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spog posted:I love them because they could nonchalently use the phrase, 'we're going to use our lathes to send a fax to each other' Tim: "I usually decorate my circuits with tiny people" 
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Feb 15, 2015 00:50
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Goddamn, I loved that show so much. It was so hard to catch episodes because the ABC always tried to hide it between Playschool and preschool shows. The first episode I ever saw was the fax machine one and fell in love.
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Feb 17, 2015 13:03
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Zaphod42 posted:Anybody else have one of these babies? This is from a few pages back but I loved my Cybiko--it was so ridiculously ahead of its time. App store before that was a thing, wireless before Wifi was common, had a pretty good enthusiast community at the time  My sister gave me her's the other day which was great, except I don't have a sync cable for it and obviously nothing that would blast RF to transfer stuff wirelessly  Sadly there doesn't seem to be much of a community for it anymore, which isn't surprising since it's 15 years old at this point and likely completely incompatible with modern hardware/software. But at the time it was an absolutely amazing piece of technology.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:12
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robodex posted:This is from a few pages back but I loved my Cybiko--it was so ridiculously ahead of its time. App store before that was a thing, wireless before Wifi was common, had a pretty good enthusiast community at the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ8n61VNcWM I remember downloading dozens and dozens of games, and almost all of them were total crap, but a few were pretty good. Similar to TI-83 calculator games' limitations, I guess. The wifi was pretty hot but I don't think I ever ran into anybody else who had one. God drat I'm a nerd.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:33
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All of this is making me nostalgic enough to dig out my first smartphone. Back in 2003-2005 this was my memory, and not just due to drinking heavily. It was the first phone I'd had that could handle more than contacts. I wrote a half-dozen short stories on it using the external keyboard, read ebooks from Project Gutenberg, checked email and IRC... it was everything I wanted from a computer and a phone all at the same time. The camera was poo poo, syncing with a desktop was a pain in the arse, but it had proper threaded texts, a keyboard that was surprisingly useable, and was fun to write code for. I remember during the iPhone launch event being one of those dweebs moaning about how it could do just a handful of what the Treo could do, so what's so great about it anyway (I grew up). But then Palm started making devices with Windows Mobile — an OS that was better-named as "WinCE" — and HTC made better hardware for lower prices, Palm went down the shitter, and people moved on to iOS and Android. Every now and then, I remember how natural that Treo felt to take notes of things that I wanted to remember in the morning, or to tell me where to be and when, and I get nostalgic. I don't even know if it powers up.
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Feb 17, 2015 21:58
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I still have my Treo 600 CDMA in a drawer. I was using it up to 2012.
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Feb 17, 2015 23:15
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PalmOS was great in general. Everything was fast and responsive, and to this day I have yet to see another implementation of handwriting recognition that actually works.
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Feb 18, 2015 01:25
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Mr.Radar posted:This printer talk reminded me of The Secret Life of Machines episode on copiers. About a third of the way into the episode they give a demonstration of the world's first commercial xerographic copier: I love this show so much. I remember watching it on the Learning Channel back in the mid-90s when it actually showed really cool science and history stuff. And the charming cartoon bits that they animated. "Eyyyy you breaka' my plates, I smasha' you face!"
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Feb 18, 2015 01:48
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DigitalRaven posted:All of this is making me nostalgic enough to dig out my first smartphone. It almost certainly does. I found my old 650 while I was looking through some stuff. It hasn't seen a charger in years but it fired right up.
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Feb 18, 2015 02:08
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Just plugged mine in. It still works!
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Feb 18, 2015 02:20
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:PalmOS was great in general. Everything was fast and responsive, and to this day I have yet to see another implementation of handwriting recognition that actually works. The handwriting recognition only worked if you were willing to learn their special system of glyphs. It was also super slow for text entry.
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Feb 18, 2015 04:44
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The Diamond Edge 3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jChtlWNIAL4
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Feb 18, 2015 05:05
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Humphreys posted:The Diamond Edge 3D That was really cool, thanks. Thank god young me didn't know about that, I would've robbed people.
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Feb 18, 2015 05:13
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Humphreys posted:The Diamond Edge 3D Is this something that Saturn emulators could use? Like could every game on the Saturn benefit from this or was it something that required games to be programmed specially for the card?
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Feb 18, 2015 07:18
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Light Gun Man posted:Is this something that Saturn emulators could use? Like could every game on the Saturn benefit from this or was it something that required games to be programmed specially for the card? Honestly I have no idea if it could be used for emulators. Could be interesting, but I do think games were specifically rejigged to be used with this.
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Feb 18, 2015 07:23
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If it's a "game had to be made to work with this" kind of thing, maaaaybe they could somehow do it in reverse and apply the hardware changes to the Saturn or something? I don't know what I'm talking about, obviously.
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Feb 18, 2015 07:26
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eddiewalker posted:The handwriting recognition only worked if you were willing to learn their special system of glyphs. When I write by hand, my y's have curly tails to this day because of Graffiti
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Feb 18, 2015 16:44
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eddiewalker posted:The handwriting recognition only worked if you were willing to learn their special system of glyphs. I got pretty good with the on-screen keyboard. That thing was pretty drat amazing on the Palm T|X, where you actually had enough screen space to see more than a few lines of what you were typing. The mobile Word app was pretty exceptional as well. Aside from the power button being a bit wobbly, the one in my drawer that I bought all those years ago still works just fine.
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Feb 19, 2015 05:45
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Before GameTap went the way of the dodo they were given the source code to Panzer Dragoon Saga and a bunch of other Saturn games since they had some kind of licensing deal with Sega and they went "welp, if you can make it work, you can use it" and they were drat close to getting a functional port/emulator thing going before everything went to poo poo and people started jumping ship.
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Feb 19, 2015 09:13
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:PalmOS was great in general. Everything was fast and responsive, and to this day I have yet to see another implementation of handwriting recognition that actually works. I had a galaxy note 2 and now a 4 and the stylus is amazing man, seriously impressive.
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Feb 19, 2015 15:22
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eddiewalker posted:The handwriting recognition only worked if you were willing to learn their special system of glyphs. The very late PalmOS devices had essentially natural recognition, if, ah, you naturally wrote something like grade school print. Only the Ts and 4s were fussy, really.
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Feb 19, 2015 17:20
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ArcMage posted:The very late PalmOS devices had essentially natural recognition, if, ah, you naturally wrote something like grade school print. Only the Ts and 4s were fussy, really. I remember my Palm Centro being decent at it. Man, that was such a great phone. I miss the days when you could have a phone with no case on it. That's what I want from the iPhone 6, a built-in otterbox.
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Feb 19, 2015 17:31
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Coffee And Pie posted:I remember my Palm Centro being decent at it. Man, that was such a great phone. I miss the days when you could have a phone with no case on it. That's what I want from the iPhone 6, a built-in otterbox. There are still a few of those - Samsung's "active" versions and the like. I suspect the cheap Lumias are fairly solid as well, they have a thick plastic shell that seems like it could take some hits as long as you don't break the screen.
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Feb 19, 2015 18:18
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peter gabriel posted:I had a galaxy note 2 and now a 4 and the stylus is amazing man, seriously impressive. Yeah, the note can read my lovely cursive better than actual real life human beings. That's gotta be worth some recognition.
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Feb 19, 2015 22:27
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Humphreys posted:The Diamond Edge 3D We had one of those!
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Feb 20, 2015 19:03
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Code Jockey posted:
For me it was when I borrowed heroes of might and magic 2 and came up with the brilliant plan to copy the entire disc to my 2:nd hd and install to main drive from there. Strangely enough there was no protection from this and it worked perfectly. I was amazed.
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Feb 22, 2015 06:57
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KozmoNaut posted:I went straight from a Riva TNT to a Geforce Ti4200 128MB, which was one hell of leap. I upgraded my dad's PC when I bought a new video card - he went from a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP to my old GeForce 3 ti500 and was blown away at how much faster it ran. Plus it didn't need an additional molex for power, I remember him flying around in Freespace and tearing poo poo up in Mechwarrior games like he'd just played them again for the first time 
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Feb 23, 2015 00:45
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Indy posted:For me it was when I borrowed heroes of might and magic 2 and came up with the brilliant plan to copy the entire disc to my 2:nd hd and install to main drive from there. Strangely enough there was no protection from this and it worked perfectly. I was amazed. Master of Orion 2 had this as well. Transfer the whole disk to your drive, and then change the ini file to point to the hd path rather than the disk. Remember when game companies didn't treat their customers like criminals?
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Feb 23, 2015 02:22
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Humphreys posted:The Diamond Edge 3D On the topic of that Diamond Edge 3D and its usage of quad-based polygons instead of triangle-based, I'm curious about a couple things. First, how is the whole thing with quad polygons supposedly being better at creating rounded shapes than triangle polygons supposed to work? Second, I've seen a couple examples of people claiming that quad polygons aren't "true" 3D like triangle polygons are; what on earth is that supposed to mean? The way it was presented (comparing the Sega Saturn unfavorably to the PlayStation) makes me think that it's probably just some dumb myth created and perpetuated by console fanboys, but I kinda wonder if there's some grain of truth in there that's been warped into unrecognizability.
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Feb 23, 2015 05:07
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Quad polygons are "better" because: - More intuitive for 3D artists, both the modellers (who prefer to map a compass-direction grid over objects, vs a compass+45 degree angle grid when using triangles) and the texture artists, because quads map more intuitively to 2D quad textures than triangles do. - More conducive to get better results for higher-order surfaces like NURBS (not applicable to the Saturn, which couldn't draw those) - Better compression of polygon data However I say "better" in quotes because all those advantages don't really apply anymore. These days artists don't have to care much about poly counts anymore, and most 3D packages probably use higher order surfaces anyway. Compression is no longer an issue because either computer resources are no longer scarce, and/or triangle strip technology is probably better at compressing polygon data these days than quads are. (Triangle strips are a efficient way of representing lots of connected triangles. They work by defining 3 points of a triangle to start with, and then each additional triangle is represented by adding 1 more point to the list and using the last 3 points as the vertices) Doctor Bishop posted:Second, I've seen a couple examples of people claiming that quad polygons aren't "true" 3D like triangle polygons are; what on earth is that supposed to mean? The way it was presented (comparing the Sega Saturn unfavorably to the PlayStation) makes me think that it's probably just some dumb myth created and perpetuated by console fanboys, but I kinda wonder if there's some grain of truth in there that's been warped into unrecognizability. Neither the PlayStation nor the Saturn graphics chips were "true" 3D, in that their graphics chips had no concept of a Z axis or did any 3D calculations. They were just fast 2D triangle renderers with texture mapping support, and without any per-pixel 3D calculations it meant that textures got warped the more they were viewed side-on. All the 3D calculations were done on the CPU. People also said that quads were better at representing true curves, and "therefore the Saturn was better". It's true that if you want a perfectly smooth surface with no discontinuities between patches, then you want to make those patches out of quad higher-order surfaces like NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) rather than triangles. However rendering NURBS was a Big Deal back in 1995, you needed some serious hardware to do it, and the Saturn definitely didn't have that. (I recall that there were big rumors floating around prior to the launch of the PS2 that it would support NURBS in hardware, which would have been huge if it was true because even high-end PC graphics cards couldn't do that) Quads have some downsides too. These included: - it's possible to make a quad where the 2 internal triangles overlap, and this caused havoc with transparency because it meant some transparency calculations got performed twice. - if you just want a triangle then you have to collapse a quad into a triangle by making 2 vertices the same, and this was a waste of processing power.
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Feb 23, 2015 10:38
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twistedmentat posted:Remember when game companies didn't treat their customers like criminals? I honestly can't even tell if this is sarcastic at this point.
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Feb 23, 2015 17:39
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twistedmentat posted:Remember when game companies didn't treat their customers like criminals? What, you don't remember the uncopiable copy protection matrixes and the disks with non-standard sector layouts that make it impossible to make any backup or install your program to the hard disk?
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Feb 23, 2015 17:49
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I remember a boy in my class paying for access to pirated software. Never could figure that one out. (Yeah obviously it was cheaper than legal copies but who had any money on 7th grade?)
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Feb 23, 2015 17:53
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twistedmentat posted:Remember when game companies didn't treat their customers like criminals? When was that exactly?  
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Feb 23, 2015 18:05
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Zaphod42 posted:When was that exactly? Ah but that in no way hindered making back-up copies or multiple installs.
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Feb 23, 2015 18:07
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Jerry Cotton posted:Ah but that in no way hindered making back-up copies or multiple installs. And most modern DRM doesn't either. There was only a small period in the late 2000's that DRM was truly garbage.
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Feb 23, 2015 18:18
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minato posted:Quad polygons are "better" because: Back what when I was a 3d Modeler, quad polygons and NURBS we're just becoming popular. I did take to NURBS like a fish to water using Rhino, but I never like quad tessellation. Triangles seem to make a more pleasing surface. Now I'm a glorified accountant and middle-manager. Life sucks.
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Feb 23, 2015 18:20
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mostlygray posted:Now I'm a glorified accountant and middle-manager. Life sucks. Peter Principle in action.
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Feb 23, 2015 18:23
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mostlygray posted:Back what when I was a 3d Modeler, quad polygons and NURBS we're just becoming popular. I did take to NURBS like a fish to water using Rhino, but I never like quad tessellation. Triangles seem to make a more pleasing surface. Ray tracing will become mainstay...one of these days...just you wait. Have there been any recent attempts to get ray tracing working on modern hardware?
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Feb 24, 2015 01:11
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TerryLennox posted:Ray tracing will become mainstay...one of these days...just you wait. Take your pick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_%28graphics%29#In_real_time
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Feb 24, 2015 01:14
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