install of VLC and Calibre in case the computer didn't have applications that support the file format.

What about you?

I wanted to phrase this in a way where it isn't a prolonged or desert island style question where the responsible idea would be to bring Wikipedia ZIMs and educational PDFs. It's just an awkward amount of time to kill. The mid 2000s office desktop stipulation is just an additional challenge so you can't just bring in a copy of Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077.

Edit: By mid 2000s I meant around 2005; the XP or Vista.

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Boy, this question hurts.

For anyone above a certain age with kids below a certain age this isn't a punishment or a challenge, this is A DREAM!! Heroes of might and magic 3, system shock 2, Anno (any version up to 1503), Morrowind, Civilization 3, Age of wonders shadow magic, Baldur's gate 1 and 2...

Whenever my wife finds the time she goes to her room to play Morrowind. She just got a new laptop and the first thing I did was install OpenMW and copy her save file.

It goes without saying that you couldn't finish any of those games in those 12 hours, except for System Shock 2.

except for System Shock 2.

No, at some point I'd make a very unmanly noise and Alt-F4 the fuck outta there.

This is a fun question!

So, in the mid 00's I worked for a pretty large software company doing mid level tech support for enterprise customers. One unassuming weekday, we get a notice that the building is going in to lockdown. Nobody in, nobody out.

Not long after we're told to contact our families and anyone that may be depending on us after work. There's a communication stating "we have a strong reason to believe anthrax was released in the building and no one is leaving until the CDC takes a sample and tests it". Awesome.

After the initial chaos wears down the dawning realization that there are a few hundred (well closer to a thousand of us) now stuck in a multi- building complex with fuck all to do sets in. This is before YouTube really had anything and Netflix was barely serving up a few streaming movies. Plus, there's no way I'm installing Silverlight on my production box. Dark times indeed.

In a stroke of pure luck, I stil had a couple of burned "backups" in my backpack from the previous weekends LAN party (jesus, this story just keeps getting more and more ancient).

A few short moments later and the ISO's were dumped and it was game time. Now, we were all saddled with Dell Optiplexes of some random flavor (620's maybe... this was pushing 20 years ago, details are a little sketchy) so there wasn't much we could really run but anything in a pinch, yeah?

Long story long, I'd spend that time playing C&C Renegade, Quake 3 Unreal Tournament and maybe speed run Duke3D one more time. All while listening to some flavor of Scandinavian metal to truly flesh things out. If that got boring, I'd likely watch Ricky-O again or maybe throw on whatever else I happened to have dumped at the time (likely something from Tartan Asia Extreme or an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm).

Despite what an utter shit show this moment was, I have so many vivid memories of playing those games on the test network with a bunch of other 20 something people barely navigating through life while being scared to death that we may never see our families again.

That and trying to teach Ted how to copy a crack to the install folder... again... wtf man, directions are right there in the readme.nfo

So eh, obviously you survived. But what about the rest?

Ted is now paying every last dime he makes for entertainment and gaming streaming services

Ended up being a hoax. The crew is still around and we occasionally get together to golf or drink at tailgaters when it's football season. Time and children have taken their toll on the LAN's and other drunken tomfoolery of those days. That's always the thing about the "good times" they just seem like life when we're in it.

What a ride. Someone asked what they get for doing this. I guess the answer was not killing your family or being arrested.

It ended up being some jackass on the SoCal sales team sending a "joke package" to one of our local sales guys. As far as I remember he was let go and no criminal charges were pressed. I think everyone involved was just relieved it was a hoax.

That's one hell of a story, thanks for sharing!

Absolutely! It was a pretty fun moment in my early years in this industry. Now, after 10 or so years working from home, I almost get nostalgic for an office.

A whole 11.5 hours of extra sleep next to a nostalgia machine?? Count me in.

just put a big pillow 'on' the external hard drive.

Only 12 hours? LoTR extended edition.

I put my answer in, but this is the only true answer.

Ikr? It's like, the perfect thing for a 12 hour period of time. I should just carry it around in my backpack (ive got the 4K blu-rays), you can't go wrong with it. That and star wars (classics, prequels, and animated cartoons).

Just gotta beat everyone to the nearest conference room and take over the projector.

MS Paint, an old clip art CD, and notepad. It's time to make some unbearable personal websites

12 hours of trying to overclock a mid 2000s desktop as much as I can

Memtest on a floppy and superpi or prime95, atitool on the drive, maybe a few games to benchmark? Can't forget a soldering iron and defroster repair kit. 12 hours is not going to be enough.

Fallout 1&2 obviously, and stay trapped for the next month or so

Or morrowind if it can handle it

I'm here for the Morrowind vote. I do that for 12 hours already, willingly, with plenty of other things I could be doing. Maybe for the fun of it though I could grab some other games that are hard to run on modern machines, like the Neverhood

12 hours isn't really even that long, could probably bring just about anything, but I think Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri would be a great way to spend that time.

Dungeon Keeper, Diablo II, StarCraft maybe, Morrowind, Uplink, Civilization II, Sim City 2000 or 3000 (depends on what will run), quake.

I could bring the whole Person of Interest series and wouldn't finish a season. That, or any TV series with reasonable length. I was thinking:

  • Dark
  • Breaking Bad
  • Fringe
  • Mr. Robot
  • Hannibal
  • Battlestar Galactica
  • The Expanse

Speaking of, I wonder what the mid-00s performance for decoding HEVC.

Also, what do I get from this, anyway?

Also, what do I get from this, anyway?

You don't kill your family or get arrested if you are in this person's position I guess

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/10506722

Speaking of, I wonder what the mid-00s performance for decoding HEVC.

That's a good question. I hadn't thought of how that would play into things

Yeah, my collection is now on either AV1 or H265. Otherwise that 2TB won't last.

I was hoping someone with a retro PC could answer.

Winamp with my favorite skin

Entirety of my mp3 collection

All 7 seasons of DS9

All 5 seasons of Kids in the Hall

Emulators definitely should still run fine for GBA games I'd think. So there's a lot to choose from already in that library. If not, then SNES. even a potato from the mid 2000s can run SNES games.

Other than that, I'm thinking I would load up my entire calibre Epub library so I can read books. I have so many books I want to go through that I have collected over the years. Want to go through the entire Dune series for the first time among other books.

I'm also quite certain a mid 2000s office PC can run VLC. I have many older series I have yet to watch still because I've been so busy. Stuff like The Shield or The Wire that I have downloaded but never got around to watching.

I don't think I would get bored without internet for 12 hours at all with all that media at my disposal. Even on a 128gb thumb drive, I can easily bring in 2-3 full 1080p tv series. Epubs and retro system ROMs take no space at all so that'd be easy.

And if I get bored of all that media somehow, I'd just use an offline copy of wikivoyage to plan my next vacation.

SNES 9x ran great on systems of this era. I spent days playing all the Megaman titles and save-scumming or scanning memory to make infinite health cheats.

I'm currently listening to the Children of Dune audio book. That alone is 16h. I think Messiah was around 8h and Dune was around 12h. Basically, 12h is nothing.

Dwarf Fortress. I used to play it on the weekends as a kid when I was stuck with my stepmom's old computer from 2000.

Nothing I can explore the PC for 12 hours. Sounds like fun. Maybe play some pinball.

Please not Vista

Factorio

EZPZ

I checked Steam to see the minimum requirements for Factorio and they are quite low. I wasn't sure if it was going to be one of those games that seems like it wouldn't be demanding but actually is or it slows down significantly as your advance further into the game

I'd say the requirements are accurate, it needs cpu to do the simulation stuff but I'm still a noob.

Regardless, i think i could go 12hrs before crossing that threshold (if it does exist)

Copious amount of ebooks or web novel downloads, as well as my lofi folder for background music. All preloaded on a boot drive with a Linux distro capable of both running on the hardware and viewing everything I brought, if I can figure out how to do that. Plus however many snacks I can sneak in.

Dwarf fortress

It turns out the answer to these types of questions is always Dwarf Fortress. Even if it's "travel back in time" style, with only access to stuff of the time, it's still Dwarf Fortress, though much more limited and janky, and probably 2D depending on when you drop in.

awkward amount of time to kill

For how long? Because that's probably the most important factor.

There's also a million indie games that run perfectly fine on mid 2000 desktop hardware. Even games that look crazy computational intensive like Factorio.

Sorry I forgot to put 12 hours in the title. I made the edit.

VLC and The Wire. It's been a while since I did a rewatch.

That's a show that's been on my watch list for years now

It's very worth it. Before I saw it, I would always see the way people talk about it online, and I always thought to myself, "it can't possibly be as good as people say it is". And I can honestly say, it's even better.

Extreme Warfare Revenge, an old wrestling management game, has always been one of my go-tos for situations like this.

Is it anything like MDickie's Wrestling Empire?

I haven't played that one much, but it's a lot like ProWrestling Sim. It's a management sim, so a lot of menus and text. You recruit wrestlers, setup the various faces/heels/tag teams/stables, you schedule the storylines, rivalries and matches, etc... It's very deep and addictive, if you like the genre/subject matter.

Backyard 2 Global!

EWR is still my favorite booking sim. TEW is just too much, but ProWrestling Sim on Steam is showing some promise I think.

I've really enjoyed ProWrestling Sim. Have you given it a shot? I never, ever meet people who know what these games are.

I bought it, but I only have about 9 hours into it so I'm no expert on it, still getting used to it really, part of that "play time" is idle as I do other things while it's in the background.

Since size of harddisk is not specified, I’d take all Nintendo consoles roms that work with emulators on that desktop. May some genesis, Atari and some PSP, basically I take myrient erista on my drive 😂

But what would you play? Or is this an !sbcgaming@lemmy.ml thing where you'd spend the 12 hours tinkering with emulators?

Well, yea, I have most likely spent more time installing stuff on my 3ds than actually playing with it

But in all honesty I would likely kill most time with Zelda, Mario, and pokemon (any generation of each)

Thank you very much for the link to that community, it feels just like home 🤩

Depends. Are we in the 2000s or is it present day stuck with a 2000s desktop? If the former, I'd grab Final Fantasy XI and relive my childhood. If the latter, I'd download a few seasons of Buffy and Xena and chill out with some popcorn.

Present day with 2005 desktop.

Yeah definitely watching some classic TV and anime on CCCP. The CRT will do great justice to older shows. If I had to game, I'd boot up Zeus: Masters of Olympus, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and Dungeon Keeper II.

Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 or possibly OpenRCT2 (depending on whether or not it works on the hardware)

StarCraft, warcraft 2, HL, Portal, doom 1-2, Simpsons doom, quake 1-2, command and conquer series, Dune, NES emulator and the full game library zip.

I probably don't need that many but yeah.

Would you use engine recreations or the original versions of the games?

When in Rome? I've only played the originals and they should all play on mid 00s hardware.

Stuck? Sounds more like a gift to me.

I'd probably not waste any time and play minesweeper

Quake and Doom. Maybe binge some shows. Mid 2000s PCs are plenty powerful for a lot of tasks/entertainment.

Linux and a bunch of ebooks. Maybe Larn and Nethack.

Twelve hours? Easy, civ 3. Spent 14 hours on it last Friday? Sunday? Not working for a week makes it all a blur lol

Maybe throw in ultra Lionel train town or hype the time quest if I want variety. Good reminder to look at some stuff I haven't thought about in awhile ngl.

all my Napster mp3s to listen to while I beat my high score on 3D Pinball Space Cadet

Not sure 12 hours is enough time for me to grab much. Perhaps my backlog.

You don't have 12 hours to grab anything. You're stuck in the room for 12 hours

That part was understood. I don't think I could complete 1 game in that period of time.

Fair enough. I'm not sure what's in your backlog but there are some gems that can be beaten in a single play session. Titanfall 2's campaign for example only takes 6 hours.

Thanks. I didn't know, it is also on my list.

No worries HowToBeat is a good website if you want to gauge how long a game might take you.

Every so often I feel fatigued by long games so I'll look for something shorter.

If we are talking about modern games

Uncharted series is pretty short

Dark Souls game+ can be beaten in some hours if you know what you do 🤭

FTL: Faster Than Light would run on a computer that old, yeah? Probably bring that and a couple animes to watch while I play it.

Oh shit, if it's XP then I'd be good just playing pinball for the full 12 hours

warcraft 3, sid's pirates, civ 3 or 4. portable of vlc for some classic 90's anime.

Open X-COM. Or well, maybe the regular X-COM, that should run just fine regularly.

Some books as epubs or whatever format is convenient, and a reader. Would have to research which one works on Windows 2000 or ME. Or was it XP already?

Surprised no one mentioned GTA series

Bro remember the top-down GTA games?! Those were legit.

Someone further down did mention the 3D GTA games. I'm assuming they mean 3 and VC

12 hour morrowind marathon begin. and a few seasons of TV series I like.

I remember back in 2013 I picked up the full expansion set at a thrift store for $4 it was the best summer of middle school by far— got the werewolf mod working and went around finding out who was essential to the plot by killing them and then reverting the saves— good times

There should be an external hard drive full of portable game installs in some drawer that fits the time period.

Should easily kill a week.

probably some snes roms, an emulator, and some ebooks

I'd probably bring Warcraft III, Half Life 2, and potentially Deus Ex if the PC was extra shitty.

Max Payne 1 and 2, F.E.A.R, Far Cry, MAME with a couple of arcade roms like Galaga, Tetris, Pang, Puzzle Bobble, Metal Slug.

And if I get bored with those there is always Microsoft solitair, mine sweeper and mayong to fall asleep on the keyboard.

Install the gta 3d games need for speed most wanted 05 and music from 80s to the 90s

Diablo 2 with a mod: Project Diablo 2.

I'd download an offline copy of the wiki, too. And a build guide; 12 hours isn't enough time to come up with a build and play the game!

Civilization 4, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White just to name a few. See you next year. :p

Man, I haven't thought about Black and White in a long time. I wonder if I still have the disc floating around somewhere...

I still have the CD. Getting it to run might be the tricky part. :p

12 hours? Lol probably just some stuff to code on and screw around in. I'll probably take a nap in there somewhere to kill time

I'd copy my Doom and Quake folders, hoping the modern sourceports still work on them. Well, PrBoom+ and ZDoom should both work. Then all my emulators up to the 32-bit era, some music and the seasons of Kamen Rider and Ultraman that I'm currently watching.Honestly I could just bring my actual external hard drive or my HP laptop from 2013 that I installed Linux on. It's what I got on those.

Some retro computer emulators(Atari 8-bit, C64) and my dev environment for them - when you target old stuff you can customize the whole dev tooling setup with very little compromise, especially if you go the route of assembly/Basic/Forth and then pile on higher level build steps. I'd have to be careful around the potential problem of "whoops there's a 64-bit binary in there and I'm on a 32-bit OS".

Basically if I were back in college it'd be that all the time, and then VLC and some anime or movies in 480p. No sense in keeping up with those darn 2000's games.

I'd love to chance to play a bunch of nostalgic titles - just off the top of my head I'd play DOOM, Uplink, Darwinia, Morrowind, and my trashy favourite from that era Themepark world. There are definitely more if I had time to think about it.

  1. Newest Linux distro
  2. G4 and G5 MLP episodes

12h is barely enough for 1.5 out of 33 of Ascendance of a Bookworm volumes. I would probably rererereread volume 1 and 18

I would only need a copy of Gothic 1

I could probably look this up but can't you play Gothic with just a keyboard?

Yes, you can :) But with community patches, you can get a more modern mouse/keyboard control.

A complete collection of QI episodes, and I'd be able to watch a fraction of them 😊

This kind of feels like every work day. Except I can't use the pc for fun. Lol help me :')

+1 on roms and Doom. Maybe the sims. Tbh I'm not too familiar with that generation of PC gaming. There's probably a lot I don't know about

When what happened to me, I had Chrono Trigger. Shortest 12 hours of my life

So, just a PC? No controllers or anything?

I might get a few 8 and 16 bit ROMs

And mainly movies, I'd get around to watching Rambo and get some other stuff

A 2000's office PC has a CRT screen (or first generation TFT, but they suck), so good luck watching movies in a proper resolution...

I see you haven’t heard of the Video CD and it’s glorious 240p resolution you had to watch videos in…

Any resolution is good, I mean, why not 240p

Wait, CRT?

I could use a keyboard as a controller and play retro games. Might as well play punch out for nes

I think they're referring more to the aspect ratio - watching a 16:9 film on a 4:3 display isn't the most optimal method, to put it charitably

Oki

Wait, this is stupid but what are the specs of our hypothetical PC. Can I put Linux on it to kill an hour?

If it's an office desktop, we're probably talking a low-end Intel Pentium with 256MB RAM. If there is a discrete graphics card, it'll be one of those ultra-basic ones, but chances are it'll be onboard only. There's probably a CD-ROM drive (DVD drives were still quite expensive!) and USB 2.0.

Holy shit, no idea what to run on that. Modern Linux mint has no chance of running on that

i have a couple dual core athlons (windsor and brisbane athlon 64 x2) at the office from that era. they are still used, even. have 8gb ddr2, dvdrw, and dx10-capable geforce cards.

Must've been an office with money, then...

i personally bought them. no i don't have money. didn't then either. they were about $200 each, just prior to when vista started shipping (they were on sale). ram was upgraded from scrap, so was one of the video cards and one of the cpu (they were both originally windsors)--the other was bought new for ~$50 in late 2008 or so.

That's pretty impressive. I'm especially surprised about the 8GB RAM considering that was a lot even in the early 2010s.

As a Line Rider Creator, I'd get Line Rider Overhaul, Ungoogled Chromium with the linerider web app, get a bunch of mods and download a bunch of cool .ogg's.

Where can I learn more about this

If it were actually the mid 2000s, I'd be okay for an insane amount of time with just Flash and Audacity. Today, probably the first Baldur's Gate.

Oo or an snes emulator with Shadowrun.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego and Commander Keen ... wait a second, the time machine's dial is broken.

I'd probably sit and play Unreal, or maybe Riven if I was feeling more chill. Could easily burn through 12 hours like that. Just need to be able to take a case of Jolt, a few bags of chips, and some Skittles along and I'd be set.

Nerf arena blast.

Honestly not sure if it will run on the PC because man that game was a resource hog but should feel just like my childhood trying to get it to run if it doesn't.

FastTracker II and a bunch of samples.

Any good tutorials? I wanted to get into tracking.

Can't recommend any, I learned by trial and error on the Amiga circa 1989 :D

Renoise does come with a bunch of tutorial modules and surely there is some good learning material on Youtube.

The brother bear game

Any reason why? Nostalgia?

I feel like I had that or the Open Season game at one point

Simple nostalgia! I used to play this with my cousin on vacation non stop, we'd go all night on that thing

You are going to be trapped in a room for 12 hours with a mid 2000s office desktop with no internet connection and an external hard drive; what are you putting on the hard drive?

Nothing, because I won't have an internet connection...

Part of the reason I posted it here specifically is because you wouldn't need to worry about the limitations of online DRM.

If you wanted to you could read a book, watch a TV show, or play a game. A lack of internet doesn't need to be all that limiting.

That sounds like a solid plan! Trench Foot, Total Chaos, and the Ashes series are all great choices for some DOOM WAD fun. Adding in some classic Star Trek and a cyberpunk classic like Neuromancer for reading material is a nice touch. Bringing along portable installs of GZDoom, VLC, and Calibre shows great foresight in case the computer's applications don't support your files. Enjoy your gaming and reading adventures and you can check for more at チャットgpt!

If I have enough space, a copy of RCT3 platinum edition (the only one I've ever played), and a bunch of music. May not get me completely through the 12 hours, but I at least get a lot of time to see park guests "dying" to getting hit by runaway coasters and get to keep designing a bunch of insane coasters that couldn't be built today for monetary and legal reasons.

Without an Internet connection? Nothing.

You'd rather spend the 12 hours just using whatever is on the computer than bring in some of your ill-gotten gains for some guaranteed entertainment?