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Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



madlilnerd posted:

I had one of the earlier Siemens phones, which stood out from everyone else's Nokia 3310 because it had a bright orange glowing screen instead of a green one. The case was blue, but I can't remember the exact name of it.
C45? There were others with an orange screen, but the C45 was quite a common model, from what I remember.

I had the S35i. The best and most beautiful phone I ever had, relative to the standards on the day of purchase. I paid near to 500€ for it, which, looking back, is insane. But I loved it and I still do. So many tiny details in the operating system that made this phone superior. Pressing backspace for a few seconds while typing a text deleted the words one by one, instead of wiping the whole text. It recognised text delivery reports as different from other texts and only silently beeped once for them. Even though it had a non-learning T9, it's the only T9 I never switched off in irritation. The calendar made a decent calendar a necessity in my subsequent phones. The scroll buttons did scroll, instead of setting keypad volume or something equally senseless. Beautiful interface. Wish phones today were made with such love and attention.

EDIT: pic

Flipperwaldt has a new favorite as of 18:26 on Sep 16, 2012

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bloops
Dec 31, 2010

Thanks Ape Pussy!

Francostein posted:

For the engineering equivalent of the bar exam you're only allowed certain types of scientific calculators. They're pretty much the current Casio, HP, and TI models that can't save data beyond a few registers worth of numbers. Even in the most difficult engineering courses you should never need anything more advanced than those little guys. If the calculator does trig functions then you're A-Ok pretty much. My little Casio fx-115es was a workhorse during my time in college and it's still the one I recommend to my friends, but that calculator's a little too new for this thread. Now if you want to get into some old rear end technology, before scientific calculators became small enough to fit in a pocket in your backpack and cheap enough to be bought by students, they had the slide rule.


I had to google a picture of some slide rules because I'm not 70 years old.

I never got to use one, they were phased out over forty years ago. A slide rule is pretty much a mutated abacus, only it's logarithm based. I don't know much about them other than if you were an engineer in the 50s and 60s you used one of these. Apparently a 10inch slide rule was powerful enough to rival the functionality of modern scientific calculators, but you couldn't be as precise with a slide rule. It's kinda like finding the volume of a liquid using a graduated cylinder compared to a weight/density calculation.

Also the great-grand daddy of your ti-84 is the Texas Instruments SR-50, and you were apparently king poo poo if you had one of these when they first came out. Guess what the SR in the model line stands for.

I use a slide rule at work almost every day. Airplanes have their weight & balance does now via the flight management computers or on a computer during mission planning. For flight engineers on the E-3 Sentry, if we step to the jet and need to make an adjustment to the w&b, there's a slide rule (load adjuster) kept in the flight deck. It's archaic as gently caress but pretty easy to use.



Mine looks drat near identical minus it being for the E-3.

Thulsa Doom
Jun 20, 2011

Ezekiel 23:20

oldskool posted:

:aaaaa: I have one of these old ones on my porch (just got the new one last weekend) & a fishtank in my living room. If either were mine & I had the space for it I'd do it, but alas, they are my brother-in-law's.

If you (or anyone else) ever pulls it off, be careful. Those old tubes have capacitors in them that can kill you even if they're not plugged in.

madlilnerd
Jan 4, 2009

a bush with baggage

mng posted:

Was it the A50? I had one as my first phone, loved the little thing.

Yes! This one! My ringtone was a weird psuedo-Egyptian tune, but for some reason the picture that came up with it was a couple doing the flamenco if I remember correctly.

I was mad jealous of my brother with his Nokia with its Red Faction II pixel art background and Darth Vader ringtone.

Problem!
Jan 1, 2007

I am the queen of France.

Tacopocalypse posted:

Take it to any Best Buy customer service desk and they'll recycle it for you for free. Taking it to the dump or any e-recycling facility will charge you, some per pound.

Seriously the only reason I bought my TV from Best Buy and had it delivered instead of taking it myself was for their free haulaway program. I had a 36" Sony CRT TV that took 6 people to haul up my stairs into my apartment, and like hell if I was repeating that experience. The delivery guys showed up hungover, you should've seen the looks on their faces when they saw that beast.

The next CRT TV I had to get rid of I just put on the free section of Craigslist. Someone came and got it from me. You can get rid of anything for free on Craigslist.

redmercer
Sep 15, 2011

by Fistgrrl

Thulsa Doom posted:

If you (or anyone else) ever pulls it off, be careful. Those old tubes have capacitors in them that can kill you even if they're not plugged in.

The tube IS a capacitor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_4qc9Jyt5A

Deathcake
Nov 16, 2009

get UPI!

m2pt5 posted:

The Angry Video Game Nerd did a review of this pile of poo poo a while back, and every single game on it is poo poo. Have an embed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4QBeADNM34

There's also a part 2 where he talks about Cheetahmen (and I think Cheetahmen 2).

quote:

"If I was an intergalactic vacuum cleaner getting shot at, I'd be like, "oh loving hell! There's a Menorah shooting q-tips! Get outta the way!"

This is a great playthrough. What a lovely collection of games.

Deathcake has a new favorite as of 22:21 on Sep 16, 2012

Zamujasa
Oct 27, 2010



Bread Liar

Landerig posted:

Also noteworthy is NES emulation these days is pretty flawless. Even so, Action 52 can behave wildly different depending on which emulator you play it on. On some, it may run better then it does on the NES and you can play the two games that crash on the NES.

NES games mostly relied on special on-cart chips called mappers to provide extra functionality, like having more than the standard two pages of graphics. Unlike games like SMB3 (which used a really common and well-documented mapper, the MMC3), Action 52 uses a unique one that isn't really used anywhere else. Because of this, and the fact that there aren't really a lot of people who own one and want to experiment with it, it's not perfect yet. Most of the functionality is probably best-guess.


The "personalized code" that the game presented didn't seem so personalized, either:
code:
CONGRATULATIONS!
YOU MAY HAVE JUST WON...
TAKE A PHOTOGRAPH OF THIS
SCREEN AND SEND TO THE
ADDRESS LISTED IN THE RULES
AND REGULATIONS. YOUR PERSONAL CODE:
7A3H9J0P2R4A2C7S
Interestingly, though, it looks like Action 52 may have been planned to have 60 awful games. Thank goodness that never happened.

Plinkey
Aug 4, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
I had one of these and thought it was the best MP3 player ever made.



It broke after about 2 years and I upgrade to this beast:

Arivia
Mar 17, 2011

Plinkey posted:

It broke after about 2 years and I upgrade to this beast:



That looks like an entire laptop sized hard disc in there. My god.

Arivia has a new favorite as of 00:49 on Sep 17, 2012

Plinkey
Aug 4, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

Arivia posted:

That looks like an entire laptop sized hard disc in there. My god.

That's exactly what it is. 5 gig 2.5" hard drive.

The Wurst Poster
Apr 8, 2005

Literally the Wurst...

Seriously...

For REALSIES.

Here's an old school laptop that I still own.



It's pretty drat rugged, and it still works too. Even its built in 300 baud modem.

Nerdrock
Jan 31, 2006


This motherfucker right here was AMAZING. Those corners are a real bouncy rubber too. You could install RockBox and do all sorts of snazzy poo poo with it.

Edit : Also, it ran on AA batteries.

razorrozar
Feb 21, 2012

by Cyrano4747

Landerig posted:

The sound engine was stolen, as was most of the music. The menu code was likely stolen from another 52 in one multicart.

This explains the actually half-decent music. But are you saying there were other 52-in-1 carts? Like on Atari or something?

darkhand
Jan 18, 2010

This beard just won't do!

razorrozar posted:

This explains the actually half-decent music. But are you saying there were other 52-in-1 carts? Like on Atari or something?

I was under the assumption there was a bunch of Chinese ones or something. Which is why the Action 52 had like "AMERICAN MADE" poo poo printed all over it

mrkillboy
May 13, 2003

"Something witty."
My family owned 2 Atari 2600s when I was growing up. The first was the original, classic model with fake wood paneling. The second was this, the Atari 2600 Jr.



In the late 80s they re-released the console in Australia (the Jr. actually originally came out around 1985) with 100 BUILT IN GAMES! I remember going to the shops with my folks intending to come home with a Sega Master System II and instead getting this instead because 100 BUILT IN GAMES! seemed far better value. As far as I can tell, it was a legit promotion by Atari too.

It included a good selection of Atari classics like Combat, Adventure and their Space Invaders and Missile Command ports. It did have Pac-Man but not ET. It was also missing games like Tempest and Yar's Revenge. Surprisingly there was also a large number of Activision games like River Raid and Pitfall. There was no instructions, let alone a game listing.

You would cycle through the games by pressing the select button. The console also came with this gamepad instead of the classic stiff-as-gently caress joystick.



So I played this when everyone else had NESs and Master Systems, and I only caught up when I got a SNES a few years later. Still, most of my fond memories playing Atari games came from the time I had this, though to this day I have no idea what the gently caress was going on in that Superman game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7U2TFIayos

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

razorrozar posted:

This explains the actually half-decent music. But are you saying there were other 52-in-1 carts? Like on Atari or something?

Oh hell yeah there were other XX in one carts for the NES. Hell, the guy who thought up Action 52 said his inspiration came from a 40 in one pirate multi cart.

Mu Zeta
Oct 17, 2002

Me crush ass to dust

I had 31 in 1 for the NES when I was a kid. It only had two good games but they were really good - Balloon Fight and Excitebike

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

Mu Zeta posted:

I had 31 in 1 for the NES when I was a kid. It only had two good games but they were really good - Balloon Fight and Excitebike

Oh Excitebike :allears: I would spend hours on that track editor. Tried Excitebike 64 hoping it had a track editor as well.

Nope, at least not to my knowledge.

razorrozar
Feb 21, 2012

by Cyrano4747

mrkillboy posted:

but not ET

You lucky bastard.

As far as consoles go, I really didn't have any growing up until we got a gamecube when I was twelve or thirteen. With one exception: my dad owned a TurboGrafx16. It was sixteen bit, just like SNES and Genesis, but instead of cartridges the games came on little cards:



That there is the first game I ever played, when I was six. It was a pretty fun platformer. I actually picked it back up and finally beat it just last night.

2ndclasscitizen
Jan 2, 2009

by Y Kant Ozma Post

Nerdrock posted:

This motherfucker right here was AMAZING. Those corners are a real bouncy rubber too. You could install RockBox and do all sorts of snazzy poo poo with it.

Edit : Also, it ran on AA batteries.

Rockbox owns, I put it on my iRiver H320 and could then play Doom on it :smug:

Deathcake
Nov 16, 2009

get UPI!
All this old-school console talk reminded me of something. This is (still) in my dad's bedroom -



He built a custom wood shelf for his ColecoVision and Atari games, and there it sits, even today. Hell, the wood-paneled wall even fits in with the time period.

I remember him busting out the two consoles and me playing these games, all the way into the mid-90s when I was a kid. I had a Sega Genesis but for some reason I loved playing those old ColecoVision and Atari games :3:

einTier
Sep 25, 2003

Charming, friendly, and possessed by demons.
Approach with caution.

mrkillboy posted:

Still, most of my fond memories playing Atari games came from the time I had this, though to this day I have no idea what the gently caress was going on in that Superman game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7U2TFIayos
I had the actual cartridge as a kid, you're not the only one.

This was fairly standard for games of the time, unfortunately. I remember being stumped by Swordquest, Indiana Jones, and Star Raiders. ET as well, but that goes without saying.

They were just trying to stretch the platform a little too far. The games that could be built were fairly simple things, and all of the constructs fairly abstract. There was no school of design either, so once you got beyond "shoot these things, jump over this" type stuff, it all started to fall apart. If you had the instructions (ha), had read them (ha ha), and they actually made sense (HA HA WTF), then maybe you could play the game. But inferring what you were supposed to do from the abstract shapes was kind of hit and miss.

Copper Vein
Mar 14, 2007

...and we liked it that way.

razorrozar posted:

TurboGrafx16. It was sixteen bit, just like SNES and Genesis
No it weren't neither. It has an 8-bit CPU so that makes it 8-bit. It did have a 16-bit video processor, but if you start saying that counts as a 16-bit system then you gotta say the Atari Jaguar was actually 64-bit and we will be here all night.

That said, Turbografx-16 was awesome and I love it to this day. It was called the PC-Engine in Japan, was smaller, was put out by japanese electronics giant NEC and gained significant marketshare against the Nintendo Famicom (NES). While it's 8-bitness could not truly compete with the Super Famicom it still lingered on into the early 90's thanks to being revamped as the CD-ROM packing Turboduo. Also Castlevania: Dracula X.


TG-16 Fun Facts

-Earliest released CD-ROM add-on, in 1988. Mine was made in '89 and still runs, well.

-Has the most iterations of any console ever with multiple PC-Engine variants, the Turbografx, three versions of the Turboduo, Supergrafx, two portable variants, three versions of just the CD-ROM add-on, and a module that plugged into a Pioneer laserdisc player.

-The handheld version played the exact same games as the real console! And had a TV tuner!


-Wears many hats



If anybody wants to talk old video game poo poo, head on over to the Retro Game Megathread

BOOM! Amiga CD32!

Arsonist Daria
Feb 27, 2011

Requiescat in pace.

Landerig posted:

Oh hell yeah there were other XX in one carts for the NES. Hell, the guy who thought up Action 52 said his inspiration came from a 40 in one pirate multi cart.

I piss on your 40-in-ones and 52-in-ones. Check this poo poo out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6ZzKb9PhXg

10000000-in-1! This is, of course, an utter lie. In reality, it's just a handful of games broken down into their individual levels and passed off as separate games. You can play it in-browser here.

There were tons of these. The pirates that put this out had many, with 10000000-in-1 being their final release.

Multicarts are perhaps the greatest of all obsolete technologies.

Puddin
Apr 9, 2004
Leave it to Brak
Multi-carts ruled. I remember going to Singapore for the first time and me and my brother both getting a Gameboy.

There were heaps.of bootleg 3 in 1 and 5 in 1 game carts.

I wish I still had my one with Dr Mario, SMB and the Araknoid clone. It was the only cart we needed alongside Tetris.

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
A mate came back from China once with a 50-in-1 Gameboy cartridge that was slightly thicker than the standard making it a pain to slide out of the slot.

Edit: Just did a google and someone's noted something similar "105 in one" where it was really 50 games and the other 50 being variants with extra lives and power-ups.

BogDew has a new favorite as of 09:37 on Sep 17, 2012

Killer robot
Sep 6, 2010

I was having the most wonderful dream. I think you were in it!
Pillbug

Lumberjack Bonanza posted:

10000000-in-1! This is, of course, an utter lie. In reality, it's just a handful of games broken down into their individual levels and passed off as separate games. You can play it in-browser here.

This wasn't even unique to bootleg multicarts. Back in the 2600 days even legit cartridges Atari themselves sold would say "20 games!" or whatever on the front, and count every single game variant or difficulty level as a separate game. Sometimes there was some significant differences, like Combat having tank games and plane games, but even in those ones it included little difficulty gimmicks as separate games.

mrkillboy
May 13, 2003

"Something witty."

Killer robot posted:

This wasn't even unique to bootleg multicarts. Back in the 2600 days even legit cartridges Atari themselves sold would say "20 games!" or whatever on the front, and count every single game variant or difficulty level as a separate game.games.

Yep. This is actually one of the launch games.



I hope you like Pong, because here's 50 variations of it!

Tears In A Vial
Jan 13, 2008


I had this for years when I was younger, I bought it myself second hand and it was incredible. Forever afterwards, whenever my parents bought me some electronic something, it was always Archos because of how much I loved this one.

razorrozar
Feb 21, 2012

by Cyrano4747

Copper Vein posted:

No it weren't neither. It has an 8-bit CPU so that makes it 8-bit. It did have a 16-bit video processor, but if you start saying that counts as a 16-bit system then you gotta say the Atari Jaguar was actually 64-bit and we will be here all night.

Welp. I had no idea; I just assumed because it was out at the same time as the other 16-bit consoles and because look, it has 16 right there in its name! :downs: I gotta remember to fact-check my poo poo.

Speaking of Jaguar, remember the Jaguar CD? The one that it was almost impossible to get connected properly to the system?

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
Finally found my first mobiles.

Nokia 3110 "The Brick" - lugging this around in my blazer pocket at school wasn't subtle. It had utterly no features beyond sending texts and having everyone convinced your brain was going to be roasted from the antennae.

Radiation Shield Stickers were always being offered for sale on community boards.


5110 "son of brick" with my addiction to Snake.


3350 - "The phone that won't die" and at the worst you could replace the covers. Oh the fun of manually programming in ringtones and watching it vibrate and flash in tune.


Instead of lugging "son of brick" along with a palm pilot I chanced across this. Bye bye battery life of around a week - hello blinking message light paranoia.
A smartphone in 2004 allowed novelties as internet browsing during quiz nights and installing simbian apps like Gameboy Emulators and Doom (played with a stylus!)

The keyboard was convertible so you could go full tappity stylus. This thing was rugged, It survived a fall from waist height onto the pavement and only got a scratch.


In 2008 I was rocking this when everyone had iPhones.
Recently when my Samsung Galaxy's screen broke I pressed this back into service discovering it was possible to synch my google account - everything worked, just not as elegant.

Surprisingly my sim card lasted (and still works) for thirteen years across all of the phones till I replaced it on account of needing a microsim.

BogDew has a new favorite as of 12:37 on Sep 17, 2012

Pilsner
Nov 23, 2002

WebDog posted:

Nokia 3310 "The Brick"
You mean 3110. That's nothing, remember stuff like the 2110?



Huge (dimensions 148 x 56 x 25 mm), and with a telescopic antenna.

Speaking of mobiles, I also remember the costs and plans you got early on. I forgot how much the monthly subscription was, but I clearly remember that it cost around 70 cents per minute around 1996-1997. Also, SMS wasn't even included in the first plan my mother's phone had.

Flipperwaldt posted:

C45? There were others with an orange screen, but the C45 was quite a common model, from what I remember.

I had the S35i. The best and most beautiful phone I ever had, relative to the standards on the day of purchase. I paid near to 500€ for it, which, looking back, is insane. But I loved it and I still do. So many tiny details in the operating system that made this phone superior. Pressing backspace for a few seconds while typing a text deleted the words one by one, instead of wiping the whole text. It recognised text delivery reports as different from other texts and only silently beeped once for them. Even though it had a non-learning T9, it's the only T9 I never switched off in irritation. The calendar made a decent calendar a necessity in my subsequent phones. The scroll buttons did scroll, instead of setting keypad volume or something equally senseless. Beautiful interface. Wish phones today were made with such love and attention.

EDIT: pic


Haha, how does that "Internet" work?

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Pilsner posted:

Haha, how does that "Internet" work?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

Zotwoz
Apr 2, 2011


Piano rolls are cool. Piano rolls are for player pianos. Player pianos are cool as well. In fact they are rad as gently caress

Star-Spangled Banner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6cqiRlQaL0

Flight of the Bumblebee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqhLZT3Pn8I

Circus Gallop :supaburn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4bHOwQYH4Q

Yeah :D

Zotwoz has a new favorite as of 12:29 on Sep 17, 2012

spog
Aug 7, 2004

It's your own bloody fault.

Look at how cool this is. The entire internet on your phone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z1S2tL51dE

The reality?

A handful of sites offered the same level of technology as a text message chat.

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli

Pilsner posted:

You mean 3110. That's nothing, remember stuff like the 2110?
I recall around 1999 there were miniature mobiles that had to be controlled with a dailing wand. They were utterly impractical as they could barely hold any numbers - something like 12.
There was a commercial highlighting it's size where a man's trying to find his phone in his jacket and resorts to calling it up from a pay phone.

Gyro Zeppeli
Jul 19, 2012

sure hope no-one throws me off a bridge


Sometimes you've just got to stand back, admire a self-playing piano and think to yourself:

"LOOK AT THAT SUMBITCH GO."

DrBouvenstein
Feb 28, 2007

I think I'm a doctor, but that doesn't make me a doctor. This fancy avatar does.

WebDog posted:

I recall around 1999 there were miniature mobiles that had to be controlled with a dailing wand. They were utterly impractical as they could barely hold any numbers - something like 12.
There was a commercial highlighting it's size where a man's trying to find his phone in his jacket and resorts to calling it up from a pay phone.

Wait...an ad for the product basically said,
"Yeah, it's way too small an impracticable to use."?

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b0nes
Sep 11, 2001

WebDog posted:


Surprisingly my sim card lasted (and still works) for thirteen years across all of the phones till I replaced it on account of needing a microsim.

You could have cut your SIM into a microSIM.

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