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FilthyImp posted:I miss the little button that switched between Black and White and color. There was a nice iris that opened up when it was pressed in for color mode. She was born in the early '30s and died in 2015. To see the technological advancement she saw in her lifetime ... Also, the other day my father (pushing 70) was talking about such things, and the Apple Watch is mindblowing to him -- everything else he remembers from sci-fi back in the day was "what we have, but smaller/better" but Dick Tracy's wrist radio being a real thing just amuses the hell out of him. He admitted that SpaceX landing rockets on their tails like Buck Rogers was also pretty cool, after I mentioned it. Edit: wait, why the gently caress would you need a button? BW shows just fine on a color tube, because NTSC was a thing from 1941, and the color version ('53) was backwards-compatible. Unless you're Euro/Brit, PAL was specifically made for color (because NTSC was a bit crap, even in the '50s), so I can see that being a thing. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 17:04 on Apr 28, 2018 |
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Apr 28, 2018 16:43
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Watching movies about/from the 60's and 70's it always a little startling to see how small TV's were. Like even if you were rich, you're TV might top out somewhere in the 20 inch range. So in Elvis' case you'd just get lots of TV's. 
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Apr 28, 2018 16:48
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Krispy Wafer posted:So in Elvis' case you'd just get lots of TV's. But yeah, even when I was a kid in the '80s, any TV over, IDK, 35" was a projection rig with RGB lights and magic and weighed like 700 pounds.I knew a few people whose parents have 50" TVs, and they were... kinda poo poo, low contrast, didn't really work well with the lights on, etc. Now my parents have a 43" that is two inches thick and can be carried around by one strapping young lad (usually my younger brother, because gently caress if I'm touching it, he's still young enough to trust according to Jack Weinberg.) Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 16:58 on Apr 28, 2018 |
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Apr 28, 2018 16:56
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Also, talking with Dad about the whole TV thing: one of his brothers used to be a TV repairman. That job just kinda ceased to exist in, idk, 1999? I remember him coming over and fixing our 32" CRT in '97-ish.
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Apr 28, 2018 17:17
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Over the last 5 years I've had a TV repairman do warranty repairs on both my DLP and my plasma. So they're out there, but since it's not cost effective to fix most TV's I imagine they survive off warranty work. The inside of a modern TV is wild. It's like all screen and the tiniest little circuit board.
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Apr 28, 2018 17:25
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I hired a TV repairman for my projection HDTV in TYOOL 2006, did a full alignment and bulb swap for under $100. Which was about fair considering I inherited it from a dumpster. I kinda miss that beast. It was truly the perfect college TV off the era as it took component HDTV signals from the Xbox 360 to look phenomenal, and still was fuzzy enough to smooth out the imperfections of the PS2 RCA composite. The size was perfect for split screen gaming (STOP SCREEN PEAKING, FUCKERS), and the speakers were huge and boomy compared to any other of my peers, TVs. E: actually we had S-Video from the PS2. Truly we were gods amongst geeks and stoners Wasabi the J has a new favorite as of 17:36 on Apr 28, 2018 |
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Apr 28, 2018 17:29
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 Not obsolete!
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Apr 28, 2018 17:50
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Wasabi the J posted:I hired a TV repairman for my projection HDTV in TYOOL 2006, did a full alignment and bulb swap for under $100. Which was about fair considering I inherited it from a dumpster. If you were true gods you woulda used component for the PS2 as well and enjoyed glorious 480p for the games that supported it  (and 1080i for Gran Turismo 4 and Tourist Trophy)
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Apr 28, 2018 17:55
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Wait there was 1080i output capability for the PS2??! What the fuuuuck? Wasabi the J has a new favorite as of 18:17 on Apr 28, 2018 |
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Apr 28, 2018 18:15
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mobby_6kl posted:
555s and cockroaches will be the only survivors of WW3.
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Apr 28, 2018 18:59
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Wasabi the J posted:Wait there was 1080i output capability for the PS2??! I like how 480p on PAL is a whole another category with barely any entries compared to just 480p I'm glad I didn't care about this poo poo back then, or else I might've been annoyed a bit! The PS2 does the bare minimum for PAL support as it is, so it's kind of a double whammy the easily-included 480p60 NTSC mode was left out for quite a few PAL releases. At least Naughty Dog had the good sense to keep it in.
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Apr 28, 2018 19:17
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I love the two titles for 1080i on the PS2 for Gran Turismo 4 and Jackass: The Game.
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Apr 28, 2018 19:38
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What's funny is the NES had a slot for a modem add-on.
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Apr 28, 2018 19:55
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Back in probably around 1995, a guy I knew had an add-on for the SNES that would let you  back up your cartridges onto floppy disks, and then read and play the games directly off of the disks. Needless to say, he had a copy of pretty much every game in existence, including some Japanese ones that had never been released in the US. (He was our group's anime freak and had pen pals in Japan, with whom he exchanged a lot of disks and VHS tapes.) And of course any game he had ever rented, or that a friend brought over, was his forever for the price of a floppy disk. We were all unrepentant pirates of DOS games, but it was really cool that the same thing was even possible in the cartridge world. Unfortunately the hardware was super obscure; my friend's was the only one I ever saw or even heard about.Found a video someone made about it. It was was either this exact thing or something almost identical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVBEeIdELF0
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Apr 28, 2018 20:39
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Krispy Wafer posted:The inside of a modern TV is wild. It's like all screen and the tiniest little circuit board. That screen uses technology which is 40 years old and not likely to become obsolete for a while yet.
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Apr 28, 2018 20:41
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I remember World of Xeen had some "this literally only works because the internet is still poo poo" DRM where it had you turn to a certain page in the manual and type in the 17th word, or something along those lines. My uncle gave me his legit copy at some point in the 90s but I didn't have the manual so I could only gently caress around in the first town or teleport to the only other city whose name I knew at that point and get instagibbed by dickwolves.
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Apr 28, 2018 20:45
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Volcott posted:I remember World of Xeen had some "this literally only works because the internet is still poo poo" DRM where it had you turn to a certain page in the manual and type in the 17th word, or something along those lines. Lots of games had something like that. The book (sheet, codewheel, whatever) would sometimes be printed in black on dark red paper to try and prevent photocopying.
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Apr 28, 2018 21:00
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Volcott posted:I remember World of Xeen had some "this literally only works because the internet is still poo poo" DRM where it had you turn to a certain page in the manual and type in the 17th word, or something along those lines. Original Warcraft was like this too; you had to type X word on Y page to install the game. They gave you the first letter as a prompt. Best part: at least in the copy I bought, the possible inputs didn't match up with what was in the manual.
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Apr 28, 2018 21:04
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Powered Descent posted:Lots of games had something like that. The book (sheet, codewheel, whatever) would sometimes be printed in black on dark red paper to try and prevent photocopying. Thank god for the codewheel because after missing one too many putts in Jack Nicklaus Golf I tore that drat thing in two and was spared ever having to play the game again. 
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Apr 28, 2018 21:28
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Powered Descent posted:Back in probably around 1995, a guy I knew had an add-on for the SNES that would let you I had one of those exact units back in the day. It was neat, but it didn't work with special chip games and loading the games from floppies was really slow. The nice thing about this particular unit vs the others at the time was that it retained whatever game was loaded as long as you didn't unplug it from the wall, so you didn't have to start the whole process of swapping floppies over again every time you turned the system on. It also let you load games via a parallel cable, but I was never able to get that to work.
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Apr 28, 2018 22:43
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Krispy Wafer posted:Over the last 5 years I've had a TV repairman do warranty repairs on both my DLP and my plasma. So they're out there, but since it's not cost effective to fix most TV's I imagine they survive off warranty work. No affiliation, but these guys have lots of parts. Fixed a couple flat screens with their guides/parts. http://www.shopjimmy.com
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Apr 28, 2018 23:32
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Chillbro Baggins posted:555s and cockroaches will be the only survivors of WW3. and HP Laserjet 4s
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Apr 28, 2018 23:34
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Powered Descent posted:Lots of games had something like that. The book (sheet, codewheel, whatever) would sometimes be printed in black on dark red paper to try and prevent photocopying. I'm pretty sure old-school copy protection has been talked about a lot in this thread (or maybe the tech relics thread) before. Lazy Game Reviews on Youtube has a few videos too. The one that springs to my mind is Space Quest V, in which you navigated to different planets using a 5-digit code. Only thing was, those codes were in the manual and there was no way to determine the codes in the game itself. I also remember how CD games from the Windows 95 era didn't bother with copy protection at all, because the size of the game itself was the main way of preventing that. Hard drives didn't have much more space than CDs and CD burners weren't around yet.
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Apr 29, 2018 00:49
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:I also remember how CD games from the Windows 95 era didn't bother with copy protection at all, because the size of the game itself was the main way of preventing that. Hard drives didn't have much more space than CDs and CD burners weren't around yet. CD burners were around since the late 80s, they were just really expensive. By the time Win95 came around you could get a CD burner for under $1000 and most burning software did direct drive-to-drive copies, so the size of the hard drive wasn't a limiting factor.
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Apr 29, 2018 01:14
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Sweevo posted:and HP Laserjet 4s And I'll be king because we somehow have a huge stockpile of 98As in our warehouse. I'll print books! For this year. Next year. The year after that. And the year after that.
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Apr 29, 2018 01:35
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:I also remember how CD games from the Windows 95 era didn't bother with copy protection at all, because the size of the game itself was the main way of preventing that. Hard drives didn't have much more space than CDs and CD burners weren't around yet. I remember it costing $250 to update our Windows 95-running AST to a whopping 2 gigs of hard drive space.
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Apr 29, 2018 01:45
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I’m not going to cheat and look it up, but I seem to recall on the C64 the more sophisticated copy protection actually relied on a laser pinhole at a specific track and block on the floppy to generate a 1541 Error 21 code. Error 27 and Error 29 seem to ring a bell for some reason. It never really mattered, because there was a thriving Fast Hack’em sneakernet at my high school. Whoever was the first to download the latest update off the BBS made as many copies he/she could for hero cred.
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Apr 29, 2018 02:14
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tribbledirigible posted:And I'll be king because we somehow have a huge stockpile of 98As in our warehouse. I'll print books! For this year. Next year. The year after that. And the year after that. * cheap aftermarket toner cartridge gunks up the drum * ...That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. 
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Apr 29, 2018 02:15
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Sweevo posted:and HP Laserjet 4s Can’t say I’m looking forward to this.
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Apr 29, 2018 13:33
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Wasabi the J posted:I love the two titles for 1080i on the PS2 for Gran Turismo 4 and Jackass: The Game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uCOnFaxli0 wow its pretty amazing to see this running on a ps2
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Apr 29, 2018 15:16
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Proteus Jones posted:I’m not going to cheat and look it up, but I seem to recall on the C64 the more sophisticated copy protection actually relied on a laser pinhole at a specific track and block on the floppy to generate a 1541 Error 21 code. Error 27 and Error 29 seem to ring a bell for some reason. I watched a video about this recently. It is definitely worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaq9vlfoGnA
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Apr 29, 2018 17:28
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spog posted:I watched a video about this recently. It is definitely worth a watch: Seconded. That was really interesting.
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Apr 29, 2018 22:24
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4am on Twitter is in the business of cracking old Apple // programs and includes detailed notes on what they've had to work around. Bootloaders messing around with disk drive motors is a personal favorite. https://twitter.com/a2_4am/status/964249607738884097
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Apr 30, 2018 01:07
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spog posted:I watched a video about this recently. It is definitely worth a watch: Back in the old days of the PC, I used to have a Copy II PC Option Board (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Point_Software), which I bought because of all the joys their Apple copier had brought me.
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Apr 30, 2018 03:07
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Samizdata posted:Back in the old days of the PC, I used to have a Copy II PC Option Board (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Point_Software), which I bought because of all the joys their Apple copier had brought me. Jesus. Their Apple copier actually came with my ][e/c clone. Fitting I guess.
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Apr 30, 2018 06:14
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Rev. Bleech_ posted:Jesus. Their Apple copier actually came with my ][e/c clone. Fitting I guess. That motherfucker copied EVERYTHING. OTOH, certain protected floppies could only be used ON a machine with an option board due to the tricks it did with certain protection schemes.
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Apr 30, 2018 10:11
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Jesus, I just had a nasty flashback. For certain people here, these 3 words will strike terror in their hearts. C1541. HEAD. ALIGNMENT. That used to such a problem, companies sold kits to fix it. You took the shroud off and adjusted the alignment screws while running diagnostic software. The thing was, the more you “fixed” it, the more often you had to.
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Apr 30, 2018 13:25
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I'm curious, if I'm not only using a Samsung Galaxy S4, but have installed on it an Android 7.1 OS, does that still make it obsolete? Speaking more on the topic though, when my grandfather died when I was 12, he passed onto me his microcomputer, specifically a TRS-80 Color Computer 2. When people think/talk about the TRS-80 they're usually talking about the TRS-80 Model I/II/III (an entirely separate line/architecture from the CoCo), or the TRS-80 Color Computer 1 if they know about the CoCo line at all, as far as I've ever seen, so fulfilling the nostalgia quotient for my younger childhood is a little difficult in this area. But I got a CoCo2 and a bunch of programs on tape and several magazines/books full of BASIC I could enter and it was a lot of fun to do things with. However, even as I obtained the CoCo2 it was already obsolete in the face of the CoCo3, a fact I was kinda beaten over the head with by the fact that for some reason a bunch of promotional material was in with the stuff I inherited, making me wish I had the CoCo3 instead. Why? There were two mind-blowing features that the CoCo3 had and the CoCo2 lacked: the ability to write text into a 'graphics' display mode, because the CoCo had a 'text' video mode and several resolutions of 'graphics' video modes and previous to CoCo3 they were exclusively independent, and lowercase letters. You could even combine both! Man I wanted that.
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Apr 30, 2018 13:33
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Black Pants posted:I'm curious, if I'm not only using a Samsung Galaxy S4, but have installed on it an Android 7.1 OS, does that still make it obsolete? Heh, that sounds like a more benign version of the Osborne Effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect quote:The Osborne effect is a term referring to the unintended consequences of a company announcing a future product, unaware of the risks involved or when the timing is misjudged, which ends up having a negative impact on the sales of the current product. This is often the case when a product is announced too long before its actual availability. This has the immediate effect of customers canceling or deferring orders for the current product, knowing that it will soon be obsolete, and any unexpected delays often means the new product comes to be perceived as vaporware, damaging the company's credibility and profitability. Competition from Kaypro was probably the real reason they went bankrupt, but this certainly was a factor as well.
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Apr 30, 2018 14:05
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I have an Osborne PC from the beginning of the USB era (judging by the internals) and I really should get it up and running just because I like the logo so much. All it needs is a HDD and a video card. And a power wash. E: I need to check if Mikrolog is still around the next time I'm buying a PC.
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