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Kind of mindblowing to think that Softdisk thought there was enough of a market to justify publishing Apple II software in 1995. I mean, I'm sure there were Apple II hobbyist users back then; but that there were enough who would be interested in a subscription, and who made up a market big enough to justify paying at least one someone's salary to compile a new disk on a regular basis, is just surprising as heck to consider as a thing that happened. I suppose SoftDisk would have had some long-term employees around with Apple II experience that they could draw upon to actually make these disks, but it's a funny mental image to think of them wrapping up intense team meetings for what was going to be on the Mac, DOS, and Windows disks, and then going down into the basement and nudging some slumbering greybeard awake to compile an Apple II disk. And when he died (or they ran out of a source of Apple II floppies), they had no choice but to shut the whole thing down.
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Nov 2, 2013 02:01
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Original_Z posted:I grew up with an old Atari Computer, then a Texas Instruments and eventually an IBM which had no hard drive so we had to use services like Microsoft Works and Prodigy completely on disks. Somehow they were all good for playing games though, usually with a bit of tweaking. It's a funny thing, in a way. In probably our most dire and broke computing period, me and my brother had to use floppy disks for everything on our beater 386. And, if you adjusted your expectations accordingly, there was a lot you could do with just a few floppy disks back in the day (in our case, dialing in to our ISP's UNIX shell system and browsing the web through the Lynx text browser). Today, we have live CDs and so forth, but it seems like everything is so abstracted, high level, and dependent on so many other things that stuff feels less functional if you don't have a hard drive. You might boot Ubuntu, but it's literally a WYSIWYG situation - you don't get to update software, make changes to settings, or do other general computing tasks without burning a new disc or never rebooting and clearing the memory. Maybe I just think this because you could cram COMMAND.COM, your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files, and some utilities on a floppy disk and still have close to a megabyte left for other things, all on a read/write media. Yes, it'd be in small pieces and a pain in the rear end at times to deal with, but you had the ability to extend your whole computing world 1.44 megabytes at a time if you had or desired to do so. Today, it's a fishbowl; sure, it's gigantic with nice gravel, sweet castles, and fancy accessories, but if something breaks, things just grind to a halt it seems like. Of course, all of this comes with the caveat that I haven't really tried to run a system like I did back then; maybe it'd be possible, but maybe (in some way) it'd also be worse.
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Nov 2, 2013 08:29
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kirbysuperstar posted:Wouldn't USB flash drives with persistent installs of Ubuntu/etc. be the the same thing but for a more modern age? Maybe? I suspect that between the greater overhead and background demands of a modern OS, the USB interface would somehow bottleneck it all. It might be interesting to try, though. The main advantage about DOS, when I think about it, is that it was pretty hardware agnostic; you could pretty much run it on anything from a 286 to a Pentium (and probably beyond) with minimal or no hassle. It was also lightweight, since it wasn't multitasking, didn't deal with background services, and didn't display a pretty GUI. There's a reason it was tops for gaming up until DirectX and 3D acceleration started coming into their own.
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Nov 2, 2013 10:29
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d0s posted:Does anyone where to buy bulk 3.5 floppy disks for cheap? Those things got expensive since I last had to buy a bunch (When I got a Super Wildcard DX in 1997) The cheapest price I'm seeing is about $0.50 per disk. I think they've climbed out of the "rock-bottom" price stage at this point, and are back on an upward trajectory, since they're a niche format and the supply has shrunk to meet demand.
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Feb 7, 2014 22:14
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I don't know if I'd worry too much about it. Most "old computers" that people might have in their attics and basements are far more likely to be old-rear end (and maybe not even that old!) IBM PCs than they are to be character pieces like the old 8-bit micros, Atari STs, or Commodore Amigas, and still far more likely to be those than obscure-yet-valuable relics. Then, too, getting into the retro computing game is a hell of a different kettle of fish than the retro console game is. For retro consoles, the hardware can very much be an afterthought, cost-wise; it's the games that are very often the more valuable aspect of it all (look at the cost of an SNES, compared to a cartridge for a game like "Earthbound"). Everyone and their mom sells SNES and Genesis carts, new hardware is available for those platforms (putting aside the snafus), there's an active promotion of it all through geek and (to a lesser extent) hipster culture...all a perfect storm for a bunch of Johnny and Jeannie-come-latelies to drive up the price in. Retro computers, on the other hand...well, the hardware seems to be the thing that has value, above all. And it's not something that a novice (even one with excess money and a raging nerd-boner) is going to just get to jump into. After all, a complete C64 has a 1571, a tape drive, a period-compatible monitor, and so on and so forth. How much does that all cost? How much space does it take up? How much of a pain is it to put together, configure, and make sure it works? Essentially, only hardcore geeks really get feelings about old PCs; there's no mass nostalgia driving the market. Barring a spontaneous, mass cascade of hardware failures drastically reducing the supply, how much more value can be squeezed out of it? Newspapers have done stories about this exact thing off-and-on over the last 20 years, but it's like ham radio or something; you can't get people excited about something they've never really known.
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Feb 11, 2014 10:13
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Yesterday, I found this site and fired up DOSBOX for God of Thunder, Chopper Command, and Jetpak. And it was everything I could have hoped for and more. This was cask-strength nostalgia flooding over me, so help me god. All of that is probably because my 90s PC gaming experience was mostly defined by Apogee demos and whatever I could download from AOL that would run on my EGA (and, later, SVGA) monitor and 386DX CPU. So older CGA and EGA games, stuff like Bio Menace and the like. So pretty much all the "classic", A-tier stuff was bypassed by me, and my retrocomputer gaming experience was defined by the sometimes amateurish programming efforts of shareware programmers, the "Software Creations" logo, and (typically white text on blue box) ASCII exit messages exhorting registration. But that aside, I was also hit by the 1990s PC MIDI music (you had to have been there to truly appreciate it), by the low-res 256 color graphics, and just the whole...experience, I guess? Having to browse the command line, doing a "dir.exe" since filenames were constrained by the 8.3 name/extension limit and were thus often cryptic, typing it in and watching the magic of the transition from the command line to the program happen. Especially the slow but steady screen fade that seemed to be the favored method of transition. Anyhow, just thought I'd share. Does this happen to anyone else, or are you hardcore folks basically like "Everyday in 1994 for me!"?
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Apr 19, 2014 04:17
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d0s posted:Instead of AOL I had Prodigy for my first paid service but the same shareware stuff was available there, plus there was this weird phenomenon of shareware being sold on diskettes at the dollar store so I experienced a lot of those titles that way. Ha, yeah, same thing here. The electronics section of my local Fred Meyer department store had a basket with shareware floppies for 25 cents a pop. So I got shareware copies of Bio Menace, Commander Keen, and other good stuff at times. My local dollar store also had some $1 boxed games, but they were decidedly third-tier titles; I recall Virtuoso and Defcon 5 (both shooter titles that were also ported to the 3DO) being prominently featured. The public library was kind of a big part of my retrocomputer gaming experience. First was playing Oregon Trail and Crosscountry USA (halfassedly, admittedly) on their Apple II GS. Later on, they upgraded to better PCs with some educational games and a Mac with Kidpix, Cosmic Osmo, and some other stuff no one really gave a rat's rear end about. So I got to have my first taste of Simcity 2000 and Cosmic Osmo at the library. Something else that came to mind is being blown away by the kid at the public library who repurposed the dedicated CD-ROM encyclopedia PC to play Raptor: Call Of The Shadows on it. He obviously did a very unclean restart (i.e. hard power cycle), and either booted from his own DOS floppy or interrupted the normal DOS bootup to get to the command line. Me and my brother thought he was a wizard, being technologically non-proficient at the time, but it was really small potatoes stuff in retrospect. And finally, in those early days of Internet access, the library had a pretty nice connection compared to the dial-up available at home. So me and my brother would download various demos and such to bring back. Except, of course, a demo could be larger than 1.44 MB and thus unable to fit on a floppy disk. No worries; my brother somehow learned or figured out how to exploit file handling in Netscape Navigator to launch the Windows File Manager, and from there it was just a matter of launching COMMAND.COM or the MS-DOS Prompt and running a RAR program to break large files into chunks. Memories...
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Apr 23, 2014 01:59
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That port of Jungle Hunt appears surprisingly well done. I shouldn't be surprised, I guess, because the arcade game isn't really that complex. But it's still pretty cool.
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Apr 29, 2014 23:10
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From some reading around, I think your best option might be to get an ISA form VGA card and install that. MDA/CGA/EGA/Herc outputs appear to use a different video format (not just connector wise, but internally) that many VGA monitors can't recognize, so a connection conversion alone may not work.
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May 10, 2014 21:17
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d0s posted:Computer gaming really wasn't a "thing" among kids here in the 80's the way it was in Europe. It went on, sure but I think it was seen as maybe a bit nerdy and was not really hugely talked about the way, say, the NES was until PC/Windows gaming got big. Yeah, this is how I remember through the early to mid '90s, here in the US. Kids knew there were computer games, but gently caress if they could name any franchises off the top of their heads, and most computers just seemed dull or inferior. To be fair, since computers weren't as powerful or ubiquitous back then, the exposure to computers that most kids received would have been solely in an educational context. And those computers would likely have been Apple IIs (most of which couldn't hold a candle graphically to the NES, SNES, or Genesis), some restricted Mac running Easy Access, or very likely older IBM PCs running boring programs on graphically unimpressive yellow/orange/green/monochrome/CGA displays. I remember seeing a snippet on USA Today way, way back then that blurbed about how PC gaming was becoming the new hotness, and (based on my knowledge and conception of computers back then) wondering how the hell that could be. I don't think PC gaming became a real thing to me until I heard about Doom on an NPR profile about Id Software and then saw it in action. And suddenly, it seemed like "Holy poo poo, this is some amazing techno wizardry!"; all those colors, the sound, the violence and blood and whatnot.
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May 25, 2014 03:42
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d0s posted:I'm having a strange problem getting an IDE CD-ROM working with this Tandy. Running DOS 6.22, every single CD-ROM driver I try reboots the machine when config.sys tries to load it. Toshiba, Oak, LG, etc. No matter if the CD-ROM is plugged in or not, I see the driver's message in the boot sequence and then after that comes up the machine immediately reboots. REM it out and it's fine. Am I missing something here? Without knowing the model and all that, I will say that a cursory look around suggests that the Tandy 386s might use a CD-ROM driver called LMSDD250.SYS. You might be able to get a self-extracting .EXE with it here. Also, this appears to be the factory-default CONFIG.SYS for one of those models - maybe you're missing some switches in the driver call?
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Jun 22, 2014 03:35
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Quarex posted:And if there is one thing we know about online discussion anywhere other than on actual white supremacist forums, it is that these reactions are usually people self-censoring to some degree. So I imagine all that "borderline racist" was actually "holy poo poo racist" but slightly edited for Internet posterity. It's a kind of fascinating thing I've noticed in bits and pieces of my trawling of right-wing forums over the years - the weirdos, freaks, and extremists seem to like anything but Windows PCs. Like, on a forum for machine gun enthusiasts/owners, it seemed like a disproportionate amount of computer questions revolved around Macs. I think Stormfront also had their own "Jew cleansed" Linux distribution or something. So it really wouldn't surprise me if the super maladjusted ones, the greybeards living in dark basement apartments and taking colloidal silver for their arthritis and hemorrhoids, were Amiga diehards with Bad Opinions™.
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Jun 30, 2014 07:36
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Skeletron posted:Can anyone tell me about this thing? I went to pickup a free washer from craigslist the other day and ended up with this dude's old DOS computer system from the 80s or early 90s that he was about to throw in the trash. I assume it's just some kinda generic PC. It says TURBO 2000 on the front and LICA TECHNOLOGY LA, ASSEMBLED IN U.S.A., SERIAL NUMBER blahblahblah on the back. It came with the monitor, keyboard, joystick, and a bunch of random DOS games on floppy disk. Flight Simulator 3, Commander Keen, Last Half of Darkness, Clyde's Adventure, Where in The World is Carmen Sandiego? etc. Like d0s said, looking inside the case would be your best bet to figure out what CPU and other capabilities it has. That said, I'd wager that it's probably running with either an 8088 or 80286 CPU with an EGA-compatible graphics card (if the monitor connector only has 9 pins, this is probably the case).
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Jul 3, 2014 22:57
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Skeletron posted:Sure! Here are some shots of the motherboard. http://imgur.com/a/Td1AF That "8MHZ TURBO BOARD" text printed on the motherboard suggests it's probably an early 286 (since that CPU model was originally offered in 6 and 8 Mhz versions). Does the video card have any 15-pin ports on it? And, if so, does the monitor have a 9-pin or 15-pin connector?
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Jul 3, 2014 23:49
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Skeletron posted:Aw, nope, the back of the video card just has a 9-pin port, what look like two RCA ports, and a little panel with 6 tiny switches. Sounds like a CGA/EGA board, then.
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Jul 4, 2014 00:57
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The dedicated server PC my brother and I run in our home for various purposes is named after an anime character  . Though, to be fair, it's had the same name (in its various hardware and OS incarnations) for well on twelve, thirteen years, outlasting whatever anime enthusiasm drove us to name it that way in the first place. It would just seem weird and unnatural not to have it named that way at this point. Police Automaton, that forum sounds less like a retro hardware community and more like some form of purgatory.
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Aug 14, 2014 08:07
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Jehde posted:I powered on my IBM PC350 to see how it's faring. On boot I get a 161 Bad CMOS Battery POST startup error, which sounds to be pretty common for old computers. But it still boots into Windows 95 fine, so I left the computer on for 24h to see if that alleviated the issue, but no luck. So I put a CR2032 on my shopping list, but how important is it really to replace the CMOS battery? Also are there any precautions I should take for replacing the battery when I do eventually get a replacement? Most CMOS batteries I've seen just slide in and out of a clip on the motherboard, so replacing it is probably a good idea. Not replacing it could mean your BIOS settings get lost, and then you'd have to re-enter them and so forth. Jehde posted:EDIT: While I'm at it, the windows start up complains about a couple files being referenced in the registry not existing, any idea what they could be so that I could try cleaning it out? This seems to be related to some software called InSync CoSession, which appears to be old "remote desktop" software. You could probably make it go away by commenting it out of the SYSTEM.INI file.
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Aug 17, 2014 22:55
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Quarex posted:These posts are definitely hitting home for me. Your boundless retro hardware knowledge is now causing me to sit transfixed just as so many Amiga enthusiasts have throughout the rest of the thread! Quake, as you said, was kind of the killer app for the Voodoo line. Since the Quake engine was licensed for a lot of other games, having a Voodoo card was useful for those, too. Hexen II comes to mind as one of these. The Voodoo2 was basically a souped-up version of the first Voodoo card, and was kind of the carry-all card for Quake II and its derivatives. That was kind of the 3dfx high point, though, as other companies got their game together and started to give the Voodoo line a serious run for the money. A very serious run for the money, I should emphasize. It's funny, really. I recall 3dfx cards (especially the Voodoo2, and especially SLI Voodoo2 if you could swing it money and hardware-wise) as basically being the king of the 3D accelerator mountain. Just utterly predominant in the gaming arena and leaving all the other chipsets in the dust as scrub-tier hardware. They seemed eternal, a fact of the universe, a company that would endure for a good long time. Just bulletproof and unstoppable the way Nvidia and ATI are right now. And yet, Wikipedia says their first chipset was released October 1st, 1996. Their last chipset was the Voodoo4 4500, released on October 13, 2000. Four years and pocket change, and then Nvidia sucked up their assets and left them to languish in bankruptcy proceedings. Meanwhile, of course, Nvidia kept on trucking and ATI stepped up its game and the rest is history. 3dfx just couldn't keep up and compete. Police Automation, don't Voodoo1 and Voodoo2 cards usually require a separate 2D card? That is, outside of integrated boards that some manufacturers made, they're 3D-only and don't do 2D display work at all? That's what I recall.
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Aug 31, 2014 09:17
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al-azad posted:But what I'm most interested in is the monitor. I vaguely remember a post here where someone was testing out the monitor and it looked sharp as gently caress. What are the inputs on the thing because I wouldn't mind hooking up other consoles to the monitor itself. Rufus in the retrogaming thread smack-talking on PVM owners with a 1084, with d0s showing a picture of the inputs on the back of one: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3515794&pagenumber=981&perpage=40#post432216052 And from Rufus' blog: http://wargamedork.blogspot.com/2013/05/more-fun-with-commodore-1084-monitor.html http://wargamedork.blogspot.com/2013/12/retrocomputing-why-bother-special-fun.html
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Sep 10, 2014 06:26
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atomicthumbs posted:This Amiga 1000 I bought came with 150 disks and a Supradrive HDD with interface. Not one of them is a Kickstart disk or a Supradrive boot disk. I am no Amiga expert, but isn't "Kickstart" the ROM firmware, and Workbench is the actual OS? Do you have any Workbench disks in your pile?
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Sep 11, 2014 05:43
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It's theoretically possible to do from another Amiga 1000, though that doesn't do you much good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiPxoU1vtCw You could use the utilities mentioned here to try extracting the ROM from your 2500, although that's probably imperfect and may not work: http://www.lemonamiga.com/help/kickstart-rom/kickstart-rom-1-3.php This one seems best to try; the other one doesn't seem to apply to the models you have: http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/GrabKick That LemonAmiga also mentions that the TOSEC collection has archived the A1000 Kickstart disk; if you can track that down, get the ADF file onto your 2500, and then write it to a floppy disk from there with a utility, you might be set.
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Sep 11, 2014 08:55
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atomicthumbs posted:I've found an ADF for the Supradrive autoboot disk. How do I get it onto the 2500, though? From some research: If your 2500 has Workbench 2.1 or higher, it should have an included utility (from back in the day) called CrossDOS that allows you to read MS-DOS formatted disks (only if they're 720K or are maybe 1.44 MB disks formatted as such). So you'd want to zip up the ADF (since those are usually 800+ KB due to the proprietary Amiga floppy disk format, bigger than what a 720K disk can handle). Make sure it's zipped in a format that has a decompression utility on the Amiga side. Gzip seems popular for this, and if you can find an LHArc utility on both ends, that seemed to be the preferred Amiga archive format. If you're using a version of Workbench under 2.1, look at *both* of these links: http://oldwww.nvg.ntnu.no/amiga/amigafaq/AmigaFAQ_81.html http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/MSH-1.58 Same gist as above. EDIT: Check your PMs. If you don't have a floppy drive in your PC, you're going to have to look at other transfer options. All of them will probably involve sacrifices through archaic methods to get working. Captain Rufus posted:Not on the 1000. You don't want a 1000. It is ungood. Less ram and Kickstart is a disk. Yeah, I had vaguely heard the 1000 was not ideal. And now I understand why (even though I don't own one and have never been in the Amiga market).
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Sep 11, 2014 09:22
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Not my sale, but someone in SA-Mart is selling a VIC-20, and I figured it might be of interest to someone here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3669441
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Oct 16, 2014 22:36
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d0s posted:If I had an A600 I'd find a cute but extremely high quality monitor for it like this guy I'd contend that a 13" or 14" PVM would also be appropriate, though. Most accept RGB (through appropriately vintage and weird interfaces), most handle both PAL and NTSC signals, and considering the Amiga's heritage in video production and broadcasting, a PVM is most certainly a more natural display companion for one than some scrubby IBM-compatible VGA monitor  .
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Oct 31, 2014 22:44
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McCracAttack posted:
For the XPC-4, you would probably need to track down a Sanwa AD-D15NE adapter to convert the video interface from the weirdo RGB-15 interface natively used by the X68000 into a standard PC VGA one. You would also appear to need a VGA to DVI-I adapter from there, since it appears the XPC-4 only accepts that as an input. Going the PVM route might be a bit cheaper, but it might not be, and it has other caveats. First, PVMs can be pretty bulky and heavy. 8"/9" and 13"/14" aren't too bad, I guess, but can still ask for plenty of desktop space. A 19"/20"? Yeah...CRT battleship, yo. Second, you'd need one that can handle both 15 khz and 31 khz modes, which isn't common from what I've seen. It's the inverse of the "Why can't I use my SNES on my PC monitor?!" issue - PC monitors can't talk down at the lower rate the SNES needs and a PVM supports, and PVMs can't talk up at the higher rate many computer systems demand. Third, if you found one that handled both modes, you'd need to adapt it to the PVM's interface. Most PVMs support RGB, but some are only composite and S-Video. You also have to watch out when looking at the back; some might have what looks like a VGA port, but it's practically always a 9-pin RS232 serial connector for whatever purpose you might use one of those for with a PVM. Most PVMs use four BNC connectors (one each for RGB, plus one more for composite sync) or some proprietary Sony 25-pin CMPTR plug, but adapters from SCART (Euro format, not JP21) to those interfaces are available. I guess this item might be an actual X68000 to SCART cable from a Spanish vendor of all places? Overall, I'd say you'd be better off with the XPC-4, because finding a CRT PVM that supports the modes you need could be tricky and just as expensive (shipping alone would be a gut punch, to say nothing of cost!).
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Jan 8, 2015 09:18
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Quarex posted:Shame about the censored cover art though. Oh and the art in general. Was it in this thread that the fascinating discussion about composite monitors came up? I was just reading theo other day about efforts to properly emulate the appearance of 1980s monitors through software! I wouldn't hold my breath on this ever being completely successful, due to it being so subjective. Scanlines will be too thick, or too thin, there will be too much pixel blur or not enough, and there's a whole range of other factors that have to be considered, such as what kind of CRT is being emulated. A TV is not the same as a computer monitor is not the same as an arcade monitor. Yes, they're all CRTs, but they were built to differing degrees of quality, utility, and expectation about what they will display. And then, for old computers and video games, the actual image on a CRT is dependent on the input type being used; a picture over RF is not the same as one over composite, which in turn is not the same as one over S-Video, Y/Pb/Pr component video, or straight up RGB. I'm not saying, of course, that people pursuing this sort of thing have to get it right 100% or not bother trying. Rather, my point is that there is plenty of margin to put in effort and get it "wrong" in someone else's eyes, and that certain elements of nostalgia or cargo cult memories about how it should look could negatively influence things (e.g. if you apply a baseline of a 1975 TV with RF hookups as being the standard for everything). Obviously, too, I make an exception for fiction. That all said, if you have a bunch of old hardware that does composite or S-Video (be it directly, or that can be modded in), a pro display like the Panasonic BT series of CRT monitors can be a sound investment. I have a 9" Panasonic BT-S901Y that I really like, which only takes composite and S-Video and is from 1992. I took some cellphone snaps of stuff running on it: http://imgur.com/a/xJjSf The NES stuff is running over composite, of course, while the "Samurai Spirits" logo and "Pocky and Rocky" screens are from S-Video. If I had some old PC stuff, it'd be interesting to see how it looks on it. Or, maybe, step up to a Panasonic BT-M1310Y, which also has RGB inputs and a larger screen...
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Sep 9, 2015 21:38
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Police Automaton posted:I mean, lets stick with Fallout as it's a good example. We have a beverage there called Nuka Cola which is obviously not accidentally similar to Coca Cola. This similarity was a lot more obvious in earlier Fallouts than it is now in the most recent one, FO4. I of course do not know what the actual reasoning for that was, but I would wager a guess making these two things increasingly less similar was probably not purely an artistic choice. Sure, might be, but eh. Doubt it. I'm also pretty sure that in how things are nowadays, no game company would get the idea to put a thing like "Nuka Cola" (as it was back then) into their Videogame in 2015, if it wasn't already established beforehand. Not even because they maybe couldn't get away with it (they probably could even) but I don't think they'd even risk it and their lawyers would probably discourage it from the get go and the idea would never really leave the conference room. It's just a very different climate now I think. Actually, "Nuka Cola" in Fallout is interesting. In the first and second games, only the name itself gave any kind of "wink wink, nudge nudge" reference to Coca-Cola. Otherwise, the graphic for it in the games was very nondescript and generic. Move forward to Fallout Tactics, and while the dark brown color and shape of the soda is more pronounced, it's still a pretty far cry from the classic image of Coke in a glass bottle that we (in the US, at least) typically associate with the brand. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas went full steam ahead with it , however. Red and white logo (complete with ribbon), evocative font, and even the bottle shape is a lot closer to the classic Coke bottle shape than in previous games. You're probably right that things might be a little more iffy today, if Bethesda were to start the whole series from scratch. On the other hand (no idea how prevalent this is in Europe), there's been a major uptick in beverage, snack, and even fast-food companies associating themselves with video games. And not even in a "Hey kids, it's a Super Mario Bros. McDonalds Happy Meal!" family-friendly way; quite often, the marketing partnership is for games that are more violent and shooty and all that rather than not. So, today, Coca-Cola might be far more interested in a marketing partnership were Bethesda to approach them than not. On the other hand, it would probably be a straight up "Put our product in your game!" kind of deal, rather than a controllable piece of lore, so that would probably explain why Bethesda changed the Nuka-Cola model for Fallout 4 - it's wise from both a legal standpoint, and also because they just can.
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Nov 27, 2015 01:24
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Police Automaton posted:Haha, I remember it exactly the other way around (more descriptive in FO1+2, less so in FO3) which might be because I don't think I even played FO 1+2 this century. (If I did, it's at least ten years ago. How time flies) What I do remember though that there was a graphic of a broken down, red nuka cola truck in one of the isometric fallouts. Couldn't say which one if my life depended on it though. One of the wiki pages I saw mentions it as being in Fallout Tactics (which ostensibly was a turn-based/real-time squad game). The first two RPGs were more low-key, if I recall right. Police Automaton posted:Honestly, the more I think about it the more I think people today are just as sue-happy as they were 20 years ago. The big and only difference (I think) is that you can't keep stuff like that low-key nowadays anymore, because of how widespread internet usage is. If you put something somewhere in a game, it'll be in some youtube video on the day on release for the entire world to see, no matter how well (or not) it was hidden. If your game is really popular, it'll probably happen before release, even. Also, I'd say video-games aren't as niche anymore as they once maybe were and there's a lot more money involved. That's probably a factor too in how the involved parties act. Eh, never underestimate the willingness of American companies to market their product as something you can't do without, rather than an option for fun and putting zest in one's life. Mountain Dew, which is a soft drink brand owned by Pepsi, is famous for their "Game Fuel" flavor line that comes out with various high-profile game releases. The use of "fuel" is very interesting; it's implied that it's a drink you need to keep on gaming, rather than something that you enjoy with the game. I admit it's kind of a semantic and sociological point, but I think it suggests that Coca-Cola wouldn't be wholly adverse to the player becoming "addicted" to some form of post-apocalyptic cola. It just might not be obvious, like you're addicted to Coca-Cola and need it to function, but there would be an incentive to pick it up and it would be everywhere. And to a degree, the precedent for this is already present in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Nuka Cola, its variants, and Sunset Sarsparilla (in the case of New Vegas) provide decent HP recovery and some stat changes. The regular versions of Nuka Cola and Sunset Sarsparilla are everywhere in the game. Even though they're fictional brands, they're pushed pretty heavily. In Fallout 1 and 2, on the other hand, drinking a Nuka Cola did very little for the player. It was there as a riff on both Coca Cola being ubiquitous enough to survive the nuclear apocalypse, and to reflect something of the sensibility of the "future retro" pre-war society. EDIT: Since this thread is about old games, I might as well mention that I used Nuka Cola in Fallout 2 as "small change" when bartering with merchants. Here are some hunting rifles, some knives, a spear or two...oh, I'm $5 short? Here's two Nuka Colas, keep the excess value and buy something nice for yourself .
Kthulhu5000 fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Nov 27, 2015 |
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Nov 27, 2015 03:31
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I watched it, Rufus, are you goddamn happy? ARE YOU!? But seriously, a pretty good overview (if a bit short and basic). The possible deal between Commodore and Sun that fell through was interesting to learn about, although in the long run it would probably not have kept the Amiga alive in any meaningful fashion. Between the rise of Linux, the general decline of the proprietary UNIX workstation, and more of the old "heavy lifting" tasks that those workstations did being able to be done on standard desktop hardware (be it Mac or Windows), the Amiga line would have been tethered to a ship that was only a few years from being beached anyway. Also, Sun would have probably subsumed it all into the bigger organization, and either morphed it into something unrecognizable and decidedly non-Amiga, or just let it languish once they realized there was no market for yet another computer platform and trying to support it with their SPARC workstations would be a fool's job.
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Dec 2, 2015 03:04
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Sagacity posted:He just posted part 4 of this series Good link. The whole mess between Atari and Commodore seems as much about Jack Tramiel being spiteful about his ejection from Commodore as it does wanting to, you know, make a solid computing platform. The link also highlights the fact that Commodore (and Atari, for that matter) never quite managed to shed the image of being "toy" computer companies, rather than serious technology companies. Even if the C64 had sold mondo units, IBM still had its business and mega-corp technological image, while Apple had its own inroads into the home and educational market - and both were probably far more prominent and respected as prestige brands in the 1980s than Atari and Commodore ever were. That hurts a lot, especially when you're trying to convince people to spend $1000+ on your new hardware when your image has been built around "cheap cheap cheap" or something non-serious like games. And of course, the advertising missteps and misfires for customer targeting also did not help things at all. I think the biggest factor was just the factionalism. Even if Compaq, AST, Packard Bell and the like were trying to snag sales from each other with more or less similar PC-compatible systems, each sale represented a concrete expansion of the DOS/Windows platform as a whole. If your friend bought a Compaq and you bought a Packard Bell (ugh), you could reasonably expect to be able to share software, and both of your purchases made development of further software more lucrative because of it. Meanwhile, every Atari sale was at the expense of the entire Amiga platform and vice versa. Is there a cool game for the Amiga? Tough poo poo, you have an Atari; better hope the developer has the financial investment, hardware resources, and time to devote to porting it your platform with a different OS and similar-but-not-really hardware. Or the reverse situation would occur. Look at Apple - they were the frontrunner in the non-x86 consumer market, and they were sprawled on the floor and almost down for the count in the 1990s before Microsoft infused them with some cash and Steve Jobs (much as I hate the worship and fanboy fellatio he receives) managed to start the company's turnaround. And they were the other computer company of the 1980s, the "and" to the IBM PC when talking about desktop computers! With Atari and Commodore basically being personal fiefdoms and plunder pits for Tramiel and Commodore executives, it almost seems like they had more of a deathwish interest in settling vendettas than in trying to compete. Of course, this is all in an American context - YMMV elsewhere. I guess the takeaway is that you can pull off a hat trick, but it really only matters if you can leverage it to pull off another one (that is preferably bigger and better) and continue to do so.
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Dec 2, 2015 17:55
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fishmech posted:It's worth noting that Apple's fortunes for computers were downhill from about 1992 to 2006, when they finally experienced real growth again, even though Steve Jobs had come back in the late 90s. 1984-1992 they were quickly losing overall market share but were still sustaining healthy growth, and were progressively benefiting from all but themselves and the PC clones falling off the cliffs into irrelevancy. Well, Apple found its niche in the much vaunted desktop publishing realm, but it also offered a mostly solid, well-supported alternative to DOS-based PCs for a few specific cases, at least until the 386 and 486 CPUs became common and Windows 3.x made its debut. I imagine for many creative businesses in the late 1980s, the Mac's graphic capabilities and Apple's name recognition as a "legitimate" computer company that wasn't going to leave you high and dry made it the most optimal choice. Which isn't to say that the Atari ST and Amiga didn't have niches they filled; the ST had some music use and the Amiga made inroads into broadcasting and video editing, as we all know. But Atari and Commodore just didn't seem too interested in pushing hard for some dominant edge or advantage anywhere. It was just "Look, we have some great graphics and sound. It's a computer. Buy it." - and if the manufacturer can't show that they're enthused about their product, then it's understandable that consumers might be gunshy of it, too. fishmech posted:I also think a decent part of why Atari ST and Amiga couldn't get by on games in America, which thus crippled income for both companies to keep going worldwide, was the fact the controllers available were too low in buttons, and often too old-fashioned design, leading to play being less appealing compared to stuff like the NES and Genesis - while not having the "well at least your parents can use it for serious business and household stuff" qualities of the PC platform. Yeah eventually both platforms got wide support for full buttoned controllers and such, but that was way too little way too late. Whoa, careful, you're going to set Rufus off. The NES and Genesis, besides being very much purpose-built for gaming (Nintendo's attempts in Japan to make the Famicom more than a game system notwithstanding), had the advantage of being cheap to start with and becoming ever cheaper (about $100 for an NES in 1990 or 1991, $129 for a Genesis in 1992, and $139 for an SNES in the same year) and, at least from a graphics and audio perspective, were "good enough" or better than, say, the C64 or Amiga. Yes, that's a provocative statement, and I would say that the C64 and Amiga may have had an edge for audio, but both were getting long in the tooth during the NES heyday in the US and the following 16-bit era. There's also a socioeconomic element that I think many people forget about. In the 1980s and 1990s, a computer wasn't a necessary thing, per se. Yes, maybe a programmer or white collar professional had a use for one at home, but a tow truck driver? A nursing aide? A plumber? A line cook? I'm not maligning people in these professions, of course - rather, I'm pointing out that a large swath of the American population couldn't really afford or justify a full-fledged PC in their home at that time, just on the basis of writing papers or crunching numbers or whatever, and certainly not just for games. There's even an argument about physical space to be considered; a whole PC setup, including desk or table, can take up a fair amount of floor real estate in a small home or apartment. If it's of little interest and practical use, why buy it? Even something like the C64 is a dicey proposition - either you have a dedicated space for it, or it's cluttering the hell out of your TV area with the computer itself, its disk and tape drives, its joystick(s), its floppy disks, its printer... But a console like the NES and Genesis? Cheap, physically discreet, popular, and with games that you can borrow and trade with everyone else or rent for low cost at the video store? Something to get the kids and shut them up? Something that you could shuffle into their bedroom with a cheap rear end TV and never really have to think or worry about? There's a lot to recommend that, from a function and price viewpoint. So in the US, at least, Atari and Commodore were caught in a bad place. The people who had an interest in or strong need for a personal computer, and the money to spend on one, could get a lot of their needs met with a PC clone or Macintosh. When you're dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars on a computer (either at once or through financing/loans), you want some assurance that you won't end up with a paperweight. People knew about IBM, and they knew about Apple. Atari and Commodore, through their own failures in advertising and marketing, were going to be unknowns or too "odd" to risk buying unless you were some sort of know-it-all gamer or egghead. And on the other end of the market, the ST and Amiga were cheaper were still too pricey for the non-PC owning public to bite at without sufficient cause.
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Dec 3, 2015 02:25
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Segmentation Fault posted:Hey, I'm considering getting a vintage computer but I'm not good at haggling or bartering. How much do you guys think this is worth? My gut says $75, maybe $100, but I always second-guess myself. I think that's way overpriced. Like, yes, 486 systems aren't out and about for a song anymore, but it only has 4 MB of RAM, a 130 MB hard drive, and doesn't include a mouse, keyboard, or the like. Also, just a 50 Mhz CPU. I wouldn't even bother trying to haggle or lowball that; it just seems like a greedy seller trying to pass off underpowered garbage as something rare and special.
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Jan 27, 2016 09:40
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Captain Rufus posted:https://translate.google.com/transl...ida-2016-turbo/ Looks like it would work the same way that the NESRGB mod works, by intercepting data and taking over some of the processing duties from the system's video processor (thus allowing it to use that raw video data and convert it to whatever output format is desired). The installation of something like that board would probably be about the same as the NESRGB I suspect, and would likely be a "permanent" internal hardware mod (in that installing it and uninstalling it isn't something you do easily and on a whim) rather than a multi-purpose box or board that you plug output cables into. There would be zero point to using what comes out of the AV port, anyway; most of the old 8-bit micros seem to top out at composite or S-Video formats and quality, by and large, and by that point in the video flow you're basically converting and possibly scaling up the degraded signal to HDMI and exaggerating video artifacts and lag, same as most every cheap x-format to HDMI scaler does already.
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May 2, 2016 05:11
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Captain Rufus posted:I am gonna crosspost this post over to the normal retro thread too because I need some help. (That thread will get a couple pictures of some arcade classics playing on PC Master Race hardware so its got some content. OK, my picks across each platform. These seem the most interesting, probably because they're what I might choose were I doing something like this, and also to try and cockblock you from stuff that you might feel is safe and friendly to your interests, 'cuz I'm an rear end in a top hat like that. Kthulhu5000 fucked around with this message at 10:07 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 09:48
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d0s posted:EDIT2: Looks like a Televideo TS803 http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1077
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Jun 23, 2016 23:43
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Captain Rufus posted:Well given the UK money is now tanking thanks to Brexit anyone who wants to fill their UK software holes now has a hella good opportunity. Shipping will still be pricey but this is our chance to get Amiga stuff ala the PC Engine days with that Jpn site that had all the stuff cheap. I still regret not getting Ogre for the MSX. Are Amigas voltage-agnostic at the PC end (that is, they're happy with either US or UK/EU power supplies, since it all gets converted to a different voltage anyway), or are they hard fixed for 110V / 220V operation internally? And there's a reason why you don't hear too much about people bring in stuff from the UK and EU, even with favorable exchange rates, and that's because there seen to be so many gotchas and extra bits you need. Oh, it needs a proprietary monitor or an adapter for such. Oh wait, it hooks up to a TV - nope, PAL only! OK, video should be sorted and - different wall voltage, it's not working right or at all. Add in the shipping cost for games, and the whole UK and EU computing world just seems to have such a high barrier of entry to do "right". Unless you have some irrational love for the Speccy and the like and don't reside in the UK, there's so much expense and hassle involved that it's not really worth doing.
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Jun 25, 2016 04:13
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Well, admittedly, I'm not in the market for one right now (got an Atari 1040 STF I need to get in operational shape right now, though I might just sell it at this point). But I figure that it might be good info for everyone to know, especially if the drop in the British pound is giving people ideas.fishmech posted:Edit: and I forgot to mention: most of the integrated with keyboard Amigas used an external power brick rather than an internal power supply. So you can buy a loose American power supply if needed, or if you're really daring strip off the special plug and hook it into a multivoltage supply (most of those Amigas will have -12V, +5V, and +12V coming in off the power brick, as well as the ground.) The power supply for desktop-ized Amigas is suitable for most of them, as it sends the power out the same sort of plug. Yeah, this is what I was thinking of when I asked the question - the ones with external power bricks. d0s posted:I imported my PAL A500 from the UK for about $70 shipped a couple years ago (from ebay shockingly). I use it with a US A500 power supply I was lucky to have around, there are no problems. I assume you could use one with a stepdown or something and get the same result. The US 1084 monitors display the PAL RGB signal just fine with a little geometry tweaking which on my (daewoo made) model meant opening the case to access hidden controls. I would like to take advantage of the collapse of the British Empire by finding a PAL C64 to go with it, though they can keep the Spectrums which will provide a fine source of microscopic amounts of gold and other metals that may be used for barter in the My 19" Sony PVM apparently handles PAL and NTSC, so if I were to get one, I'd probably be OK on the video front (and this Amibay review of my model says the Amiga's RGB works on it). But for other people, the cost of either getting a PVM and SCART cable, or a 1084, could sour the whole idea for them.
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Jun 25, 2016 06:57
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Dr. Quarex posted:Well for as much as I am shocked and mildly appalled by this, when I checked out the Sinclair QL I did immediately say "whoa," so I can totally understand the visual appeal of having that computer be useful. I just... I just think there must be an easier way to do that than by actually making a new compatible motherboard. "What you don't understand is that there is a 600 quid a year business at stake that depends on the continued tip top operation of a Sinclair QL!" * Said business is in a small village of elderly people, and involves transcribing paper letters to e-mail and vice versa, while the owner studiously spends the rest of his time ensuring his customers don't catch wind of other methods *
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Jun 28, 2016 07:28
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d0s posted:I have a ROM 03 IIGS coming to me, nothing in it at all. I already have an ADB keyboard and mouse (the IIGS specific model even) and external 800k floppy drive, but no RGB monitor. I'm mainly going to use it for IIGS specific stuff as I have a IIe, is it true that the composite out doesn't work for this and I need an RGB monitor? I have a trisync NEC monitor that I use with my X68K, would I be able to just build an adapter and have this work? Also what's a reasonable amount of memory for a setup that I only want to use for "period correct" games and apps (don't want to attempt any modern tasks), and what's the most cost effective way to expand the IIGS memory (or would I even need to for a ROM 03)? If your NEC multisync monitor uses a VGA connection, you might be able to build an adapter for the IIGS with the pin-matching at: http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/faqs/Csa2MONITOR.html#015 That FAQ suggests that composite might work, but it might not play well with certain IIGS modes, and it will probably look junky. It appears the IIGS uses a horizontal sync rate of 15.7 Khz and analog RGB, so it may be compatible with most PVMs, too, if you have a way to adapt the IIGS video to BNC or that Sony 25-pin CMPTR connector.
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Jul 4, 2016 02:45
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Police Automaton posted:Somehow, I've never heard of this and it's very fascinating especially considering how ill-suited the platform is in just about every way you can imagine. It's also interesting for me because I always imagined an MMO in that adventure-game 2D room-based style, (is there an official name for this? I haven't got the slightest idea) There I go and thought I had an original thought, I guess. He uses Wordstar 4.0, apparently, according to this interview on Conan O' Brien's talk show. Apparently, it's due to it not being feature-rich or having spell check and the like. And that makes a lot of sense; a professional wordsmith undoubtedly develops a work flow, and things like having to move a mouse, dialog boxes popping up willy-nilly, and your main window losing focus interrupt that. And if it's a DOS-era program, it also is likely to have more of a keyboard driven interface, which can be great for workflow, too.
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Jul 10, 2016 01:56
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