A letter to my best friend – Mel. This was before social media. This was before email. This would have been printed and sent by, gasp, snail mail. Personal computing in 1995.

I haven’t been NET surfing or CorelDRAW!ing much lately. I’ve been absorbed in DOOM. I’m getting pretty good with a shotgun. Dede puts on the headphones and sits next to me and watches while I blast away. “Tell me if you hear any bad guys sneaking up on me, honey.” The beauty of this game is that it is so widely supported on the net. Kinda like a VW beetle. You will always be able to find parts for it. When I finish the episodes included with the original from ID, I can download more levels, sound fx, and music. These wads are made by hackers and are really quite good. Some are designed to run on fast 486s so they get a little jerky at times on my machine. Here are some that I played. Hurt me plenty. They must have taken some serious work. I have to replay some of the sections many times. Seems like I’m out numbered and low on ammo! Save often. You can run them from the DOS command line like so: Change to your DOOM directory and at the prompt exactly type–

doom -file serenity.wad sersound.wad -warp e3m1

Cool! I found a utility on-line to convert .au to .wav so you can listen to those sound files.

Really COOL! Using Window’s Object Packager, I embedded sound into those graphics you sent me. I hope this works on your PC. Open the .cdr in Corel and then double click on the little icon I put there. Multimedia!!!

I just got your Greetings From LaLa Land. I liked the font! What’s it called? How do I get it? Ah, Painter.zip, I was most curious as to what it was. Man. That sucker was huge, man. How do you get that whole file into Corel. Mine balks with insufficient memory dialog boxes. I’ll bet the pics from Greetings… used up some RAM. Can you set your scanner for lower resolution or definition to save bytes? Can you control the dithering? My impact printer got a new ribbon. It had more ink then any of the others; a quality control problem of sorts. I think it should be okay now. I use 360 x 360 dpi, its maximum, otherwise the graphics look like s___. I need colour. I was reading about the comparisons between the 560C, Epson Color, and the Cannon. It’ll be tough to decide when the time comes…

Wow! Glad to hear about your new office computer. How are you ever going to get any work done? That’s what I paid for my Zeos only a 18 months ago and it’s only a 25Mhz. Hah! I notice now in their advertisements that they don’t even offer a 25 or even a 33 anymore! I’m following the prices for the Intel Overdrive upgrade chip. Perhaps a 75DX4? Also I see hard drive prices are way down. Mine is 3/4 full. I’m having to be real selective now with what stays and what gets dumped. I have only 50 mb left.

On the floppy is a new release from 3d Realm. Terminal Velocity. Should play pretty well on a 486/66.

Boy! The web is changing. You may not recognize it when you go back on-line. Using the latest NETSCAPE browser you can see some pretty creative home pages. BTW here’s a URL for ya: http://www.corelnet.com/index.htm (this is a new CorelDRAW site worth checking out)