Old Computer Challenge 2026

Give up, Extend, Pivot?

Who would've thought it, my spur of the moment decision of "Screw it, let's use Texinfo" might not have been the best decision I made. It was partially contrarian, the more "regular" OCC version of something like this would've just been writing some scripts to produce both hyperlinked HTML and something typeset (probably troff) from the same source. I mostly picked Texinfo because it's different and not used at all in that design space.

And for a reason, though. I knew that I was going to run into limits, as this isn't meant for graphically intensive, free-form documents. But I was disappointed about the support for tables. Maybe it's the age, where they couldn't guarantee decent enough text-only output, and thus only went for basic definition lists. (You had characters to create borders and the like on DOS, but until Unicode fonts made that common again, all you had in ASCII where plus, pipe and minus signs). Markdown renderers these days have no issue with that. Maybe multi-page tables or linking to entries is also an issue, if you force the user to restructure the document, you avoid having those in the first place.

Anyway, that's why I spent way too long researching how to do tables in plain TeX, with conditional rendering in Texinfo. It's easy enough to get the conditional part, but phew, TeX by itself, without add-ons like LaTeX is hard enough, and even the latter has some advanced modules you use to patch over some issues there. And doing that research on my old laptop with w3m and some out-of date Firefox with Javascript disabled for performance and security reasons...

Given that my Friday is already full to the gills with work and other things I have to do, time is running out, so I'm thinking of three options:

1. Give up – I've got other tabletop RPG projects, including some "game james" with deadlines, so maybe just consider this a learning experience and move on.
2. Extend - Continue with "Project Pinkdaisy" after the one week OCC is done.
3. Pivot - Create some shorter RPG with other tools. A two page dungeon, or a short minimalistic rule set.

Decisions, decisions...

Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow with a genius idea for a short piece and will sit down to hack this out of raw stone in a couple of hours, but it's most likely that I'll continue the project. In addition to just getting things done, it's also because I'm quite unhappy with the general part of this years challenge.

I've been a bit down health-wise in general this week. Even on the days when I could work, I was quite sleepy beyond that, so not a lot of time available in general. And one evening that actually did work quite fine was the one I spent doing a tabletop rpg game online, with no option of doing that with an old system.

And then feeling like I have to do the research/writing part in the little moments I had didn't help much either. This years theme didn't play well with my mood or availability, although I really love what other peoples manage to do with it.

So I'm going to finish this, although it might take a bit of time. Without that pressure, I might even get around to hacking Texinfo output a bit more. I actually enjoy writing in that syntax quite a bit. (I also love doing these straight-to-HTML blog posts, so keeping this site more alive than all my half-dead blogs would be an additional benefit).

What I did today

• Looking for speakers. My music/media iBook G4 needs some new ones. The one I have that work buzz too loudly, and for others I'm missing power supplies and/or cables.
• Read the TeX documentation I have in print. Which is sadly only one "Advanced" book.
• Jotting down some notes about the setting and magical background of my RPG. This alone is a good reason for postponing the results.
• Trying some lesser-known editors available on my Slackware full install. jove was surprisingly good. I also should try customizing jed.
• Use my bike. I've been cooped up all week, and this felt quite refreshing.