May 10th, 2021

Hey all, Alan here!

My brother came home with a new PC setup. It's an old Compaq Presario 850! It has a 486DX processor! 8 megabytes of RAM! A hard drive with less than 1 gigabyte of storage space!

The computer's hard drive had nothing special on it. We installed MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 on it and slowly make it our own. Since this is an old PC, we had to deal with installing old cards and going through the painful setup process. The sound card didn't want to work either.

The sound card's drivers were on a CD and there was no CD drive on this PC. We could've temporarily setup a CD drive and installed it that way, but that would've required drivers! So I painstakingly copied the setup files onto several floppy disks and transferred them that way. I installed the drivers and it was going alright.

ISA setup time! It's asking me for IRQs, DMA channels, random stuff. I don't know what any of this is... I tried everything and I can only get the FM test to work... I tried to perform the SB test and the WSS test but they both fail. The drivers came with an ISA configuration manager, but it's hard using that with this tool... orz

I played beatmania IIDX at an arcade and I had fun. I wasn't used to the fact I had a timer on the song select, so I just played songs I were also in pop'n music, like smooooch and SigSig. I don't think I passed either of them. I did play and pass ƒƒƒƒƒ and 打打打打打打打打打打. I can't wait to play beatmania IIDX again.

My play was terrible, but it was my first time.

Also, it wasn't until several days later I found out the game defaults to auto scratch for new cards so I just have a few songs under 'Easy Clear' because I didn't even know it was on...

I want to play beatmania IIDX at home. I'm aware of the long list of games it had on the PS2, way more than pop'n music had. While pop'n music only had 8 games on the PS2, beatmania IIDX had 14 games! From 2000, all the way to 2009!

The amount of beatmania IIDX games on PS2 gave me the idea to buy a controller for it. I didn't go all out and buy a DAO, I don't like beatmania IIDX that much.

I'm pretty sure it's not entirely faithful to the arcade layout, I believe the turntable is a tiny bit closer to the keys. That's not really an issue for me. I like the thumpy noise the keys make.

For a programming class final, we're tasked to create whatever. Honestly, that class didn't really teach me anything I didn't know already. Not to be a snob, I'm not good with Python at all, but we just went over the basics of Python. Anyways, I tried my best making Bad Apple!! into a Python application. A lot of people already did it, but whatever. It opens a .gif file and prints it in ASCII.

It's horrible. The music isn't synced up with it so I omitted it from the program. Maybe there's an issue with how often I print it, but as long as I get a passing grade, it's fine.