Nostalgia Trip: My Laptop Journey

        This is a new series I’m planning where I delve deep into my memories and talk about specific events I remember, or may or may not misremember. This entry is about my laptop journey and evolution of me trying to get Audiosurf to work on them because that is one of my favorite games of all time.

        The first laptop I remember having was actually a “Hand-me-down” for lack of a better term. I remember my mom was using a MacBook (with the light up Apple logo that I was so jealous of and mad at Apple for getting rid of) for her work at a magazine company. Somewhere in between the first house I lived in and the first move I overcame, she upgraded from that to a Compaq (Pretty sure it was a Presario CQ61) which is the subject of this paragraph. My mother used that as her work laptop and somewhere along the line, she let me dabble on it a little. I used to use it to go to the PBS Kids, Sprout, and Nick JR websites, because I was a kid and was into that sort of thing. I remember the Nick JR site had these fun painting apps where I would just mess around with the spray can tool drawing a literal blue blob of what the hell. The Nick JR site also had this Blues Clues game where you gotta find Blue in the dark. The fun thing about that game was you would make little footprints. As a person who was obsessed with track maps at the time, I loved this. There was also a Peppa Pig figure 8 skating game that I loved for the same reason. I also remember this Leapfrog website that had this train game I was obsessed with. Essentially, you would guide the train to the next station by rotating the train tracks. It was so fun, and I think it’s where my obsession with puzzles started with. There is also the fact that my father put iTunes on it, weird tangent but it was another thing I remember about it. It was the older iTunes that had the large Cover Flow thing that I loved. Fast forward to 2017, my family was in our fourth move to a house in the city where a friend of my mother’s lived. We were doing a big storage clear-out (is what I remember), moving items from the storage area to the city house. We were able to put a couch where the friend’s desk lived and moved it into a dedicated office room. The couches were the weird orange-beige ones that were in the living room in the second house we moved to. They had mini shelves and the cushions looked like giant fig-newton bars. Getting off track, one of the things that was in that storage haul was that Compaq laptop I remember loving, and I wanted to set it back up. Turns out that at the time, a regular visitor was another friend of my mom’s, and she was tech savvy, so she helped us set the laptop up. My brother and I were playing with it, trying to get ROBLOX to work, because that’s what we were into at the time. I remember for some reason filming that interaction too so I can tell you what was happening accurately. We were trying to get a game on ROBLOX to work but it kept booting us out. I don’t know whether or not the ROBLOX app was not installed or if the laptop was borked but it kept booting us out. Once the game finally loaded (Or at least I thought it did), I started recording. The game went full screen, we were all excited, and then PFT! It booted us out. Eventually we resorted to watching Venturiantale. Somewhere along the way, my brother and I had the idea of trying to get Undertale to work on it, so we downloaded Steam, and hit a road block because I forgot my Steam password, so I essentially just fumbled around on the log in page. During this interaction, we accidentally bluescreened the computer, which was fortunately, an easy fix. It was just the computer going “Hi I noticed you were trying to push me to my limit so I’m just gonna stop you from doing that because I’m too old to handle this.” I remember my brother was taking about ducats because of Teen Titans Go!, which was on all of the time. Every time we jumped a hurdle, he would go “Oh those are some ducats!” When the bluescreen happened he went “OHHHH THOSE ARE SOME NICE DUCATS!” We never got proper Steam on the Compaq because I ended up accidentally bricking it because of Steam I guess.

        My next laptop actually ties in with my brother’s laptop at the time, because they were both Christmas presents. I think it was a Christmas visit to my Grandparents’ house (My current house) but I remember seeing two backpacks, one grey and one blue, the latter being mine because blue is my favorite color. Both backpacks had laptops in them, aptly in the laptop part of the backpack. The rest of the presents in the bags were just miscellaneous presents that I don’t remember because the laptops were the main event. I remember that I got a HP (HAITCH-PEA, there’s your little Dankpods reference) Pavilion and my brother got a Lenovo Ideapad, which supposedly, according to the aforementioned Dankpods, sucked, but I don’t remember him having any problems with it aside from an event that happened later in the story. We were both excited. Our own laptops, amazing! I remember the day after Christmas, my brother and I were back at the aforementioned friend’s house laying on the floor moving into our new machines. We both put generic “4K wallpapers” that had like, rainbow moons and space dragons on it and I was sat on the floor watching RedKB and JRCuber. About Audiosurf 2, I spent all of Christmas day getting Steam and the demo for it thinking that I was gonna play the song of the day, every day, but then I gave up because the demo wouldn’t let me play the game in which I thought the point of a demo was to let you play the game a little bit so you could see what to expect before buying it. My brother was the gamer of the family, so he downloaded Fortnite and Baldi’s Basics, because those were the popular games at the time. He got pretty good at Fortnite, eventually killing it when he got his Nintendo Switch and his first VicRoy. I’m pretty sure he witnessed the Cube Explosion event on that computer, along with me on my Switch watching along with LispyJimmy (Insert Bratz “EWWWW!” audio clip). I remember we got the secret death screen first try in Baldi’s Basics. I did something stupid to mine, right off the bat. I was really into Vargskelethor Joel’s “Windows Destruction” series, the one where spyware antiheroes Bonzi Buddy and Protegent infamously rose to fame. There was one site Joel went to that converts MP3 files to MIDI files. However, these MIDI files, as he came to find out, were just straight up chaotic piano keysmashes, as he found out by putting John Cena’s theme into the converter. In my childlike naivety, somehow not getting the point that these websites he goes to in a series called “Windows Destruction” are fishy malware houses, I went to the MIDI conversion website and then BOOM! Sirens went off, and bright red text said “YOU HAVE JUST INSTALLED A VIRUS.” I was panicking because I didn’t know what to do as there was nothing to do: My computer was locked on the red texted sirens. Eventually, my mother’s tech savvy friend came in clutch and installed MalwareBytes onto the computer, which fixed everything. My brother was having fun with his laptop - I remember watching TRON legacy with him using the inbuilt DVD player - until because of a joke, it broke. Our mother walked into the room and wanted to dive-hug my brother, throwing herself onto the bed, and notably, onto the laptop. The screen cracked like crazy and he ended up crying because it was such an expensive gift. I then handed my laptop down to him, making him feel better. He restarted his journey from there.

        My next laptop was another hand-me-down. My mother wanted to get back on the job and so she got a Surface Pro foldable laptop-tablet thing that I was obsessed with. Somewhere in between the fourth move I overcame, from the city friend’s house (because of a falling-out) back to my grandparent’s house (where I still reside to this day), she let me have it because she got a HP Pavilion of her own. Immediately I moved in. I changed the colors, changed the wallpaper to a noclip.website screenshot of the top of DK Summit, downloaded Steam, logged in, and because I had a Steam card, redeemed it and got the full version of Audiosurf 2. Immediately I was THRIVING, playing all of the same songs with all of the same skin and mode combos that Morleux, my very inspo for Audiosurf 2 (More info on Morleux here: Their YouTube channel, my blog where I touched on them briefly) was playing. It was so fun trying to find free songs to play, finding all different modes and skins (I even found some Undertale modes and cool vaporwave skins). It was freaking amazing fulfilling my lifelong childhood dream of playing this epileptic seizure wormhole simulator while dubstep and gabber music played. After watching a YuB video on cheap gaming setups, I went ahead and downloaded OBS so that I could record my gameplay and upload it to YouTube. I now have 5-6 YouTube videos of me playing Audiosurf poorly and very laggily because the computer I was using was a nugget Surface Pro. Sometime down the road, I got obsessed with meme mashups (I just thought they were unironically cool), and I wanted to play them on Audiosurf, so in my naivety again, I went on one of those YouTube to MP3 websites and converted a meme mashup to MP3. I also did a YuB video because I thought it would be funny. A few days later, I started getting weird notifications on my laptop. “Your storage is running low,” “Your MacAfee subscription is running out,” “90210 cast reunion coming soon”(?) and so on. After a little research I found out that I went on a website that secretly installs PUPs (Personally Unwanted Programs) onto your computer. These PUPs can just, send you notifications whenever, so I got weirded out. Eventually, they went away, and it was all good again, until the proprietary magnetic charging cord decided that it wasn’t gonna work anymore. I don’t think I had the patience to look for another one because I was pretty sure they barely existed on market. After an 18-month period of non-usage, I decided to get back into the computer and revisit Audiosurf 2 for the final time because of the charger. That was the final time I played Audiosurf 2, until now (Spoiler alert).

        The laptop after that one was quite a doozy. After (I think) giving away the Surface, I was bent on getting another laptop. My only criteria was that it had to be small, and it had to be able to run Steam and Audiosurf 2. This is where my blunder came in. My mother has this thing where if you want a gift, you have to make sure to send exactly what you want to her, which makes sense because it gets all of the specifics out of the way. I didn’t get this concept and just said “Audiosurf 2 please!” My brother also wanted a laptop with Steam because he had a VR thing he wanted to hook up to it. So with that, it was the last day of school, class of 2022. My and my brother’s last day of school presents were two laptops, one for the each of us. They were from a brand called Core Industries. They were both small, and they both seemed like they could run Audiosurf 2. I remember being home before my brother and seeing an open, updating laptop on the desk as I walked into the room. I got so excited. All of the day was spent setting up the laptop to my needs. Then I entered the desktop. I tried to do the usual process, first downloading Chrome. Weird, it didn’t even try. Then I tried downloading Steam, that didn’t try either. Turns out, the Windows variant that the laptops had had something called S mode on it. Basically, what S mode does, is it locks all downloads to the Microsoft Store, which pretty much - aside from certain games and apps - is all crapware. The S stands for “Security,” but I just see it as the bad word for poo. I couldn’t even get Steam because It wasn’t on the Microsoft Store. Spotify and Discord were the only apps in my rotation that I could get. In the wise words of Dr. T.C in ‘Golden’ “But wait, it gets worse!” After all was lost, I tried to at least customize the computer’s colors, but I couldn’t. This was because the Windows OS that was on the computer wasn’t even activated, which I feel like it should be activated right out of the box to ensure an easy experience. This means I couldn’t even boot myself out of Windows Stupid Mode without jumping over 100-mile tall hurdles on one leg both ways. It was then we just used it to access the Weatherscan website when a big storm came through. Then I let it set. Then it went into a junk basket in my room. Then it went into a shed. (I forgot to mention that somehow my brother got Steam on his, but the laptops were running slowly so he just made it repeat the last three sentences of this paragraph).

        The final laptop I got, to this day, is what I am using to type this on. After the wild kerfuffle that was the Core Industries sadnesses, my mother got a MacBook Air for her new job as a writer for an entertainment news site. This then led to me kind of wanting one. A minor problem with that was there were only certain Steam games that could run on Mac software, and I was sure that Audiosurf was not one of them. So I objected against a Mac during the prelude to the Core sadness. After realizing that getting a MacBook made my mother’s work life easier, being that everything from her Mac was synched to her phone, I started thinking “Hm. I want one. It’s just an iPad but a souped up laptop? Sounds cool to me!” So I asked for it for my birthday. Then my birthday came, and surprise, surprise, my new MacBook Air. The exact model as my mother’s, but dark blue. Almost as immediately as I moved into the Surface, I moved into the Mac, putting one of the old Gitaroo Man wallpapers on it, and downloaded and logged onto every app and website I remember logging on to on my phone and iPad, and as MTV Classic rickrolled us, I sat there playing with the laptop that would end my journey of finding the perfect laptop. Few days later, I was figuring out how to get and play Gitaroo Man on it. Few days later I was installing SRB2Kart, a game that I wanted to play ever since I heard of it. Every day after lunch, use the Mac. When I want to visit Weatherscan, use the Mac. Use. The. Mac. I love this thing. Now it was the moment of truth, was I able to get Audiosurf 2 working on it? Well the thing is, Audiosurf 2 could work for MacOS, but the Mac I got was too new for Steam to handle (Game was 32 bit, newer Macs don’t have 32 bit support), so I wasn’t able to get Audiosurf working….. at the time (More on that later). At least I got SuperHOT working. Besides, it was basically my iPad but a souped up laptop. It was cool with me. As the years went by I went on a little software adventure with Minimeters. What Minimeters is, it’s a tool that music producers use as a live metering tool, with things like a waveform, a spectrogram, an oscilloscope, etc. Why was this special to me? Well, I was obsessed with waveforms, and I just wanted my life to be tracked in one of them. With Minimeters, that dream came true, and then some. I was also obsessed with Spectrograms in that you could hide special patterns and messages in them. The best $10 that was spent on my Mac. Even though I couldn’t run Audiosurf 2, I still used it daily. Then, in my usual nostalgist fashion, I started reminiscing about, well, playing Audiosurf 2. I kept seeing on the Steam page for the game about “running it on a PC through Bootcamp,” Bootcamp being Apple’s in-house Windows porter. Then I started looking for this “Bootcamp” app, when I looked it up and found that it couldn’t run on my Mac because it didn’t have Intel hardware in it, which is what MacBooks used to come with before the whole M Chip thing. I asked a Discord server I’m in (That did not have anything to do with Apple stuff and had even more to do with the game A Hat in Time, a game I grew obsessed with) and someone in it suggested “Apple Game Porting Toolkit,” a dev tool for Apple Developers who want to port their games to Windows devices. I thought “Hm, I may give this a try.” So the day after that night I spent my day installing it onto my Mac and trying to set it up. I remember it was kind of infuriating to set up because I barely knew crap about frick. The guides for it started talking about something called Wine, which was some Windows thing that came with Game Porting Toolkit. Eventually I got it working, but barely. I found out how to open Steam games and then opened Audiosurf 2 and was met with an unpleasant surprise. I told the same Discord person who recommended me GPT that it was working, but the issue was the in-house songs won’t play when I clicked “play.” I then gave up, posted on the Steam forum for Audiosurf 2 about a request for newer MacOS users, then moved on. That then turned into an entire chat thread documenting my journey. The other person in the chat thread suggested that I’d use a Virtual Machine, which was my last resort after I gave up completely. Off I went getting VMWare Fusion, which was the only free VM I could find. A few minutes later I got it set up, logged in to my windows account (The same one from the Core Sadness) and downloaded Audiosurf 2. There was also a patch made by the community that redid the YouTube compatibility that the game used to have. That didn’t work so I just had to settle. Again, like with the Surface, I was THRIVING, and I got really good at it, even at some moments beating Morleux’s scores on some of the songs they played. Eventually I found out how to properly get that community patch to work, and now, despite delay problems, I am able to play any song (And video) I want to.

        Moral of the story is, sometimes you have to work backwards to move forwards. I learned that when eventually settling on a MacBook Air despite previous objections. This was a long read, so I hope you enjoyed it. If you’re reading this, you’re cool.