Archive for September, 2007

Earth to Microsoft: Fix Your @&*$ing Accessibility Options!

Friday, September 28th, 2007

I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but there is one component of Windows XP that was written so badly, it occasionally ruins my gaming experience. The most frustrating feature of any operating system that I can recall using is, without a doubt, Accessibility Options.

The Accessibility Options make it possible for people who have impaired vision, hearing, or motor skills to use Windows like everyone else. I commend Microsoft for making these options available. Unfortunately, they designed the options so badly that able bodied people are forever turning them on by accident!

So, there I was, playing Extreme Pinball in DOSBox, a game in which the Shift keys control the paddles. Well, you know what happens when you press the Shift key five times in a row, right? StickyKeys pops up and freezes your game!

The first time this ever happened to me, I went into Accessibility Options and unchecked “Use StickyKeys”. Well guess what? That doesn’t turn it off. Wait, it doesn’t? You heard me.

No, merely specifying that you don’t want to use StickyKeys doesn’t make that pesky feature go away. You have to press the “Settings” button to learn that the shortcut for that service (the one you just turned off) is pressing Shift five times, and you have to uncheck “Use shortcut” to make it actually go away.

That’s not so bad, right? If only StickyKeys’ unintuitive options were the worst of Accessibility Options’ problems. You see, I made the mistake of choosing Accessibility Wizard from the Start Menu when I wanted to change my StickyKeys settings. I don’t know what I did in there, but I accidentally shrunk the Active Title Bar size to 18. Contrary to the usual intent of Accessibility Options, this made the titles of my open windows more difficult to read. I went back into the wizard and unchecked the option to change font sizes, and at the end of the wizard it told me that I hadn’t made any changes. Haven’t made any changes? Remember that option that was checked that I unchecked?

Well, I know a thing or two about computers, so I went into my Display Settings, selected Advanced in the Appearance tab, and Active Title Bar from the drop down menu. It was here that I saw that the size was set to 18. Now if only I knew what size it was supposed to be! Finally I smartened up and went into the Control Panel and opened Accessibility Options, where I assumed that I would find an option to “Restore Defaults” or, better yet, “Disable Accessibility Options”. No such luck. What? No, I’m sorry, but what??? Have you ever heard of a Windows component that can change the way you interact with your operating system and ultimately determine whether you can see, hear, and use your computer, that doesn’t have an option to undo your changes? You can accidentally make your computer unusable and there’s no way to restore the defaults? Okay, enough of this piece of crap program. It’s time to get serious: I’m going into Services!

So, I went into the list of Windows Services, and guess what? Accessibility Options is not a service, so you can forget about disabling it that way. Again, I don’t understand. There’s no checkbox to disable the feature, and it isn’t a service that can be disabled. In the days of Windows 98/Me, you could choose whether or not to install Accessibility Options during installation, and if you changed your mind you could always add or remove it later using Add/Remove Windows Components in the Control Panel. Now you have no choice! It’s just this sinister program that lurks beneath the surface of Windows and holds the potential to ruin your Windows experience at any time. You have to have it; you can’t remove it or turn it off. Fonts can become too big, too small, you can have visual indicators every time your computer makes a noise, your keyboard can behave differently, and there are a host of other things that can happen to you that would be great if you actually wanted or needed Accessibility Options in order to use Windows.

As I said, this is the greatest service in the world if you have a disability. For those of us who don’t, why isn’t there an option to undo changes or turn the service off? For that matter, what happens if a person who needs Accessibility Options accidentally changes or turns something off? There isn’t an option to undo your changes, so if you have a disability and turn off an accessibility option that you need, you’re up the creek without a paddle! I was just playing a game of pinball and now I can no longer use my computer the way I like. How the hell did this happen? Okay, this has gone on long enough. Time to send the most frustrating feature of Windows back to hell.

A Google search finally led me to this page: MSFN’s Unattended Windows : Completely disable accessibility options. What you’ll see is several dozen lines of “code” to edit your Registry to permanently disable Accessibility Options so that you can no longer accidentally turn them on. I must absolutely caution that making changes to your Registry can be dangerous and should only be performed by users who know what they’re doing. If you’re comfortable changing your Registry options, you can copy and paste the code into a text file and save it with a .reg extension. Now merely run the Registry file that you’ve created and reboot.

The Active Title Bar wasn’t actually fixed, but I’m grateful to finally be free of that invasive little program that has interfered with so many of my gaming sessions. Going back to the Display options, I changed the Appearance from Windows XP style to Windows Classic style and then changed it back, which restored the size to 25, which I now know is the size I wanted it to be when it somehow got changed to 18.

To recap, I was playing a quick game of Extreme Pinball, and by pressing the left paddle too many times in a row, I invoked a monster that changed my Accessibility Options so that my system was no longer accessible. This problem is so pervasive that someone actually posted a Registry fix to disable the service. Why didn’t Microsoft do that? Why isn’t there an option to undo changes, restore defaults, or just turn the damned thing off?

Microsoft: get a clue. This is the most half-assed Windows component I’ve ever used, and I never intended to use it in the first place. Fix your @&*$ing Accessibility Options!

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DOS Preservation and the Archival Crusade

Friday, September 21st, 2007

Webmaster’s blog, Stardate 3012.4. Too nerdy? I just like the way it sounds.

Running a website about DOS sucks. Actually it rocks, but I’ll tell you why it also sucks. Nowadays most people don’t know anything about DOS, or care that it ever existed. Plus, most of the best games were shareware, and the copyright holders haven’t sold the full version for more than a decade. And then, when I do something amazing like get the copyright holder to release the full version as freeware, it largely goes unnoticed because — returning to my first point — nowadays most people don’t know anything about DOS, or care that it ever existed.

Another gaming site offered to buy my website, with the condition that I come to work for him creating content for his own site as an expert on DOS. I declined to sell the site, but I agreed to write content for his website as a way to draw new visitors to Classic DOS Games, and on the condition that I would have carte blanche to blog about whatever I wanted, including non-DOS games. (Remember all of the video game consoles I mentioned in my interview on ASCII World? I have a lot to say about gaming on other platforms!)

I wrote a first article shamelessly promoting my own accomplishments, and have half a dozen articles in my mind that I’m eager to publish, but I haven’t heard anything from this fellow in quite a while. I’m tired of waiting, so I decided to publish the blog myself as a way to express the creative energy that I can’t normally write about in the brief reviews on my fact-based website, and expose visitors to my personal brand of insanity. So, here’s that shameless first blog entry I wrote.

I created Classic DOS Games because I was afraid that my favorite games were going to be lost to decaying floppy disks and failing hard drives, so I decided to make a website and host the files locally so that other websites wouldn’t take them to oblivion with them when the webmasters gave up on having a website devoted to DOS games. At first I was just collecting all of the legally distributable DOS games that were still worth playing and putting them on my website. While playing Chopper Commando, which was written by a teenager almost 20 years ago, I realized that people had probably stopped sending the author money, and he might be willing to release the game as freeware. I searched the web and found out where he worked, sent his employer an email and got a response from him. All I had to do was ask, and he said yes. All of a sudden, I had a new cause. I would preserve DOS games not by collecting shareware zip files, which a dozen other websites were already doing. I would go for the real prize: I would save the registered version that only a few people ever bothered to pay for before the last 360 MB hard drive failed and took the last copy of some amazing game with it. I would save the games by contacting the copyright holders and getting them to release the games as freeware!

I have to be humble on my own website, but this is a blog, so let’s let loose a little. I’ll start by listing my illustrious accomplishments, and why you should care.

I have personally negotiated freeware declarations for 26 games. First there was Chopper Commando by Mark Currie, including source code, then Mah Jongg -V-G-A-, Mah Jongg Laptop, and Mah Jongg -8514- by Ron Balewski, then all five of Moonlite Software’s self-published games: Clyde’s Adventure, Clyde’s Revenge, Crazy Eights, Cribbage, and Taking Care of Business. Then I contacted Richard Lang and Psion Software and got them to release Psion Chess as freeware, and Clay Hellman agreed to release Cybersphere and Cybersphere Plus. Maciej Miasik and Epic Games agreed to release Adventures of Robbo, Electroman, and Heartlight PC as freeware, which were also collectively sold as the Epic Puzzle Pack. Damon Hastings agreed to declare Duel 2000 freeware. John Pallet-Plowright agreed to release Traffic Department 2192 as freeware. Then Larry Tipton agreed to release Drum Blaster as freeware. Everett Kaser agreed to release Snarf as freeware. Robert Epps agreed to release Slam! as freeware. Colin Garbutt agreed to release Kye as freeware. Ste Cork agreed to release Overkill as freeware. Jeff Souders agreed to release Gargoyle Medieval Pack as freeware. Allen Pilgrim agreed to release Kiloblaster and Xargon as freeware, including source code. Most recently, Escape Programming agreed to release Thor’s Hammer as freeware. Oh, and when Accursed Toys released a Win32 version of Boppin’, I got them to give the okay to distribute the full version of the old DOS and Amiga versions for free, so that’s technically number 27. I also got Revolution Software to release the source code for Beneath a Steel Sky. Sweet. And other authors have promised to release at least two other games as freeware, but I’m still waiting for them to get back to me.

Doesn’t look so humble when I put it all in one place, does it? That’s why I don’t do this on my website.

Anyway, getting back to why you should care. Actually, I can’t really think of a reason. DOS was a big part of gaming, and the games back then were fun. That’s not a bold or radical statement, but it’s a good enough reason for me. I still see people playing the game where the snake eats numbers and can’t run into the walls, or itself, on their cell phones. People still play 2D platform games written in Flash. Why would people play simple games that just use the arrow keys, and Control and Alt to jump and shoot, in this age of Wii and PlayStation 3? Because the simple games have never stopped being fun.

I sometimes play chess with my coworkers to relieve the tedium of being a corporate drone. If you want to talk about retro gaming, I can talk for hours about the cool board games people play that are 4000 years old. You wouldn’t believe how many people still play the ancient game of Go. Some games simply become classics, and people play them generation after generation. Actually, Go, which is the world’s most popular game, is played by more people in Asia today than were alive when Go was invented: there were only 27 million people in the world when Go was invented around 2300 BC. Played with nothing more than two piles of stones and a wooden board, the game has grown more popular century after century, millennium after millennium, played by tens of millions of children and centenarians, but never been mastered. Games like chess, checkers, backgammon and Go have become eternal. They transcend the generations and will be carried throughout the universe by our descendants. Classic games are a universal constant that connect every civilization with the empires that have turned to dust, and the empires that are yet to be.

Will people still be playing DOS games in 6300 AD? Not if we don’t save them!

EDIT: Added Drum Blaster, which was liberated on 7 October 2007.
EDIT: Added Snarf, which was liberated on 2 January 2008.
EDIT: Added Slam!, which was liberated on 5 February 2008.
EDIT: Added Kye, which was liberated on 18 February 2008.
EDIT: Added Overkill, which was liberated on 23 July 2008.
EDIT: Added Gargoyle Medieval Pack, which was liberated on 2 August 2008.
EDIT: Added Kiloblaster and Xargon, which were liberated on 4 August 2008.
EDIT: Added Thor’s Hammer, which was liberated on 16 July 2009.

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