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DrBouvenstein posted:This long and no one has posted Laserdiscs? I amassed a bit of a LaserDisc collection, starting pretty much the year DVD came out (of course). LaserDisc's lack of popularity did give it a few unusual advantages that strangely persist to this day. Criterion got to handle quite a few releases of relatively major Hollywood films; some of these have commentary tracks that Criterion owns the rights to, and aren't on any existing DVD versions. They also weren't shy about extras/commentary that was critical of the motion picture studio. You also have the odd title that got tied in a weird legal snafu preventing a proper DVD release; the prize of my collection falling into this category is a Criterion Laserdisc set for Akira, which has the ORIGINAL English dub (this exists on a British DVD, but in poo poo transferred-from-VHS quality). It also took a while for DVD to really pick up enough momentum to properly replace DVD releases in terms of quality. Quite a few early DVD releases had non-anamorphic video and a poorly-compressed Dolby Surround 2.0 track, which would look considerably better on a non-digitally-compressed laserdisc with a PCM stereo track, disc flipping aside. And it took a while for DVDs to have special edition cuts in a few cases, like with Aliens (the special edition was only on like the 3rd or 4th version of the DVD, I think). LDs were popular for a stupidly long time with Asian populations for Karaoke, as well. They were, of course, ultimately crushed by the DVD juggernaut; quality-wise, the best LDs were only marginally better than badly-made DVDs, and DVDs could offer way better options for audio quality and branching paths (plus, again, no flipping). I think the cheapest LD players ever got new were about $400, and movies were $30 bare minimum. And worse than the size was the fact that they were heavy as gently caress; a single disc weighed something like 1 pound, and some movies could be on 4-5 discs (like Aliens, Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments).
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Jul 20, 2012 19:49
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SimplyCosmic posted:Fax machines are the top of my list. And will likely be on that list for at least another 5 to 10 years. Probably longer. Faxes have all kinds of legal protections tied into them that don't translate to scan-to-email type digital transfers (e.g. a notarized document's faxed copy is still legally regarded as notarized, whereas if it were scanned and then emailed it wouldn't be).
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Aug 7, 2012 13:45
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:I work for a company that makes software for multinational banks and supercorporations, and we have to make sure all our software works on at least IE6 and XP (running at 1024x768 of course!) because the bigger a company is the less likely they are to upgrade regularly, I've found. A major bank I used to work at was using Windows 2000 until about a year ago, and moved to Windows 7 despite having IE6-requiring backend websites. They ended up having to get a massive site license for VMware thinapp so they could run IE6 in Windows 7.
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Sep 24, 2012 04:25
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m2pt5 posted:If they upgraded to Win7 Pro, they could have just used the built-in Windows XP Mode and not had to buy that massive site license. Yes, but that's a bit more complicated due to the back-end XP VM and has some wonkiness because of that. Not much wonkiness, but some. Also, this was pre-SP1 and you needed a specific feature on your processor for XP Mode to work; it's possible that they didn't want this extra compatibility requirement (although I think all their computers supported it). VMware ThinApp is ordinarily expensive as gently caress, but because this was for tens of thousands of workstations I think it was doable for them.
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Sep 24, 2012 13:17
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The_Franz posted:Asians, however, seem to love it as 21% of China and 4.7% of Japan still use it for some reason. China is largely due to rampant piracy of the FCKGW and similar versions of Windows XP that Service Packs (and by extension newer versions of IE) won't install to. Vista and newer are not only harder to pirate, but are near-impossible to hack in a way that the end user is unaware the software is pirated, so they haven't seen the spread of XP. Japanese PCs pretty much never die, so the previous story about the old lady still running Windows 98 is a lot more common (my homestay mother was still rocking Windows 98 in 2008, and of the schools where I taught had a computer lab full of Windows ME machines in 2006). Hell, people would do such weird upgrades to their PCs that Windows Vista was available on CD-ROM for those without DVD-capable drives (as in stores had it in stock and you didn't have to make a special exchange with Microsoft).
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Sep 27, 2012 03:09
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Do some car players or something only have miniDVD slots? I can't see that format as being terribly useful, especially with how brutal the compression must be to fit a 2.5-hour movie into a 1.5 gig disc. A full-size dual-layered DVD at that quality would hold about 15 hours of video, for reference. They're not for PSP, since UMDs require a cartridge and aren't a standard DVD format. And they wouldn't be cheaper to make, either, since they're non-standard.BoutrosBoutros posted:I was watching "A Time to Kill" on DVD and had to flip it over halfway through. Was there a time when DVD's couldn't hold a whole movie per side? I don't think there was, but for some reason, that DVD only has half the movie on each side. The first year or two of DVD's availability, they couldn't really do dual-layered DVDs, and it took a while for production costs to go down reasonably. A single-layered DVD gives you 4.7 gigs, which for MPEG-2 can be limiting for longer movies, especially back then when the encoding technology was still in its infancy. Since its LaserDisc predecessor would require at least two disc flip/changes (and likely move for CAV editions) this was still seen as an improvement. I think pretty much every movie that used to be like this on DVD has been reissued in some capacity to no longer require a disc change or disc flip, especially with Blu-ray now; the only Blu-ray movies that still require it are the Extended Lord of the Rings movies.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:35
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Speaking of floppies, it seems they're not dead in the Canadian military: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/10/10/pol-delisle-spy-guilty-plea.html Text dump to Notepad, save to floppy, bring floppy to unsecure PC, copy to USB drive, go home with USB key, sell data to Russians.
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Oct 11, 2012 17:02
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There's a bit of a niche market for fighting game joysticks, usually costing at least $130 and working their way up from there depending on construction, exclusivity, and country of origin (such joysticks are huge and heavy and not cheap to ship internationally). Most high-profile console fighting games will have some form of deluxe stick from MadCatz with the buttons correctly laid out, and they're generally specifically designed to be user-serviceable, either to replace failing components or to upgrade the components with ones which are either better or more familiar to the user (e.g. replacing a joystick with a ball on the top with a teardrop-shaped joystick, or swapping concave buttons for convex ones). Most joysticks and their parts are essentially invincible, though. Those who take their fighting games extremely seriously can usually get joysticks that precisely recreate the button layout in an arcade cabinet; I've seen joysticks like this go for in the $400 range. Interestingly, there are now Wii U sticks for Tekken Tag Tournament 2, so it seems this will continue as long as fighting games keep getting released. I don't think there's much left in the flight stick world, mainly because there's very little in terms of flight sim software being made these days, but they're still available from Saitek and possibly a few other manufacturers.
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Nov 22, 2012 14:30
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Kwyndig posted:poo poo I finally remember what those were actually for. It's like the opposite of what you'd expect. A lot of old programs weren't speed limited if you had a higher clock speed than was originally intended for the program, so turbo buttons could step down or up your clock speed on your processor (usually between two speeds) so your programs wouldn't gently caress up. This was necessary for a decent number of DOS games, the most well-known being the first two Wing Commander games, as well as Ultima VII (although Serpent Isle actually had a frame limiter option).
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Dec 15, 2012 03:31
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PC Speaker was more capable of voice like this, although I think with the quality of speakers it was never even this good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEB_TjIsyf8
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Dec 17, 2012 19:50
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If I'm not mistaken, because SCSI typically had high-end controllers with on-board processors, they were also useful back in those days where your main CPU's processor cycles were precious.Parallel Paraplegic posted:Oh gently caress you just reminded me of the age when you had to connect the CD drive to the motherboard with a completely separate tiny cable if you wanted to be able to play CD audio, and of the fact that a lot CD drives had stereo out jacks and little volume knobs on the drives themselves so you could bypass the whole computer thing altogether. I completely forgot that existed until right now. Fun fact: I know someone who played through Loom on CD in full quality but without having a sound card in his machine, simply by plugging speakers into the front audio out port on his CD drive. He also played Monkey Island 1 on CD this way and got the Redbook music, but all the sound effects in the game like sword clashes were pumped out of his PC Speaker. Related: CD-ROM drive speed actually being a system requirement for games. Sierra had a few FMV games that were notoriously choppy even with 2x drives (at the time, a standalone 4x drive with no burn capability was at least $300), notably Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight 2. Probably the funniest thing is that modern codecs designed for use on CPUs orders of magnitude faster than the day's 486s and Pentium 1s wouldn't even need higher than 1x drive speeds to produce far better quality video than those games had at the time. This whole thing seems surreal when I bought an external USB DVD-RW burner for $17 (because I need disc capability so rarely I don't even bother with internal drives anymore). univbee has a new favorite as of 16:55 on Jan 1, 2013 |
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Jan 1, 2013 16:49
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Lowen SoDium posted:That reminds me. Does anyone else remember old CRT page monitors? The were monitors that were a very tall aspect ratio meant to be able to display a whole page in a word processor at one time. I can't find any information on what the actual aspect ratio of these monitors were, but it seems like there were pretty close to what a common wide screen monitor is today, but turn vertical. I had seem some that had a rotatable base and special video card that would automatically change the picture to match the screens orientation. It seems that this is a technology that the internet has completely forgot... or rather might have never known about since they died out before the internet came in to wide use. As mentioned, most current LCD monitors allow for this if you mount them on the right type of mount, and there was even a set of shortcut keys going back to I think Windows XP that would re-orient your screen, like Ctrl-Shift-one of the arrows to determine directionality. As for CRTs doing this, all I know of is certain old arcade cabinets had these for vertically-oriented games, especially vertical shooters like 1942. When MAME was starting, these games defaulted to assuming you had a standard 4x3 monitor and rendered accordingly, but you could throw in some commandline switches to force the game to render sideways and use more of the screen real-estate. Some people did this to turn their monitors sideways, but MAME was filled with warnings about this since CRT monitors back then (LCD still wasn't really a thing) weren't designed to function sideways; their internal functions could get screwed up by gravity not going the way they were expecting, plus a CRT isn't very safe to have setup in a way it's not supposed to be.
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Jan 2, 2013 20:35
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