Updates & Acquisitions

April 14, 2026

Much has happened in the past few months. Not all of it strictly Golfshrine-related, or even Golf-related, I must confess, but for the sake of giving this update a bit of Length, I might as well chronicle all of it...somewhat out of order, because I want to start with the fact that I met a kitty again. Not even anywhere in particular, just a random kitty out on the sidewalk.

Hey, I don't get to own a cat, I'm more than happy to live vicariously through other people's.

For entirely non-golf-related reasons, I set out towards the Big City to meet up with a local friend, where we got to attend a small-scale shindig for an upcoming video game. For reasons of Non-Disclosure Agreement, I don't even want to mention what game it was. But look at this tree! It was a beautiful day that day and I could have asked for nothing more.

Kind of day where I wanted to bust out a blanket to sit on and a drink to enjoy while I simply observed the wonders of nature.

During the course of the day, the two of us wound up at the book store, where I simply had to peek through the golf books (none of which I bought). Somewhere in the sea of professional golfer autobiographies and the New Yorker compendium of golf cartoons (and a book about golf written by Bill Murray, of all people), I spotted a joke that simply made itself.

It's not a book of perfect, either.

A couple of weeks before, though, I found myself venturing towards a different part of the metropolitan area, to make a Friendly Trade with a fellow enthusiast of retro tech: one spare XBox, in exchange for one spare IBM computer. The full specs and a gallery of photos of the thing can be seen at the Shelter, on another part of my webspace, but I've named it Baldr, and immediately set to work putting a golf game on it. Despite its 386 processor (at a blistering 16 megahertz!), it can't run Links 386 Pro; it doesn't have Super VGA support.

Getting this game on here did involve some network access; Baldr does not have a CD-ROM drive.

What of the Acquisitions? This is an Acquisitions Update, is it not? Not a Blaugh or rambling thread of micro-posts? As it happens, I did happen to order a couple of things off eBay, entirely for reasons of "they wound up being less than ten bucks." I would end up being quite surprised when they arrived in this canvas draw-string bag (inside of the more traditional shipping box full of packing paper).

I might need to update the Links Section. :D

The addition of so many new floppy disks (useful or otherwise!) to the inventory did necessitate moving Golfloppyshrine into a larger disk caddie.

Golfloppyshrine, before and after! ...And this Dymo label just will never punch correctly.
In need of a real Windows 98 machine to install this on, I decided this was a great excuse to break out Sigurd, my late-90s Panasonic Toughbook... rubber keyboard and all.

I can find precious little info about it; in my searching, I found only one magazine that actually reviewed the thing. The review indicates it would have sold for $19.95 USD, but a Chips and Bits catalog in the back pages of the same magazine lists it at $29.95. Only once have I seen a copy of this game in a box, and that was an Australian release; every other copy I have ever seen (including this one) came in a greyscaled cardboard sleeve, as if bundled with something else. (Someone has cut it apart to fit into a plastic jewelcase. Slightly uncool, but what can ya do, for the price.) The course files can be copied into older editions of Links LS, even if the program itself won't offer to do it for you, but if you were buying this back in the day for the seven courses, you'd have probably gotten a better deal buying one of the Links LS 5-Course Library CDs. I genuinely cannot understand why Microsoft produced this; they were already selling a budget version of LS 2000, as "Links LS Classic," and this was mere months before Links 2001 was due to hit shelves and render the entire lot obsolete.

Other remarks worth noting this time around...