computer that only 90s kids will understand

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > computer that only 90s kids will understand

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

is there anything modern windows does which win95 couldn�t, but is also worthwhile?

nothing meets both criteria

# ¿ Mar 2, 2019 02:56

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 13:10

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

Broken Machine posted:

render modern stuff acceptably fast?

that�s for everything to do with hardware advances, other than the os allowing access to hardware that wasn�t conceived of when 95 was released, there�s nothing newer windows brings to the picture

# ¿ Mar 2, 2019 05:52

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

i love it when computer nerds have these fights of pedantry it makes me feel alive

# ¿ Mar 2, 2019 20:35

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

a legit from-the-wild computer virus

# ¿ Mar 3, 2019 23:39

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

# ¿ Mar 5, 2019 01:50

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

idspispopd

# ¿ Mar 5, 2019 02:56

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

game spy

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 04:48

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

and lol download managers

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 04:48

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

Jerry Cotton posted:

commodore computer
atari computer
hey guys what's the difference between an ibm and a pc??!?!? computer user

my amiga had decent graphics etc compared to pc of the time but god i got shat on for how often it crashes and also dis(c/k) swapping

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 18:18

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

and god commodore hosed up by making the floppy drive the low density version so almost any floppy a pc owner handed to me fail to work because i couldn�t read high density 3.5� like i swear that was the reason we aren�t all in amiga land today

also lol �cross dos� i used it to emulate a pc and play blues brothers game and it was frame per minute slow

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 18:20

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

akadajet posted:

irfanview

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 18:52

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 18:54

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

can someone help me learn : prince of persia on amiga had some extreme kind of copy protection where the disk had to be copied using the most hardcore mode which was mega slow

why? and what was that?

is it something to do with perhaps it didn�t just use the normal accessible sectors but did something different with the error checking bits that wasn�t standard?

like, a disk chunk might say it holds 8kb for example but the reality is that there are like 9kb actual bits per chunk, but if you say write to the disk bits directly (as was possible on my amiga, used it to change the messages in the cracktros) you only have access to the 8kb of data, because the extra bits are hardware controlled error checking bits.. (as far as end user is concerned they don�t even exist) but theoretically you could access them if bypassing the driver and accessing the hardware directly? hmm 🤷‍♂️

what was kinda cool about amiga and relates to people with their autoexec scripts was that often games weren�t formatted to amigados and from my understanding it was that the game basically disowned the operating system the moment it could and just ran itself in a mostly os-free environment. the ROM was always there I guess but i believe as a programmer you were basically free to release core parts of the OS out of memory

was stuff like old playstation etc like this too?

perhaps this comes from my understanding from how modern operating systems work, do modern operating systems hand over to a program or does every program give say a single instruction to the OS and the OS determines if it�s a safe and appropriate instruction and then only executes it on its terms?

and why isn�t task manager in windows operating at highest priority

echinopsis fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Mar 6, 2019

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 19:02

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

gently caress that�s cool and interesting. a little bit above my head but it�s fuckin� cool, and such different �issues� compared to modern games. thanks for that

controlling the hardware directly is so badass.

how much efficiency could modern games get if they could do that? (disregarding the whole every hardware is different thing)

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 20:55

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

Zlodo posted:

in themselves, the extra software layers between the game and the hardware aren't adding that much overhead

what can add a lot of overhead is when the api that interfaces the driver with the game works too differently from the actual hardware. for instance before dx12 / vulkan, 3d drivers had to do a lot of magic behind the scenes because the way the api works is too divorced from the way the hardware works

if it was possible to program the hardware directly then it would imply that we know exactly what hardware we'd be running on, and that's really the real reason why it could be more efficient (not avoiding the extra software layers like driver and os, but rather knowing in which type of graphic card memory to put which resource and when, how the caches work, that kind of things). but in most games there is probably a lot more to be gained by doing more work on optimizing the game itself anyway (and that is rarely pushed to the limits because of production / time to market constraints)

in the amiga days the hardware was still small enough that there was really a clear advantage in getting rid of the cpu and memory overhead of the os (when you had only 512kb of memory and no mmu to remap memory pages around, it made sense to avoid using a general purpose memory allocator where fragmentation would waste a lot of memory), and the hardware was simple enough to program that people could do it themselves

awesome

i remember i had a program from one of those public domain things that would just fragment memory until the system was unusable lmao

one of my first programs I wrote that accessed the file system was basically this

code:

START:
makedir �folder�
cd folder
goto START

LMAO fill up the whole disk

what a revelation it was when i got a hard drive lmao

what was the difference between chip and fast ram again? my a500 had 512 chip and 512 fast, my a1200 had 2mb chip :smugmrgw:

i love computers

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 23:08

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

thankyou!! the blitter stuff was cool. reminds me of �unpacking�

# ¿ Mar 7, 2019 00:23

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

lol

# ¿ Mar 7, 2019 20:11

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

having a 386 with beck-loser.wav as the windows error sound, and taking about three minutes to load it

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 00:20

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

flakeloaf posted:

hold on i'll look that up in my Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, with bonus CD-ROM: The Animals

encarta

# ¿ Mar 13, 2019 17:25

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

~Coxy posted:

I kinda miss going to LANs and in the quiet period in the early AM just browsing and leeching people music collections

still have a couple of mis-labelled MP3s from that time period

im surprised given the way you smell that you have to miss it at all :pram:

# ¿ Mar 16, 2019 01:40

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

early 3d dates so god drat poorly. i can't ever imagine games made in the future to look 3d retro like pixel art is now.. its tragic

the first gran turismo game is abysmal. mario on the other hand is fine

# ¿ Mar 16, 2019 09:01

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

OldAlias posted:

early 3d can be charming but there�s lots of warts (pop out, jittering and rotating low res textures, view fog, tanky controls etc) but it was fuckin rad at the time

for sure

i will be surprised if games in the future going for a retro look try to replicate early 3d rather than 2d pixel art

they�ll probably do modern 3d with pixel art textures :manning:

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 00:11

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

it looks terrible how modern pixel art will do things like arbitrary rotations and ignore the (large and imaginary) pixel grid

Zlodo posted:

the biggest problem when reproducing the constraints of old 3d hardware is that you then have to work at minimizing the many artifacts that it causes (like lack of perspective correct texturing or no z buffer at all), because they're what you are after, but not too much, and games from those eras did all they could to minimize them

for 3d its easier to just do clean looking cartoonish 3d art than to emulate bad 3d from old hardware

when i was doing rod rocket i just realised that no textures looked miles better than poo poo textures so embraced the clean lines of vector 3d but modern 3d poo poo like bloom etc

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 00:50

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

shaking my dick?

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 17:38

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 13:10

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

oh god you guys are totally reminding me : remember cd-rom?

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 20:04

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > computer that only 90s kids will understand