Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Prize of the Weekend

It was a pretty good weekend - it was a kid-free weekend* - but one of the high points for me was finding this on Saturday.


Been looking for one of these. I have the original hard cover and the softcover editions (you can never have too many copies of a Hero System rulebook around the table) but I have not owned a Deluxe copy.


They call it "4.2" inside with the original hardcover being 4.0 and the softcover/Hero System Rulebook being 4.1. This edition came out in 1995 back when 4th was current and pretty popular. There's some error-fixing and a new graphical approach inside. Nothing earth-shattering but it is funny to go back and read through a book you've perused hundreds of times and find that it looks different on some pages. The real prize was this:


Yep, it has the HeroMaker disk still in the back. I've been looking for that for a long time. Before you ask, yes, I do have at least one old PC floating around that has a floppy drive. So that's the next experiment for the week - does it work and can I use it to make characters? We will see.

*One of the benefits of being a "blended" family is that we get some grown-up-only weekends, usually at least one a month, and scheduled well in advance. There are silver linings to most things, you just have to look for them. Also, choose a good lawyer.

4 comments:

GrayPumpkin said...

My hero maker still works on my Windows XP computer, the problem is getting it communicate with printer. Which was a little dicey even back in the day, and has proven, for me anyway, outright impossible today.

Theron said...

The best way to print from HeroMaker (even in the Windows 98 era) was to use one of the Postscript outputs, then use something like Ghostscript to convert it to a PDF.

For all I know, CutePDF may be able to do that now.

Adam Dickstein said...

As I've mentioned on my site, 4th Edition is my favorite and the one I am currently using to run our (near-weekly) Champions campaign.

I have never been able to get HeroMaker to work on any computer I have ever owned including my current one. No idea why.

My best guess is that it's some kind of plot by Mechanon.

Blacksteel said...

Thanks for the advice guys, I'm going to try and get it working by the weekend at least.

There is a current version of HeroMaker available that will build 5th (still pretty similar) and 6th (not so similar) edition characters but

a) it's on a limited license kind of thing that expires unless you renew (similar to D&D Insider) which I really do not care for.

b) there's just something appealing about being able to get a 15+ year old program to fire up and make characters with kids who weren't born yet when it was created.

BA, 4th is my favorite too. Nothing wrong with 5th really, but 6th changed too much for my taste and it felt like it broke 30 years of backwards compatibility. So, 4th edition it is! For Champions, in this case.