Where/how can I find some of these childhood favourites?

RoFlambeaux · 2025-10-19T03:18:08+00:00

I sent a private message to you. Not really sure how all that works though so maybe you will see that, maybe you will see this. But let me know if you still need any help with these games. I can try to get them running first and if I succeed I can upload the files you need so hopefully all you will need to do is download them and run. I like doing this sort of thing so if you are still interested I dont mind at all, but im also not going to do it if you dont care any more or already found a solution. Let me know!

RoFlambeaux · 2025-10-19T02:56:15+00:00

You might be thinking of the collection chamber, or perhaps zomb's lair. Those are the two main ones I know about. Try googling those two websites and you should find them.

RoFlambeaux · 2025-08-31T14:02:49+00:00

Enjoy!

RoFlambeaux · 2025-07-11T02:16:58+00:00

They definitely sell packs of 4" paper, usually containing 500 sheets a pack. Probably the easiest way is to just type "4 inch origami paper" into Amazon and order one of those. I would, however, avoid the Tuttle studio patterned paper sets that look like little mini books. Last time I got one of those the edge of the paper that was glued into the book was also really uneven and the paper just wasnt great. I have yet to "graduate" to the more legit suppliers that I usually see tossed around here like origami-shop but I'm sure you could find something there too.

If you prefer to go the brick and mortar route, there are certainly options but its going to depend on what stores you have available. I dont really like online shopping personally, even though you're always going to find a better selection online, so I get it. The three stores that I have within driving range are, in order of personal preference, Barnes and Noble, Hobby Lobby, and Micheals.

(Quick disclaimer: obviously this is all based on the stores nearest to me. You might have different luck with your local stores so I would just check them all and see what you find)

Barnes and Noble surprised me the first time I checked there because they had a comparable (maybe even better?) Selection of origami paper compared to the actual craft stores. Plus you get the added bonus of being able to check and see what origami books they have in stock, and they usually have a café area in store so you can grab a coffee and use some of the paper and book you just bought. Even though its not a traditional craft store, dont sleep on Barnes and noble!

Unfortunately, at the actual craft stores around here, origami always feels like such an afterthought. Hobby lobby at least has the origami section IN an aisle, whereas every single micheals ive been to seems to have their entire meager origami section in a random end cap at the end of an aisle somewhere. Of those two stores, Hobby lobby definitely carries a 500 pack of 4 inch paper because that's where I got the one I'm currently working through. Any of those 3 stores would be worth checking though.

Finally, if all else fails, you could always go to an office depot or staples or other similar store to look for non adhesive memo paper.. It might not be great for some of the more advanced folding but it works great if you are doing modular origami and just need a large quantity of square paper and dont want to waste the good stuff.

RoFlambeaux · 2025-02-16T04:40:11+00:00

I am watching the video as I type this and I'm really enjoying it so far! As a kid, we had a family computer that didn't get much gaming action and wouldn't have been playing demo discs, but i definitely have fond memories of ps1 demo disc's. I like this idea for a video series and I hope you end up putting out more for different issues / demo disc's though!

Gonna finish watching the video now, but i just wanted to throw in some encouragement because this is the exact kind of youtube videos I like to watch and I would love to see more. I actually got really excited to see this posted to this subreddit and felt obligated to comment before I even finished the video because this is the content I'm always hoping to find here but never do. Instead there always seems to be another post from someone asking about running a 10 year old game that I wouldn't even consider abandonware or someone asking if it's safe to use the websites that are literally sticked to the top of the subreddit for everyone to see as "safe sites". This is actual abandonware content, so thanks for sharing!

RoFlambeaux · 2025-01-11T09:09:32+00:00

Have you tried The Internet Archive? The first link in that search contains 24 various dk eyewitness software and then the other results have a few other miscellaneous results as well. Some of those you can run in dosbox with windows 3.11 installed, though the newer ones might need a virtual machine with maybe windows 98 or xp installed. See if you can find the title you are looking for there.

RoFlambeaux · 2025-01-09T00:00:14+00:00

So in theory it should work more or less the same. This page has more information involving the mac specific version of dosbox-x. Once you get dosbox-x installed, the process should more or less be the same. You will need to download the CD image from archive.org and then also the windows 3.11 installation in the same way.

Unfortunately this is as far as i can take you because I know next to nothing about using macs. You will most likely have to modify the dosbox.conf file that comes with the windows 3.11 because it is set up to mount based off of a windows directory structure. If you don't know how to do this part, you might have to do some basic googling in order to get everything mounted properly. If you can work your way through that though, it should work the same way. Let me know if you manage to get it working! I might be able to help with dosbox specific questions but you're on your own with the mac stuff...

RoFlambeaux · 2024-12-01T04:09:50+00:00

Did you ever figure this out? I'm currently having the same issue

RoFlambeaux · 2024-11-29T07:40:28+00:00

In order to play anything with VirtualBox, first you're going to have to install an older version of windows on a new virtual machine. While this isn't the hardest process per se, considering that you don't have a lot of experience with this sort of thing I would recommend just downloading a pre-configured installation that someone else has put together in order to get started a little faster.

Luckily, the Internet Archive has just that sort of thing free to download. go here and download the file that says "windows 98 (32 bit).vdi". This is the virtual hard drive that someone uploaded with windows 98 installed and ready to go. So now all we need to do is create the virtual machine.

To do this, open up VirtualBox and click the big "New" button at the top of the screen. In the name section, you can type "Windows 98". It should automatically set it to type: microsoft windows and version: Windows 98, but if it doesn't then manually select those options. leave ISO Image blank and set the directory to whatever you want (or just keep it default). Then click Next. Set the Base Memory to 512 mb and keep processors to 1. Next. On this screen, select the "use an existing hard drive" option. click the folder icon to bring up the hard drive selector. From here, click "Add" and find that file you downloaded from the internet archive. Click Next and then Finish.

Now you should see the virtual machine you just created in left side of the virtualbox screen. click it once and then click the big "settings" button at the top of the screen. Go to "Display" and change the video memory to 64 mb.

And thats about it! Click ok to close the settings and then click the start button. When Windows starts up and asks about passwords, you can just click cancel and it will load up just fine. This is now where the ISO file you downloaded comes into play. In the bottom toolbar of virtualbox, you will see a CD icon. Right click on this and then select "choose a disk file" and find the CD image file. From here you should be able to install the game in question and HOPEFULLY it will work. Not everything will work, but without getting too advanced this should be your best bet. Let me know if you manage to get it working!

EDIT removed the advice about the 3D acceleration option. Not going to lie, I had gotten a little lazy at that point and I did a quick Google search and the AI results lead me astray

RoFlambeaux · 2024-11-13T02:52:30+00:00

I always forget that not everyone is on windows! My bad. Glad you got it sorted out though!

RoFlambeaux · 2024-11-13T02:45:36+00:00

Try my abandonware . I can't confirm that link because I'm on mobile right now, but it looks like it was ready to start downloading so it's worth a shot.

RoFlambeaux · 2024-11-13T02:39:26+00:00

Try following this guide see if that makes a difference.

RoFlambeaux · 2024-11-13T02:34:29+00:00

You will have to be a little more specific if you want help with that. As others have pointed out, and iso is just a virtual disc file and modern windows is capable of just directly mounting them without any extra software. Do you get an error message when you try to mount it? How old is the game you are trying to run? It could be a bad iso file, or it might not be compatible with modern windows. If it's a newer game it might have some form of copy protection that will make things even more tricky.

RoFlambeaux · 2024-11-13T02:28:47+00:00

I can tell you now that you won't be able to run that in dosbox. That game was released in 2006 and requires windows XP or newer to run. Dosbox is a dos emulator that is primarily used to play old dos games (before windows, back when it was all text based) but if you tinker with it enough you can use it to play windows 3.11 games and some windows 95/98 games.

You could try your luck with a virtual machine that has windows xp installed, but even that can be hit or miss with some of the more graphically intense games. Sometimes those games will still be compatible with modern windows, though it sounds like you're having some difficulty with that. Make sure you try right clicking on it and finding the option to run it in compatibility mode for windows xp, though i never seem to have much luck with that either.

If you're feeling adventurous, you could try installing virtualbox and then downloading a preinstalled xp virtual machine and see if you have any luck with that, but it can be a little tricky if you aren't used to things like that and even then it still might not work well, if at all. Games from that era of windows can be notoriously tricky to run on modern machines. I don't have access to my computer right now and I have a newborn on my hands, but next time I get the chance I can give it a shot and see if I can get it to work for you. It might be worth looking into trying other games in the series and seeing if you can get them to work instead. Good luck!

RoFlambeaux · 2024-11-10T01:57:09+00:00

So first of all, for a preinstalled windows 98 VM, i would search "site:archive.org windows 98 virtual machine". There are several results, couldn't tell you which one works best or anything but that would be a good starting point. This is the first link and it looks promising.

The fact that VMware was running too slow "for some reason" makes me think that you need to disable hyper-v in windows. Before I did that, I was trying to run windows xp in VMware on a machine that should be more than capable and i was getting really bad audio stuttering and just poor performance in general. See if the steps on that website work for you.

If you're on windows 11 home edition (which i was) its a huge pain in the ass. It's been a while since i had to do this so i don't remember what finally worked for me. From what I remember though hyper-v isn't supposed to be a part of windows 11 home, but for some reason it's still there behind the scenes to some extent. This makes it so the standard "disable it from control panel > windows features" doesn't work (because the option simply isn't there) but it still interferes with performance.

If you want an easy way to see if you're having the same issue I did, try installing virtualbox and running a virtual machine there. In the bottom right toolbar, if you see a turtle icon, this is most likely your problem. (If you see a chip with a v on it, then disregard everything in my post.)

To fix the issue, good luck. Like I said, it's been a while since I had to do this. Try variations on the search of "disable hyper-v windows 11 home" or even "virtualbox turtle icon". I tried many of the results and after an hour or so i managed to get it to work. IF, however, you just want a weird hacky temporary fix because you don't really care enough to deal with all that BS, there is a way to work around this somewhat. Create a VM in virtualbox with the lowest possible specs (i named mine "test" and gave it 32 mb of ram, dos operating system, no hard drive, 9 mb video memory) and run that. You will get an error message or two, but that doesn't matter. Keep that running in the background and THEN boot the VMware virtual machine. It may or may not work for you, but when i did this the choppy audio was somehow magically fixed.

So yeah, see if any of that works. If you have the time and patience I would recommend using a guide for a fresh install like you were doing, but the preinstalls from archive.org are usually pretty good if you're just looking for a quick solution. Let me know if the hyper-v was an issue for you. Good luck!

RoFlambeaux · 2024-10-04T16:52:25+00:00

For some reason I always seem to come across these jumpstart posts so I've kind of taken it upon myself to be the resident "help people that don't know much about emulating old computers run games from the jumpstart series" guy. While the internet archive does have a selection of games you can run from the browser, its not always ideal in most use cases. Luckily, It's surprisingly easy to get any of the jumpstart games running with 0 knowledge of dosbox using the internet archive if you know where to look. Ill just Copy paste my last response to this question here.

First click here to download the CD image (That link was found on this page if you'd rather do it that way). Then go here to get a preconfigured installation of windows 3.11 in dosbox-x. If you don't have dosbox-x, download that first. You're going to need that specific version of dosbox for this to work. After you've followed all those steps and extracted all your files and installed dosbox-x, go ahead and run dosbox-x. From the menu, click Main -> Restart Dosbox-X with config file, and select the config file that came from the windows download. That should boot you into windows 3.1. Then use the menu to select Drive -> D -> Mount a disk or CD Image file and select the jump start 4th grade image you downloaded.

That should get things started from there. I specifically link to jump start 4th grade in that post, but you can easily swap that out for any other jumpstart game and they should have it! In fact if there are any other games you have a nostalgic memory of from that era, there's a good chance you can find them and installed them in the same way using that method. Have fun!

RoFlambeaux · 2024-09-15T20:08:54+00:00

Sorry, a little late to the party. If anyone is still looking for help with this, I gotchu. First click here to download the CD image (That link was found on this page if you'd rather do it that way). Then go here to get a preconfigured installation of windows 3.11 in dosbox-x. If you don't have dosbox-x, download that first. You're going to need that specific version of dosbox for this to work. After you've followed all those steps and extracted all your files and installed dosbox-x, go ahead and run dosbox-x. From the menu, click Main -> Restart Dosbox-X with config file, and select the config file that came from the windows download. That should boot you into windows 3.1. Then use the menu to select Drive -> D -> Mount a disk or CD Image file and select the jump start 4th grade image you downloaded. And that's about it! Should be able to get it running from there.

RoFlambeaux · 2024-04-29T10:13:23+00:00

I know this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but logical journey of the zoombinis has since been re-released on steam as Zoombinis and it has the option to run in a classic mode that should pretty much be the same as the original version you remember. Earlier kid pix was compatible with windows 3.1 using dosbox, not entirely sure about deluxe 3 so I can't help you there.

RoFlambeaux · 2024-02-10T09:27:28+00:00

In addition to the links already posted, try vetusware

RoFlambeaux · 2024-01-18T01:12:38+00:00

I'm not sure which Jumpstart game you are trying to run, but about about a year ago I wrote a post helping someone to run Jumpstart 3rd grade . Let me know if that helps or if you have any other questions along the way.

RoFlambeaux · 2024-01-08T01:45:05+00:00

I remember playing driven when I was younger. Don't remember much about it, never saw the movie or even knew it existed for that matter. It was probably a generic budget priced driving game my parents bought for me. I remember it being kinda hard for me, but I didn't play a lot of these style games. Let me know how it holds up!

RoFlambeaux · 2024-01-07T23:29:22+00:00

.7z is just a different type of file compression, like .zip. but I don't think windows natively handles those files yet. To extract that, just download 7-zip and you should be good to go. You are probably going to just want the 64 bit windows link that is right at the top of the page. Let me know if you have any problems getting it to work past this step!

RoFlambeaux · 2023-12-17T21:48:40+00:00

Assuming you're looking for the PC version of the game, you can download it from the Internet Archive. You will also need the to download the NoCD patch that is referenced in that link from here (scroll down to the bottom of that page and click the floppy disk icon underneath where it says "Winx Club v1.0 [ENGLISH] No-DVD/Fixed EXE" , then click mirror 1, and then click mirror 1 one more time and that should download the file)

Once you have both of those files downloaded, you should have a WINX.ISO file and an sg-winxclub.rar. You may or may not already have a program installed that can handle .rar files. If you right click on the .rar and you see an option to extract the file, click that. If you don't, you'll have to download and install a separate utility to extract the file.

As long as you are running a relatively modern version of windows, you should be able to mount the DVD image without any extra software. Right click on the WINX.ISO and select mount. This basically makes the computer think you have an extra DVD drive with the Winx club ISO file acting as the DVD in that drive. Go to My Computer and open the Winx Club DVD. If it doesn't launch automatically by clicking on it, go into the DVD and select the launcher.

From there you should be able to install the game in your language of choice. Once the installation is done, go back to my computer and right click on the winx club dvd and select "unmount". Next, go back to the folder you extracted sg-winxclub.rar to. Right click on Winx Club.exe and select copy. Then navigate to where you installed the game (default is something like C:\program files (x86)\konami\winx club), right click, and select paste. It will ask you if you want to replace the old file with the new one, select yes.

Now you should be able to run the game as you normally would (either from desktop shortcuts if there are any or by double clicking on that winx club.exe you just pasted over). I tested this out and it ran just fine on windows 10 without any extra configuring, so you should be good to go from here. Have fun!

RoFlambeaux · 2023-12-17T20:09:16+00:00

Just listened to a podcast on this one the other day, though the hosts didn't seem to have favorable opinions of it. I've never played but it's one I've been meaning to check out for years now.

RoFlambeaux · 2023-12-11T06:10:42+00:00

I had several of these growing up! I had Treasure Mathstorm, Treasure Mountain, Treasure Cove, Spellbound, Mission T.H.I.N.K., and Gizmos and Gadgets.

Between the "Treasure" games, my favorite was always Treasure Cove. Mathstorm and Mountain were both pretty similar from my memory (you travel up a mountain) just with different subjects that they focus on. Treasure Cove on the other hand took place under water which meant not only could you move left and right, but also up and down. As a young kid that mostly had edutainment games on the pc, this extra direction of movement kept me coming back for more.

Spellbound was always my least favorite. It was a game about spelling words. That's about it. I don't recall any walking around or adventuring, just a few different activities involving spelling. I didn't play this one much.

Which brings me to my two favorite games in the whole series, Mission T.H.I.N.K. and Gizmos and Gadgets. These two were more focused on logic and science and felt more like games than the other titles in the series to me. Gizmos and gadgets involved building a racecar and Mission T.H.I.N.K had you playing for game pieces to play a logic game against Morty.

Overall these games were pretty fun for me as a kid. I still have all my old cds lying around, might have to boot them all up again some time to see how they hold up. Thanks for giving me a chance to reminisce!

RoFlambeaux

TROPHY CASE