My oldest son (now 33 years old) has been living in another country for more than seven years. However, there are still many of his things in our house and among them I found an old laptop which may have been more than a decade without being turned on. So I couldn't resist my curiosity and after cleaning it a bit and even using a blower to get the dust out of it, I decided to turn it on and see if it worked...
And it really did work! And one of the first things I noticed on the old Windows 7 desktop, was the LEGO Digital Designer application icon... Immediately my head was filled with memories, as I grew up playing with LEGO as did my son and now his kids also have their first sets of bricks to play with.
LDD was a free app shared by the LEGO brand since 2004, however I was doing some digging and read that it has been discontinued since 2022.... Fortunately this one installed on this old laptop works pretty well so far!!!. So I decided to play with it a little bit. That's how I started (in a very clumsy way) to build this little model called "RED DEVIL" (I couldn't think of anything better)... It seems to me that I was influenced by some videos I've seen recently about car racing in the 50's.
The application is very simple and this version is 4.3.5. However it has a great amount of diversity of pieces in infinite number, so it is still a good thing to hang out and create some LEGO models.
I have plastic boxes with LEGO pieces stored in them. Some date back more than 40 years when I was a kid and my father bought them for me. There are also pieces from sets I bought for my son. However, they are all in there stored for a long time. Perhaps, now that I found LDD on this old computer, this will encourage me to dust off those boxes and play with our old LEGO sets a bit.
I had a lot of fun building this little old school sports car driven by a "skull-faced bad guy". So this has motivated me to search the internet and I have found sites where is possible to download the latest LDD version released by the LEGO company (4.3.12) and this according to what they say on those web pages, can run on Windows 10 and even Windows 11. So maybe soon I will install it on my PC and try this. I also saw another application called LDraw which is highly recommended by LEGO enthusiast people, I think I will try it too.... But for the moment I feel very happy with this old laptop and this old LDD!... :)
LDD has functions to make screenshots in PNG, that's how I got those images of the "Red Devil" with the background completely white. I was also able to take screenshots of the model building area view where you can see the LDD interface completely. There are also functions that allow you to create a step by step model building guide and export it to HTML and PDF... So if anyone reading this post knows how I can share HTML arcghivos in #Hive, please let me know in the comments as I don't know how to do it :(
I tried to make a small video recording LDD from the screen of this old laptop... But this old thing only has 4 GB of RAM and a very basic video card, so all I got was a memory crash and a blue screen which scared me greatly!... I'll see how I solve this later! ;-)
You can do a lot with this application, I even added a platform for my model and added my initials to it! :)
After having the model ready it has come to my mind this interesting community in #Hive created by the friend @galenkp and that's how I ended up creating this little post to share it with you. I hope the theme of this is suitable for the community and I also hope to be able to share in the future more models created by me in LDD. This app, even being discontinued now, is still a nice thing to do this.... And... I have infinite bricks!... That's the dream of anyone who builds things with LEGO! :))
