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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. 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.
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Dec 3, 2015 01:05
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The Atari 2600 was solidly a "you can only afford this if you're loaded" thing for a decent chunk of its life though: The NES and Colecovision were the first consoles to launch relatively cheap. Also here's a nice examination of the computer game market in America in 1988: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii-xFXBb-B8
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Dec 3, 2015 03:48
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Police Automaton posted:How come? Are they really that rare over there? They're hardly rare, but they do have a bad habit of breaking after 30 years. 
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Dec 19, 2015 19:16
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Dr. Dos posted:I set up a bot to randomly download old ZZT games and render a screenshot from them! That's rad as hell. The funny thing is, I only learned about ZZT from the ZZT homebrew port thing on the Nintendo DS, which required weird pan&scan scropping to work with the DS resolution.
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Jan 27, 2016 02:18
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Asbrandt posted:I've been looking to build a machine for 9x and maybe early XP stuff and have some hardware in mind, but I do have a question before I start; Not even dos/3.1 stuff needs stuff available only on an ISA card. Unless it's something that requires use of industrial automation stuff, which I don't think any of them do. You would need an ISA slot if you wanted to also buy a 3DO Blaster, which comes with its own CD drive and is used to play 3DO console games inside your PC - in DOS it takes over the whole screen and in Windows it can be played in a scaling window. All that said, having an ISA slot or two was common on motherboards well into the early 2000s, so you should be fine if the cheapest way to get functionality X is an ISA card instead of PCI. Also: if setting up a 98/98SE system, you can use over 1 GB, nearly 2 GB of RAM safely. But you'll want to first install and boot with 512 MB or less, because you need to manually change some settings to have it work right with more: "To warn Windows that you have more than 512MB of memory installed, add the following line to the [VCache] section of your win.ini file: MaxFileCache = 524288."" For Windows 95 this also works, but it gets a lot more unstable over 512 MB of memory. So basically, just use Windows 98SE And further, I reccomend that having installed Windows 98 SE, you then install this and most of the included options: http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/ This is "the unofficial service pack" and it bundles a lot of useful stuff like time zone updates, generic usb flash drive support so you don't need special drivers, and KernelEX which allows many otherwise windows 2000/xp and later applications to run on 98se, which includes many drivers, allowing support for newer devices than otherwise.
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Feb 27, 2016 05:18
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Asbrandt posted:Since this isn't exactly clear, are there actually 9x games expecting something such as the OPL3 capabilities of an SB16 or other hardware far easier to obtain in ISA form? Across all the games out there, yeah some will be pissy to set up without something that's easier to get on ISA. But of course, what's "easier to get" changes constantly with the selection available on eBay. Police Automaton posted:The Yamaha YMF724 is a PCI chip but still has proper sounding OPL3 compatibility. It's also one of the few chips that supports the SBLink interface, for proper DOS compatibility. I'd say, always go for buying a modern day IDE or SATA (if your system can support SATA) SSD and use that instead of fussing with RAM disks. You can get a 16 GB 2.5 inch IDE SSD for under $40 these days: http://www.ebay.com/itm/111899644029?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT I put that particular one in an old laptop I use for gaming, which I'd previously replaced the hard drive with a CF card in an adapter. Now it saturates the IDE bus on every DiskMark test, where the CF card only saturated the IDE bus on continuous reads.
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Feb 28, 2016 16:00
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Asbrandt posted:Any examples? I'm talking more along the lines of how sometimes it's easier/cheaper to get cards for a certain functionality in ISA format and other times it's that but for PCI. So just as a random example, let's say the board you're starting with doesn't have onboard ethernet, analog gameport, or sound. You'll of course need sound and that'll usually cover your gameport, and it's really handy these days to have ethernet to send files over (and to play those games that are still playable online). It might be that it's cheaper to get an ISA card for any of these things than to get PCI. Or you might already have a card lying around for that function.
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Feb 28, 2016 19:13
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I'd really like if someone came out with a cheaper/more compatible VGA or DVI/HDMI output board for the Apple IIgs. Most of the ones out for it won't handle all of the video modes.
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May 1, 2016 22:34
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d0s posted:Hey retrocomputer thread, got a question for the Apple II fans: I've been using the Apple II Disk Server to write a bunch of game floppies and I'm just wondering if anyone has anything to recommend because I have a limited number of disks and don't really want to waste time with crap. I'm mostly into action games, here's a list of some of the games I'm enjoying lately: Are you into text adventures/basic graphical adventures at all? There was a thing called Eamon which was game in that style that allowed easy modding, and so there were hundreds of games built on it. There's sorta been ports to other systems, but the Apple II remains the best way to play and all of them are public domain these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_(video_game)
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Jun 14, 2016 01:11
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d0s posted:Something you may find cool is that the giant 1MB RAM card in there, it was only used natively by very few programs but you could use it as a ramdisk and boot any software form it [edit: any proDOS software], a popular thing to do was load all of appleworks onto it before use which eliminated all the drive seeking. I actually have a copy of appleworks 3.0 coming to me because I want to do some actual productive stuff with my IIe like use the database to keep track of my game collection, having the RAM card is just a happy coincidence because it came with the computer back when I found it at the flea market way back when. This is even more fun with the Apple IIGS, because you can get up to about 8.25 MB of RAM - and really go crazy on the RAM disk stuff. Which ends up being especially neat because ProDOS volumes only go up to 32 MB each on hard disk.
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Jun 18, 2016 15:20
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d0s posted:I'm sorry to double post but I have another Apple II question maybe someone could help me with: There were people talking about building replacement cards last year, but I don't think any of those products have reached working prototype stage, let alone what passes for mass production in vintage computer parts. Laser/VTech sold a "Universal Disk Controller" card that could handle the Apple 3.5 inch drives in a IIe as well as the Laser 128 clone. You might try looking for those for sale on various old Apple community forums, but they might even cost more. There are probably other random companies who made similar replacement cards back in the day as well, so hunting through old computer magazines might get you leads.
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Jun 22, 2016 18:41
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crap. I want to look into light pens, handheld scanners, drawing tablets, a small thermal printer (even though I have printing covered with an Imagewriter II), etc etc. I did manage to find a second SSC for $20 which I'm gonna use for
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d0s posted:I just looked into it and apparently it happened: Huh, I guess I hadn't heard of that particular project. Though I think the ones I was thinking of were going to support 5.25 and 2.5 inch disks, which that one doesn't (though that isn't much of an issue until you run out of slots).
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Jun 22, 2016 19:02
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d0s posted:Yep that looks like it. Can't find one on ebay but a similar model has a BIN of $3000 with 13 watching Looking on Terapeak's eBay stuff, a Televideo TS-803 sold in May for just $70 though - albeit without a keyboard or that other vast array of accessories. In March one sold for $199 with keyboard, documentation, and disks. And one sold with the same sort of stuff in Sepetember 2015 for $127.50. So take heart: you definitely didn't lose out on over $1000 of computer there.
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Jun 24, 2016 01:03
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d0s posted:Oh drat I didn't even know about Terapeak, I used ebay's "completed/sold listings" thing and didn't get any results so I figured it was some super rare thing. Well I mean, the thing with Terapeak is that it costs a decent bit of cash per year to use, especially to go back more than 90 days. I only have access to it because of my job. It can be worth it as an individual if you're running an eBay or Amazon shop as a serious side business of course.
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Jun 24, 2016 03:00
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Kthulhu5000 posted: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? Some are switchable, some are hard wired. HOWEVER: if you're going to keep the system for good, you can usually replace the power supply entirely within, especially if you're handy with a bit of soldering. Usually just by way of buying a third party or first party power supply for the US power input (or vice versa if you're bringing a computer into Europe and so on). For example, this power supply can be bought to swap into desktop-case mounted Amigas (which is to say, Amigas that were originally the all in one to the keyboard, but were placed into desktop cases) http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=866 Then for the Amiga 2000, 3000, and 4000, which as designed and sold were already in desktop cases, you could dump the standard power supply and install any standard ATX power supply from a PC, by way of these sorts of adapter cables: http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=998 http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1164 http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=615 Even if the Amiga desktop you bought comes with a switching power supply, you might want to replace with a modern ATX power supply anyway. They tend to be more efficent, and more importantly haven't been worn down by years of use. 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. fishmech fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Jun 25, 2016 |
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Jun 25, 2016 04:28
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d0s posted:Looking through the Apple //e Reference Manual I just got in the mail, it's a really cool reference that seems way more comprehensive than what other companies would give to the general public (though I may be wrong, it's just the only book of it's kind I've personally seen). Also, never beat your Apple II with a hammer or throw it out a window: They were fairly commonly available for the older ranges of computers - after all these computers nearly cost as much as a used car might, and you were still expected to crack out some software on your own. Quality of the stuff inside varied depending on manufacturer - Apple and IBM tended to have the best written and most comprehensive. Various fly-by-night CP/M machines would be much less indepth.
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Jun 27, 2016 17:13
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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. People still do that for much newer systems: a lot of the late IBM branded /early Lenovo branded ThinkPad laptops from say 8-11 years ago? There's a hobbyist community that's gotten companies to manufacture a drop in replacement motherboard with a CPU and corresponding gpu that's only a year or two old. People just love that era's form factors that much, but wanted them with modern capabilities. Especially in the convertible tablet ThinkPad laptops with the Wacom screens.
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Jun 28, 2016 04:06
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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)? Some IIGS specific stuff looks just fine on composite, some of it looks horrible, much like trying to do later IBM PC games through composite out. I'm not sure on the specifics for converting to that NEC monitor, but there are definitely IIGS to VGA and IIGS to component adapters and schematic projects to follow, so presumably you should also be able to manage that. If you want to play some of the best IIGS stuff, you're going to want to have at least 2 MB of ram, plus having a lot of RAM is nice anyway for loading things to RAM disk. I'd reccomend with going with this for 4 MB: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-IIgs-...kwAAOSw1h5XQfK7 (about $50, isn't a huge board because it uses more modern chips) or this for 8 MB: http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-GGLABS-RAMGS-8-Apple-IIgs-8MB-memory-expansion-8M-RAM-/401053959389?hash=item5d60adc4dd:g:DOYAAOSwKtVWvB52 (like $240, but you're not going to get a tested vintage one for less money, and this is again more reliable because of newer design and not using a fuckton of old chips). 8 MB on the expansion board plus 256 KB to 1 MB of internal RAM (depending on your precise base IIGS) is of course the most RAM the system can have. I wouldn't recommend going less than 4 MB just because you're not really going to save money going for less than 4 MB with that new card. And of course there's always the consideration to get an IDE card with a CF card installed to make a hard drive for it, like this one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-IIe-I...EkAAOSwDk5T4RJu Very nice for using IIGS specific software.
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Jul 1, 2016 23:49
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d0s posted:That 4MB board seems like the way to go, unless there's a lot of stuff that requires 8MB? It seems like that would have been a huge amount for the time and not much would really take advantage of it, am I wrong? I do see that the 8MB board is available in kit form from the same seller for $179 and even if it was the same price I'd get the kit anyway because I like building poo poo, but that's still way more than I want to spend unless 8MB is kinda indispensable. I will probably get that CF card device eventually since I want to use GS/OS and not deal with disk swapping, but the price makes it something for the future, for now I'm just gonna use ADTPro to get a bunch of games on disks. Thanks for the recommendations! 8 MB of RAM becomes useful if you start using very late stage stuff for the system, especially if you want to use late stage stuff and a RAM disk at the same time. Officially Apple only supported up to 4 MB of expansion RAM plus 1 MB of onboard RAM while they were making it, so everything Apple made can run in that total of 5 MB of RAM, but later things could totally take advantage of the 8 MB total if you wanted (as-is, the ROM 03 and 01 are only coded to address 8 MB of RAM, so some of the expansion card goes wasted if its 8 MB if you don't have a modified ROM installed which goes to the system architecture's max of 14 MB of addressable RAM). It should probably have 1 MB of RAM on the motherboard if it actually shipped with ROM 03. But ROM 03 was available as an upgrade for older ROM 0 and ROM 01 systems so it could easily have just the 256 KB onboard. But there's no need to worry about that since you'll be getting extra RAM, ad thus have more than enough to run the GS/OS (as you probably know, it functions like Mac OS of the same time period except in color) with games running inside that. Also I'll note that since you love building stuff, there's a french dude who released schematics on how to build an IDE hard drive adapter for all Apple II computers, using completely off-the-shelf parts: http://s.guillard.free.fr/Apple2IDE/Apple2IDE.htm Though it has some issues handling faster/newer IDE devices.
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Jul 2, 2016 01:08
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What I've heard is that he actually used to just use current software for the times (which was up to like Word 97 or something by the end), but then he read that some author he respected insisted on Wordstar for DOS, so he decided to use it too.
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Jul 10, 2016 02:33
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d0s posted:This is weird because I always thought wordstar was like the most powerful and complex product of it's kind, like it was the pro-est word processor or whatever Yes, WordStar was a very advanced word processor for its time. If I'm remembering right, the reason he used a particular old Mac laptop for a very long time, was simply that it had very good battery life while just running Microsoft Word (which is what he prefers to use). So he just kept using it for as long as he could get new batteries, because he could just go get comfortable somewhere and not worry about a power output.
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Jul 10, 2016 14:21
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Those floppy disk speeds are why RAM disking and CF hard drives are so popular on the thing. Still, it's not the slowest floppy drives that were around, and it's faster than the drives that were in the earliest Macs. And it may just be confirmation bias, but it always seemed that things loaded faster off the disk once you'd already booted into the GS/OS, so give that a try sometime.
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Jul 16, 2016 17:23
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Kamrat posted:What's the best way of emulating a windows 98 system? Is it virtualbox? Any modern virtual machine program that does x86 architecture, besides DOSBOX because it goes so low-level that it will be quite slow. They all do about the same job, it doesn't really require something special, so go with the one that has the UI you like the most. All the major ones have Win 9x drivers available from either the developer or from third parties.
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Jul 18, 2016 18:11
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Genpei Turtle posted:Main thing is to keep dust away from them. I've found 5-1/4" disks to be incredibly durable. I got a big plastic tub of them out of my parents' attic, and they all still work, despite sitting up there for 30 years without any special protection. There were more than a few of them where multiple disks were stuck into the same sleeve! Here's the thing: 5.25 inch disks mostly kept to the same production standard through the whole time they were being produced. Plus a lot of them are formatted in low density modes, which are more tolerant of shoddy media than high density formats (like 1.2 MB PC for instance). 3.5 inch disks, on the other hand, started to have their quality really go downhill once the Zip Disk and USB drives and the like started coming out, at least for consumer usage (software distributors still had access to better disks). And past like 2002/2003, the amount of places actually making them plummeted and the quality really sank, so buying new disks started to mean buying very unreliable ones. On top of that, most 3.5 inch disks you have around are going to be newer ones rather than late 80s/early 90s ones. So because of that, 5.25 inch disks are more likely to still be doing ok, and to still be usable. However they'll all eventually die due to normal conditions after decades on end, so it'd be a good idea to backup any disks you own that still work and contain something you think might be unique or rare - say a previous owner's personal documents or some game that might have come off a BBS and you can't seem to find much info on or whatever. Because once that stuff's gone it's gone for good, and it's not like backing up even hundreds of disks takes up much space on today's storage!
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Jul 22, 2016 03:49
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d0s posted:The joystick discussion in the retro game thread got me thinking, if I want to use an oldschool PC joystick like this: Windows 10 does support gameport controllers, but it might be easier, if you have Apple II joysticks around, to use this instead http://retroconnector.com/products/apple-ii/joystick-shield/ Also, you'll have a better time setting up gameport type joystick through a gameport-USB convertor rather than using an actual gameport in modern Windows.
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Jul 23, 2016 00:40
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d0s posted:If I did want to do it the hard way and use a sound card gameport with one of those old PC joysticks (I do have some) what exactly would I need to do? Do you just plug it in and windows sees it in the game controller options? I would just rather walk 10 mins to microcenter & get a sound card than wait for stuff to be mailed to me Well if it all goes right, it'll just show up in the same place USB controllers do, and then you can calibrate it. But some cards have driver problems or something so that the gameport doesn't actually work even though Windows will happily use the sound capabilities. And there doesn't seem to be a handy "this card's gameport works in 10" list around anywhere.
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Jul 23, 2016 03:07
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Segmentation Fault posted:I thought this was dropped post-XP? XP's just the last time they basically all worked. Driver support started to become spotty in Vista, especially for 64 bit systems. It also doesn't help that it tends to be difficult to get a sound card that's compatible with the slots in modern PCs and has a gameport to use.
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Jul 23, 2016 13:49
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So I finally managed to dig out a compatible power supply for my Amstrad PPC640 (a portable MS-DOS 3.3 computer). It's got a monochrome LCD screen (driven by a CGA compatible card, but with only monochrome support on the screen), 640 KB of RAM, an 8 MHz NEC V30 (clone of the 80186 and pin-compatible with 8086) CPU and dual 720 KB floppy drives. I'm looking for games to play with it, preferably slow moving ones or text based (since the LCD screen does ghost quite a bit). And although it can do color that requires hooking up an external CGA monitor which I don't have, so it should be stuff that plays well with monochrome. I already know all about the big Infocom titles so that's settled but anything else would be nice to hear. It has a setup with a parallel port connected Zip Drive acting as multiple 32 MB hard disks for things that need a "hard drive" install to work. fishmech fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 00:59
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d0s posted:It's more edutainment than game but fun to screw around with, Car Builder lets you design cars and the simulate road tests, wind tunnels, etc. There's no actual driving or fast action or anything, all the tests come as text reports. Sounds really neat, honestly. Kthulhu5000 posted:There's the Kroz series, which uses ANSI characters and doesn't move super fast. There are also the older Apogee games like Monuments Of Mars, Arctic Adventure, and Pharoah's Tomb that support CGA and aren't frenetic in terms of graphic movement. I'll try those too. It's just too bad that it'll only run an hour or two on battery (which in this case, is cramming 10 C batteries in it)
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Aug 5, 2016 16:15
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Police Automaton posted:Love these non-games. I remember one for the C64 where you had to run a nuclear plant. No idea what it was called. Oh yeah I know all about what portable meant at those times - for a while I had the TRS-80 Model 4P, the "portable" all in one TRS-80 system. This thing is legit something you could carry around with you! You combine that with the fact it actually does have battery-run capability and this thing could be used completely unplugged from anything else for quite a decent amount of time, considering. I've been wondering, what exactly does everybody's old computer collection look like these days? I'll describe mine: First off, this Amstrad PPC 640 as I've been mentioning. After that, I have a Toshiba Satellite 335CDS laptop from the late 90s, which has a 266 MHz Pentium MMX CPU. It's had the original 32 MB of RAM upgraded to 96 MB of RAM (it's supposed to be expandable to 160 MB by placing a 128 MB module in, but for whatever reason it'll only recognize 64 MB of that), the original horrible 4 GB 2.5 inch IDE drive replaced with a 16 GB IDE SSD (which itself replaced a 16 GB CompactFlash in IDE adapter). As an actual aptop to use on its own it really sucks primarily because of the screen - it's a "Dual Scan" LCD at 800x600 and what that means is that the contrast ratio tops out at 40:1 in the best conditions and is more like 20:1 in others, plus it ghosts constantly. Most of the time though, it's hooked up to an external monitor so that doesn't really get in the way. The lithium battery though is surprisingly good for the time - with the SSD in and drawing a lot less power, it can still do a good 4 hours on battery. This mostly gets used for DOS and Win 3.1/9x games, especially if they don't need hardware 3D rendering. It'll comfortably handle 1024x768 at 16 bit color but has to drop down to 256 color for 1280x1024. It runs 98SE and has a dual USB 2.0 and a 10/100 ethernet PC Card both in. It also has botha standard 1.44 MB floppy drive and a 20X CD drive. Then, I recently got a hold of a Toshiba Satellite 2805-S202 from the early 2000s. This has a 700 MHz Pentium III, a 1024x768 active matrix LCD that's quite good, 256 MB of RAM installed, and still has the original 10 GB hard drive in (I'll get an IDE SSD for it at some point too). This also has both a 1.44 MB floppy drive and this time a 24X CD/8X DVD drive. Plus the S3 Savage/IX M7 does well enough for many games that want hardware 3D in conjunction with the P3 CPU. This one is significantly more comfortable to use portably, and also gets used for more intense Windows 9x games, as well as being used for some 3.x stuff and DOS stuff. It's also nice that it has 10/100 ethernet integrated. Finally I have a Thinkpad X61 Tablet from 2007. This has a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo, and I run 32 bit Windows 10 on it. Even though the intel integrated graphics aren't that great, it runs a lot of Win 9x games well that the other ones don't handle. It also is very nice for most Windows 3.x stuff! Of course DOS stuff is straight out of the question with it, but I find I end up using it the most for games that aren't too picky. Sadly I've had to sell off a lot of other stuff due to various moves around the country, like my Apple IIs and Commodores and the like. I make sure to keep my IBM compatible stufff though, especially since a lot of it matches up well to computers I had as a kid and teenager.
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Aug 5, 2016 18:42
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Police Automaton posted:
Nah the way it works is that there's 32 MB soldered to the motherboard and a single RAM slot for expansion. The 128 MB module is from 1998 as is the laptop itself - my first attempt at expansion was a 64 MB module from 2000 or so that wouldn't get recognized at all! The spec sheet for the laptop specifically states it's expandable to 160 MB, but I suspect there might be some defect in the manufacturing or something. Not a big deal, the 64 MB of it that does get recognized behaves stably.
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Aug 6, 2016 15:35
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Police Automaton posted:Very much doubt it, this halving or quartering is the classic memory density issue. I'm gonna make the general guess that it's an intel 430TX chipset notebook with the rather rare 266 Mhz "Tillamook" CPU you'd find in notebooks like that and many thin clients. If you're lucky you have a Yamaha 71x chip for sound which is awesome, if you're unlucky Crystal with farty FM-Synth. Depending on the original price of the notebook for graphics either a cheap C&T which you'd often also find in industrial applications (some implementations super blurry on VGA for some reason) or some flavor of S3 chip. That's the stuff they'd put in notebooks and the first thin clients. I have a thin client like that from IBM. The CPU has a lower core voltage than normal around that time and is a die shrink of the much more common P55C, allows for higher speeds and less power consumption but only OEM in such devices AFAIK, so kinda rare. It's the fastest MMX CPU there is (wikipedia lists a 300 Mhz version but I doubt that ever existed) and also at the same time consumes a lot less power than the much more common P55C 233 Mhz MMX. Yes, you can actually plug these into some desktop mainboards, but even if you can adjust the voltage to not fry the chip, usually you'll get problems with the BIOS not recognizing it properly. Wikipedia talks something about a module where it comes with the 430 TX chipset integrated but I've never seen that. I do have 266 Mhz Tillamook CPUs here though, IIRC they don't have any labeling, just a QR code, like the Celerons. The sound chipset is claimed to be Yamaha OPL3-SA3. the video chipset is a C&T 65555. I also didn't see any performance decrease with it having 96 MB of usable RAM versus the stock 32 MB, regardless of testing in Windows 98SE, in DOS booted off a floppy, or Windows 3.11 running on top of Windows 98SE DOS mode (a nice trick incidentally, it uses some program I found and results in a mostly FAT32-aware Windows 3.11 setup). Toshiba's spec sheet is here, incidentally: http://support.toshiba.com/support/staticContentDetail?contentId=638204&isFromTOCLink=false Edit: And this is what CPU-Z has to say: code:fishmech fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Aug 6, 2016 |
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Aug 6, 2016 18:46
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d0s posted:amiga OS is obscenely user-hostile but thankfully you never have to look at it if you just want to play games "But it's so ahead of it's time!!" I always find it funny that people are surprised Amigas never caught on.
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Aug 8, 2016 00:55
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By the time the first Atari ST rolled off the line, IBM and compatibles were already very solidly entrenched as business computers is the thing. There's no way around it, the only way to "win" the race to be the standard computer was to be open to clones. The best Atari (or for that matter, Commodore) could really have hoped for was to muscle out Apple to take the "second place by quite a lot over everyone else, but still way behind first" spot by the end of the 80s. It wouldn't have been impossible for Atari to take that space, they'd done pretty ok in the US 8 bit home computer era after all, but they just couldn't execute on the implementation, and didn't come around to really pushing the strength of their design (the music stuff) until far too late. d0s posted:Until Windows 95 the business world (outside of creative stuff which was solidly mac & a bit of amiga) had absolutely no use for GUIs, it was even considered a detriment because it marked it as a non-serious computer. They would have been fine with using a GUI, if GUIs of the time didn't also tend to be really quite slow and clunky due to the hardware in use.
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Aug 8, 2016 01:18
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d0s posted:and if they had about a decade and a half's worth of business applications to use with them as they did with DOS They only had about 3 or 4 years of DOS applications when the the Amiga/ST came out, and for many of them effectively 0 since they'd just started getting computers if they had any at all, so it wasn't nearly the sort of issue. It's just that the Amiga/ST didn't offer anything besides a GUI, and that GUI was a slow one due to the limitations.
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Aug 8, 2016 01:31
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Kthulhu5000 posted:Well yeah, the scenario I'm suggesting would basically have involved Atari doing a quantum leap beyond the state of the existing market in order to sell the ST as a business platform and LOL if that was ever going to happen. And pushing the music strength of the platform probably wouldn't have helped, not when the Amiga was making strides in the video market and had its own audio capabilities. Here's the thing: the Amiga's video prowess was entirely tied to mid-80s analog TV, in a time when it was already known that sort of thing was dying in two different ways: 1) Computer monitors of far higher resolution were quickly catching on. 2) Even though it was going to be years and years away, the planning and design of a digital high definition replacement for analog TV was already starting development in the mid 80s. Meanwhile the audio stuff with the ST wasn't under the same sort of fast impending obsolescence. And continuing to improve it wasn't subject to the same restrictions as trying to maintain compatibility with video output on the Amiga side was. So it was something that could have been built on with some luck, unlike the Amiga which was born on a dead-end path. You can easily add on better sampling support, plain old recording, and synthesis to the ST sound setup. Meanwhile getting the Amigas to display at a mere 1024x768 with 24 bit color was a hassle and a half, to say nothing of extending it past that point.
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Aug 8, 2016 01:50
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286 and low end 386 systems were still very common into like 1993 or so in business environments, and Windows 3.x ran pretty horribly on them. As a result, you wouldn't see Windows on a lot of them. The 386 wasn't out at all until late 1985 and was still pretty darn pricey for one that would be decent for Windows 3.x until 1988/1989. Here's a good way to see the way Windows caught on though:  Windows 3.0 sells in its first year more than double the amount that the 1.x and 2.x versions of Windows together had sold in 5 years. Windows 3.1 in just 3 months sells almost as much in 1992 as Windows 3.0 sold in a whole year. And then Windows 95 sells 10x as much in its first year as 3.0 had in its.
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Aug 8, 2016 02:11
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Gio posted:Comes with fluff, microscopic alien fleet, peril sensitive sunglasses, both demolition orders, and "Don't Panic" button. Box has some wear given its' age but everything else is in pristine condition. If that fetches for $50, that would be more than anticipated. I suggest buying an Apple II system just to test the disks. 
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Aug 17, 2016 16:44
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I'd rather have a machine like that at least have 95 installed, so that it's easy to move files onto it through Windows networking over ethernet, even if you use it in DOS mode most of the time. Also it probably needs to have the system drive defragmented if you're not going to replace the drive.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:56
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You might want to just install Windows 98 SE over it instead of keeping 95, especially if the specs aren't rock-bottom for 95 to begin with.
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Aug 23, 2016 22:08
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