Winning Great with Win 98: Fluxed Capacitors.

No I didn't change my mind about Win 8 and misspelled it in the title.

If you're expecting this to be one of my long drawn out diarrhea of the keyboard sessions with lots of unrelated twists and turns and ultimately ends up with me realizing that what I wanted was in front of my face the whole time making all that work moot, you're right. Let's get started.

A while ago a friend of mine got a butt load of ancient copiers and was tearing them down for the scrap metal. I blundered by and took a look around to see if there was anything worth saving. I saw nothing and told her to make sure to separate out the aluminum. As I was getting ready to leave I stumbled over this:

 

 Cool. "Do you mind if I take it home and look at? If it's good enough I could take it to the auction and sell it for you."

"I was hoping you would. I know nothing about computers."

Skipping ahead to my workspace. I open it up and was surprised to see a couple of SATA ports and a stick 1 GB, 256 GB, and 128 GB of ram. Somebody must have added that ram in at some point. Now I plug everything in and peek through the bios and see a 2.6 Celeron. Nothing fancy but an interesting choice for a computer meant to run some copiers. I leave the bios and note on the post screen the option for a boot menu. Now even more surprising is that I can boot from a USB. Now I'm impressed. For a pretty old machine it has a function my brand newer rig doesn't.

Alas it turns out that hard drive is scrap metal. Throw in another and proceed to find the drivers. Going from HP's home page I drill down until I find the HP Compaq D530 SFF. That page says "Huh? We don't know what that is." You got a picture of it right there! "Huh? We do?" (By the way, I just looked again, it's worse, they won't even show me the page.)

It's Google time. First page is drivers for XP. Good good. But I need drivers for Vista at least. I click the link on the left and am presented with a whole list of OSes. Usually when presented with such a list all I typically get is the drivers for XP and maybe a network update for everybody else. Well not quite, OS/2 had audio drivers. Meanwhile 2000, XP, Vista, and 98 and audio and video drivers.

HOLD IT! You mean this thing has drivers for Windows 98? I have been wanting this for such a long time. I have some old games that won't work on 7. (I've tried DOS Box and it's a real pain in the ass.) Driver for Win 98? Especially on a machine this new. It was probably built in 2004, maybe 2005. I have a couple of machines from the 90's, but they're like bottom of the barrel even then. So I try downloading the drivers and the links are surprisingly good. (By the way, I'm not sure if that website is an actual HP site or a clone of it.) I go to my Windows Museum and grab out a copy of Win 98 SE. (Again, by the way, it has to be SE. I made the mistake of loading up Win 98 and the drivers didn't work.)

Drivers are all loaded up. Things are going great. I decide to keep it for myself. I go back and pay my friend. She wasn't too happy about it. She'd seen computers go for $200. I told her that was one of mine. I also sold one just like it a week later for $20. Minus a ten percent commission. I'm giving you a guaranteed $100. "$100!? Oh I'll definitely take that!
(My words. Hers were more like "(Bleep) YEAH!")

Back home  it's time to load up all those great old games, everything goes to crap. Change out the DVD, ram, reconfigure the PATA setup, (I hope it's not the power supply, it's one of those proprietary ones,) even Lunix wouldn't load up, and lastly I try the CPU. I removed the heat sink and find that 7 out of 10 capacitors are corroded over. This motherboard is crap.

I take the board to another friend's computer store. (My family has put his grandkids through college by now.) He lets me dig though his pile of similar machines. Unfortunately the boards are different and don't have Win 98 drivers. I keep digging and find an unlabeled one with an almost exact motherboard in it. The numbers are different, but hey, it's worth a try.

I am now happily playing Discworld Noir. Let's see if I can get Discworld 1 and 2 loaded. Wait, what's that? They're available on Scumm VM and it works in Win 7?

DAMMIT!

Ravy 2011 Pg. 41.

Click Here.

When coming up with character names, I have two versions: One is the real one, the other is the back story I make up at the last possible second for the comic.

Sera's name is directly from Megaman Dash 2. In the comic however, let's say that only those who have for some strange reason been hanging around long enough would know what other character has that name.

On top of that, I'm about half way done with next year's run of comics and I have yet to reveal why Toni thinks she's heard the name "Hanakoganei" before.

Addendum to Economic Sacrifice.

I forgot to mention this earlier, and it was quite the controversy years ago in my state. When Guard and Reserve Units would come back form Afghanistan and Iraq, they would leave their equipment behind. I can only guess at the reasons: expedites transitions for one unit to another. You can deploy quicker if you don't have to spend weeks prepping gear. You can can continue working up to the last minute if the equipment is staying. You won't have to waste time washing it. The equipment will be available immediately upon a new units arrival. Often Guard/Reserve gear doesn't have as much wear and tear on that Active Duty gear does.

That left a jurisdictional dispute between the states, the Feds, and the Four-H Club. In times of natural disasters states would use that equipment to fight fires, floods, and such and such. It was bad enough losing all these people and the economic input the were providing, then losing the use of the equipment permanently. The states were expecting this stuff back.

I'm a little bit very hazy as to the command/control and who pays what, but in the five minutes I spent looking it up I saw why states would object. Without that camouflaged equipment, states would have to negotiate with local contractors and pay 100% of everything. So states would have to come up with additional revenue out of an already strained budget.

There is an upside, that equipment needs to be replaced. And I have been seeing a lot of brand new M916A3s getting delivered over the past several years.

Ravy 2011 Pg. 40.

Long long time ago I made mention that I spent hours pasting together a new background, then forgot to save the extra stuff not used in the panel.

A week later I found it.

I have a not new, but new to me way of making these. I save them as JPGs. The dithering gives backgrounds and objects a "rough textured" appearance. I like it. Of course I then resave them as PNGs to prevent any further dithering.

One more thing:

Click Here.

How Other Comics Annoy Me Personally: Part 3. Take your pinky off teh shift key.

I'd bet you're probably thinking I have certain people in mind. Of course I do. I'm constantly taking the time to quickly look at their webpages and comics as I type this out. But I'm not going to name names. Why not? Because I keep seeing these annoyances repeated over and over. Just because teh really cool kids did it, doesn't mean you'll (me) be cool as well. Just because they did this spectacular effect, doesn't mean it was any good to begin with. Count how many times it was used. If was used once, or even a few times, (or even in every comic,) probably wasn't a good idea to begin with and is not worth repeating.

In this rambling misgiving I am going after the comics themselves. What I am NOT going to do is criticize story, jokes, writing, or even the art. What's good and what is not good is subjective. One person finds stick figures a number one, the next finds it crap. Someone may think jokes about lesbian twin sisters are funny, or maybe they think it's just gay.

I just got done reading a comic about a fairly popular video game amongst a group of hardcore fans and discovered that while the art style was very distracting, I found myself ignoring it and reading the text. It was well written and the jokes were pretty funny.

Another reason I won't name names is that I don't want to piss off certain people. SO I'll just go back to my random ramblings.

Headers and footers. Sometimes these can be excessively too large. I opened up one of these comics in MS Paint with the magnification set at 100%; I took a tape measure to my monitor and measured it. The whole comic was about seven and a half inches tall. The header and footer was two and a half inches. Really? Inch and a quarter apiece? Really? That really is annoying. You got to have some way to identify your comic sure, do a cover page. (Please not a “click here to enter.”) Put in some fancy, but small and undistracting title bar and if you must have a copyright statement keep it short, sweet, to the point, small, and undistracting.

Keep in mind how people read. Since I come from a European background I read left to right so I construct my comics the same way. I try and keep it so that there is no question as to which speech box is to be read first, second, third, and so on. The second will usually be to the right or below the first. Only rarely do speech boxes cross panels. I try not to cover up the characters at all costs. Though sometimes I have no choice or I need to hide something for a while. The text is clean and crisp (usually for easy editing if years later I find I mispelled a word,) and it is on a flat white background.

However, people still haven't learned from other people's mistakes. I've seen this font that puts a halo around the text. This would be a cool effect for angels, but not every character. It gets to be very difficult to read with the background showing through. Speaking of that, FOR GODDESS SAKE DON”T FADE THE TEXT BOX INTO THE BACKGROUND! On top of that DON”T USE A FONT LESS THAN A TEN AND THAT IS ANTI-ALIASSED! You do this, people won't read your comic because they can't. You may have Superman like vision, not everybody else can see through Lois Lane's clothes.

Now the occasional misspelled word is okay, but not okay in every line. Use a word predecessor to type everything out first and then copy/paste it into the comic. Get one with a spell check. You can download Open Office for free. (Buy the weigh, spell chucks wont cats gamma.)

How do we read? Typically you don't move your head , you don't move the book, you don't move the monitor. You move your eyes. (And sometimes lips.) So make sure you consider this: NO LEFT TO RIGHT SCROLL BARS! It is annoying to have to stop reading, move the mouse to the bottom of the browser and move the screen, continue reading, stop, scroll back to the left, continue reading, stop..... you get it? Be sure to chose a panel format that prevents left/right scroll bars. Consider the flow of the comic. Will the reader be able to at least understand which way to read it? I've seen comics constructed like it was a game of snake. You start in the upper left, then it's up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, and Mr. T as B.A. Baracus.

One final bit about flow is once in a while I'll see the up to down method. It's not just a webcomic thing. Some nationally syndicated cartoonists and my local paper will often chop up comics to do this for space. It's annoying.

Here is one thing about writing and flow: This comic I was reading last year seemed as if it was changing stories halfway through the comic. Out of an eight panel or so comic, it felt like I was reading a different comic at around panel five. Not really annoying, just confusing. It was beautifully animated, just not a consistent read within one single comic.

Oops, Am I criticizing something I said I wasn't going to criticize? Put it to you this way, writing to me is the most important part. So what about stick figures? Good writing will overcome that every time. Then again, what's that song by Tim Wilson?

Plan ahead on your publication destination. If you have your own site which allows for the format, size, and color depth you desire, great. But not everybody can spend the money. So you decide to use a freebie site instead. These freebies can have many limitations. Some are not mentioned. Facebook changes all formats to JPG. They say you can upload a GIF, but it is re-GIFed at a lower quality or even changed to JPG. I have to consider that. One of my local papers runs a bad cartoon contest every year. I have to print out the comics, then they scan them in and resize for the paper. I've learned to make compromises of number of colors and what colors to use. For one comic I had to change the color of Penny's speech box so it wouldn't blend into the background.

Keep in mind that site providers will often shrink large comics down. So the reader will have to click on a thumbnail to see a slightly larger version, click on another thumbnail to see an even slightly larger thumbnail, to click on that to be blinded by white background.

Filenames. Keep your comics organized. If someone is asking about comic number 1495 you can look it up real quick and give an answer immediately instead of stalling for days trying to track it down. Plus, some readers save comics, they do like to reread them in order. A number of free providers have this strange tendency to generate completely random filenames. Like comic number 1 suddenly becomes 34r78106re2807314 b1bx018exb7t1e82t7bex871290te087.

If you can't control the file name, put the comic number in the header or footer.