The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page (2010)

ski.ihoc.net

173 pointstosh41 comments

Heh, I have a fun little side project for carpooling to ski fields (New Zealand based). I setup skifree as the default 404 page :)

https://snowpool.org/notarealpage

Just out of curiosity, did you buy a license for this or is it public domain by now?

I just used (slightly modified and with permission) https://github.com/basicallydan/skifree.js I did not even think about licensing I admit :|

It is licensed MIT, so if you give credit for using the code, you should be good.

He said with permission, which overrides any license.

But is the js version sanctioned by the original creator?

Very nice.

Small nitpick: I think "In the meantime ... have a game of skifree :)" would be prettier (note the 3 dots).

Easily missed, but at the bottom of the page they're selling a SkiFree shirt[1].

I got one for my birthday a couple of years ago and it's my unashamed favourite geeky shirt I own, even though it looks a bit silly and isn't a terribly high quality shirt.

[1]: http://www.cafepress.com.au/mf/37735548/abominable_tshirt?sh...

Took me way too long to realize that image wasn't playable...

Playable version:

https://archive.org/details/win3_SKIFREE

Man, as a kid in the early 2000s I used to play a version of this at school. Not quite as good, similar to Linerider, forget the name though.

Well, there went my evening...

This kind of digital crack should be labelled properly.

Even worse: https://archive.org/details/internetarcade

Remember to press F! https://xkcd.com/667/

I get "failed to download game data."

He has a download for it on the original article that works great with Win10 64 bit. Why not link to the original article's download link: https://ski.ihoc.net/ski32.zip or https://ski.ihoc.net/ski32.exe

> Why not link to the original article's download link

I would rather not run binaries from the internet for a 5 minute gaming session. The link from the archive includes a DosBox emulator.

You have to view source and search for .mp4 and find the link, it may be urlencoded (just joking) but this is the case for "certain" sites that try to have you login to download their videos and try to obscure the source.

Many moons ago, I was forced to use a computer. I pretty much hated them, back then. Anyhow, I had to learn BASIC. To do so, I got a bunch of books and my first program was a rehash of a skiing game. I called it Ski Downhill Faster. (Naming things is not my forté.)

It made the rounds at the university and was improved by others who were more adept than I. It was a bit of an informal open source, I guess.

I was actually talking about this recently and lamenting the lost data. It's unfortunate that so many little things weren't archived. I highly doubt that a copy exists anywhere.

Also many moons ago there was a competition for one line Apple ][ Basic games and someone wrote a terminal based downhill skiing game. All you had was left/right and played until you hit a mound.

By the time my humble program had made the rounds, early 80s at MIT, it has ASCII trees and points for going through the gates. IIRC, the trees slowed you down and took points away. The point system was, I think, based on time remaining and gates cleared. If you ran out of time, the game was over.

I kinda wish I still had access to it, but only to use it as an example. It was a fun project in an otherwise not fun time. I pretty much despised computers back then, as they were difficult to use and had limited functionality. My, how times change.

I remember those days when people uploaded mp3s of albums they owned - https://music.ihoc.net/

Edit: no markdown

> Get SkiFree here (39409-byte ZIP containing one 118784-byte Windows 32-bit EXE).

Remember when every download link on the web told you exactly how big it was?

I still get truncated downloads occasionally nowadays. And my file explorer still doesn't show the checksum my filesystem has done anyway. So this is probably still the best poor-man's-integrity check.

The bear hunts me until this day.

The history article seems to confirm that it's indeed an abominable snow monster.

How much would those msft shares be worth now?

[removed]

I don't think that actually answered the question; this looks more correct to me: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+shares+of+MSFT+from...

Because of the stock splits that another commenter mentioned, it looks like this is actually asking a rather different question (more like "What would the price be to buy 100 then-current shares of MSFT at each moment from 1991 until today?").

100 shares, plus a history of Microsoft stock splits:

06/27/1991 3 for 2 = up to 150

06/15/1992 3 for 2 = up to 225

05/23/1994 2 for 1 = 450

12/09/1996 2 for 1 = 900

02/23/1998 2 for 1 = 1800

03/29/1999 2 for 1 = 3600

02/18/2003 2 for 1 = 7200

7200 shares, current price of $72.82 = $524,304 (or 2/3 of that, if he didn't hit the 1991 split).

edit: formatting

I spent way too much time on this game as a kid. Thanks for the brilliant game. Was a lot of fun to play. Multiplayer would have been awesome...

I do hate to be the jerk here, but this page keeps getting reposted just about annually - it started here almost a decade ago. I know that SkiFree was a memorable game, and it's nice that the programmer released it all those years ago. But really, while a nice diversion, this page just doesn't feel like it deserves to be on the front page of HN anymore.

So... why do HN members constantly repost it?

https://xkcd.com/1053/

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ski.ihoc.net

In my opinion, I don't see it being a "repost" epidemic.

> But really, while a nice diversion, this page just doesn't feel like it deserves to be on the front page of HN anymore.

So hide it?

This is the first time I've ever seen it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ihoc.net

Take a look there instead.

There are a number of submissions that follow a similar pattern. People discover them on their own and want to share. Not everyone checks the history to see if it's been posted before.

Can anyone hazard a guess as to what the original Atari 2600 game was?

The link in the article leads to the Activision game "Skiing"

https://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=...

The History page has a NSFW "This is where baby snow monsters come from" graphic.

It's a 40x28 gif...

This graphic is about equally NSFW as browsing this website while your boss walks in.

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