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Shlomo Palestein posted:We talked about it a few months back, actually! It's a 1541. Drive is obviously doing *something* but it sure isn't reading the discs. I did a very basic cleaning to it. Later, I got a 1541 II for free (The guy wanted $20, but when I got there he said he had no idea if it even worked, so he just shrugged and gave it to me), and the second I turned it on something exploded and the office smelled like several old computers had decided to throw bombs at each other. Oh yes, I remember somewhat. Sorry, I forget things. The burned down 1541 II can be everything power-related really and I don't want to take some blind stabs that are probably not really helpful. Ever tried different disks on the other one? It's hard to remotely diagnose old C64 floppy drives. I am sure I probably already said this months ago, too. With some good pictures from the inside I might be able to say a bit more, in the other thread.
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May 6, 2015 21:06
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Police Automaton posted:Oh yes, I remember somewhat. Sorry, I forget things. The burned down 1541 II can be everything power-related really and I don't want to take some blind stabs that are probably not really helpful. Ever tried different disks on the other one? It's hard to remotely diagnose old C64 floppy drives. I am sure I probably already said this months ago, too. With some good pictures from the inside I might be able to say a bit more, in the other thread. No worries. Again, it was months ago. I'll update that other thread if I can get good pics.
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May 6, 2015 21:42
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So I picked them up, they're pretty lil machines. One of them however turns on to a black screen. From what I'm reading this isn't too easy of a fix? Any good pointers? Wooha! Not one but TWO Commodore 64s.  And the cutest lil cartridge holder   Games laid out, unlabeled one is Q*Bert   The guy kept all the manuals AND THE BOX (for one) $100 even if one doesn't work I think I did alright
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May 6, 2015 23:33
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So I've been dicking around with the dead C64 tonight to see what I could find and I'm not sure I want to go down the  path of fixing it because it seems pretty broken. The regulators show proper voltage and when I pushed down on all the socketed chips I got a blank pink screen. I then used Kickman to test if there was a bad kernel/rom chip and then I got a rolling screen of red lines. I know the PLC is usually the first to go but the output from Kickman has me worried other ICs are broken and I cannot find a place that isn't expensive for replacement ICs. Guess it'll be a spare parts machine for my main unit.
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May 7, 2015 04:57
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Make a few pictures of the Mainboard. (in a Quality so you can read the print on the ICs) It does not have to be the PLA. Post them over in the other Thread then.
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May 7, 2015 08:52
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Ok, now for a change I want to ask a question. I wanted to build a higher end Win98 Machine to play games of the mid to late 90s- to maybe early 00s. That Machine is supposed to be time appropriate to the mid to late 90s (haven't decided completely here yet but so no late-gen Pentium 4 or something) and I also do not want to mix and match with components that were released 5 years later. I am aware this will lead to poor performance in some 3D titles that would run better on more modern resolutions on something faster, but well that's just the way I want it. I have pretty much everything here from that period in parts, you name it, I probably have it. I can't really decide if I want to go with an Intel TX based (64 MB limited) Pentium MMX 233 Mhz System. (with board modifications, I could use an MMX 266 Mhz CPU with Tillamook core, I have a rather rare one here, I also have a SIS and some other Socket 7 Chipsets I don't remember right now) Then I have a Pentium III Mainboard with BX chipset and a variation of Pentium 3 CPUs I can select, then I also have an ALi Super Socket 7 System, with support for 100 Mhz FSB and AGP Port+400 Mhz AMD K6 III+ CPU. Graphics card is supposed to be an appropiate Matrox part for nostalgia reasons. The Harddisk will be connected via (time-appropriate) SCSI controller and the Soundcard is supposed to be an EWS 64 XL. I also have a few Voodoos somewhere. Playable on it should be mainly 2.5D titles like Duke Nukem and old RPGs like Fallout and such, I understand the MMX would be more than enough for that but I think I might also be interested in later things like System Shock II, were a faster System would of course be a lot better. So it's probably mainly up between the P3 and the K6. What do you people think? Remember, late gen P3 CPUs are out of the question, the parts are supposed to be from the 90s. EDIT: One thing I should add because it's nice, the MMX Mainboard from intel has the rather rare feature for that time that you can set the FSB and Multiplier in the BIOS. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 12:30 on May 8, 2015 |
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May 8, 2015 12:24
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I would look at the published recommended specs for the games of that period you are interested in, a lot of them are still online. From memory I think you'll need a P3 for System Shock II
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May 8, 2015 12:40
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It's difficult because most of them say an early Pentium is fine as lowest Spec which I can't imagine to be much fun in practice. I just found out though that the Mobile K6 was released in 2000 which actually makes it invalid as choice, even though you could probably see it as technicality. I might actually end up building two systems, one lower specced MMX System for the mid-range games and games my 486 has trouble with speedwise and one Pentium 3 for everything afterwards, which is not a lot. But well, it doesn't cost me any money so why not.
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May 8, 2015 13:47
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Dual P3 system with a Voodoo 3 3500 aka my dream system from 1999
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May 8, 2015 14:02
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Police Automaton posted:It's difficult because most of them say an early Pentium is fine as lowest Spec which I can't imagine to be much fun in practice. I just found out though that the Mobile K6 was released in 2000 which actually makes it invalid as choice, even though you could probably see it as technicality. I might actually end up building two systems, one lower specced MMX System for the mid-range games and games my 486 has trouble with speedwise and one Pentium 3 for everything afterwards, which is not a lot. But well, it doesn't cost me any money so why not. I guess it sort of depends on your true end goal: do you want to have a "period correct" computer, or do you want one that runs the games you want reliably and quickly without issue? You can totally do both, but in your shoes I'd just use the fastest setup windows 98 won't freak out about and just do that. And I get why you'd put such a restriction on yourself; it's similar to the VW Bug weirdos (and I mean this in a positive way) who use those strange "Air Conditioners" that are literally a box of ice that air is funnelled through, since that's what people'd use in the 60's. It's more a "this'd be neat to experience" thing than anything practical. That said, I'd go for the PIII. They made an 800mhz one in December 1999 if you want to be true to the letter of the law, at least. 
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May 8, 2015 16:27
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Shlomo Palestein posted:I guess it sort of depends on your true end goal: do you want to have a "period correct" computer, or do you want one that runs the games you want reliably and quickly without issue? You can totally do both, but in your shoes I'd just use the fastest setup windows 98 won't freak out about and just do that. The more I think about it the more the memories are flooding back to me. Many games also ran like absolute crap (comparably speaking to what you would expect performance-wise nowadays) on the current hardware and sometimes really needed the hardware to catch up to them. I mean between the last Socket 7 from Intel, the Pentium MMX with 233 Mhz (let's ignore the OEM and Mobile variants) and that P3 with 800 Mhz - there are only about 2 1/2 years between them if you want to believe Wikipedia. Also many 3D titles let you select resolutions basically arbitrarily with the developer heeding no regards if they would actually work on the hardware back then in any reasonable way. (I guess they too saw the hardware development and wanted to make things sort of future-proof) Now these resolutions are a lot more reasonable with modern screens and modern computers and we wanna select them, not thinking that nobody in their right mind back then would have even tried to run Quake at 1600x1200 on a 133 Mhz Pentium. (or would have been disappointed if it didn't work) That being said, it is probably utterly pointless to try to build a period-correct Machine for late 90s DirectX supporting titles, as like I said, most didn't run well with everything on "max" on the machines that were new around the time that they came out. Without checking it, it's probably a lot easier and more painless to get something like System Shock 2 to run on my i7. If memory serves correctly, the big problem with many games was the switch to wide-screen resolutions. So yes, it's mostly about the "experience" and using the old Hardware. I might actually scratch the idea to run late 3D titles on old Hardware entirely. Something like an 800 Mhz P3 might not scale back to older games from around the mid- to later 90s nicely, then but no idea. So many choices...
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May 8, 2015 17:08
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Yeah I think "100% period-compatible" is a better general goal, really; my DOS machine originally had Windows 95 on it and is specced to about 1996-top-quality standards, but it also natively runs basically everything fine in MS-DOS 6.22 since everything still had that compatibility at the time, so it feels -almost- the same as my 486/33DX that I lost in 1998. Though certainly nothing can replace that "off-brand unexplained random system failure" sensation.
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May 8, 2015 17:49
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Just by way of semi-applicable but only barely-so analogy: I had a 233mhz powerbook in 2000-2002 I played all sorts of old OS9 games on, and even that was too slow for a lot of stuff. I get nostalgic about it now, but I know if I had to deal with that thing to play anything I'd just immediately get fed up. In college, I had an 800mhz G4 ibook. Runs OS9 in classic mode, which does 99% of what I need it to do if I get that nostalgia bug. Can play Marathon at high res (well, for a 12" ibook), which my 12 year old self would be amazed by. I'm lazy, and you obviously have a lot more experience with this poo poo under the hood. If I were you, I'd just build the fastest thing windows 98 will deal with out of old parts with a whopping 256 or 512 megs of ram, like some sort of rich person, and play video games until my eyes bled. If I got the bug to do a period-correct sort of thing, I'd probably just build both and barely use the period-correct one, leaving it more as a weird museum piece. At some point during all of this, my wife would murder me and the whole exercise would be moot.
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May 8, 2015 18:49
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As far as building period correct, I'd say you should get a 2-3 year "bonus" as far as laptops go, because that's generally how far behind laptops tended to be. I just recently got a free Pentium III laptop, like 512 MB of RAM, decent size hard drive etc - its got basically the specs of the actual desktop I got in 1999, but it appears to have been sold in either 2001 or 2002. I also have an older laptop from 1998 that has just about the specs of my desktop from 1996 (CPU's marginally faster).
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May 8, 2015 22:09
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Nintendo Kid posted:As far as building period correct, I'd say you should get a 2-3 year "bonus" as far as laptops go, because that's generally how far behind laptops tended to be. I just recently got a free Pentium III laptop, like 512 MB of RAM, decent size hard drive etc - its got basically the specs of the actual desktop I got in 1999, but it appears to have been sold in either 2001 or 2002. Makes sense. You need to get a version of the chip that won't set everything on fire in a small package, and that takes some engineering lead time.
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May 8, 2015 22:33
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Yes, the "mobile" versions of CPUs often have a smaller Process (meaning the die is shrunk down) which also allowed to lower the voltage, which produced less heat and also consumed less power = more battery time. You will also find lots of these kinds of CPUs in OEM builds and the failed Thin-clients, they weren't so available on the open market. The K6 III+ and the Tilmahook 266 MMX CPU I mentioned is also a "mobile" CPU. (core Voltage of 1.6V in case of the K6 ,I have as "low voltage" version, you first have to find a Mainboard which actually supports this low of a voltage, in most Mainboards you'd have to overvolt or modify the mainboard) People who did lots of System tuning and overclocking loved those CPUs because usually, they were immensely overclockable and also would easily be able to sustain noticeably higher voltages (running a K6 like mine at 2V is usually not a problem with normal air cooling and I wouldn't consider it too outlandish to push this 400 Mhz Version way beyond 500 Mhz). It was usually lovely and cheap mainboards/chipsets holding them back. People skimped where they could for hardware contrary to now as your brand new computer would be obsolete in a few months, computers in general were a lot more expensive than they are now and dropping lots of money was in most cases just not really worth it. You could easily drop a few grand on a top of the line machine which would be laughably obsolete 8 months later. Intels last, most common Socket 7 TX-Chipset allowed only a cacheable area of 64 MB. Everything above that would result in serious slowdowns regarding memory access, especially in the way the old Win9x used the memory. Some people claimed that was a bit of planned obsolescence by Intel, but I am not too sure about that. 64 MB was a lot of memory. All competitor chipsets I am aware of didn't have that limitation though (as long as there was enough L2 Cache on the Mainboard). Anyways, P2s and P3s which only really started being worth it the time the Coppermine P3s came around (regarding cost/what-you-actually-get ratio, they were amazingly expensive - of course something that doesn't matter nowadays). The "budget" AMD offering, the K6-III I'd say were actually fairly competitive performancewise up to coppermine and also bypassed the cache limitations of chipsets like the Intel TX by bringing it's own on-die L2 cache. Hell, with some modifications you sometimes could even get them running on even older Socket 5 Mainboards. Of course, on such Mainboards and with a FSB of 66 Mhz they were less than competitive. Still a nice boost for an aged System, though. The first K6 III (without the plus) were at their limit regarding overclocking and such. Like already with the Pentium Intel was better at floating point performance which started to get important with 3D crap more and more, and also getting industry support for their special instruction sets which sometimes could really make a serious difference with some games. (even if I'd go as far as to say that this often took years. I'd wager that by the time MMX actually started giving you an real advantage in software, all the Pentium CPUs advertised with "with MMX technology" were utterly obsolete) Also this 3-layer design you would get with such an K6 (L1 and L2 on the CPU, L3 on the Mainboard) proved actually to be quite a little boost even for old mainboards which nobody really anticipated. Coppermines also started coming with their L2 Cache on-die though and the later ones would clearly just simply be better than the K6s. There were also later Socket 7 Chipsets by not-Intel which had AGP and supported a FSB of 100 Mhz, but they were just not that good. (The board I have has an ALI Chipset, which I would consider the only good one, they were so proud of their 100 Mhz FSB that they even printed "100 Mhz" on the Chipset) Especially the AGP implementation was often a bit of a Problem. But I don't know if I'd always blame the Chipsets, the Boards were quite lovely back then sometimes because of all the cut corners and these are pretty critical signal speeds where a shittily designed board can really cause some instability. The Intel offerings were often not that lovely made, but also were a lot more expensive. So in conclusion, K6 III and P3 are more head-to-head than one should think. As long as we're talking 90s P3s that is. I also don't know to what degree 3D Accelerators like the Voodoos even the playing field but I just guess they probably kind of do a bit. Well, anyways. The comparison to the Apple computer is really not all that fair as Apple stuff (even with what little I know about it) was legendary for being backwards compatible and playing nice. It's often not so with PC stuff (even though you don't have such dramatic architecture changes like 68k -PPC) and a too fast CPU can really ruin your day on old titles and lead to all sorts of oddities. I'm concerned I might not be able to scale down a powerful P3 as well as i would like to for the somewhat older games. It would be cool to have a good and comfortable coverage from the mid-90s up to the late 90s. This doesn't sound like a huge span but it sort of is. Also, like I said, I would like to stay sort of period correct because else I don't really see the point in the entire exercise. I am sure most stuff would just run best on my i7 then. I don't mind the occasional lag, I really enjoy playing System Shock 1 and Daggerfall on my old 486 even though it's not always up to it in every possible scene and you have framerates dropping sometimes. I find 20-30 FPS adequate and for me, that's just part of the experience, because it certainly was back then. I guess I'll just try around with several systems, I have all the parts lying around anyways.
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May 8, 2015 23:57
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Mo'slo and similar programs usually work just fine for slowing down DOS based applications, and it's relatively rare for actual Windows based games you'd still want to play to have serious cpu speed issues. Mostly, I only see that in a serious way with things like certain crappy Windows 3.1 shareware games.
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May 9, 2015 00:04
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I want to build a win9x machine but I really don't have the room for it and I'd imagine trying to get drivers for outdated hardware could be a potential nightmare, not to mention acquiring such old hardware without it costing an arm or a leg. Also, there's also the question of what other purpose could such an old or frankensteined machine serve. There's no way I'd connect a win98 machine to the internet, unless I'm real curious on how many viruses I can infect it with and if today's internet causes the machine to blow up.
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May 9, 2015 01:24
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Starhawk64 posted:I want to build a win9x machine but I really don't have the room for it and I'd imagine trying to get drivers for outdated hardware could be a potential nightmare, not to mention acquiring such old hardware without it costing an arm or a leg. Also, there's also the question of what other purpose could such an old or frankensteined machine serve. There's no way I'd connect a win98 machine to the internet, unless I'm real curious on how many viruses I can infect it with and if today's internet causes the machine to blow up. Laptops are perfect for this. You can usually get them quite cheap, they'll have a manufacturers site still up with the proper drivers if it's any sort of big time company, and there's no compatibility worries. Simply plug it into a VGA monitor if the screen's too small/bad for your tastes and you're golden! Let alone the fact that, being a laptop, it's low power consumption as hell, and takes up very little space. Also haha, no practically none of the malware around now works on Windows 98. It basically all is compiled for NT kernel operating systems, typically Windows 2000/XP or higher. You can also use firefox up to 2.0.0.20 on Windows 98, or you can use K-meleon, which is a fork of the Firefox project that supports most modern web stuff on OSes all the way back to 95. You will only get viruses/malware on Windows 98 in 2015 if you go out of your way to hunt down obsolete malware/viruses to put on it. Edit: here's a good example of decent laptop to use as a Windows 98SE machine: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Toshiba-Sat...=item234a6f2fb6 No hard drive, but all you need is to buy a like $5 mobile IDE to CompactFlash adapter and a decent 16 GB CompactFlash card which should be around $30. Also doesn't seem to have a power adapter with it, but Toshiba laptop power supplies were pretty standard and third party ones can be had for around $20. Then when you have 98SE installed, you want to grab http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/ because it adds some improved driver/usability things, and support for USB flash drives without having to dig up drivers every time. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 01:44 on May 9, 2015 |
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May 9, 2015 01:37
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The only problem with Laptops is that you don't get to cherry pick components, and have to live with whatever is inside. So stuff like Voodoo etc. is normally out, how much that matters is up to what you want to do. But like already said earlier in these posts, laptops that are a few years newer than what you want to play usually hit everything out of the ballpark. Technology kept progressing after all. Many laptops from that time came with crystal soundchips which are very decent qualitywise but have the worst FM-Synth emulation I have ever heard. This might matter for old games, for newer games I guess less. Depending on how the Soundchip is attached internally it can be difficult to get it properly working in DOS. Regarding other purposes for screwing around besides gaming - I have recently tested it and on the P3 things like FreeBSD actually run very well as long as you've got enough memory and stick to the console. Usually it's not worth it because of the power consumption though. There are better server solutions which are also cheap these days. General purpose browsing will probably be really frustrating on a P3, considering how complex the internet became and how memory-limited these machines are. EDIT: I also found a P3 HP Brio in my basement this morning. Why do I have so many of these things. FAKE EDIT2: Be aware that machines from around the turn of the century could suffer from the capacitor plague. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 08:17 on May 9, 2015 |
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May 9, 2015 08:05
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My Win 98 rig is a 3.2 equivalent Amd CPU in those days where they actually competed with Intel. It was a XP box circa the 02-5 timeframe I used it but I eventually turned it into a retro rig. I still have some work to do to bring it properly up to snuff though. But if you can get a good Voodoo 5 card and pop it in such a beast you will pretty much own rear end. Just maybe have a CPU slowdown for the nutty poo poo like Magic Planeswalkers which alternates from wanting all the CPU power you have to almost none of it depending on which part of the game you are playing.
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May 9, 2015 10:26
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I have a bunch of P4s here that could absolutely murder everything software-side of the late 90s-early 00s. Like I said, just feels kind of pointless. Most of that stuff will be running fine on my modern system, putting together an old computer for it gives you the reward of having exactly the same stuff run on it, just maybe with longer loading times and at lower resolutions?  I guess I just see many of these games as "modern". Same goes for the P3s, which held up nicely with the P4s (especially considering how much cheaper you could get them) for a long time, just you'll have even lower resolutions and even longer loading times. The P3s also have (for me) the disadvantage that they're really hard to slow down by hardware means for older games, most stuff will still be way too fast with the brakes applied. I know moslo and other software like this, but in my experience often the results are sort of hit-and-miss. Also talking early 00s where these systems were actually still standing at the homes of people you'd be talking games like Morrowind and Sim City 4 already which also list P3s as minimum requriement, but man why'd you even do that to yourself.As I am sure it kept many of you awake, I will tell you what I decided now - I will actually go with the K6 III+ together with the "Super Socket" 7 Mainboard (as it has a very good overall build quality). If this ever goes to court my reasoning is as follows: I am mostly interested in early Win9x and late DOS games and really not all that interested in all that later ~1999-2000 DirectX Stuff (besides a few exceptions) or actually not that interested in running it on old hardware. The early 9x Stuff can often be a royal pain in the rear end to get running on a modern computer though and the K6 III+ will absolutely murder even stuff that an 233 Mhz MMX might not. It also just seems like an interesting CPU to play around with. I contemplated going with the MMX as more period correct but the MMX has kind of a narrow window in which it was relevant and it might actually start being too slow for the late titles on that spectrum. The K6 also has the big advantage that I can fiddle with the FSB a lot and actually set the multiplier of the CPU in Software, this gives me a bit more leeway in getting the right speed for some things and might even make me replace or scale down the 486 to a degree. To make my decision even more nonsensical for some I will pair the entire thing with either a Matrox G200 or G400. They have sort of a bad rep for 3D because the drivers were a mess when the cards were released but Matrox actually worked on the drivers for a long time and later on they got quite good, and I'll not be doing a lot of 3D stuff on it anyways. I'll also pair the entire thing either with a Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2 for Voodoo support (SLI doesn't make much sense with a CPU like that), we'll see. It's not the best possible build and sort of breaks my own rules but feels appropriate to me, it's more fun if the computer is actually taxed. I think it should work comfortably up until and including '98 and even later for stuff that's not 3D intensive. There are some games that are proper pigs regarding CPU and would no joke benefit from 1Ghz+ while being released in the mid 90s but meh. If that proves to be underwhelming I have both a 440BX and i815E mainboard (the latter interestingly enough from Fujitsu-Siemens, but not an OEM Mainboard. I guess very barebones in the BIOS but it has a very good manufacturing quality) which I can use with a big variety of P2/P3 CPUs. I might build a second computer then, I have another Desktop case. 
Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 12:19 on May 10, 2015 |
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May 10, 2015 12:15
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I think you'll enjoy it. I have a friend who had one of those K6-III's (could've been a minor iterative difference, a plus or something) and at the time the speed was mindblowing. In other old computer news, I was helping my mother in law clean out the house, and she asked if I wanted the Atari. So of course, I'm thinking 2600, and I figure "sure, why not." Turns out it's an XEGS with a few games. Not exactly like finding a Vectrex or something hiding up there, but still a more interesting find than I expected. Keyboard, a few controllers, lightgun, and the one game I read the title of was Frogger, so that's kinda neat.
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May 10, 2015 12:39
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Shlomo Palestein posted:I think you'll enjoy it. I have a friend who had one of those K6-III's (could've been a minor iterative difference, a plus or something) and at the time the speed was mindblowing. I think it's easy to forget that these were in parts (alright, SS7/K6 maybe less so) at least very decent or even top of the line machines that many people would have been happy to have, even though they don't hit some perfect 60 FPS mark with absolutely everything. For me, performance is absoultely acceptable when it fits in the 30 FPS bracket. I remember playing Wing Commander 1 on my unexpanded Amiga. Talk about slow, you could plan and think every maneuver out carefully. Still it was loads of fun and the probably sometimes single-digit framerate just didn't matter. I took a look at vogons the other day and people are building Pentium 4 "retro rigs" to play Oblivion on.  I think I also should build an early i5 Lynnfield retro rig for Skyrim. Remember 2011 kids?I think the general slow down in dramatic hardware advances makes those people that back then bought a new computer every year go out of their minds. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 11:29 on May 12, 2015 |
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May 12, 2015 10:45
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Police Automaton posted:I took a look at vogons the other day and people are building Pentium 4 "retro rigs" to play Oblivion on. I am so happy this happened. I bought a Sager laptop in 2011 that still plays anything I throw at it, and I feel like I won the "real slow on that obsolescence front" lottery. Now that I've said it, Intel will announce an 8ghz 12-core that costs $300.
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May 12, 2015 12:46
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IMO "retro rigs" only makes sense if you're working with old hardware that's wildly different from current standards, e.g. a Gravis Ultrasound, a Voodoo 2, a CRT monitor, serial/parallel/gameport peripherals, etc. Playing Oblivion on a Pentium 4 offers the same experience as it does with a Core i5 (and in some cases better). Unless there's compatibility issues with modern hardware and early Gamebryo (which honestly wouldn't surprise me) there's no reason for this poo poo wtf
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May 12, 2015 13:00
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Especially considering how bad the whole Netburst architecture was. That was probably the worst stuff intel has ever done (the 286 was pretty bad too but meh) and it's no wonder they abandoned it for the Core microarchitecture. Especially the energy to processing power ratio, later P4s had a TDP in excess of 110W, their power consumption was outrageous. Even my early Lynnfield i7 I'm writing this on is below 100. They couldn't have pushed that stuff much farther, complete developmental dead-end. Having used intel CPUs my whole PC-computing life, that was the one time I went with AMD.Shlomo Palestein posted:I am so happy this happened. I bought a Sager laptop in 2011 that still plays anything I throw at it, and I feel like I won the "real slow on that obsolescence front" lottery. Now that I've said it, Intel will announce an 8ghz 12-core that costs $300. I don't think that will happen. Since Nehalem (2008) intel is just die shrinking and shuffling components around. ( I know some people will probably get an aneurysm reading this, but really. Prove me wrong. I am not even saying CPUs didn't become faster since Nehalem, they totally did and also quite significantly. But the quantum leaps we saw earlier between generations really were not there.) Even the up and coming Skylake doesn't really look like it's gonna be the revolution some people with too much time really wanted to make it out to be. Intel already had problems with the predecessor Broadwell. I think we are drawing to an age where all is done that can be done with that medium. (the medium being "classical" silicon-based computing, that is) But that's just my opinion. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 13:43 on May 12, 2015 |
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May 12, 2015 13:39
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Police Automaton posted:I don't think that will happen. Since Nehalem (2008) intel is just die shrinking and shuffling components around. ( I know some people will probably get an aneurysm reading this, but really. Prove me wrong. I am not even saying CPUs didn't become faster since Nehalem, they totally did and also quite significantly. But the quantum leaps we saw earlier between generations really were not there.) Even the up and coming Skylake doesn't really look like it's gonna be the revolution some people with too much time really wanted to make it out to be. Intel already had problems with the predecessor Broadwell. I think we are drawing to an age where all is done that can be done with that medium. (the medium being "classical" silicon-based computing, that is) But that's just my opinion. Well, I was just kidding. But I agree. I think a major factor is how the typical person viewed processors as being "Fast": raw clock speed. Until the last five or six years, clock speed was the end-all-be-all for 99% of the market, even if a good number of people knew what else to look for. Intel (and to a much lesser extent, since they're basically in a tailspin at this point, AMD) has been concentrating on die size, energy consumption, and the stuff that makes processors faster that is hard to get into quick and catchy marketing gibberish. You won't really see clock speed double again so quickly until someone figures out whatever the wall is we're hitting and a way over it, (and until there's actual demand for it, since ~4 ghz is an incredible speed for everything we're currently doing, and concentrating on more cores is more sensible anyway -- or it will be once more software takes advantage of it).
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May 12, 2015 15:59
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I might have been to harsh on the earlier P4 comment. I mean, it's 2015 after all, there might actually be people who feel nostalgic for that particular computer. I think the processing power often (in the private desktop enviroment, even though you could make an argument that is dying anyways - nontechnical people use tablets now) is simply not needed. I dabble a bit in "indie game development" lately (and also got a custom title from the nice folks in the game development thread over there because apparently, I offended with my very wrong interpretation of things) and the basic philosophy there seems to be to just waste whatever processing power you have to waste with layers of 3rd party libariers to get quickly to your goal, the computers will pull it off no matter what. This is very different from the developing of such things I have known, just a few years ago. I also assume this stuff will just get easier, not harder. I also just found a screenshot of oblivion on my harddrive, I am posting it because it sums up my experience with that game pretty well: 
Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 16:33 on May 12, 2015 |
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May 12, 2015 16:28
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Oh absolutely. A major problem with modern software is that it isn't being designed to work within a limiting framework. I understand that it's frustrating to only have so much overhead in terms of processing/memory, but it makes your programs streamlined and better for it. So you end up with stuff that should take at most a couple hundred mhz and some small amount of RAM blossoming to a ghz and several hundred megs just out of sheer desire to get things done quickly. This is why I enjoy the demoscene so much. They have so little to work with, but they find a way to do it. Yeah, it takes years and a team of people to show more than 16 colors on a C64, but it's like seeing the final result of a proof that took a mathematician years to complete. Whereas having everything you need from the outset is like watching a rich kid just buy a new garage to fit his new ferrari instead of selling one his dozen old ones.
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May 12, 2015 16:57
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Police Automaton posted:I might have been to harsh on the earlier P4 comment. Nope. Netburst really was that bad. Feel free to hate away. "Netbust"
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May 13, 2015 09:18
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Police Automaton posted:I might have been to harsh on the earlier P4 comment. I mean, it's 2015 after all, there might actually be people who feel nostalgic for that particular computer. 90% of indie gamedevs are incredibly lazy and this shows not just in their code and execution but their entire game design philosophy. So much is being focused on middleware and high-level programming that I'm honestly convinced that in 10 years low-level programming will become all but a lost art.
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May 13, 2015 09:33
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I haven't read this entire thread yet (am way behind) but wanted to know in general just how many goons here had and/or were interested in Coco2 stuff? Long story short, a very cool guy I work with (guy in his 60s) found out I was into older games a few years back, and randomly gave me his old Coco2, misc hardware, games, cassette player and cassettes, etc and I've barely scratched the surface with it since then. Besides playing a few games on it it's been in my closet pretty well ever since due to life being life and all. Are there any big sites for Coco stuff I need to know about or would be handy? I'm finally going to get it out this weekend and play with it, and wanted to make sure there weren't any huge common "don't do this" scenarios I should know about before getting into it. For reference, I'm 31 and have been playing with computers since the Apple II and 386/486 days. I've played with a TRS-80 a few times but didn't do much besides screw around with BASIC (BASIC/QBASIC is the best ever) Regardless I plan on taking pictures galore and posting all about it. It's been on my mind all day for whatever reason and I can't wait to tear into it again.
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May 13, 2015 16:12
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So I got around to dicking with my 1GHz TiBook recently and started actually organizing it so I could game properly on it. So far I have a pretty good start on games but could use some suggestions as to what else to add. I'm trying to stay away from multi-platform stuff that exist within dosbox and stay strictly exclusive to OS9 and/or OSX 10.4.
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May 13, 2015 21:13
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flyboi posted:So I got around to dicking with my 1GHz TiBook recently and started actually organizing it so I could game properly on it. So far I have a pretty good start on games but could use some suggestions as to what else to add. I'm trying to stay away from multi-platform stuff that exist within dosbox and stay strictly exclusive to OS9 and/or OSX 10.4. Some good old pre-Mac OS X games that you don't have that I enjoyed back in the day: Exile Trilogy Realmz (though I never liked that as much as others did) Prime Target Troubled Souls King's Bounty The Dark Castle series of games Crystal Caliburn Comanche Mac Myth: The Fallen Lords (and Myth II) Lode Runner: The Legend Returns The Mac versions of the Sim games (Sim City, Sim Ant, etc) were also extremely good. Probably a lot better than the DOS equivalents of the day IMO.
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May 13, 2015 22:15
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Escape Velocity and the three Marathon games, definitely. If you can find a non-shareware Oxyd copy, I remember loving that. Robot Battle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Battle_(Macintosh_game)
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May 13, 2015 22:24
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Genpei Turtle posted:
This is especially so for Windows 3.1 SimCity Classic and Windows 95 SimCity 2000. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 23:39 on May 13, 2015 |
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May 13, 2015 23:09
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Shlomo Palestein posted:Escape Velocity and the three Marathon games, definitely. If you can find a non-shareware Oxyd copy, I remember loving that. Marathon was indeed awesome and I lost a good chunk of my life playing network games with my floormates in college, but I kind of hesitate to recommend it in a world where Aleph One exists. Marathon just screams for mouselook and doesn't have it. The only other game from the era that's worse in that regard is Descent. I have no idea how we all played those keyboard-only back then.
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May 13, 2015 23:22
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I played Descent 1 on Playstation and dual shock didn't exist then  Thanks for the recommendations, gonna load some more up!
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May 14, 2015 00:48
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Descent was the only game that could give me a serious headache when playing. I wonder if it still would. Not even sure if that's playable with modern expectations. I bet it's a great game to test if you're susceptible to epilepsy though. Most of that early 3D stuff was so crazily frantic, so unlike many modern games. (Well except online games maybe. I don't know, I don't play online)Segmentation Fault posted:90% of indie gamedevs are incredibly lazy and this shows not just in their code and execution but their entire game design philosophy. So much is being focused on middleware and high-level programming that I'm honestly convinced that in 10 years low-level programming will become all but a lost art. I think a big part of this is that everyone wants to be the next indie videogame internet sensation and have millions of dollars appear on their bank account overnight. Bit like the YouTube stuff a while ago. Many of that lazy-rear end crap you see would have also never existed if all the 3rd party engines wouldn't make it possible. I see a point in all the 3rd party stuff as it can really make your life easier and there is nothing gained from reinventing the wheel over and over, but it'll not write the game for you. I am not sure everyone calling themselves a developer understands the latter. Also that performance optimizations absolutely never matter is not the full truth either, there are a few Unity games for example made by more professional setups that run noticeably like absolute crap for what they offer. Also then you have fun things like with Cities: Skylines (an excellent SimCity successor) where the developers themselves don't seem to know why some stuff runs as bad as it does. Fun times. What's absolutely unforgivable though is the plethora of EA-grade marketing bullshit many of the indie developers try to pull off. This PR cargo-culting gets really, really annoying. You're two dudes who only know each other over the internet writing a dungeon crawler, you are not EA making the next FIFA, so cut it out already. It just makes you look ridiculous. Better spend that effort into making a good game, with how the internet works and how information gets spread, if your game is good, people will play it anyways. My (many people would say wholly outdated) opinion as how this is happening is that people these days seem to want to be instantly rewarded for absolutely every little thing they do. They don't take pride in it their work or care particularly about it, they just want the instant recognition and gratification, no matter for what. No, you don't need a few grand for your non-descript "retro pixel art" platformer via kickstarter before you even start working. Who are you even and why should I care? IMHO it's a massive attitude problem I don't only see with this particular stuff, and it actually concerns me a bit on a bigger scale. But maybe that doesn't belong in this thread. Also yes, play the escape velocity games, they are great. The Mac generally has an interesting software library that's worth exploring, lots of hidden gems there.
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May 14, 2015 13:19
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