In the good old days you solved problems by calling Sierra’s 1-900 hintline instead
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I think his official statement on the matter was that on DOS, when you had to write your own custom boot discs allocating your computer’s memory between low level memory, hi level memory an extended level memory instead of having an operating system that could do that on the fly, PC gamers were a population that self selected for people who could tolerate and even like putting up with dumb bullshit like that.
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looking at the early Sierra On-Line catalog its hard to argue with that
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(the one on the left is actually the Australian release of Pipe V, not the Amiga classic on the right with the iconic screaming pipe god man in the sky)
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to be fair, you didn’t need to write the config.sys and autoexec.bat totally by hand, you just had to switch the instructions around to figure out which ones aligned on memory block-sizes and thus netted you more free pages of memory (ymmv there, but in the end it came down to the mem requirements of the soundcard, cd-rom and mouse drivers that dictated how much mem you could claim for applications).
my theory is, it was as much an optimization game as speedrunning is, you try to wring out the max of a system you can fiddle with but ultimatively have no control of, and when you’ve reached the peak, … there’s a void waiting to be filled.
So what’s next? 
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portage/make.conf, limits.conf, .asoundrc…? 
Haunting…I know lots of Famicom/NES music is sort of ice-cream-truck-favorable, but, I feel like this one, if an ice cream truck were to use it as its ice cream truck music, you would be like, “Wow, that ice cream truck driver…where are they going…they must have a date with destiny…!” 
As a side note, it makes me think of the theme from the Mitsume ga Touru MSX game, which you might also enjoy…it doesn’t seem to be online anywhere in a standalone form so perhaps a tiny bit of history is being made here. 
As it happens this is one of my favorite game songs.
Thinking of this also spurred me to dig up this twisted experiment from last year among my musical odds-and-ends
Just to be clear, this really is something game-related I think about a lot. I feel like it shows humanity’s evergreen obsession with pipes. Apparently we can’t get enough. We easily lose ourselves in wild dreams of a life that is entirely pipe-themed. Perhaps this has always been true. I bet these games would have been a hit in ancient Egypt.
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xorg.conf
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You know how GameFAQs has a little message board for every single game ever (the most commendable aspect of a commendable website)? I think a lot about how the Pipe Mania message board on GameFAQs was the secret unofficial “talking about drugs” board in like 2005. Then someone made a spin-off website with its own message boards where the weirdest and most maladjusted GameFAQs users went to post without moderation, and they called their drugs message board Pipe Mania too. And that’s where I learned the proper dosage for 2CE.
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Wow. That is an amazing story. Brings a tear to your eye in a way.
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That board is still around too, on a spinoff site of that spinoff site! I don’t know how it is these days though, I burned out on that community’s toxicity like 15 years ago.
But the drug advice was useful!
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C’est la vie…
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boards on spinoff sites of spinoffs sites? sounds very shady tbh 
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my lack of Ninja Rope skills in Worms Armageddon weighs on me almost as gravely as my lack of a second language
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When I used to play the Worms 2 demo with my friend, we would always loudly sing the Beverly Hills Cop tune whenever we used the ninja rope.
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Atlus’s website c. 1996
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EZ2DJ accidentally inventing PogChamp (photosensitivity warning)
this is hands down the funniest background animation in a music game ever
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unrelated but this track sounds exactly like something that would have been on OC ReMix in like 2004 or 2005, it’s uncanny. now i guess i know where that style comes from.
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peter stillman was really named that because he was a still man… but in the end he was still a man…
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