The Road To Dune

Shortly after an afternoon breakfast, boredom struck. As I sat silently in my bedroom I looked around for something to do. I wasn't in the mood for doing any work so I stared at my games shelf. It was there I spied Dune 2000; a game I had never really played but had somehow acquired. I couldn't come up with anything better do to so I grabbed it, booted my laptop into windows and installed it.

Everything went well so I started up the game. As expected for a nine year old game, the resolution was small. 640 * 480 to be exact. The game was a small box in the center of my laptop's screen. I played through the first two missions just in case I got bored. I didn't, but my eyes were starting to peel from trying to focus on such a small picture. I turned on hardware scaling to stretch the image to fit the screen but the picture quality was dire. I couldn't continue to play Dune like this. Luckily I had received a nice 17" CRT monitor from Eoin the previous night - perfect for gaming. Now, all I had to do was hook the monitor up to my laptop and I could play. There were, however, several problems to overcome...

The monitor was currently sitting on my bedroom floor. It would have to go in the space being occupied by my laptop. No problem, I moved my laptop and put the monitor on the desk. Now, where would my laptop go? There wasn't enough space in front of the monitor nor was there enough space on the keyboard shelf for it. After much searching for space I spotted a cardboard box in the corner used to store things that would otherwise be left all over the floor. It was perfect to act as a laptop sized table. I put the box on top of my PC case and put the laptop on the box. Now I had a monitor on my desk and my laptop about half a meter to the right of it, separated by a second CRT. This wasn't a problem as I didn't need my laptop in physical reach. But wait, that would require me to plug a keyboard and mouse into it. I already had the mouse covered but all the keyboards in my house had PS/2 connectors. One one logical solution to this problem; buy a keyboard!

It was time for a journey. PC World in Carrickmines was the destination. I needed money. My parents had left me food money while they were away. Since I had been cooking my own food there was plenty of it left. I hopped on my bike, grabbed the money and set off on what should be a short cycle. I reached the M50 in good time but once I came out of the housing area and into the open motorway a harsh wind stuck. What should have taken about five minutes to cycle took about three times longer. On reaching the shop (after nearly been blown into several cars) I set off looking for their cheapest keyboard with a USB connection. Among the massive wireless kits I found a thin box with a picture of a cheap looking keyboard on the front. "USB connection". Perfect. No price. Not to worry, it can't be much. Turns out to be €12.99 which my wallet was happy with.

I arrived home after being gone for about an hour. I plugged the keyboard in to my laptop on my "docking station". Finally I could play Dune.