About Don
Don, a resident of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, has been described as “a…person”.
After two decades of personal religious study, he has gone from being an evangelical protestant to a Messianic Believer to, currently, an agnostic.
Don holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Manitoba (majoring in computer science and minoring in zoology). The consummate intellectual, he scored in the 90-95 percentile on aptitude tests taken in high school and on aptitude tests provided by the Canadian military during his university years.
Don’s interests are as varied as the colors of t-shirts he wears. These interested include ancient history, Biblical studies, computers, video games, science fiction, reading, movies, board games, card games, and role-playing games, among other things. One of his hobbies is collecting dice , which he has been doing for over seventeen years. He also has a nearly complete collection of the Power of the Force series of Star Wars action figures released in the mid to late nineties, but declining interest and increasing costs have long since ended this hobby.
He also has a predilection for artistry which manifests itself in the occasional dabbling into graphic design and craftwork such as the painting of miniatures.
Something Don sees as important is the appreciation of things past. This is most readily apparent in his love for vintage video games, which spurred him to build his own MAME arcade cabinet.
Born without a sense of humor, Don attempts to play pranks on his coworkers almost daily. With a quick wit and sharp, dry humor, Don can often be found trying to cheer other people up. He looks down upon most contemporary comedy, believing that relying on crude sex jokes and hurtful insults is a sign of a weak and poorly developed sense of humor. “A good joke”, he says, “is one that which doesn’t need to prop itself up with the shock value of taboos and insults”.
An intelligent, witty, and sensitive man, Don is a loyal friend to those who know him.
Brad Hickling said
Hey Don! A good little auto-bio about yourself. I helped a buddy of mine build a full-size arcade-style cabinet (complete with the authentic knobs, buttons and such) with emulators and roms for nearly every game from Colecovision & Atari all the way up through Sega Genesis, SNES and even the N64. It was pretty fantastic when it was done, but I have no idea how he’ll ever get it out of his apartment if he has to move… what consoles does your cabinet run?
Don Dueck said
As a MAME arcade cabinet, it primarily runs the MAME emulator, which emulates over 4,500 unique arcade games. I haven’t used it in a while, and I think I cannibalized the computer to lend to a relative a couple of years ago.
Brad Hickling said
Ahh, very cool – I’ve never done anything with MAME, just the various console-emulators (I think I’ve still got 6 or 7 GB of emulators with ROMs). I’m assuming when you cannibalized the computer you kept the HDD so you wouldn’t have to re-acquire your software etc? I’ve probably got a system laying around that could be used to resurrect that thing.