Category: Life with Pratts

Chex Quest 3

Chex Quest 3 is available for download! In 1996 Eric was a wee lad of four years. Back then I was doing a lot of the grocery shopping (or, in deference to SamJay, food shopping), and one day I saw that Chex cereals had a promotion with a computer game on CD-ROM. It was called Chex Quest. The discs were manufactured by AOL in return for Chex including the then-ubiquitous offer to join AOL. Although I had no interest in America Online, I couldn’t pass up the free game.

Chex Quest menu

My computer was an 83 MHz Pentium with 8 MB of memory and a 300 MB disk, that I’d upgraded from a 40 MHz 386 with 4 MB and a 170 MB disk. The upgrade made it possible to run Windows 95 no slower than I’d been running Windows 3.1. Internet access was a 33.6 Kbps modem dialing into a local service provider, and at that speed it took about an hour to download Chex Quest 2.

After installing Chex Quest, I recognized it immediately as being a DOS program based on the DOOM game engine. I watched the introductory video, with the background story for the game. I’ll let Eric explain the premise…
Continue reading Chex Quest 3

Not Dead Yet

I realize that I’ve lost some blogging energy and haven’t posted much lately, and what there is has perhaps very little interest to most. I’m working on some things that will hopefully be more entertaining to you. But there are gutters to clean — again — and leaves to rake, and guests are coming over today then we’re all going out to dinner.

Our Confused Clock

Do you have a radio controlled clock that receives the shortwave signal from the atomic clock in Colorado? Eric has a digital model in his room, but the analog “atomic clock” in the kitchen is old enough that it doesn’t know about the change in dates between Standard and Daylight Savings time. So Sunday morning it had fallen back. I switched the time zone setting to force it ahead by one hour. Because it’s an analog clock, this is how it’s done. Looks like a time-elapse effect from an old movie
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