Thank you for the dosbox-x suggestion. I am running Ubuntu on a newer laptop and did not have any luck getting Age of Empires to work in a virtual machine because of issues with DirectX on modern hardware. The game would render so slowly as to be unplayable.
I installed dosbox-x out of curiosity, then saw you could load Windows 9x on top of it. I chose the recommended Win98SE. It took a bit of tweaking to get the drivers loaded for 256 color display and the sound card, but I was just able to play the game. Because DosBox emulates the machine (I think this is it, anyway.), there are no issues with DirectX rendering. I was able to play through the Ascent of Egypt learning campaign for the first time since 2009 or so.
Maybe next I'll try to loading up a version of BASIC. I'd have to rewind back to 2000 or so for using Visual Basic in high school computer lab.
Thanks again, getting to play AoE without having to buy an XP-era laptop, was a real treat.
Not that I know of. The wikipedia article on ISC.ro [1] gives the handle (i.e., username) on the owner of the site, "Carol". I will say that migration to a browser-based interface has helped. It's now possible to play on a smart phone, albeit a bit awkward, with a small input line for commands.
Speaking to an earlier point, the domain of ".ro" may reflect a reality of who has licensing of Scrabble in Romania, and also outside of the U.S. and U.K. I'm not up to date on all of that.
Thanks for posting. I've been a user of the Internet Scrabble Club for over 15 years now. I came to it after learning of competitive scrabble from reading Word Freak by Stephan Fatsis [1].
I had a background playing internet chess. I started with yahoo and gravitated towards lightning (1/0 time controls). I think there's more than a grain of truth to the quotation, "I play way too much blitz chess. It rots the brain just as surely as alcohol." ~ attributed to Nigel Short, English grandmaster. Fast-paced board games that deliver rewards are addictive.
As a student of neurotransmitters, I can attest that playing blitz chess or scrabble does result in dopamine hits. Particular to Scrabble, one can receive such a hit of dopamine from a bingo (50 point bonus for playing all seven tiles). In a three minute (or less) time control, a medium to expert player can look forward to an average of two of these per game. All that's missing from this slot machine is the lights and sounds.
Isc.ro is a unique little corner of the internet. It's navigated away from a downloaded console to a browser. It has its fair share of persistent trolls. There's a chat room, channel 20, that used to regularly have over 100 members active at any given time, and significantly more than that during peak hours.
Competitive scrabble as a community peaked, IMO, in 2004 with the nationals in New Orleans. There's a Sports Illustrated article chronicling its subsequent problems [2]. NASPA in particular is undemocratic in its governance and pushed a woke agenda during the pandemic, resulting in the removal of hundreds of words from the official lexicons. The net result is there are now at least 4 dictionaries, fracturing an already small and arguably dwindling community of word enthusiasts.
An alternative to NASPA in the competitive Scrabble tournament and club scene is WGPO [3]. My personal experience is that most mid-size cities have clubs, and you'll meet worthwhile people in them. I liked to say, at a Scrabble club I always felt comfortable that I was typically not the most nor the least odd fellow there but rather squarely in the middle of the pack.
I've noticed a pattern at the Internet Scrabble Club that I also noticed at the Free Internet Chess Server (fics.org), where I migrated after Yahoo games was phased out: a loss of members. ISC now competes with numerous viable alternatives easily accessible from a smartphone. In its heyday, it was unique place where you could navigate the interface with telnet commands. [Insert finger pun here.]
Invert this point ("SUV or a pickup colliding with a smaller car was 28 percent and 159 percent, respectively, more likely to kill that car’s driver.") to get that one is less likely to die in a big vehicle.
It is in your interest to buy and drive the biggest car you can afford, due to the presence of other large cars on the road.
See [1] 12 black swans to avoid, YouTube video from ER physician Dr. McGuff. First thirty seconds. Force equals mass x acceleration.
The photographs in this article resonate with me. As a young child in the late 1980s, I would ride along with my father on visits to various rural Black communities located in one of the states covered by Mr. Lee. One gentleman in particular stands out in my recollection. Aged nearly 90 back then, one of his grandfathers had been a slave and the other a White man. His son was a sheriff's deputy, and they both kept cows that still ranged free, even though stock laws had stopped the practice there in the late 1970s. Also, his wife was named after my great-grandmother. It was Faulknerian.
I installed dosbox-x out of curiosity, then saw you could load Windows 9x on top of it. I chose the recommended Win98SE. It took a bit of tweaking to get the drivers loaded for 256 color display and the sound card, but I was just able to play the game. Because DosBox emulates the machine (I think this is it, anyway.), there are no issues with DirectX rendering. I was able to play through the Ascent of Egypt learning campaign for the first time since 2009 or so.
Maybe next I'll try to loading up a version of BASIC. I'd have to rewind back to 2000 or so for using Visual Basic in high school computer lab.
Thanks again, getting to play AoE without having to buy an XP-era laptop, was a real treat.