The Cool Stuff Page
Welcome to The Cool Stuff Page! Yeah, believe it or not, there are other cool things besides games!
Here you’ll find other links to some shnazzy sites along with other fantastic stuff! As well as the section on free software, you can also find a new spot on some great commercial programs too. I’ve tried ALL of the stuff listed, so you know I’m not recommending anything that’s dodgy.
(Every link in this page opens the page in a new window for your convenience!)
Electronic Related Stuff
SM Components If you’re looking for great service, and an amazing range of L.E.D.s especially, check out this eBay store. I had a very positive experience here and Mike from the place was generous too!
Mike’s Electric Stuff In with the old & out with the new! Er, well sort of. This site has excellent sections dedicated to some of those old & quite frankly rather bizarre electronic contraptions of days gone by. From nixie tubes, valves and those fascinating mercury arc rectifiers to psycho high voltage gizmos and even LASERs this site has it all. Check out all those glass goodies! Geissler tubes, old fashion lamps — Mmm, yummy. Be sure to see the Muppet Alert section also. You’ll even find Mike’s circuit design for a nixie tube clock.
If you’re looking for electronic components, and other neat gadgets, Jaycar is always a good choice.
Computer Related Stuff
Computer Stupidities Wherever there are computers, there seems to be a large collection of people who don’t know how the heck to use them. Some are willing to learn, others are completely arrogant, and then there’s the ones who just shouldn’t be using them at all. From the scary abuse that they give their equipment, to the physical trimming down of Nintendo 64 carts to work with PCs, and people who just don’t
even know the difference between Netscape and their operating system it’s all here on this hilarious site! Not to mention the idiotic technicians that don’t know what Linux is, and computer store employees who haven’t a clue
Eliminate The Blue Screen Of Death! At Nathan Lineback’s Site Nathan’s Toasty Technology page. This guy HATES Microsoft Internet Explorer, so watch out if you’re a fan of that browser.
Windows-less Laptop Computers
Power Notebooks — Another American joint that offers customisable laptop PCs, including a no OS option.
Pioneer Computers. Here’s another Aussie joint that has laptop computers with a choice of OS option, including Linux (Ubuntu) or none at all.
Pens
Goldspot Luxury Gifts This American joint has quite a good selection of fine pens at reasonable prices. The international shipping costs are a bit painful, but if you’re getting up to 5 items, then it’s not quite as bad. Plus they also have Conklin pens which seem hard to find in Australia.
Colorado Pen Direct This American joint appears to be a great place to get yourself a quality pen for a good price.
See The Fountain Pens Page for more links!
Music
Red
Eye Records looking for import music? Or records? This is a great place to go. They have 3 locations in Sydney. Well, 2, since 2 of their shops are combined in the one building. This is
where I ordered my Sudeki soundtrack. It was a piece of cake, and I got a good price too.
MOD Archive - Over 29 800 music files! Pro Tracker Modules, Scream Tracker, Impulse Tracker, you name it, they have songs in all these formats & more!
Art
Nothing in this section currently. (All the sites that were listed here have died over the years.)
Miscellaneous
In the interests of avoiding genetic engineering and other abominations, this little top section of the miscellaneous area will be listing various sites that promote natural products. I have no commercial relationship with these companies, but urge you to choose them wherever possible as a step to a better environment. Look for products that are approved by the ACO and which say GE Free.
Mrs. Oldbuck’s Pantry — currently under new ownership.
Zentveld’s
- check out this nice coffee that I had from up north.
The Purist Company — makers of A'kin skin care.
Flyin’ Fox Ice Blox — Great tasting and ethical ice blocks that you won’t feel guilty about eating!
This company has a very high environmental standard, using broken surfboards for the sticks and non-plastic wrappers. (They look like plastic, but aren’t.)
ACO — Australian Certified Organic. The organisation which provides certifications on products.
Daylesford & Hepburn Mineral Springs Co.
Valley Produce Co. Crackerthins — Non GMO Project Certified potato based water crackers. These seem kind of halfway between a regular water cracker biscuit and a chip.
Neal’s Yard Remedies — Organic health & beauty products. Also promotes anti-animal cruelty.
Coco Tribe — Sydney based dairy free yoghurt + coconut ice cream.
Amy’s Kitchen — Organic “convenience” foods, such as canned soup, burgers, burritos and ready made meals. All their products are vegetarian, and they also produce various vegan products as well, and do not use peanuts for those with allergies.
Herbs Of Life — Organic health foods, from Lawson, in the Blue Mountains of NSW.
Boulder Canyon — An American company with various snack foods.
Coolibah Herbs — Victorian joint with salads & herbs of course. Available at Harris Farm Markets.
Byron Bay Chilli Co. — Corn chips and dips from Byron Bay of course, in northern NSW.
Queen — Vanilla, peppermint & other essences for cooking.
Perfect Potion — I saw this shop at Pacific Fair in Queensland.
Bellamy’s Organic — They do baby food.
Genovese — Sugar and coffee. They seem to have ACO sugar, but I don’t know much else about them at the moment.
Proper Crisps — They prefer the “crisps” name to chips to try and get away from the whole mass produced image. These are made in Nelson, New Zealand.
Wild One / Wild Beverages — They do various soft drinks.
Junee Licorice & Chocolate (By Green Grove Organics) — ACO too.
Pure Pops — ice blocks from Sydney, using organic ingredients
GreenCane — GMO free bamboo & recycled sugarcane paper towels etc. with non-plastic wrappers.
Also take a look at my document on how I feel GE should be dealt with in Australia and how we can clean up our act. Some of it may seem a little bold, but it’s something that needs change. Feel free to pass this on to your friends, if you have similar ideals and even refer it to your local members in the government. (Do not “e-mail bomb” people with it though.) This has now been updated for November 2019.
Online Conversion translate all those pesky imperial measurements over to metric easily and accurately. Although some of the spelling could be converted too from American to English.
Amo’s online crossword puzzle dictionary good for crosswords and for Scrabble too I suppose.
The Vintage Typewriter Shoppe this is an American site that deals in restored typewriters in excellent condition. They send stuff overseas too. Worth looking at just to see what they have.
Automatic Washer — collections of washing machines and what not.
VacuumLand — The official site of the Vacuum Cleaner Collectors Club.
Toaster Central — Vintage toasters, fryers, corn poppers etc.
Mikey’s Old Technology Page — Check out some interesting old televisions and what not. (Based in England.)
Dob-A-Driver — The driving blacklist of shame! If you’re listed here, it’s time to clean up your act.
My personal driving blacklist — You’ve been spotted being a git on the road! Pedestrians and good drivers take note if you spot these vehicles being driven poorly.
Witch Needle Threader — My Nanna had a couple of these, and they’re really useful for hand sewing.
Cool Free Stuff:
Operating System: |
Approximate download size: |
• What was that saying? The best things in life are free? You already pay too much in life for a lot of things, so here’s some worthwhile goodies that you can pick up for bupkis, diddly and el zilcho. (Please note that I don’t upgrade my copies of these programs on a regular basis, so I can’t be held responsible for new bugs, viruses, pornography or any other surprises! ![]() • Mac applications will now have the following balls, so you know which will run on Intel CPUs and which will run on PowerPCs. If there are separate versions of each, they will have both balls. I’ll also be mentioning which programs work with Mac OS X Tiger, which is the earliest version of Mac OS X I have, and as a lot of people still use it for the Classic environment, it could be handy to know what you can still use. I’m not listing any programs which do not run on Leopard or earlier, because they’re of no use to me. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() • Also, apart from my own stuff (— see the Downloads Page for my own Windows & Mac programs —) I do not host any of the mentioned free programs, because there just isn’t the room for them. |
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An excellent video editing program that also allows you to capture video. Great for editing unwanted segments of video, resizing, de-interlacing etc. You can also append videos together, stretch the audio on out of sync videos and choose from the various codecs you have installed for the final product. There’s even a plug-in to remove transparent logos in videos. |
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A great tool for converting hundreds of 3D object formats. I use this to convert stuff I do sometimes in Corel DREAM 3D to the Unreal Editor .t3d format. Also comes in handy when you’ve downloaded stuff in formats that you don’t have the program for too. It supports OpenGL, and you can view objects with flat shading, gouraud shading, wireframe or points. This is shareware, so not all file formats are supported, until you fork up the dosh. |
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Edit your MIDI files, or make your own simple tunes up using your regular PC keyboard. |
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My fave music player for Windows. XMPlay is an excellent music player for MP3, Windows Media Audio, wave and Ogg Vorbis formats, plus it plays module type music more accurately than WinAmp also. Obviously plays XM files, MOD, S3M, IT, UMX etc.
It’s compact, has some great features and an easy to use play list that’s automatically saved each time you quit. A must to download! (Also supports WinAmp plug-ins.) |
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82.5 MB |
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2.57 MB |
I used to make quite a lot of programs in QBASIC and Turbo Pascal and always did like to do a bit of animation. Now I’ve found something that’s given me quite a few extra things that I’ve always wanted. Just BASIC is fast, does sprites as easy as pie and gives you the benefits of whatever resolution and colour depth you have set in Windows too. Loading bitmaps, playing wave & MIDI files, creating buttons, tick boxes it’s all a piece of cake. It comes with a heap of tutorials and demo files, plus a comprehensive help file also. Check it out and see what it can do for you. |
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6.04 MB (With the IDE.) |
If you used to use QBASIC, or still do, and want a high similarity but with more grunt, then this is the way to go. With minor modifications, you can get your QBASIC programs running in Windows or Linux, plus there’s a DOS version too. Make use of OpenGL, OpenAL, DirectX, high resolution screen modes, true colour, windowed or full screen modes and more new stuff that you wish you had in regular QBASIC. And of course it’s great for starting out too, because it’s easy to learn and gives you quite a lot of power at the same time. And because your programs are compiled, it’s also very fast. You can write your programs in any old text editor, like Notepad, or Kate perhaps, but check out the package you get with FBIde. This includes the compiler and the IDE. (Integrated Development Enviroment.) You can even make programs for your XBOX, apparently. It’s really easy to use with Knoppix also. You can install it anywhere you like, pretty much, using the install.sh program / script thingy, and then you’re set to go. |
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This has to be one of the best icon and cursor making software that I’ve ever found. You can edit your current icons, and even make up animating ones too. It’s a shareware application, but you can download it to see what it’s like. |
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An excellent media player that comes in quite a lot of Linux distributions, and plays more formats than you can poke a stick at. It will play modules, DivX video, Ogg Vorbis, MP2, MP3, Sega Saturn .CPK files, videos with Duck compression, M-JPEG, QuickTime, Windows Media 7, (8 & 9 with extra codecs not included,) Electronic Arts .WVE files, Apple Interchange Format (.AIF), Autodesk Animator Flics, wave files, MPEG 1 & 2, Cinepak, Video CD, DVD (unencrypted), Audio CD and a big fat wad more. You can even de-interlace on the fly using various techniques. |
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4.85 MB |
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420 KB |
Niall Moody’s site, who has a cool PNG to icon converter. Turn those images with alpha channels into cool looking icons for Windows XP. |
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AW Icons Lite - Make your own icons and cursors for Windows. Works on Windows ’95 & up. Also supports icons with alpha channels. |
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142 KB (Mac - Intel) |
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6.14 KB |
Want some cursors I made up? There’s a neat looking glowing arrow which is transparent, with additional window resize cursors, plus a purple 3D arrow also. They’re only for Windows XP though. |
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Shuangz WAV To MP3 Converter |
509 KB |
Here’s a quick and easy to use program that will convert wave files over to MPEG Layer 3 in a jiffy. It also gives you bit rate and frequency options too. (This site seems to have gone, so I’ll try to hunt down another program that does the same thing.) |
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444 KB |
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1.26 MB |
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3D Desktop Aquarium Screensaver 1.25 |
974 KB |
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A suitable replacement search utility for Windows XP’s rather broken search feature. |
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2.77 MB |
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65 KB |
A brilliant extension for various Mozilla based browsers that blocks all Flash animations until you say otherwise. Obviously the best purpose of this is to prevent annoying ads. Add to the white list what you want to allow. |
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I’m into track editing with Need For Speed: High
Stakes, and I found this to be THE texture editing application for the game. Of course it does more than that. You can do things with the cars too, and with previous Need For Speed games. It provides alpha channel support also by importing Targa bitmaps. Works with the QFS and FSH files very reliably. Worth checking out! |
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2.72 MB |
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3.79 MB |
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111 MB |
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1.75 MB |
This handy utility will help you keep an eye on your PC’s temperatures and a whole lot more. |
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79.9 KB |
If you’ve ever opened a JPG file in a text editor, you’ll have noticed that many have copious amounts of extra garbage. (Especially ones created with Adobe Photoshop.) This excellent little program for Windows ’95 & up is just perfect for scraping out all that extra junk! Not only that, it also allows you to preserve the original file date and time! Huzzah! A must download! |
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NovoEdit (Another one that seems to’ve gone.)
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9 KB - Windows 840 KB - Mac |
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623 KB |
This is a neat and quite small FTP program which seems to have been made about 12 years ago in 1999, but works quite well, and has the features I need to upload my files and keep track of how much space I’m using on the server side. You can also compare file differences. |
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1.57 MB |
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This is a handy plugin for WinAMP which will let you play CMF (Creative Music Format) and other not so common files. |
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513 KB |
This is part of the Windows XP Powertoys, which is a great little dealie that lets you right click on a folder and have a command prompt open at that spot. There was a similar feature in KDE, which I noticed when I used to use Knoppix, and then I wondered if such a thing existed for Windows XP or not. And it does! |
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523 KB |
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Soundflower (I will try to find a new link for this.) |
289 KB |
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206 KB |
That’s right, I finally made up some nifty icons for Mac OS X. Use them to spruce up your folders or Dock perhaps. Get a preview here. |
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895 KB |
This will allow you to play files in Windows Media Player which have their video stream encoded with H.264. |
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Here are a couple of handy PDF files that list the extended characters and how to get them in Windows and Mac OSs / System software, which I whacked together. Click on the Finder face for the Mac version and the window for the Windows one. |
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4.83 MB |
This is a pretty speedy conversion tool with a good lot of options. Convert to various video codecs, choose audio bitrates, crop and so forth. On a small-ish resolution video I got a conversion speed of almost 200 frames per second on my 2.4 GHz AMD Athlon 64 CPU, to XviD with MP3 audio. I use this mainly for converting videos to watch on my S9. (Installation size is 5.16 MB) |
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8.57 MB |
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Wanna see font previews of non installed fonts without having to double click through every one? Well this handy program will allow you to speedily preview fonts from any drive or folder as well as showing you which fonts are already installed. |
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1.16 MB |
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Here’s a handy true type font which has the 437 character set which you see mostly in text mode applications. The archive contains both a Windows version and a DOS version. This is explained in the accompanying text file. |
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28.8 KB |
Ever wanted to change the time & date properties of a file? Well, this easy to use program can do it for you. Set that text file you edited back to 1980, or maybe correct a picture from your camera, where the time was way out. :-) See the Downloads Page for my own Mac rendition. ![]() |
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1.26 MB |
Like JPEG & PNG Stripper, this is another program that removes all the junk out of JPEG files, but scrapes out even more. The other program had issues with certain colour profiles, which affected a lot of my pictures from Photo Booth on my MacBook. However, this program can deal with removing that stuff too. I would have preferred a drag & drop interface on this, but it isn’t too bad. :-) It preserves the file date and of course does not recompress your images. |
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Like FLAC, Monkey’s Audio produces lossless compressed audio files. And while FLAC is very good, I thought I would give this a whirl also. :-) It’s another format supported by my Cowon S9 too. The Windows application from the official site will work back as far as Windows ’95 and has an easy to use interface. The installer also includes a WinAMP plug-in that will work with XMPlay as well. Cog for Mac OS X can play the appropriately named APE files, but if you want to encode, click on the Mac icon to get ![]() |
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2.39 MB |
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Pale Moon |
14.6 MB |
This is a customised version of Firefox made specifically for Windows XP and above. You will also need a CPU that supports SSE 2. If you don’t like the look of the newer Firefox browsers, like me, then this is a pretty good alternative. Plus it supports new Firefox plug-ins as well. The people behind this program are no longer supporting Windows XP, so I may soon remove the link. |
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334 KB |
This handy program allows you to do something in Windows I’ve kinda wanted for some time — using your mouse wheel over other programs without changing focus manually. Especially handy when you’re working on something, while you’re watching a DVD or listening to music, and when you don’t realise you haven’t changed focus, and end up changing the volume instead of scrolling down a page of text for instance. Mac OS X kind of lets you do this with Finder. One issue though is that certain programs’ functionality may change. In Corel Photo-Paint for instance, you could zoom in and out of an image with the wheel so long as the program was the one with focus. With KatMouse you must have the mouse over the image window at all times for this to work, since it regards the outer window as being separate. In any case, you can always quit it to restore the normal Windows method. |
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27 KB |
Similar to the KatMouse program, but slightly different. This one can change a program focus when you scroll the wheel on your mouse, and it works better with zooming in Corel Photo-Paint and Windows Picture & Fax Viewer. Uses slightly less RAM as well. Available as a 32 bit or 64 bit program. Works on Windows ’98 & up. Requires no installation. Just run it from anywhere and you’re in action. |
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1.11 MB |
Fony is a nifty little font making program for bitmap fonts. If you’ve ever browsed through your fonts in Windows, they’re the ones with the .FON extension. With Fony, you can set the size of your characters and import from a bitmap. I found the best way to do this, is to make a BMP image “sheet”, with the letters in black, and the background in white. Then you simply line up the square on the letter you want to start at, and as you type the letters matching your bitmap, the square grows into a rectangle as it moves along, selecting more letters! So you can import a whole row in a flash! Once you work it out, it really is quite smart. There is a paste function too, but it didn’t work too well for me. Importing from a BMP image which contains your entire font is much better and faster. Or you can create the letters in Fony and make them right there. Your left mouse button draws, and your right one erases. Simple.
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11.5 KB |
I got this little program for Windows 7. It allows you to edit your context menu “New” selection, so you can remove what file types you don’t want in the list.
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HandBrake
(This site may be gone.) |
13.6 MB |
(I also tried HandBrake 0.93 on Windows 2000, and even though it doesn’t require Internet access, the program requires Microsoft’s NET dealie #2 as well, which is 22.42 MB. And THAT requires the Windows Installer 3. So I just got the 3.1 v2 edition. So if you don’t want to download all that, I would probably recommend getting this for a newer version of Windows which comes with most of this stuff. The 0.93 version of HandBrake does support direct AVI creation however, but will not work with DVDs which are encrypted. You can’t run HandBrake 0.991 on Windows 2000, because it requires the NET frame work 4, which isn’t supported on that OS. Just thought you’d like to know.
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3.04 MB |
I use this program with HandBrake. It can “re-containerise” MP4 files (& others) into AVI containers without recompression. I couldn’t figure out what settings my Cowon S9 would work with when it came to MP4 files, so I just used this program. It became a simple method of choosing the file I wanted, and then having it start. Even if you recompress the audio, but not the video, it is still pretty quick about it. Whole 90 minute movies took a couple of minutes.
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30.5 MB |
Something free from Microsoft! Good gracious! This, as the name suggests, is a virtual machine program, which lets you run an operating system (designed for Intel / compatible CPUs) inside another one. For instance, Windows ’98 on a 64 bit version of Windows 7, so that you can run 16 bit programs. With the extensions enabled in the guest OS, you can drag files between the 2 OSs and resize the screen to unusual resolutions as well. If you want to run Windows ’95, you can use the extensions from Virtual PC 2004 with Virtual PC 2007, since there is no support for Windows ’95 in the later version.
The program is easy enough to use, and supports disk / disc “images” as well. You can specify RAM limits, virtual hard drive sizes and share your optical disc drives. |
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976 KB |
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EasyFind 4.5 (This link is broken already! I shall probably never fix it @ this rate.) |
866 KB |
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2.78 MB |
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3.07 MB |
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327 KB |
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270 KB |
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10.4 MB |
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Anyone remember the old Best Of Windows Entertainment Pack? I still have mine, which came with Windows 3.11, which is just as well, since it’s pretty hard to find now. I’ve arranged the following games here not because they’re exact replacements, but because they happen to be similar in gameplay to those which came with that classic floppy disk. Some are very similar as you can find out. |
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1.92 MB |
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Ivory Mahjongg (Currently gone as well.) |
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38.4 KB |
SkiFree, if you don’t know, was a neat little game made back in 1991 by Chris Pirih. You can get the original game here and a newer updated 32 bit version. |
Cool Commercial Stuff:
Operating System:
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Of course some things are worth paying for, so here’s a list of some great stuff to buy: | |
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I’ve been using Corel DRAW since 1995, when I had version 3, and it’s
absolutely brilliant. I also have version 8, which I’ve been using since 1998 and version 11 on my Mac. If you can find it, version 11 is the last ![]() ![]() |
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I like this DVD player, which came bundled with some piece of hardware I have. ![]() |
Handy Hardware:
Here are some handy gadgets and what not that you might find useful also. ![]() |
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This nifty, compact, light weight converter will allow you to input video to most computers with a FireWire connection and suitable software, such as iMovie, Final Cut and Pinnacle Systems’ Studio. You can use it with Mac OS X Puma and higher, Windows 2000 with DirectX 8 & service pack 3, and Linux as well. If you can plug a video camera into your computer and capture video through your FireWire port, then this will most likely work for you too! Use it to connect up VCRs, game consoles, or even just your television. It works both ways, so you can convert digital video back to analogue. So long as you’re using a 6 pin FireWire port, it needs no extra power supply. However you can purchase one seperately if you need it for a 4 pin connection. These sell for about $400 or more in Australia, but you can pick one up for under $300 from America, including postage. (If you’re using this with low resolution console modes, turn off the audio lock underneath, or you may get jittering audio in the final product. You may need to re-sync the audio though!) Read more details in the Gadgets Page. |
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Read about this nifty portable music / media player here. |