Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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monolithburger: Sep 7, 2011

Cojawfee posted:

wtf? Shots of cops walking around, a woman in a living room, and then a naked women in a water filled tube?

# ? Apr 12, 2022 09:53

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# ? May 14, 2024 04:53

Rappaport: Oct 2, 2013

barbecue at the folks posted:

You do realize that USB floppy drives exist, right? I hope you didn't throw them away just because of that.

I have even seen these devices in the wild. But didn't / don't own one, and didn't know any of my pals did either, so do I throw away a box of poorly labeled floppies along with other video gaming junk, or store them somewhere in the hopes I will need them one da-----

Oh. Oh! :aaaaa:

A lot of the video game junk was old game demo CDs, do those count as obsolete if not exactly failed technology?

# ? Apr 12, 2022 13:48

KozmoNaut: Apr 23, 2008; Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle

Magazine cover CDs ruled, they were by far the best way to get patches and demos, if you had a very slow internet connection (or none at all).

# ? Apr 12, 2022 14:35

Woolie Wool: Jun 2, 2006

Rappaport posted:

I have even seen these devices in the wild. But didn't / don't own one, and didn't know any of my pals did either, so do I throw away a box of poorly labeled floppies along with other video gaming junk, or store them somewhere in the hopes I will need them one da-----

Oh. Oh!

A lot of the video game junk was old game demo CDs, do those count as obsolete if not exactly failed technology?

Why is it so hard to make a PCIe controller card for floppy drives? There's a card or a gadget available for almost any retro function imaginable but reading a 5.25" disk on a modern PC seems utterly impossible.

# ? Apr 12, 2022 14:39

sarcastx: Feb 26, 2005

barbecue at the folks posted:

You do realize that USB floppy drives exist, right? I hope you didn't throw them away just because of that.

Man I've been dying to find a copy of "This Map Is GoodFun!" but it seems lost to time - there's not even a valid copy of the page itself (let alone the map) on archive.org... makes me wonder if anyone's still got a copy left on a CD or something.

# ? Apr 12, 2022 14:50

Collateral Damage: Jun 13, 2009

A USB 3.5" floppy drive is about $20 on Amazon. Buy one, copy your nostalgia to your cloud storage of choice, then you can throw away the disks.

# ? Apr 12, 2022 14:56

Cojawfee: May 31, 2006; I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius

If they are good quality disks, you can likely find them a new home. Someone out there will want them.

# ? Apr 12, 2022 15:25

Woolie Wool: Jun 2, 2006

Cojawfee posted:

If they are good quality disks, you can likely find them a new home. Someone out there will want them.

Yes, especially since the disks produced in the early 2000s near the end of production are both the most common and the worst. Good-quality '90s disks deserve a second life and you can sell them for decent money.

# ? Apr 12, 2022 15:32

mlnhd: Jun 4, 2002

sarcastx posted:

Man I've been dying to find a copy of "This Map Is GoodFun!" but it seems lost to time - there's not even a valid copy of the page itself (let alone the map) on archive.org... makes me wonder if anyone's still got a copy left on a CD or something.

I searched for cranky "goodfun.zip"

http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/planetquake/cranky/GoodFun.zip

# ? Apr 12, 2022 16:07

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Woolie Wool posted:

Why is it so hard to make a PCIe controller card for floppy drives? There's a card or a gadget available for almost any retro function imaginable but reading a 5.25" disk on a modern PC seems utterly impossible.

PCI and PCIe slots do not have access to the DMA and IRQ channels needed for generic floppy support. So a floppy card would need it's own BIOS to be bootable, and custom drivers to work under Windows. And there's just no demand when a USB floppy drive will do the job in 99.9% of cases.

# ? Apr 12, 2022 17:18

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

I have no idea what happened to my wife's old 2003-ish laptop, but believe me I know exactly where the hot-pluggable floppy drive that just happened to have a mini USB port on it that came with it is

# ? Apr 12, 2022 17:25

Phanatic: Mar 13, 2007; Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Light Gun Man posted:

could go for a plate of shrimp

Let's go get sushi and not pay.

# ? Apr 12, 2022 17:27

AlternateAccount: Apr 25, 2005; FYGM

Cojawfee posted:

wtf? Shots of cops walking around, a woman in a living room, and then a naked women in a water filled tube?

Did you gloss over where it says David Lynch?

# ? Apr 13, 2022 01:11

Tunicate: May 15, 2012

a woman got abducted by aliens and the cops are investigating

# ? Apr 13, 2022 01:30

Woolie Wool: Jun 2, 2006

Sweevo posted:

PCI and PCIe slots do not have access to the DMA and IRQ channels needed for generic floppy support. So a floppy card would need it's own BIOS to be bootable, and custom drivers to work under Windows. And there's just no demand when a USB floppy drive will do the job in 99.9% of cases.

All USB drives are 3.5". If you want to get a file from the internet to a 5.25" disk, you need a chain of multiple computers and it's a hideous pain in the rear end. And considering the sort of insane and insanely expensive specialist hardware that people buy (one day I'll be able to afford the AWE64 Legacy :shepspends:

) I'm surprised nobody seems to have made such a card.

# ? Apr 13, 2022 15:18

3D Megadoodoo: Nov 25, 2010

Woolie Wool posted:

All USB drives are 3.5". If you want to get a file from the internet to a 5.25" disk, you need a chain of multiple computers

A chain as in two.

# ? Apr 13, 2022 15:22

Thomamelas: Mar 11, 2009

Woolie Wool posted:

All USB drives are 3.5". If you want to get a file from the internet to a 5.25" disk, you need a chain of multiple computers and it's a hideous pain in the rear end. And considering the sort of insane and insanely expensive specialist hardware that people buy (one day I'll be able to afford the AWE64 Legacy ) I'm surprised nobody seems to have made such a card.

It's not cheap, but this is a USB device for grabbing stuff off of 5.25 drives. https://webstore.kryoflux.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1&products_id=30 You still need to provide the drive itself but it will write to disk, clone disk, and read from disks in a variety of formats.

# ? Apr 13, 2022 15:36

stevewm: May 10, 2005

If your vintage machines are running DOS and you have a network card with DOS drivers, then the FTP Server in the mTCP bundle of tools (https://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP.html) is an easy way to eliminate floppy/storage shuffles.

I've used it with a few vintage DOS machines and it works great.

# ? Apr 13, 2022 15:51

JnnyThndrs: May 29, 2001; HERE ARE THE FUCKING TOWELS

Woolie Wool posted:

All USB drives are 3.5". If you want to get a file from the internet to a 5.25" disk, you need a chain of multiple computers and it's a hideous pain in the rear end. And considering the sort of insane and insanely expensive specialist hardware that people buy (one day I'll be able to afford the AWE64 Legacy ) I'm surprised nobody seems to have made such a card.

I�ve thought the same thing many, many times. I keep a PII NT4/DOS/WFW 3.1 retro machine around specifically for dealing with old floppies, but it�s an irritatingly complex solution. That Kryo card looks tempting.

Edit: I found this read-only 5.25�> USB controller that�s designed for reading/archiving old floppies, looks like it�s been around for awhile and isn�t horribly expensive

https://shop.deviceside.com/prod/FC5025

JnnyThndrs has a new favorite as of 15:29 on Apr 16, 2022

# ? Apr 16, 2022 15:15

Rexxed: May 1, 2010; Dis is amazing!
I gotta try dis!

I have some DDR2 motherboards with modded LGA771 xeons in them with floppy connectors. I think I last used them with Windows 7 but they might take 10. I wonder how Windows 10/11 support for floppies is. Probably fine knowing microsoft.

# ? Apr 16, 2022 16:34

rndmnmbr: Jul 3, 2012

Rexxed posted:

I have some DDR2 motherboards with modded LGA771 xeons in them with floppy connectors. I think I last used them with Windows 7 but they might take 10. I wonder how Windows 10/11 support for floppies is. Probably fine knowing microsoft.

It's the kind of thing perfected in the 80's, honed incrementally better by fractions as the 90's progressed, and then never touched since because MS doesn't believe in breaking compatibility and/or cleaning out old code.

# ? Apr 17, 2022 00:44

Humphreys: Jan 26, 2013; We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule

Rexxed posted:

I have some DDR2 motherboards with modded LGA771 xeons in them with floppy connectors. I think I last used them with Windows 7 but they might take 10. I wonder how Windows 10/11 support for floppies is. Probably fine knowing microsoft.

I still use floppies on my Win10 gaming system.

# ? Apr 18, 2022 04:45

EoRaptor: Sep 13, 2003; by Fluffdaddy

Rexxed posted:

I wonder how Windows 10/11 support for floppies is. Probably fine knowing microsoft.

When you check out the latest Azure Virtual Desktop Windows image from the Microsoft Gallery and deploy it to a virtual machine, floppy support is enabled and a �drive� present by default.

This is probably for some hellish legacy oemsetup.inf compatibility layer, but gods they could just have that be an option that is disabled by default.

# ? Apr 18, 2022 07:20

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Bootable CDs work by having the BIOS pretend the CD is a floppy drive. The disc literally starts with a 1.44/2.88mb floppy image which gets loaded into RAM and then run as is it were booted from a real floppy drive. So floppy support will probably be around for a long time.

# ? Apr 18, 2022 11:38

3D Megadoodoo: Nov 25, 2010

Why on earth would they disable floppy support by default? What would be the advantage?

# ? Apr 18, 2022 11:41

Powered Descent: Jul 13, 2008; We haven't had that spirit here since 1969.

24 years since the first iMac, and we're still grieving the loss of the floppy drive. :rip:

# ? Apr 18, 2022 17:45

insta: Jan 28, 2009

A modern-ish network-enabled machine with a 5.25" floppy drive sounds right up Linux's alley

# ? Apr 18, 2022 18:50

barbecue at the folks: Jul 20, 2007

insta posted:

A modern-ish network-enabled machine with a 5.25" floppy drive sounds right up Linux's alley

I started wondering if there was a RaspPi project that could accomplish this and lo and behold, grab your solder irons: https://www.smbaker.com/raspberry-pi-floppy-controller-board

# ? Apr 18, 2022 19:14

Desert Bus: May 9, 2004; Take 1 tablet by mouth daily.

My girlfriend will def tell you that I support floppy drives.

# ? Apr 18, 2022 20:24

tight aspirations: Jul 13, 2009

Desert Bus posted:

My girlfriend will def tell you that I support floppy drives.

3.5"?

# ? Apr 18, 2022 20:27

Desert Bus: May 9, 2004; Take 1 tablet by mouth daily.

tight aspirations posted:

3.5"?

It's a lot bigger as a hard disk, I swear.

# ? Apr 18, 2022 20:30

Desert Bus: May 9, 2004; Take 1 tablet by mouth daily.

The average is 5.25? I thought it was 3.5. This is very unsettling.

# ? Apr 18, 2022 21:42

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Desert Bus posted:

The average is 5.25? I thought it was 3.5. This is very unsettling.

No the average these days is definitely 5.25 going by all the groups I see, only the diehards still play 3.5

# ? Apr 18, 2022 22:11

3D Megadoodoo: Nov 25, 2010

insta posted:

A modern-ish network-enabled machine with a 5.25" floppy drive sounds right up Linux's alley

Yeah but what's a floppy drive without the EEEEOOOO-nurrrrrrrh-EEEEEOOOOOO-nurrrrrh when booting up?

# ? Apr 19, 2022 08:03

3D Megadoodoo: Nov 25, 2010

I just remembered I have a cardboard box that's roughly 5,25" wide and tall, and contains 5,25" diskettes, and someone wrote 8'x8' DISKS on it in marker.

# ? Apr 19, 2022 08:04