Recent content on felsqualle.com
Every journey comes to an end, and this is the end of a very personal journey that started back in May 2025 . A lot has happened since then: I uncovered what breaks the game, how to fix it , bought all available versions of the game I could find (including some quite expensive shipping from Japan to Germany), did some last-minute fixes , and discovered some secrets . Thanks to the help of my…
While working with the game files of Masters of the Elements , I found something exciting hidden in one of the script files: Multiple, undocumented cheat and debug codes. Well, they were undocumented up until now, so without further ado, but a hefty spoiler warning, let's see how we can bend the laws of time, train bats, or get infinitely lucky. I broke down the debug and cheat codes into three…
While recently going through the latest commit messages for the incredible PC emulator 86Box in preparation for their release of version 5.0 , I stumbled across commit 8944c92 with the following commit message: CD-ROM: Parity and CRC checking support, System Shock 2 now works with a directly mounted .CUE image as well. My initial thought? 'Wow, they just added support for the SafeDisc copy…
In the previous part of this series , we finally fixed the game itself by removing the broken library and replacing it with a more modern alternative. However, we are not done yet - there are still some minor issues left to fix. Let's go! Starting the game is a whole puzzle by itself. Depending on the release, the intro screen, which also serves as the main menu, is broken starting with Windows…
I briefly talked about Xtras and XObjects in the first part of this series . To recap, Xtras and XObjects are specially crafted libraries that extend Macromedia Director's functionality by exporting additional functions that can then be used in the Lingo scripts powering the individual application. This allows a deeper integration with the operating system, since the Xtras and XObjects can provide…
For my next small side project, I'm running a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as a proxy server for my website. In fact, right now, fabulous.system is served from this exact Pi! For this task, the limited CPU capabilities are not that big of a deal, but the limited RAM is. Sometimes, 512 MB is really not enough memory. Clearly I can't simply add more RAM to the Pi, so I decided to disable as many hardware…
In Macromedia Director, everything is related to cinematography and theaters. A Director project consists of individual movies, timed and coordinated by the score. The canvas where you place all the objects is the stage; objects and scripts compose the cast, and each object and script is a cast member. Then, there's the Projector, the executable file that plays all movies in the defined order. And…
Masters of the Elements (or Meister Zufall und die Herrscher der Elemente in Germany) is an educational adventure video game developed by the Dutch studio IJsfontein Interactive Media , initially released in late 1997 for Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. I don't remember when I got the game; it was most likely Christmas 1999 or 2000. What I do remember, though, is that I spent many hours wandering…
One part of my work for the ScummVM project is helping to keep the server infrastructure up and running, including our primary server, which hosts our website, wiki, forums, and some internal applications. About three weeks ago, I started receiving monitoring notifications indicating an increased load on the MariaDB server. This in itself is nothing too unusual. It usually means nothing but a…
In June 2022, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would be phased out. In February 2023, they deactivated it with a Windows 10 updated and encouraged users to switch to their Edge browser. If you ever tried to start Internet Explorer through iexplore.exe after this date or on a fresh Windows 11 installation, Windows opens the Edge browser instead. If you want to use a web application that…
For my previous article , I added Syntax highlighting to my Hugo installation. Reviewing the page on my iPhone, I noticed something weird—the font rendering for the code blocks was entirely off. Time to fix it! Hugo's support for syntax highlighting provides an easy way to make your code snippets more readable. To add them to your page, you add the highlighting shortcode and describe the…
This is the first episode of a new series: BTS, short for 'Behind the Scenes'. In this series, I'm going through some scripts and techniques I use to build and maintain felsqualle.com. Over the weekend, I wrote a script that parses my entire website and submits all URLs to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine , including all outgoing links. Update 2025-01-21: I found out that the Wayback Machine…
On April 25, 2024, Microsoft released the source code of MS-/PC-DOS 4.00 to the public, and the community managed to provide MS-DOS 4.01 as well. While the original release was available as a set of six 5,25" floppy disks (and optionally three 3,5" disks for version 4.01), this open-source release does not have official installation media. Recreating the original media would theoretically be…
March 1995. Although PCs had been around for many years at this point, less than 40% of households in the US owned one. Back then, people mostly associated PCs with being a machine used at work, not a thing you'd even need at home. They were complicated and… unfriendly. Just a few months before the launch of the all-new Windows 95, Microsoft Bob was an attempt to create a user-friendly…
Today, I'm excited to finally announce a new side project I've been working on for quite a while. To be more precise, this will be our new side project that we'll be working on in the future. Please welcome fabulous.community , a brand new message board for everything related to retro-computing, and the contents of this website. Yes, my initial idea was to find a way to make comments on the…
Introduction Have you ever noticed that a pixel-perfect screenshot from a virtual machine running MS-DOS in the default VGA text mode looks slightly off? The characters are too wide, and the whole image seems stretched. At the very least, it doesn't evoke the same nostalgic feeling as the old CRT days, does it? But did you know that what you're seeing is a perfect representation of the actual…
Do you know what computer games and the Voyager space probes have in common? Clever engineering can extend their missions way beyond their intended lifetime. 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet, the iconic game bundled with the Microsoft Plus! packs and included in Windows NT4 up to Windows XP, is preserved for decades to come thanks to a reverse engineering project by Andrey Muzychenko. Andrey's…
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft released the source code of MS-/PC-DOS 4.00 to the public. Due to various bugs, DOS 4.00 was a relatively short-lived release, and it was replaced by DOS 4.01 just a couple of months later. Howard M. Harte (hharte), who already fixed various flaws in the official source code release of MS-DOS 4.00 , managed to figure out the differences between DOS 4.00 and 4.01…
On April 25, 2024, Microsoft released the source code of MS-/PC-DOS 4.00 to the public. While this release is exciting and essential to computing history, Microsoft's release process was not entirely flawless: An accidental conversion from codepage 437 to UTF-8 destroyed parts of the source code and caused build failures. In less than a week, on April 30, 2024, the community provided all necessary…
A brief introduction I launched my Daily MS-DOS command bot a few months ago. The initial idea was straightforward: Pick a random command or program that ships with MS-DOS 6.22 and post a brief description. With a bit of help from some websites that archived the MS-DOS reference manual, I finished the initial revision of the JSON-based data file including all the comments with a short description…
Microsoft released the last standalone version of MS-DOS as MS-DOS 6.22 in 1994. Even though this operating system is decades old and a true relic of the past, people still develop new software for it. Thanks to a couple of modern tools, we can connect MS-DOS to the internet. Since just having a connection to the outside world itself is pretty boring, we connect MS-DOS 6.22 to something fairly…
In my previous article , I described how I managed to install Windows 2000 in DOSBox-X. Even though this experiment was successful, I was not really happy with the results. While I got Windows 2000 working, I didn't want to stop there. The final goal for the project was to get Windows XP running instead. However, after multiple attempts I gave up, thinking that Windows XP was impossible to use.…
DOSBox was one of the first emulators I used when I learned about emulation back in the early 2000s. Originally developed with its own DOS implementation for running games and legacy applications in mind, newer forks like DOSBox-X and DOSBox Staging started to support 'real' system emulation as well, providing similar functionality as PCem or 86Box . While originally only targeting MS-DOS…
A few days ago, I posted an image that showcased an ASCII art representation of a Raichu from the Alola region. This image appeared after logging into my server using SSH. Surprisingly, it sparked curiosity, and I received several inquiries about the magic behind it. Let's delve into the details. If you haven't heard about pkmn.li , you should definitely have a look. pkmn.li is a website that…
Back in March 2023, we heard about Meta's plans to join the fediverse for the first time after they confirmed that they are working on a Twitter-like alternative using the ActivityPub protocol. Codename: Project 92. Great! Now we can connect with even more people using our familiar apps! But there's a catch. In the last couple of days, new rumors appeared. According to various sources, some…
With decentralization and federation in mind, Mastodon allows exporting a list of all the accounts you follow directly from within the GUI. This function generates a CSV file you can later import to another server. This function is especially helpful if you want to create a backup of your data or if you don't want to do a full migration (and lose your first account), but open up a second account…
There are some things in life you will remember forever. In case you are just like me, then the very first PC you ever used is most likely one of these things. I still remember the specifications of the family computer 6-year-old me used in 1999, even though its mainboard died around 15 years ago. It was a Packard Bell PC, powered by an Intel Pentium II @ 233MHz, 32 MB of RAM, a 20x CD-ROM-Drive…
Since virtual machines created with KVM/QEMU are not simple containers but quite isolated from the host's environment, exchanging data and information between the host and the VMs can be a bit tricky. Therefore, QEMU offers a companion service called qemu-guest-agent for Linux guests. qemu-guest-agent acts as an interface between the VMs and the host system. Some features like passing ACPI…
Windows has some pretty amazing backward compatibility. In many cases, you can run ancient 32-bit Win32 applications just fine on your current system. However, there's one issue: If you ever tried to run a 16-bit application from the Windows 3.x days, any 64-bit Windows version (starting from Windows XP) will refuse to run the application with an error message indicating that you should ask the…
'A new project? Again?!' Yes, I know. My personal projects are as persistent as volatile memory. But hey - not this time! Welcome to felsqualle.com , where we take a deep-dive into the wonderful world of mostly ancient (but awesome!) technology. For those who don't know me: Hi, I'm felsqualle. I'm a systems administrator at the German webhosting company manitu by day and a general-purpose tinkerer…
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Ever since I discovered the Myst series back in 2005, I'm in love with it. To me, the Myst series feels like an immersive trip to another world - it is truly something different compared to your average point-and-click adventure game. Needless to say that especially the first entries in the series - the original Myst and its successor Riven - are truly remarkable games. In my opinion, the…
One of the main advantages of snap packages is the possibility to use them not only on one Linux distribution like 'traditional' packages, but on a wide variety of distributions without having to modify or rebuild them. Many distributions provide the necessary snapd daemon in their repositories. It is entirely possible to use snap packages with Gentoo too. Even building new snap packages with…
Over the last couple of years, I aquired a nice collection of various domains. Since I only keep them for historical purposes, I decided to redirect all domains to this blog domain. Usually, you can achieve such a redirection by simply pointing all your domains to the same virtual host within your web server configuration in case you are using WordPress. However, this won't work when using some…
For my ScummVM nightly server , I'm using the apache2 module mod_autoindex. I noticed that – even though I enabled UTF-8 support in the apache configuration – one vHost was still served with ISO-8859 encoding. The problem is that the autoindex module simply ignores the global charset settings. Instead, it insists on using ISO-8859 for the vHost without further configuration. In order to enable…