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Dec 20, 2015 01:33
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If you are affiliated with any government, anti-piracy group or any other related group, or were formally a worker of one you CANNOT enter this web site, cannot access any of its files and you cannot view any of the HTML files. If you enter this site you are not agreeing to these terms and you are violating code 431.322.12 of the Internet Privacy Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1995 and that means that you CANNOT threaten our ISP(s) or any person(s) or company storing these files, and cannot prosecute any person(s) affiliated with this page which includes family, friends or individuals who run or enter this web site.
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Dec 20, 2015 02:49
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:1.3 fo life I got the kickstart upgrade with my harddisk controller&harddisk. I think according for inflation and currency change it was about 600 bucks maybe for those. Man, this poo poo was expensive. Especially considering it was obsolete 2 years later.
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Dec 20, 2015 20:17
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:my parents got the A500+ literally a day before commodore announced the A600 I got the A2000 '87 because the salesman was *very* insistent of it being more future-proof because of the expansion slots. The time the A500+/A600 were around, that ship has already sunk for Commodore. I remember getting the A1200 years later, going "Oh." and exchanging it for a 486.
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Dec 21, 2015 02:17
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Return Of JimmyJars posted:Man I used to love reading poo poo like this. Thanks for the memories. http://www.textfiles.com knock yourself out.
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Dec 21, 2015 19:39
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Mad Monk posted:Good lord I forgot all about that nightmare. I used to teach old people how to use computers and a couple of them had this thing. Yes. Did you know that every one of the little people was unique to the disk you got because every disk was unique? That was very neat for that time but still something that's funnily basically unknown, probably because it was pirated to hell and back. quote:Actually, we thought it would be nice to get some of this confirmed, so we contacted David Crane, designer of the game and programmer for the Commodore 64 version, and he was kind enough to give us the info we needed. His mail follows. The entire Article: http://www.softpres.org/?id=article:game:little_computer_people A bit of old hardware porn because, why not:     It's an MPEG-decoder card. You gotta know that computers at that time did not have the capabilities by far to decode something like movies in any sensible way, especially not Amigas. This card worked by hooking it up directly to a TV. The manual was like "Imagine... watching Terminator 2, on your Amiga!". It does work pretty well for VCDs and the like. I've seen such stuff only many years later for PCs. It even had digital out for sound. Very high-end and crazy expensive for it's time.   These are pictures of a rather rare, early german Amiga 2000 Mainboard. They didn't end up being used for the Amiga 2000 as Commodore deemed them too expensive and went with a different cost reduced solution. It still works, I just had all the ICs out because I was cleaning the Mainboard. While the Amiga 2000s that were sold in big numbers more in common with the A500, this Board has a lot more in common with the A1000.    This is one of the few Amiga graphics cards which were made. Contrary to the PCs, the Amiga had a graphics chipset solution, which was far ahead of it's time at the beginning but later on was seriously obsolete and outpaced by VGA. There were never graphics chips for the Zorro bus, so this card has actually a PC-Chip below the heatsink, a Tseng Labs ET4000W32. Tseng Labs was a very popular manufacturer of graphics chips in the early 90s, but later fell behind when the 3D accelerators started cropping up. They ended up being aquired by ATI. All the little chips you see there below the graphics chips are programmable logic, emulating a PCI bus for the chip to communicate with the "Zorro"-Bus of the Amiga. I ended up getting ahold of the Designer of this card as I had a problem with mine. He's a very nice guy and even gave me the schematics.   Another card for the Amiga, cirrus logic chipset. Very common in the PC World.  An OpalVision sort of an primitive 24 bit color Framebuffer. With hardware expansions, it was supposed to become the Video Toaster killer but the expansions never materialized. Still has a pretty nifty 24-bit true color paint program tho! (the older Amigas are normally limited to 32 colors in normal color modes) This card costed several thousand dollars at release. The Program looks like this:   It could also do 24-bit animations which were basically like truecolor-.GIFs which was very cool at that time.   Commodore had this weird thing where they would name their Keyboard-Amigas after B-52 songs. This is a system not many of you will know from my home country, a KC-85/3. It was produced in eastern germany (VEB Mikroelektronik "Wilhelm Pieck" Mühlhausen/Kombinat Mikroelektronik Erfurt) before the wall came down.      The eastern bloc had it's own convention regarding markings, but they all roughly translate into western things. They were always behind in semiconductor designs. There were a lot of deals made with west germany but also a lot of stealing and reverse engineering. The CPU you see in the picture, "VB880" was an unlicensed and in east germany developed (through a lot of reverse engineering of course) clone of the Zilog Z-80, which you'd find in the ZX Spectrum for example. The soviet version of the chip is the КР1858ВМ1, which in turn is an exact clone of the U880. Even though the original idea was to get these computers as items for private usage (east germany being THE model socialist state and all) they were mostly distributed to schools, government facilities and the like and computers were very hard to come by for the average citizen until the end of the GDR and the available software was not very interesting, to say the least. That in turn made C64s and the like acquired by west german relatives or acquaintances a very sought-after item. You could also purchase them in so-called Intershops. It was very difficult to get software for western-made computers in east germany as every kind of data storage device (floppies, cassettes etc.) was basically forbidden to import and could land you in very hot waters.  Still works! Not exactly old internet relics but maybe interesting to some.
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Jan 12, 2016 18:50
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The Kins posted:They look and sound great, but gameplay was typically pretty spotty, especially since the most widely-supported controller on the platform was a one-button joystick. (Hope you like pressing "up" to jump!) Most of the big name fun games were eventually ported to the PC or consoles. I had an huge issue with controllers for the longest time because I was used to the joysticks. Then I got used to the controllers and now I have an huge issue with the joysticks.  It's possible to connect a controller to an Amiga.Mak0rz posted:Being a gamer from the Amiga era must have really been something. A lot of the games I see look fantastic and have pretty amazing soundtracks for the era. They were pretty fantastic but I'd say only a handful aged well. It's easy to sit down in 2016 and be bored by many of the games but back then they were great and they were also some serious eyecandy, which yes, also back then was sometimes the only reason to really play something. I guess this never really changed, there are a lot of games still nowadays which basically only have the graphics and overall composition going for them, while the gameplay is pretty meh. What's kinda annoying and sad is that all these "retro-style pixel art games" usually just use these words as code for bad graphics, while the style they claim to copy never really existed that way.  This is from Defender of the Crown on the Amiga, a 1986 game. This picture has only 30 different colors. The amiga is interesting because it has a pretty different hardware architecture from the IBM clones. It's not really much about the CPU which already back when the Amiga released was nothing *that* special (Motorola 68000@7 Mhz, a '79-Design which had mostly a great price-to-performance ratio going for it, roughly comparable to your average 286 in performance) it's mostly about the pretty advanced chipset which was quite capable for it's time and quite accessible to programmers which could pull off neat tricks with it with some serious low-level programming while basically completly bypassing the OS. This also had a lot of downsides later on but that's a whole different story. Also:  This is my alltime favorite game and I still play it nowadays sometimes. It's Airhockey. (Yes, I know they made a remake. No, I don't really care)  Also liked this one a lot. 1990. It was an isometric strategy/action game where you'd command a fleet of spaceships against an opposing fleet of spaceships of an alien race which would turn suns into black holes for energy. Game was lost if Earth's sun was turned into a black hole. Not only did it have a working model of gravity affecting the ships and covering things like inertia, but the ship you were controlling (you could switch between all ships in your fleet which would work on AI or your orders if you didn't control them) also had four programmable drones you could program with kind of a drag-and-drop programming language. Even though it has quite a few problems and maybe isn't even all that what you would consider playable with modern tastes, the scope was positively vast and it's complexity really drew me in at the time. There was also Midwinter, a game I think it's wikipedia page explains quite well, as there was also Balance of Power. So no, it wasn't really all Jump 'n Runs, there were quite a few creative gems. Enos Cabell posted:GVP A530 expansion for the A500. Added a fast 40 processor, 8mb ram upgrade, 3.5" scsi HD bay, and an optional 286PC emulator card (which I never got). It literally made the stock Amiga 500 about 10x faster. Still kicking myself that I sold the whole setup back in the 90s. I got an Blizzard 2060 68060 Accelerator Card for very cheap when this whole retro thing wasn't as in as it now is and I'm laughing all the way to the bank. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 20:53 on Jan 15, 2016 |
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Jan 15, 2016 20:50
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Ayn Randi posted:I hosed more than one amiga 500 mouse playing defender of the crown. From memory there's a repeating sword duel sequence when you capture a castle that basically amounts to click as fast as you can and the left button didn't hold up under prolonged abuse you destroyed a genuine commodore tankmouse? I didn't know such a thing was possible. I still have the mouse I got '87 with my 2000 and it still works. Went through a lot of joysticks though. Until I figured out how easy they are to repair, that is. The problem with creative cards is that their support for this wasn't what you'd consider 100% compatible, at least under DOS, so the games either had to do their sound support with AWE32 cards in mind, just General Midi compatibility wasn't enough. Creative was very popular with it's soundcards and the joke is that they often were poo poo in many ways, especially the drivers. They just got where they were because they got there first and through aggressive business tactics. They did not have the superior product and would shave off pennies wherever they could, even if it'd inhibit functionality. (So you could say, they went to Commodore business school, they just were better at it) The whole AWE32, it's countless revisions and it's bugs and oversights were a prime example for this. There were a lot of soundcards that did a lot of things better and were cheaper to boot, but people simply didn't know about them. Remember, it was the time before the internet was a huge and completely common household thing and information for the average user was pretty sparse and relied on a magazine or two and hearsay. Edit: deleted a few "often"s, wtf Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 11:03 on Jan 18, 2016 |
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Jan 18, 2016 10:55
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stealie72 posted:12 year old me spent so much time on that game. I loved the questions to "prove" you were over 18 at the beginning. Joke about the questions is that I bet there are many people who're "old enough" now who'd fail at answering them.
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Jan 20, 2016 13:57
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TotalLossBrain posted:Yes, for a short time CD drive speed was a limiting factor in those flv/avi heavy games of the mid-late 90's. WC3, WC4, Privateer 2 all had loads of live-action video. I remember how trippy and weird Privateer 2 was. Also John Hurt. For a time it almost looked like that's it, that's what videogames are going to be like, weird movie/game like things. Thank god it was just a fad because video game designers got mad with money and storage capacity. I remember upgrading from 4 to 8 MB of RAM of my then-obsolete 486 to meet the minimum requirements to run WC3. Could only play at low-res because that was all the CPU could pull off. Loading missions would take minutes. Still, when it ran it ran and I at least found it quite enjoyable, yes, even the videos. One of the few games I bothered finishing. (I do that very rarely) For people confused why the CD-drive speed would play such a big role: Affordable run-of-the-mill harddrives around that time were at 300 to 500 to 800 MB capacity (depending on which exact year we were talking) so at best could barely fit one CD with no room to spare, so all the data had to come directly from CD. Video compression also wasn't as advanced as it is now and usually came with a big price ether in terms of CPU-Load or Quality or size of the video, usually all three. Video cards also still were mostly dumb frame buffers which would have no acceleration support for such things, that happened much later. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 17:54 on Jan 20, 2016 |
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Jan 20, 2016 17:49
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What I absolutely hated was Rebel Assault. People were falling over each other to get CD-Drives just to play that game, then it was just a dumb shooting gallery with very, very cheap acting in-between. But hey it was Star Wars and the franchise hasn't been ruined at that point.
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Jan 20, 2016 18:05
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Casimir Radon posted:
I loved that game, even though it was torn up in some gaming magazines back then. (You know, when ~gaming journalism~ had still a shred of decency. It was not impossible for games to get genuinely bad reviews when they were bad and it was also not impossible that different magazines had different opinions! Imagine that.) The Amiga soundtrack is especially good, even better than the other ones IMHO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOFf79OhAIw Gonzo the Eggman posted:
That's a likeness of Kyle MacLachlan, from the David Lynch Version of Dune where the game's trippyness came from. LOVE LOVE SKELETON posted:actually, has any boutique electronic company colored their products "stained plastic yellow", to remind me of hand me down game consoles? The yellowing in many cases is actually a chemical reaction happening with the fire retardant they used to put into some of the plastics. It's interestingly enough fully reversible with a peroxide solution and UV-Light and things get their original color back. But plastic != plastic and the mileage varies wildly. Some plastics can become brittle, often the yellow eventually comes back. Not worth the effort IMHO. I have some IBM Model M Keyboards (and one 122 key Terminal keyboard) from the 80s and they're still pearly white. It does not happen with all plastics from that era. The 6581 SID of the older C64s (the sound chip) is an interesting piece of hardware because as especially the early revisions had very wild manufacturing tolerances, pretty much ensuring that no two SIDs sound alike playing the same music. The later in years (and revisions) you get, the less this is an effect. These ICs are very fragile and break very often, especially the early ones. (Commdore/MOS Semiconductor Group also had problems with the manufacturing process. You gotta understand, mass manufacturing of computers at this scale was simply not done before) A friend with the appropriate equipment once carefully drilled a SID out to measure the temperature closest to the die of the chip and if I recall correctly in a closed up C64 it was well past 90 degrees celsius in operation. (194F) That chip is usually uncooled, some board revisions have a piece of metal as heatsink attached to the chip but there seems to be no system in if Commodore did this or not. The latest revision of SID doesn't get as hot as it is a different manufacturing process (HMOS-II).
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Jan 22, 2016 12:34
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Buttcoin purse posted:So was it that no game developer wanted to invest the huge amount of time required to make their game look like that on top of the time they were already spending on development, or that they didn't want to make things even less portable back in an era when they were trying to release to half a dozen different platforms? Demos like this are made with an intimate knowledge of the hardware and applying every trick in the book possible and need a lot of experience, sometimes experience that wasn't around because the platforms were not that old. They also often rely on knowledge and technologies that only became common when the platforms were obsolete and are sometimes actually quite modern. Also the code usually is very tightly knit to produce exactly what you see, not more, not less. There is very little flexibility and leeway and it takes lots and lots of time. The approach to demos is not exactly the same approach you'd take to more traditional pieces of software you'd also like to maintain and expand somewhat long-term. Developing and especially debugging also was a bitch on many of these old systems, because of their constrained resources. Emulation makes these development steps also A LOT easier, and this cannot be overstated. I don't think many of the very neat things you see in modern Demos you'd ever see without emulation on modern hardware making things so much easier for developers. That being said, in a lot of old games there's already a lot of trickery going on to achieve what you get, especially with platforms like the C64 and Amiga where there was a lot of knowledge about the inner workings of the system and you as developer could be sure that they're all essentially the same. (Which wasn't always the case and sometimes led to problems) Programming back then was a job I'd call a lot more challenging in some aspects as it is now, or at least you needed a lot more intimate knowledge about your platform to be a good programmer. That this knowledge is lacking sometimes you can see in some software products today. You can get away with a lot more inefficiency at least. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 02:18 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 02:08
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Melmac posted:Wouldn't a flash drive or even mechanical hard drive stored away somewhere be more reliable than even those gold CD-Rs though? This is a complicated topic and the question is "for how long?". The problem is that technology keeps advancing and if you stow a data storage device away now, and if the past is any indication - chances are that in the future, future computers won't have a fitting interface for it or won't be able to interpret the data, even if the device still works. It's already now quite complicated to get data off of floppies and harddrives from some systems and onto a modern computer, and that wasn't even that long ago. There are also things like the M-Disc but the same basic problems remain. If you want to save data for future generations to read, write it on paper. Or update the storage medium occasionally. Flash isn't all that long-term reliable though. How everything relies now on relatively volatile data storage, there's a serious chance that in about a hundred years from now, outside of a select few datapoints which were properly archived, there won't be much stuff from our time surviving into the future.
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Jan 24, 2016 12:59
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To be fair though, compilers have come a long way regarding optimization. Also the inefficiency simply often doesn't matter anymore and cutting down on development time (=cost) and ease of maintenance is far more important. an AOL chatroom posted:Backing things up on hard drives is usually a pretty bad idea, actually. Drives fail under normal use around 2-3 years, and as drive manufacturers find new and creative ways of jamming more storage into the same footprint, they get increasingly sensitive. Powering down the drive and putting it into storage keeps the head from potentially doing any damage to the platters, but now you've got the issue of the ball bearings drying out and seizing. Yes, that's what I meant with "properly archived", I do not think that outside of these select few things there will be a lot of records that will survive our time for exactly these reasons, as contrary to inane conversations people had via postcard in the late 19th and early 20th century. You can go to every flea-market in my country and buy boxes full of that stuff for a few bucks just because there is so many of it around. At the same time, I'm pretty sure this forum post here will be gone in 2116. That's where my paper comment comes from. For the average Joe and his backup sensibilities though it's easiest to just have enough redundancy and update your storage mediums with the technology available at the time occasionally. You gotta remember that most people don't bother to make backups at all. I once had a tape drive for my first PC where I religiously made backups being happy I could move away from floppies and the storage capacity was unbeatable (800 MB it was?!) which was almost more important, eventually and with technical progress, I just gave up. I just don't have data THAT important to justify the inconvenience. Probably still have a few tapes flying around somewhere. It's kind of a pity I threw the case&the streamer drive away a few years ago (especially considering the small fortune that drive cost but those where the days before eBay) I would've liked to put that computer back together like it was and I really liked the sound the tapedrive made.  Still have my needle-printer tho.Dr.Caligari posted:Would those demos have even been possible to make back then? Would you need some modern technology to get the demos to that point? They would've been possible to make as they do exist and run on these machines, so of course. If anyone actually would've pulled it off is the question and I'd wager a guess and say for a lot of stuff, no. Demos aren't exactly a new thing, there are lots of old demos around. Just compare them to "modern" ones in complexity and quality and you'll see that the people and experience "grew" with years. Modern accessibility and information exchange made this a lot easier than it once was. A lot of stuff just would've been really unfeasible to make without modern tools. EDIT: Funny sidenote about harddrive decay, I once resurrected an old SCSI-drive and saved the data by opening it up and removing the rubber-rest thing the head rested on when the drive was turned off, the rubber turned to a sticky gunk over the years and the head got stuck. Was enough to save the data, wouldn't recommend with modern drives for aforementioned reasons, these older drives are a bit more robust. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 16:28 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 16:06
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The_Franz posted:Ahahahahaha I tried to keep this thread as un-technical as possible and you should, too. These slapfights are already non-entertaining in SHSC and lead nowhere there either. Mak0rz posted:Yeah I realize that but I don't know... It just doesn't seem as impressive to me. It's because the resources just aren't as limited and the programming on these things is downright cushy compared to the old one. Bet it takes away some of the magic already saying that people use modern tools like emulators to make these demos. Anyone remember this horrible game? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6Sb1kKqmvA So many prescribed aspirins. So many dead patients. The blood just keeps coming!
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Jan 24, 2016 18:10
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Holy poo poo that site is up: http://heavensgate.com/ For people who don't know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_%28religious_group%29 EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC0tqZfMv34 Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 23:45 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 23:41
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Germstore posted:I wonder why there's an AT&T chip on it. Probably a Microcontroller. Lots of companies in all sorts of IC business back then, AMD for example did all kinds of stuff (especially programmable logic) not only CPUs. I have a big SCSI server drive from around that time, it's a bit like that just two drive units high and pretty heavy. Still works (wouldn't expect any less to be honest) but incredibly loud, sounds like a chainsaw. Harddrives really started to get a lot more quiet with the introduction of dynamic fluid bearings, but that happened a bit later. It's also a possible failure point. From personal experience (and completely anecdotal evidence I have nothing to back up with) in private usage scenarios though, harddrives on average seem to have gotten a bit more reliable, not less. It is true that the platter density is higher now and but the mechanical and electrical aspects have improved also a lot, even though they might not be as robust against adverse operating conditions anymore (they will not see in normal home operation anyways, except perhaps excessive heat). I think also pretty much every manufacturer had a series of harddrives now that were very prone to failure because of some problem with the very design or manufacturing of the unit and this gets affected people that got burned and lost lots of data to swear up and down "I will never buy anything from this company again", but there's little point to that. Just make backups and don't rely too much on one single harddrive to carry all the data you don't want to lose. Even if you're computer illiterate and/or don't have a lot of money, just get some redundancy in that your stuff isn't all in one place. The chances that you have several data storage devices falling out of the blue and you lose all your data is a lot smaller than if you put all your eggs into one basket. I'm talking regular backups and not data archival for 10+ years here of course. Funnily enough it takes people usually one catastrophic loss of data to learn that lesson. I've got a non-technical friend who swears up and down that he's got RAID 1 and does not need backups.
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Jan 25, 2016 19:43
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I had two of the death stars, I only heard about that design error after the first one failed. Didn't wait for the second one to fail. (They're one of many good examples why RAID 1 isn't backup even if you discount software failures. Imagine having two of them in a RAID 1 array) I have a WD Green which I used for about 4, maybe 5 years. Just recently mothballed it because I just didn't need it anymore. That's why all of this outside of something like the death star is anecdotal at best.
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Jan 26, 2016 12:50
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Anybody played Starfleet II: Krellan Commander?    and the intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsTlnQ5WnWM (this was played via PC-Beeper and I didn't find any other version of the intro music, it sounds pretty wrong and doesn't do the PC-Speaker I had justice to be honest, a classical piece and it sounded quite nice) It was a game mostly played in ASCII, but with a few graphic screens if you were to be so lucky as to have an EGA Card at least. You played basically a TOS-Era Klingon commanding a battleship, had to finish mission objectives (which got balls-hard towards the end) but could do all sort of neat things from space battle, to boarding ships, to enslaving/torturing/executing/interrogating people. You could also build bases, send away teams, infiltrate, invade (which was almost a game in itself) and bombard planets of varying technological level (starting from stone age) and allegiance. This game didn't become a classic because it was delivered in a very sorry and unfinished state, or so I heard. I don't know about that, I played the patched version. It also has a manual which is several hundred pages and a must-read to really get what's even going on in the game. The first game in the series had you in the role of the humans and was also pretty good if not that detailed, there also was kind of an successor called Star Legions which focused on the invasion part exclusively and apparently was what the invasion part was supposed to be but couldn't because of lack of time.
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Jan 27, 2016 00:59
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Shufflepuck has the best intro score on the Amiga. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9XKtcPiO7U (I have the feeling there's something off about the music, but that was the best version I could find) EDIT: Also forgot all about this little gem in the related videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiYuq6Ac3a0 (One of the commenters puts it best: R.I.P. Jools) EDIT2: Kill all enemy Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 19:02 on Feb 1, 2016 |
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Feb 1, 2016 18:54
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The best thing I did back then was connecting my Amiga to some cheap off-brand stereo (with cassette deck!) I could afford. Blew my mind away. (as been said, 20-some years ago) I think the worst disappointment with giving up on the Amiga and moving to the PC was how lovely game music was on the PC. It was bearable though because there were games actually.
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Feb 1, 2016 19:23
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The_Franz posted:What is it with Russians/soviets and that dingy green color? It as though it was one of the only colors the people's paint factories were allowed to produce because everything east of the iron curtain was at least partially painted that color. Even today, if you watch a tour of the ISS it's extremely obvious when you cross into the Russian section because it's that same drab green. Robotron was east german. They did a lot of the reverse engineering of western stuff, and as a satellite state of course, whatever they had the soviets had also. The ZX Spectrum was so popular to clone in the eastern bloc because it's a machine you can really build out of off-the-shelf parts rather cheaply, contrary to other home computers like the C64 which rely heavily on advanced (for that time) custom ICs specifically developed for their feature sets. Not really a lot of innovation here. The eastern bloc was always behind in IT. Robotron also did their own developments though, and had quite adventurous deals with the west due to their unique position with west germany and contacts within west german industry especially where they also managed to get a lot of their machinery and tooling and even somewhat of a supply of western technology. Around the second half of the 80s where the technology race started to get heated, of course their economy was in a dysmal state as it was with all the eastern bloc countries shortly before it all fell apart. They did deliver results (which over there, wasn't a given) and did have quite a bit of know-how though for what they had to work with, although not results comparable to western technology.
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Feb 2, 2016 21:28
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I love beige.
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Feb 3, 2016 03:57
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Same with SCSI really, you can hook up "modern" SCA server drives to '90s SCSI Controllers and they'll work. The SCSI standard has backwards compatibility as one of it's bullet points, even if there are (or rather were) some harddrives which didn't quite stick to that. SCSI was also a lot of fun to set up, you couldn't have cables too long or too short, you had to have them properly terminated, even the way you would lay them around the case could cause crosstalk happening, all good fun, especially the faster the controllers became. If you were especially unlucky you could end up with data becoming corrupted *sometimes*. Always fun to track down. Even if IDE was indeed a bit more haphazard in theory more than often it did just work. (and never underestimate the value of that) It also was cheaper because it was simpler. SCSI still was where it's really at for a very long time. Thank god we don't need to rely on this sort of parallel wiring to get our 1s and 0s fast from A to B anymore. If you have cables catching on fire the most simple explanation is that the cables were damaged. Especially ribbon cables can thin out and break if they are bent too harshly, then that little spot where the copper wiring is thinned out or broken will get hot if it has to transfer too much current. If the variables are right the resistance will climb more and more and eventually it'll just get hot enough to melt the mantle/catch on fire. Happens more often than one should think. If the wires are thin enough, you do not need a lot of Watts to get 'em glowing. Sometimes the mainboard power jacks where you'd plug the power supply in internally will also have oxdized or will have chemically reacted with the metal in the power supply plugs, creating a layer on the contacts that ups electrical resistance. This also causes lots of energy being turned into heat at the plug and can also start a fire or at least instability of the old machine because of the voltage dropping too much. Cleaning is a good idea.
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Feb 3, 2016 15:53
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Tarkus posted:This thread has inspired me to collect a huge array of emulators and ROMs/Disks the last few days. That said, I Remember when I first got our first Matrox G400 video card, the tech demo that came with it made me think that nothing could ever get better with graphics. God I was such a Matrox fanboy. They were smart in knowing when they were defeated and pulling out/focusing on what they did well, probably the only reason they're around anymore. Although I think their latest cards all use AMD stuff. I still have a Parhelia  and my recent K6 III I put together to play older games has a G400.Because of how SCSI also was an actual, proper bus you also could have several SCSI controllers on the same bus which meant you could share drives between devices. Of course you couldn't write to them at the same time without causing a mess, but you know, it had it's uses. That is, when the controller let you change the ID, some *insisted* on being 7. I have some video hardware for the Amiga lying around which would capture analog video, digitize it and directly raw stream it to connected SCSI drives without going over the system bus as that would've been prohibitive with the 3,5 MB/s Zorro II had. This was incredibly advanced stuff and costed thousands, you needed fast drives for that. Every USB Stick for ten bucks nowdays is faster. How time flies. I used 4DOS extensively. I also dragged my feet on Win95 for a while. EDIT: Just remembered the huge-rear end manual for 4DOS. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 21:38 on Feb 3, 2016 |
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Feb 3, 2016 21:15
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Yeah, voodoo around that time was pretty much dead. The biggest problem with Matrox was bad drivers, even though they still kept patching them for years and they're actually in a usable state now for these old games. The true way to go already was nvidia, I guess just like it is now. They were very expensive cards though, a GeForce 3 would be around 400 ( EDIT: I think more like 499) bucks. Again, I guess just like now. Then there was ATI. Tseng Labs ended up being acquired by ATI. For gaming purposes with VGA ISA the choice of card for gaming didn't really matter though so you didn't miss out much. Usually either the bus or the CPU was the limiting factor long before something like the graphics card came into play. There wasn't any acceleration as we know it now anyways (outside of very primitive blitter operations in GUIs like Win 3.1) the CPU did everything. The only real factor was resolution, picture quality and color depth. With cheap graphics cards limited to 256 colors and lovely RAMDACs and the more expensive ones being able to do more at higher resolutions, but again this did not really matter for most if not pretty much all games. That being said, Western Digital also did excellent graphics chipsets, funnily it's basically unknown now that they did. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 22:51 on Feb 3, 2016 |
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Feb 3, 2016 22:44
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Mak0rz posted:Voodoo peaked and was still pretty strong at the 3 3000, which was available at the same time as the Matrix G400. 3dfx took a pretty hard nosedive after that, though. Might as well, I don't remember. Everything happened so fast in these few years, it was crazy. This was also around the time intel and AMD made a run at the first 1 Ghz CPU. Intel played quite dirty.
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Feb 3, 2016 23:35
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Regarding soundcards, this card from my home country of germany was where it's at: The EWS64XL, it had the excellent crystal codec (with not-so-excellent FM-Snythesis but you can't have 'em all) and the french DREAM synthesizer chip for midi. You could expand it with memory and load your soundfonts directly into the RAM of the card and make it sound however you wanted, there were quite a few soundfonts for it. I think it went up to 64 MB or so, so plenty of space. Sounds great. It was a lot like the AWE cards in that regard, with the difference that this actually worked like you would suppose it to do and the Dream chip was 100% General Midi compatible without weird driver kludge like the creative cards, even in DOS. You could also edit in reverb and chorus effects etc. via the crystal chip. It was a bit difficult to set up but sounded great if it was set up correctly. EWS is short for the german "Eierlegende WollmilchSau" which is kind of an Idom and describes a fabled creature that produces eggs, milk, wool and ham, so basically everything you need in one place. I swear to god everything worked better than creative cards, even cheap-rear end no-name soundcards with often great and commonly known codecs. I mean they were there first but that didn't save a lot of other companies in the computer world either. How they constantly dominated the market with their crap so absolutely is beyond me.
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Feb 3, 2016 23:59
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I'd say piracy nowadays is easier than it ever was. Back then with no internet we had to get our pirated software off of friends, coworkers, relatives... including all the viruses you could fit on these disks. Granted, back then these would only make the computer act weird or delete a disk, not send your bank account credentials to chinese/russian mobsters.
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Feb 5, 2016 00:59
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Yes we're all mature adults now. We can even afford all the virtual hats, super mario beercoasters and pretend spaceships we want.TotalLossBrain posted:I caught "Yankee Doodle Dandee" off some pirated game in ~1994. It coerced the PC speaker to play the song, something like once an hour. My dad was 'very concerned' about this virus. There was one dude on youtube who obsessively had all kinds of videos of viruses and their effects and function. It was quite entertaining but I can't find it for the life of me. If you sometimes trawl through old disks or download some image of some old game from the internet you'll still find the occasional virus, far more common than one should think. It's always good to have a virus scanner for that (an old one of course, the new ones know nothing about these, why should they)
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Feb 5, 2016 01:22
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woodch posted:Back in the heyday of my Apple II days, the way I and most pirates operated was by actually mailing a printed list of what you had to someone. You usually got their addresses from Computist magazine or something similar in their personals section. They'd send back a package of blank disks, your list with checkmarks next to the stuff they wanted, and THEIR list. You'd copy and label stuff for them, send back their disks, a bunch of blanks, and THEIR list check marked. Rinse and repeat til you had ALL THE GAMES. I didn't even use a modem til I got my first IBM compatible many years later. Amazingly, I never got burned--Always got my disks back and they always worked. Here in germany we had a rather infamous lawyer (named Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth) posing as a teenage girl (often named Tanya) looking for people to swap games with in magazine classifieds now and then. The entire thing was a trap he could earn money with because he exploited a certain ugliness of how german law works. (Abmahnung - in short and for example, parties just observing a criminal act can hire a lawyer, have sort of something like an C&D letter sent and demand being reinbruised to cover the fees. A lawyer though doesn't need a client to do this and can basically earn money by finding people breaking the law and sending letters telling them to cut it out - I'm not a lawyer and can't explain it better either, it is a bit more complicated than that) This caused the police to show up at doorsteps with search warrants, not too unusual now but then in a time where people didn't really consider piracy a crime quite shocking to many. He made a lot of money doing this and sticking parents of teenagers with huge bills, guy was an absolute sleaze but also quite charismatic in a pedantic kind of way. He had a certain love/hate relationship with the local cracker scene and one particular group, and would even show up to scene parties as sort of invited celebrity. A few years ago he bit off a bit more than he could chew when his practices finally caught up with him and he was supposed to go to jail for fraud. He ended up killing himself after sending several goodbye-letters, even to several people inside the cracking scene from back then.
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Feb 5, 2016 02:11
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TotalLossBrain posted:I didn't realize he'd killed himself. Yeah, dude tried to auction off the domain of a german newspaper (TAZ) after having it seized for the TAZ allegedly not paying for one of his "Abmahn"-letters which wasn't even true and which he knew wasn't true. He first got six months, appealed, and then managed to get Edit: Found the virus channel! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqbkm47qBxDj-P3lI9voIAw (and this is not advertising, I don't know the guy and I'm certainly not the guy either, I don't speak english that well) Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 03:55 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 03:35
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max4me posted:wait there are guns in germany? Yes you just aren't allowed to carry them around on you for no reason
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Feb 5, 2016 04:01
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Keith Atherton posted:My first boss and a coworker designed all the Win 3.1 icons. They are also responsible for the desktop themes including the infamous Hot Dog Stand. Did they sometimes remarked things like "Hitler was alright, I guess."? Just trying to understand. Thanks for your stories, they're an interesting read. A bunch of 20-somethings setting industry standards that would affect the entire world afterwards is actually less unusual than one should think. The pioneering days were crazy.
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Feb 6, 2016 16:19
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TotalLossBrain posted:The platform jumping was bullshit and so were the stupid puddles you'd drown in (basically any surface of water, no matter how small, would insta-kill you if stepped on). The best thing was jumping, not landing perfectly where you're supposed to land which would cause the avatar to bounce around like a rubber ball over the entire area and then usually drop into some water&die. The world was quite creatively designed IIRC and I liked that but man the game was bullshit otherwise. Ultima 7/Serpent Isle was where it's at. Ultima 7 at it's time felt immersive with all the NPCs doing their business and so many items you could interact with even if it often was in a meaningless way.
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Feb 7, 2016 11:33
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Didn't IPS Panels have problems with ghosting? At any rate it's a lot more prudent to just have your OS turn off the screen anyways, for the power savings and also to go easy on your screen's backlight.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:47
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I miss good games pay 30$ and wait three years for this indie retro sandbox survival platformer rpg to be finished (maybe) (no refunds) EDIT: Also subscribe to our youtube channel
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Feb 9, 2016 03:31
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:at least thats an option, and some good games have come out of it. It's really nice that a lot of that stuff is coming out to PS4 and stuff as well. It's a decent time to be a gamer, imo. Yeah that's true. Well, I guess I just wish people were less stupid with their money then. Also this whole marketing and social media crap from the small-time developers like they were some sort of huge media entity. Just make the godamn game dude. If it's good people will probably play it. I'd be embarrassed to release what some people consider worth paying for. I was really hoping the whole indie game thing would take off and deliver the delightfully weird and unique games I've seen so many of in the late 80s and the early 90s. Instead they rip each other off endlessly ad infinitum. That's quite of a bummer, too. There are a few pearls tho, that's true also. I feel it's such a whole different crowd nowadays than back then.
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Feb 9, 2016 03:58
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Shaquin posted:No offense man but this is because you are a grandpa gamer if that timeline is accurate. You are old and the games are not targeted at you. Could be, could also be that I don't remember the sheer amount of crap that was out back then also. Who knows.
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Feb 9, 2016 04:05
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