http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/113 - Jill of the Jungle (shareware episode).  Commander Keen and many other classic games are also on that site.

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net - DOSBox, a PC emulator with a built in version of DOS (so it\'s easy to set up) designed for running games.  Can run many games that don\'t work for \'real\' on a modern PC.

http://www.apogee1.com/games.html - 3D Realms still sells the registered versions of several Apogee Software games (for a lower price than originally).

The \"dialog\" it\'s looking for is almost certainly a program which is used by some Linux shell scripts to display colourful menus (e.g. the Linux kernel uses it for one of its configuration interfaces).  See if you can find a package of it for your distribution - it\'s probably included on the CD(s).

In Gentoo, \"dialog\" is available as an \'ebuild\' and can be installed in the usual way by typing \"emerge dialog\"... I don\'t know about any other distributions, but it\'s a common enough program that it will be somewhere in the standard set of packages, probably in some sort of \'development\' or \'utilities\' section.

BTW, this thread would be more appropriately placed in the \"Linux Specific Issues\" forum.

As MaidenIndigo said, the bit on the right is (an approximation of) your name:

 =  \"matto\"

Set your browser to Unicode ( UTF-8 ) encoding and those characters might appear legibly.

As for the rest... I can see the character ? (\'earth\'), and it appears to be part of some other character, possibly ? (\'divination diagram\') with part omitted.  The bottom character appears to contain ? (\'strength\') but the top half isn\'t clear.  You\'d have to ask a native speaker, and even they might have difficulty reading it... I suspect that, like an English signature, it\'s not meant to be readable.

I tried typing \"Fumio Demora\" into Notepad with the Microsoft Japanese IME, but the characters it came up with were clearly nothing like the signature, so it doesn\'t appear to be his name.

A subject that I was quite interested in a few years ago...

I\'ve read a lot of stuff about \'free energy\' (or \'new energy\' or whatever you want to call them...) devices, but never persevered enough to seriously experiment with them.

From the stuff I\'ve read, I believe there\'s an unfortunate \'catch-22\' that arises with these machines.  The people who are able to make them work are those who *don\'t* have formal education in physics / electrical engineering etc., who just tinker with things in their back yard, and trust their instincts and what they see with their own eyes.  They often spend years perfecting their designs to isolate and optimise the \'free energy\' effect they\'re using, and over that time develop their own theory of what\'s actually happening.  But then, having developed their own understanding, they have great difficulty explaining it to anyone else.  Often they can\'t explain it at all; they have no idea *how* it works,  they only know that it does.

Add to that the skepticism/cynicism of mainstream scientists (\"This is a load of rubbish because I say so and I\'ve got a PhD so I know what I\'m talking about\"... but you\'ll never hear them say it in quite those words!).  Millions of dollars are poured into \'hot\' nuclear fusion research, but nobody with the money wants to fund research into known devices claimed to deliver \'free energy\' - even though it could potentially deliver much bigger results for much less money.  It seems to research anything in science, one must already be able to \'prove\' it... which makes progress glacially slow.

Then the confusion of the \'free energy\' field itself, with so many different devices that may or may not actually work, and so many different theories.

Then the fact that the effects that make these machines work always(?) seem to be very elusive - the magnets have to be in exactly the right places and the right size, the voltages have to be just right, etc.  Most back-yard inventors have neither the money nor the patience to do the amount of trial and error required.

Then the greed of the inventors themselves (\"I want to keep this secret and make loads of money from it\") which prevents most of them from releasing the full details needed to replicate their experiments, and the ego problems they often develop (\"I\'m going to save the world!\").

Then the large number of machines which don\'t actually work - where the inventor has measured wrong and thinks they\'re getting \'free energy\' where they\'re not, or where the machine didn\'t scale up as straightforwardly as expected - or of course, where it\'s an outright fraud.

And finally, physical suppression.  Inventors of \'free energy\' devices having their houses / workshops broken into and things destroyed or stolen, or the inventors themselves being threatened, or even murdered.  Go and look for information about Stanley Meyer, who was poisoned just after he\'d received a large grant for cold fusion research...  (and I very much doubt it\'s \'the government\' as such is responsible... more likely rogue elements in government agencies, and criminal gangs, working in cooperation with the oil companies).

Add all that together, and it\'s pretty hard for any serious research to take place.  I hope the Internet can help change that, but I won\'t hold my breath... (and that introduces another trap to fall into: it\'s much easier to talk about things on-line than to actually do experiments!  And I have no room to complain here!)

Anyway... here\'s some (hopefully) interesting links:  - also search for the names of the people / machines to find more.

http://www.cheniere.org - Tom Bearden has spent more than 30 years trying to fit together theory of \'vacuum energy\' and is convinced that there\'s a lot of serious flaws in existing EM theory.  His articles get into heavy particle physics stuff and are too far removed from reality to build a real device from, but if you\'re interested in theory, take a look.
(also search for \"Tom Bearden\" on Google to find more - his paper \"The Final Secret of Free Energy\" is a good place to start)

http://www.geocities.com/theadamsmotor/cdmotor.html - Tim Harwood\'s replication of the Adams motor with CDs and cheap readily available parts.  Apparently instead of heating up, it actually sucks in heat from its surroundings!

http://www.zpenergy.com - a \'free energy\' news portal

http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=MostPopular - several papers about various \'free energy\' devices and topics


http://www.keelynet.com/tilley/tillwilson.htm - Can it really be this simple?  I tried building something like this using 3 motors (2 of them in \'reverse\' as generators) and a car wheel, and it didn\'t produce any \'free energy\'.   (Hatchnet - this machine sounds similar to what you described - can you tell us any more?)

http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/MagneticMotors/ - big list of motors claimed to gain power from permanent magnets.

http://jlnlabs.free.fr/ - Jean-Louis Naudin\'s energy and propulsion experiments.  All of them professionally done and well documented.  Most recently he claims to have achieved over-unity results from a new variety of \'cold fusion\' reactor.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page - a \'Wiki\' site about free energy systems.

http://www.remnantsaints.com/AlternativeUtilities/Transportation/Bob_Boyce/ - Bob Boyce is one of a few people claiming to have made a car run on water, by using electrolysis with resonant frequencies that produces much more hydrogen/oxygen with far less energy that normal.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/watercar - Yahoo group for discussion of water-powered vehicles.  Frank Roberts from this group claimed to have a working device with electrolysis with a simple pulsed 12V, but I haven\'t checked recently to see if anything else has happened.
I experimented a little bit with pulsed electrolysis, but didn\'t notice anything interesting... but I never got as far as trying to replicate Frank Roberts\' or Bob Boyce\'s device.

http://www.intalek.com/Index/Projects/Research/Dragone.pdf - \"Energetics of Ferromagnetism\" by Leon Dragone.  A simple and quite easily understandable of how it should be possible to extract energy from a permanent magnet, which will then replenish it from whatever source powers permanent magnets.  Dragone claims at the end that he built a working motor and solid-state device from this theory - unfortunately he didn\'t give any details, and having died of a heart attack in 1988, isn\'t around to ask any more.

Did I really write that much?!!!

(I\'ll be away until Monday so can\'t reply to anything until then)

If you want to be *really* purist about not letting languages split the community, there\'s always the option of inventing a whole new language for the game and only allowing that to be spoken... but then you probably won\'t get many players.

Although IMHO it\'s the lesser evil for multiple languages to exist rather than everyone speaking the same (and English did not become the international language by being any good for the purpose), ramlambmoo mentioned the idea that different languages are like different types of food.  Indeed they both add diversity to to the world, but there is a serious flaw in directly comparing languages to food: everyone knows how to eat - there is no or very little learning needed to eat different types of food (maybe e.g. learning to use chopsticks and even that\'s usually optional), whereas a lot of effort is needed to learn to understand a new language.  Even the effort involved in learning to cook different food is probably less than learning to speak a different language.

Can I just point anyone who hasn\'t seen it to my suggestion for a translation help channel (on the Wish List board):

http://www.planeshift3d.com/wbboard/thread.php?threadid=14746&boardid=11&styleid=3&sid=59f6e22ac12164b343e67d1b2ea07e6b

...and my post about gestures which is somewhere earlier in this thread, and maybe I should re-post it somewhere else.

And, not related to PS (but this thread isn\'t now anyway) - here\'s a few fun language-related links:

http://www.omniglot.com/ - if you think \"writing\" only means the letters A to Z, think again...
http://www.trigeminal.com/samples/provincial.html - \"Why can\'t they just speak English?\"... and the equivalent phrase in about 100 languages.
http://www.google.co.uk/language_tools?hl=en - by clicking the links under \"Use the Google Interface in Your Language\", you can see what Google looks like in all the supported languages without it changing your default language to them.
http://www.lojban.org/ - Lojban: the logical language - an interesting constructed language which is based on the principles of logic and aims to allow maximum flexibility of expression.  But isn\'t, in my experience, quite as easy to learn as they claim.

Hi,

I\'ve been lurking on the forums and playing the game occasionally for several months now, but this is only my second post.  Disclaimer:  I haven\'t played any other MMORPGs, and only a few single player RPGs, so I have very little knowledge of what ideas have been tried elsewhere and whether or not they worked.  Anyway...

A point that is being overlooked is the importance of non-verbal communication.  In everyday speech, we don\'t just listen to the words a person says - their facial expression, tone of voice and stance can convey a lot about how they feel, and many people also use gestures to emphasise what they are saying.

If you ask someone \"how are you today?\", and they reply \"I\'m fine\" in a low, slurred voice while frowning, they\'re obviously not telling the truth.  If you invite someone to go out somewhere, they will not only say something like \"Great, I\'d love to do that!\" or \"Err, no, I don\'t really like that place\" but will say it in a certain tone of voice.  You will probably be listening more for the tone than the words - if it were a foreigner who hadn\'t learnt intonation properly and.  In this case the single word \"yes\" or \"no\" would be sufficient to convey the relevant information - the rest is just to fit social conventions of politeness.

When people meet in RL who can\'t speak the same language, gestures are better than nothing, e.g. pointing and finger-counting when trying to buy something.  I\'m currently taking a Teaching English as a Foreign Language course - to give us would-be teachers an idea of what it will be like for our students, trying to learn English from a teacher who doesn\'t know their language, we were given 6 hours of Russian lessons delivered entirely in Russian.  The teacher had to use simple words, exaggerated tones and lots of body language to communicate anything.  At the end of 4 lessons, I still wasn\'t sure of the Russian word for \"listen\", but the teacher always emphasised it by cupping her hand around her ear, which made the meaning clear.

What does this have to do with Planeshift?  To point out that players in PS should be able to make some sort of gestures.  This idea is not new - a quick search of the forum reveals that it\'s been intended since the beginning.  I just wanted to point out that IMHO, gestures are an important feature, especially if PS is intended to be a role play focused game.  They would add a lot of depth to role play, and with enough flexibility, possibly have the side benefit of helping players overcome language barriers.

Consider the example mentioned earlier, of the player who walked in to the tavern with a sword, and didn\'t understand the instructions of the people already there to put it away - which is quite a plausible scenario.  With facial expressions, shaking heads and pointing, the people there might not have been able to communicate to the newcomer \"no weapons allowed in here\" (and the same would be true in a similar RL situation with real gestures), but could at least have expressed their displeasure and desire for him to leave.  Rather than spoiling the role play, this would have fitted in or maybe added to it.

How to implement gestures is a difficult question - AFAIK, it hasn\'t been attempted much before, and of course it will be impossible to have as much freedom as in real life (where you can wave two arms and legs around freely and make all sorts of faces).  Someone in another thread mentioned the idea of the player being able to point at things by clicking on them, and their character would then point in that direction with their finger.  If it were possible to drag the mouse to move the character\'s arms about, this would be a good starting point.  Also, it would be good if characters\' heads moved realistically as the player looks around with the mouse - this would allow nodding and shaking of the head ( \"yes\" and \"no\" ), but it might be better to have shortcuts for these.

I think the technology to do this sort of thing is basically there with cal3d\'s skeletal animation, by moving control points around, but I\'m not quite sure what the capabilities of the engine are.

Comments, anyone?