You can play a reverse engineered version of Space Cadet from the AUR!
skiifree was also a solid choice
And Chip’s Challenge.
What savages would use Paint without AI???
I’m not a nostalgic one, but Space Cadet got me with all the good feels.
And this was fancy stuff. Command prompts on an Apple IIe was my first computer experience.
MS-DOS and qBasic for me 😂
Gorilla and Snake were my pre-internet.
All I see is four badass apps with no ads and no dark patterns.
I got a Minesweeper app for my phone a few months ago with no ads. It’s amazing.
In general, get stuff like that from F-Droid. Ads and other enshittification basically isn’t allowed.
Shoutout to Breezy Weather on Fdroid.
For Linux, Mac, and Windows (sorry bsds)
I also recomnend Libremines https://bollos00.github.io/LibreMines/
I grew up with a a Windows 3.1 machine, so for me my game selection was Chip’s Challenge, Miser Mind (MasterMind), WinTris (Tetris), Atmoids (Asteroids), and JezzBall. Oh and SkiFree of course but somehow I never played it.
Chip’s Challenge was my favorite. To this day I still haven’t beaten every level.
3.0/3.1 user also… paint always felt like a downgrade from paintbrush.
Yeah you could set custom colors in Paintbrush, which was removed in Paint and I don’t think was ever restored.
I loved that game so much.
You can still play it
https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball
Loved. Past tense.
Encarta was the internet
Was Encarta the one with a trivia game? Or was that Britannica? Cause I remember my antisocial young self playing it to death.
I still got some useless facts stuck in my head, taking up valuable space… I can’t conjure any of them on demand; but someone could randomly mention a species of frog and I would go, “oh yeah, they’re native to Madagascar!”
Iirc encarta was an encyclopedia software
My Encarta 97 CD-ROM had a game where you went through rooms of a castle answering trivia questions to move on.
Yeah that’s the one!
I stumbled onto this at a library as a kid and couldn’t get enough! This library was a big one and it wasn’t near us, so I selfishly tried to squeeze in every moment I could.
I did feel guilty, knowing my grandmother was stuck waiting for me, but the game was too compelling, my nerdiness too severe, and my grandma too gentle. I was powerless to do anything but press on.
Years later I realized…my grandma was a librarian, and this was an unfamiliar library to her. She had the better time by a mile, and must have counted her lucky stars that I was content to just stay in one place (AKA safe and behaving myself) for hours on end. I can remember her coming to check on me every so often, and each time I couldn’t believe I got to play even more.
Thanks for the memory :)
Not many people owned a PC before the internet blew up
But in my neck of the woods plenty of people owned a PC before Windows networking AND ISPs were reliable lol
Like yes I had Internet at home, but sometimes it didn’t work very well, sometimes it was really slow, etc.
For years, it was almost normal in a small town to have an ethernet cable routed from your neighbour’s house to yours, share a connection. Guess what, it’ll be slow as shit when they’re using it too. Or if the router needs to be restarted for some reason and they’re not home? Welp.
Why did we have that setup? Estonia over 20 years ago was still pretty poor. This whole ADSL thing was pretty new too, it cost quite a bit. I found an article from that period and turns out in 2003 there were three main providers. Starman at 149 EEK per month, Eesti Telefon at 345 and Uninet at 800. I have no idea about Uninet, but Starman was only available in a couple of cities and even in those cities I think it was mostly just apartment buildings. Minimum monthly salary BEFORE tax was 2160 EEK. First 1000 EEK per month was income tax free, on the other 1160 EEK you’d be taxed 26% so 301 EEK. The remaining 1859 EEK, and this is with only income tax deducted, nothing else, is equivalent to 119.16 euros. 345 EEK for internet is 22 euros and change. Imagine spending 18% of your income on an Internet connection!
Still, a computer was becoming necessary for schoolwork. Researching subjects online, printing out homework, etc. If you didn’t have one at home, you’d need to use computer class at the end of the day, or go to the library. Having one at home got me into gaming and tinkering with software and the tinkering got me into programming at the age of ~13 and you can guess what I do for a living now.
US here. I got my first “home computer” a TRS-80 CoCo (16k RAM) sometime around 1981 before PCs were a thing. The internet existed but cost around $7 US per hour plus it was a long distance call to Compuserve the only ISP which would have cost around 50 cents a minute (on a 1200 baud dial up modem). I still have an advertisement somewhere. Also i have a thin book of websites. You had to type in the IP address because domain names didn’t exist yet. I couldn’t afford any of this so I visited BBS’s though I did fumble around with the internet on public library computers. The Macintosh and PCs came out a few years later but few homes had one because they were expensive and you couldn’t do much with them besides play games. Businesses of course had them because they were useful. It wasn’t until the mid 90’s did everyone buy one after the internet got popular.
Holding shift and dragging the selection box around in paint was like 60% of my computer classes.
Loved old school paint. I used to try and recreate 3d renders of Nintendo characters that I’d seen printed in magazines and on my Gameboy pocket pouch by doing a kind of primitive dithering technique that 10 year old me thought up drawing 1 pixel blocks of specific colours in alternating patterns to try recreate shading or gradients of colour and I’d draw whole rows of them with the line tool which naturally had a staircase effect to it. Used to save it all on a zipdisk.
Man this takes me back.
Encarta and Paint were where I spent most of my computer time as a younger teenager. The trivia games on Encarta were dope, I also spent a lot of time walking around the 3d castles and ancient ruins. And a lot of time in the ummm… Art section. Learned a lot about myself from Venus of Urbino.
Used to waste time by painting giant graphic and bloody battle scenes between stick figures in paint. Did it pixel by pixel! Good times!
Fucking encarta! I always am amazed that no one else my age remembers that. I don’t think I ever found the art section interesting… I don’t even remember it.
Not shown: my Amiga500
MS paint used to have a spray paint tool. I spent a lot of time using that tool to fill the entire canvas.
