jmaslak expresses himself thusly: "I'm in the market for yet another new mouse. My average mouse-span is three months. Once in a while, I can stretch it to four, but sometimes the darn things die after only one month. I've tried cheap mice and expensive mice. Microsoft makes a decent mouse, as it usually lasts four. But I hate spending $50 every 4 months!" (Read more for the details of jmaslak's quest.)

wedonneednoSTEEKINGguis asks: "After an hour of Google searching that turned up empty, I turn to the next best thing, Slashdot's hordes of trained monkeys. Does anyone know whatever happened to the console-mode (character-based, text-mode, whatever you want to call it) Word Perfect for Linux 5.1? I'm -positive- I recall it being included with the full GUI package in some Linux version or another, but naturally all traces of it have disappeared from Corel's FTP site, and I can't even find any references except for people talking about using emulation to run MS-DOS binaries. Word Perfect continues to be the WP of choice in our office (as well as many legal firms, so I've heard), and we don't need the features or want the overhead of a graphical version. Does anyone know where this beast might currently be located, or has it become unofficial abandonware?" Ah, I remember quite a few teenage summers where I worked in jobs that used the text version of WordPerfect. Of course, I never could remember keyboard command for "bold"...Alt-F5, or was it F6?

Kyudosha asks: "With the recent emergence of some of these high-quality SNES emulators for Dreamcast, I find myself wondering about those emulators that aimed to do the same thing for the PSX. I seem to remember a few... what happened to them? The PSX has good hardware, it should be able to handle SNES emulation, shouldn't it? Plus, with the advent of some of these compilers for the PSX, wouldn't it be easier to port, say, SNES9x to to the PSX?"

Acheon writes: "The CPS-2 arcade board from Capcom uses some hard encryption scheme that has been a very hot issue in emulation for years. Yet finally the code was broken Final Burn, a quite recent arcade emulator, showed concrete results by running previously unsupported games such as Street Fighter Zero using decrypted ROM images. The CPS-2 Shock Team, who managed to reverse engineer the process for scratch, really outdone themselves and it is a very uncommon achievement." Thanks to Jamie for also pointing out more info.

Kevin Lawton, currently employed by MandrakeSoft, is the creator and driving force behind Plex86, the Open Source X86 virtualization software which runs under Linux and now boots several operating systems, including QNX and Windows 98. This is a tricky endeavor, because (among other things), as the plex86 site states: "The x86 processor is not 'naturally' virtualizable. That is to say, it was not designed to run multiple operating systems concurrently." But with enough feints and jabs, Kevin and company have cajoled it into doing so anyhow. He's agreed to answer your questions about virtualization (and / or emulation -- he is the guy behind the also-Open Source bochs project to emulate X86 processors), so please post your stumpers below. Make sure to check out the Plex86 website first, and perhaps read other things about Plex86 on Slashdot. (And "What's the point?" is not a stumper.)We'll forward the top questions on to Kevin, and hear back from him soon.

The list grows of how many OSes Plex86 can boot. Soon you may have an easier time of installing a new kernel (besides turning to page 207 of Running Linux). SAGE wants to know the intimate, personal, steamy details of how much you earn as a SysAdmin. Also, not everyone trusts the proposed data-escrow deal involving Celera and Science. All below, in this episode of Slashback.

In addition to all the other books he has insightfully reviewed, chromatic has written this review of CGI Programming With Perl. This books sounds like a great resource for the builder of dynamic Web sites with a Perl background. And isn't it nice to see a book with "an unapologetic Unix flavor"?

ScottMan asks: "The company I work for is interested in WAN emulation software that does stuff like create false latency, random packet dropping, etc. After scouring every resource I know, I was able to find only one piece of software called The Cloud (at $4,000 a license) Does anyone know of ANY WAN emulation software that is GPL or similar?"

duffbeer703 wrote to us with a ZD story regarding Transmeta's Crusoe speed and benchmarking. As we've heard the benchmarks haven't overwhemled people - but are we measuring things the wrong way? Of course emulation is slower then native chipsets - that's a given - but are the other elements of Crusoe enough to make up for it?

JayBonci writes: "The emulation and classic gaming world has been a large grey area for a while. The subject of reverse engineering other products for the sake of emulating has come up numerous times (see also the Bleem and Connectix lawsuits), but what about emulating your own stuff? It seems that Capcom is going to use emulation as a standard way to make more games cross platform. The blurb is short, but an interesting though. How viable a solution is this? If the performance hit is fairly minimal, how will this affect the future of cross platform game development? It's an interesting solution, IMO."

More news from the protecting-the-children front in Indianapolis (and it's good news, even if fleeting); bits on emulation and long-ago video games from a British perspective (and another wacky British story that you can tell your kids as a cautionary tale); and educational news of Cosmic significance, all below. And I promise, apart from this paragraph, there will be no mention of Lieberman, Gore, Cheney or Bush.

Davy Mitchell writes "Interesting article on emulation on the BBC's site Good interview with Paul Burgin - author of several Dragon 32/64 emulators. This makes his views on copyright quite surprising!" It's a good article on emulation, and the revival of the old style computers. Good nostalgia.

nontrivial writes "Linux Medical News has a decent review of Win4Lin, a MS Windows emulator. The article and submissions also touch on other solutions for having to run Windows applications. I use Win4Lin daily, and I must say it is rather spooky how well it works. The review doesn't spell it out, but Win4Lin 2.0 does include sound and serial and parallel support, and so far I've had no problems with the beta. It runs Windows in a SDI type interface, comes with DOS emulation, and can be run in many odd resolutions if you don't like running it in it's own virtual console. The bad news is that it technically requires a licensed copy of Windows (95, 98, etc, not NT), it is intended for business applications (so no DirectX support for example), and only TCP/IP networking is supported within the emulation. But overall it's stable (no more crashes than MS causes, and it doesn't take the whole box down when you see blue), it's fast (native speed), and it's cheap ($35). IMHO it's the best transition software I've used."

gribbly writes "Forget emulation -- now you can read classic Atari design docs!" It's all documents from the early 1980s, I think, and looks totally...I dunno. It's like taking a journey into the past.

Jake Pinsky writes: "3DGN posted a large emulation feature discussing arcade emulation, Super Nintendo emulation, and even Sega Genesis emulation. It's a nice look back on the games we used to play, and it even has places where you can get the ROMs. In the section on MAME (a popular arcade emulator), the writer even discusses building your own arcade machine, and there are some photographs of the one he hollowed out and put a computer in. There's nothing like having an arcade machine in your home that can play over 400 games..."

adagioforstrings asks: "A couple years ago I remember hearing a lot about an open source operating system called Freedows. It used the concept of a cache kernel in order to provide emulation for several operating systems (among them Windows, Linux, MacOS). I was looking at the Web site and there haven't been any updates for nearly a year now. What happened to the project? Too ambitious, or did it just never get enough steam going?" According to the site, it looks like Freedows didn't quite make it out of the specification stage. Is the project still alive? Is it dead? Or is it in suspended animation waiting for the right set of people to reanimate it?

dragonfly_blue writes: "Just wanted to let you know, OpenBSD 2.7 is out, with significant advances; including OpenSSH2, better Linux binary emulation, DSA encryption, and (my personal favorite) support for encrypting your swap space. Theo and the gang have also expanded the ports and packages collections considerably, so get 'em while they're hot!" (More.)

Robotech_Master writes "According to this article in Wired News, a court has just dismissed many of Sony's charges against Connectix in the Virtual Game Station emulation case, noting that 'both copyright and trademark law favor broad consumer choice.'"

martial writes: "I saw the information on IGN; it seems that the people at Bleem! are going to release a DreamCast version of their software to play PC Playstation Emulator."

rapett0 writes "Sega of Japan has decided to take a much welcomed step and support downloading and playing of Genesis/Mega Drive and PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 games on the Dreamcast via a service called DreamLibrary. Apparently they will cost $1.50 per download/per day and you lose the game after you turn off your system, but can redownload if you still have rental time left on the game that day. The same article makes mention that Bleem! might be released for Dreamcast as well. " Granted, this is only for Japan right now - but it's a cool step.