Old Timer here

[SJMPARMAN1]

I am SJMPARMAN from FPS 98, PGA 1999 and PGA2000. Mike Boyd was my original "pard" and my best friend for many years. I fell for Sunshine early on. I was a good friend of Greeneyez, Cindy Sue, Tyson, Shelbygt, Banna and many others. My playing internet golf shaped my life. I was good friends with $uggins and Redneck Lady. After things didn't work out with Sunshine, $uggins and Redneck Lady introduced me to Shedevil, Redneck Lady's daughter. 23 years ago, I ended up married to her. We played regularly after we married with Dash and Danny60 on Fridays for many years after Kali kind of closed. But Shedevil and I had 3 kids (she changed the screen name to (mrssjmparman) and it kind if got too busy to continue that. Plus there was only so many times you can experience the same Friday without wanting something different. We appreciated Dash and Danny's friendship for the years we played Friday night's together though.

I started playing internet golf in 1998 as a way to stay in touch with my sister. She passed away too many years ago. She was my best friend for 40 years of my life. I am now 65. Redneck Lady passed away about 4 years ago. I got news today that $uggins passed away a few days ago. I am healthy but I feel sad that so many of the people I bonded with so many years ago are gone. I share the sad news not because I mourn the losses but to kind of tell you all how much I appreciated the experience we shared playing internet golf together back then and I will tell you, without a single doubt in my mind, I would do it all again if I had the same opportunity. You were all great and my life benefited for knowing and being a part of your world. So I just say thank you for all of what you did for me, and my family, as I continue with my life.

[SteveHorn]

SJMPARMAN1
Your post made me happy and sad. I hope your golden years are happy and prosperous. I'm also 65 so I can relate to some of what you said. Your always welcome in this community and maybe you'll start playing again.

[BrianZ111]

Hey SJMPARMAN, thanks for sharing your story and gald you made it here. I don’t know if we ever played together but I certainly do remember your name from either seeing you online in the game or maybe in the forums. I’m sorry to hear the news that we have lost some community members, but thank you for sharing with us.

I too played all three versions of this game and started playing online with PGA '99. I was just a teenager at the time so I’m a lot younger than you guys (I’m 39 now), but I still have similar feelings you’re having about the people we lost. I used to play with Gary Willford (poppy112) a lot but unfortunately we lost him almost 8 years ago now. Dar (Tincup) was also a huge help to setting this website up and maintaining it and is greatly missed.

I often wonder what has happened to some of the members who regularly played online and posted in the forums at the Copyright Club, MyGolfer, and here. Since I often spent a lot of time in the course design section of the forums I wonder about guys like DanO, R.S. Barker, and Stefan Højgaard, just to name a few. I hope they are all doing well but just fell away from interest in this game.

This game has touched people in a lot of ways we could never have imagined in the beginning. It is in part responsible for the career I have now in real golf course architecture. I continue to meet online with a group of designers and players regularly Friday nights that long since moved on to other games, games I don’t like as much as this one, but we stick together because the friendships we’ve made became bigger than the games we play.

[SJMPARMAN1]

Hi. Thanks Steve and Brian. I tried to do some things to reinstall the game on my computer but I couldn't follow all the intructions for reinstalling the game. I think I still have the discs somewhere (I am a pack rat) and will reinstall as I see alot of new courses I would like to play. My basic question is where do people play anymore? I can play offline I know. And I may just do that if there is no place where people congregate anymore because this is an old game and few still have the discs. But is there some place I don't know about to play on line. I think it is great that people still create courses for this game. That really surprised me.

[BrianZ111]

I don’t know if anyone still plays online. I know there was a group that still used Kali as recently as a couple years ago but I haven’t seen any of them post on here in quite a while. Kali required Windows XP or XP in a VM so that limited it’s use as pretty much everyone has moved on from that OS by now.

There was another option using something called IPX wrapper and a program called Evolve (which appears to be no longer around) to get it working in Windows 7 and 10. The group of players I play with (who only play other games now) tried it probably about 5 years ago and we were able to get 2 player games to work with a combo of OSes including Windows 7 and Windows 10 but we couldn’t get foursomes to work.

I see that Game Ranger claims to support PGA 2000, I’m guessing also in combination with IPX wrapper. At some point I’d like to try and see if there’s any interest from anyone on here in playing online. At the moment I don’t have a lot of time to mess around with getting it to work though.