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I recall the P5 Glove appearing around the early 00's. I have no idea what the VR headset is but it's a fantastic image regardless. There were a chance few games that supported this, such as Black & White and Hitman 2, and it eventually fizzled out as a novelty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoKD-R1zlpw The video kind of shows how sluggish the thing was to use.
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# ? Jun 4, 2013 06:35 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 04:37 |
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I picked one of those up for 25 dollars after they were discontinued. It has absolutely lousy positional and directional accuracy, so forget using it as a mouse or video game controller. The finger bend sensors were surprisingly accurate, though.
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# ? Jun 4, 2013 06:48 |
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WebDog posted:I recall the P5 Glove appearing around the early 00's. It appears that all of the zombies in Left 4 Dead are actually humans using the P5 Glove.
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# ? Jun 4, 2013 16:39 |
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TommorowComesToday posted:The Microsoft Sidewinder Dual-Strike Hey now, that thing got me through many tough lan fights in Heavy Gear 2.
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# ? Jun 4, 2013 18:56 |
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My god, is the center a ball-and-socket joint? I must say, I find that rather... perverse. EDIT: Alright, I guess it isn't strictly a ball-and-socket joint. But it effectively works like one, and you use it as a joystick. That is loving insane. Also this instructional video apparently came with the thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5K5_ZLbM-I Monkey Fracas has a new favorite as of 19:22 on Jun 4, 2013 |
# ? Jun 4, 2013 19:15 |
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That is so painfully 90s.
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# ? Jun 4, 2013 19:35 |
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Oh more Microsoft's Sidewinder product line was great for it's promotional videos for it's convoluted solutions to game controlers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JjCbx2Yo8Y I think with the Game Voice everyone had to have one for it to actually work. Also it was kind of redundant as at the time everyone was using Roger Wilco, which did roughly the same thing but didn't require hardware. As for voice commands, here's Bridge Commander being commanded by a robot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edKqfrvtIqI Or try the Strategic Commander, a macro controller that was supposed to work alongside your mouse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooB7K6HThlc
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# ? Jun 5, 2013 03:34 |
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I have a Strategic Commander, it's kinda cool. If you were into a specific game and took the time to program it and get used to it, it could indeed be quite useful. Mostly the buttons, the moving controls are a little funky feeling. I probably could be used for non-game programs as well, not really sure.
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# ? Jun 6, 2013 06:08 |
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I used to use the Strategic Commander for DotA back in the day. It's really good for that because you could macro all your characters abilities and items in the time before DotA had the whole standard QWER setup like it does now. You could probably still use it for modern DotA and League of Legends but I don't know if they still support using the arrow keys to move the map which is what made it useful for RTS and MOBA games.
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# ? Jun 6, 2013 06:30 |
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WebDog posted:I recall the P5 Glove appearing around the early 00's. I had this! I used it exactly once, it was cool to move the mouse with my hand and click on things by tapping my finger for about ten seconds. Your movement was limited by the range of the big purple tower you had to keep opposite your hand. Cant go too far out the line of sight. I do still have the copy of Hitman 2 it came with though! (I got them on the tail end and it was cheaper to buy that than the game by itself)
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 00:24 |
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I saw this Akai tape deck on craigslist, and thought of this thread. http://jonesboro.craigslist.org/ele/3853946951.html It certainly looks fancy enough.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 06:08 |
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TommorowComesToday posted:Alright so I was searching my memory for old stuff I used to have, and I remembered some hilariously terrible computer peripherals: Don't you badmouth the V-Pick. When I was allowed to play Quest For Fame on my father's 486, I was thrilled. I still remember it fondly, and it's aggrivating that I can't get it to run on my computers these days. And the fact that I can't connect the V-Pick to my computer anymore. I had 3 of them, since I hit them so hard against the tube I was using when playing that I broke the first two after a month of playing. I can still strum Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" with my eyes closed and without hearing the music. So many fond memories. You get out of the garage and into your first bar and this grizzly biker dude comes up to the scene and says "Play Steppenwolf" and you have to play without the helping soundwaves (or whatever they were called). I loved this game so much, and I still think it's better than Guitar Hero / Rock Band / Rock Smith. But then again, I've always had a huge boner for everything Aerosmith.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 14:49 |
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The TV tuner for Sega Game Gear which I paid almost $100 for. Even standing on the roof of my parent's house it couldn't pick up anything that remotely appeared to be a signal and we didn't live in a rural area. It was extremely disappointing. [modedit: don't leech images] (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 15:13 |
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Dragon's Lair is pretty much seen as a quantum leap in video game history. Despite being little more than a well animated quick time event it pretty much set the tone for the FMV genre that in 1983 was still a decade away. So RDI Video Systems decided to work out how to bring this thrilling form to the home console. The result was the Halcyon. Starting out as a prototype of a cassette player that synched pictures to audio it's concept was driven forward by the developments (and earnings) from Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. For a time in development it featured an older form of videodisc, the Capacitance Electronic Disc. This was basically a vinyl record that played back video and stored in a caddy. But like vinyl it degraded from physical wear. It switched over to using a laserdisc after the CED proved to be a dismal failure. It also boasted speech recognition and a computer voice that spoke back. The issue was the hardware at the time struggled to keep up when processing commands in games, the video would have to pause to keep up. But a $2500 price tag and the expenses of developing a system in the dark days of the console bubble doomed RDI. Following behind was HASBRO's never released Control-Vision a.k.a Nemo. Created in 1985 it used VHS in an attempt to create a video playback game - pre-empting the multimedia boom of the 90's. It's flagship projects were Night Trap and Sewer Shark. After being scrapped the developer held onto the rights and eventually released them for the Sega CD. Fright Night almost did debut in 1987 on VHS on another console called the Action Max that relied on you to have a VHS player. Of course the limitation of VHS was pretty dire and the games were little more than a linear light gun shooter that kept in synch with the receiver suctioned onto your screen. You either fired at the right time or "missed".
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 16:50 |
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Speaking of linear light gun games: This thing allowed you to (sort of) interact with a show on TV. Shooting at certain flickering patterns would increase your score, while other patterns would cause damage, eventually causing the cockpit to eject and scare the poo poo out of your cat. Once VHS degradation rendered the show unplayable, you could still use the accessories to play the stupidest looking game of laser tag in history.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 17:10 |
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Totally Reasonable posted:Speaking of linear light gun games: I had an army playset that was sort of like that. It had a bunch of really cheap sound and light sensors that would let you play along with a VHS by launching missiles when the bad guy on the tape sent jets to your base and stuff like that. Usually it didn't work at all right, and you could set off the sensors by turning on a light or talking near it. No idea what it was called.
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# ? Jun 8, 2013 02:19 |
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My parents bought one of these on clearance at Toys R Us when I was a kid, the Victormaxx Stuntmaster. You hooked it up to your Super Nintendo and all of a sudden you were in the world of Uniracers! Or at least, you had a little TV directly in front of your eyes that you played Uniracers on. It was extremely heavy for kids and only really worked for any length of time if you laid on your back while you used it. It didn't really live up to the "VIRTUAL REALITY" hype the box built up but it was neat enough to lay around and play Super Mario without any distractions.
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# ? Jun 11, 2013 04:56 |
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Greggy posted:
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# ? Jun 11, 2013 05:01 |
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Totally Reasonable posted:Speaking of linear light gun games: Captain Power was awesome. The toys not only worked with the VHS tapes, but also the TV show! Let me tell you, it was better than having Mortimer the pen for Picture Pages by a huge margin.
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# ? Jun 11, 2013 05:05 |
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TommorowComesToday posted:Alright so I was searching my memory for old stuff I used to have, and I remembered some hilariously terrible computer peripherals:
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# ? Jun 11, 2013 05:15 |
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And...? I'm assuming you empty-quoted by accident.
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# ? Jun 13, 2013 12:24 |
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I'm pretty sure the last two lines (the link and "full size guitar controller...") are supposed to be outside the [/quote].
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# ? Jun 13, 2013 14:29 |
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Greggy posted:
The Angry Nerd guy did a video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy373DpKGAE Neither of them can actually use it for more than a few seconds without getting a headache.
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# ? Jun 14, 2013 06:18 |
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The_Franz posted:The Angry Nerd guy did a video on it. Huh, that's weird, I played Super Nintendo on mine all the time. It was definitely one of those things where what they were trying to do was just a little too advanced for what was possible or cost-effective at the time.
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# ? Jun 14, 2013 07:02 |
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I found this TV when we moved a few years back. It is branded KTV but I can't find any information on that manufacturer, I suspect it was for a news van. It has AV and 2 wire UHF connectors and is in color, it was manufactured in 1986 and seems to have instructions for repair inside of it (Lots of service technician warnings as well). It also has some weird 4 pin 12v connector I've never seen in addition to a standard power connector. Used it for a couple years for watching tv/older consoles during trips. Still works other than the sound dial being touchy. Autoexec.bat has a new favorite as of 02:01 on Jun 15, 2013 |
# ? Jun 15, 2013 01:48 |
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Johnny Aztec posted:I saw this Akai tape deck on craigslist, and thought of this thread. http://jonesboro.craigslist.org/ele/3853946951.html My dad has that exact model still. I've been trying to talk him out of it. He still has reels of Alan Watts lectures that he would record off of LA radio back in the 70s.
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# ? Jun 15, 2013 02:00 |
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Familiar Foreigner posted:Still works other than the sound dial being touchy. Try spraying some electrical contact cleaner into the volume pot and work it in there. That stuff is a miracle.
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# ? Jun 15, 2013 02:03 |
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I'll give that a try, thanks, would be nice to have it working properly again.
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# ? Jun 15, 2013 03:59 |
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I'm pretty sure KTV was a generic brand used by some dealerships. There is a TV made by them in my friends Chevy Van 20 that was installed by the dealership whenever the previous owner bought the car sometime in the mid 80's.
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# ? Jun 15, 2013 09:26 |
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Greggy posted:
The orthodontist in my town had one of these, you could play SNES while getting your braces worked on.
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# ? Jun 15, 2013 14:59 |
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Stuporstar posted:Too many boring-rear end phones, not enough strange post-90s technology. This is from way far as hell back, but they still have an original installed at the Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill, NC. It's the same one they used to train the all the NASA astronauts to recognize constellations and poo poo. I took my sister a couple of years ago and it was cool as gently caress. "Wikipedia posted:First opened in 1949, the planetarium was used to train Gemini and Apollo program astronauts in celestial navigation.[2] Until the late 1990s, it contained one of the largest working Copernican orreries in the world. So yeah if you ever have the chance to go and are into this kind of stuff, I highly recommend it. Edit: woops, reading on it looks like they removed in 2011. That's a shame. Sheep has a new favorite as of 15:55 on Jun 15, 2013 |
# ? Jun 15, 2013 15:44 |
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Way back when in 95, my first computer was one of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-RyvZxKufo The IBM PC XT. It was built like (and weighed as much as) a tank. It rocked an 8088 processor at a blinding fast 4.77 megahertz. It "fell off the back of a truck" at my mom's work, after they upgraded to a 286 WITH MATH COPROCESSOR" for accounts payable/receivable. My XT was PIMP (as we said back in the 90's). It had the full 640k of RAM, a clock card, a CGI graphics card, and a 20MB full-height hard drive in addition to the half-height double-sided double-density 5 1/4 inch floppy drive (360k per disk!). I can still remember the sounds it made when you started it up - first it would roar like a loving jet engine as the case fan and hard drive spun up, then it would check the 640k of RAM in 16k increments so slowly you could watch it count through on the screen, 16k at a time. Then the disk drive would grind, then the hard drive would start loading PC-DOS - but this hard drive would beep in two different tones, for some reason. It was always the same pattern of beeps, too. I wonder if it had something to do with the specific sectors/tracks that DOS was stored on on the hard disk. One day, after reading a PC World article about the importance of backups, I calculated it would take 52 floppies to back up my XT's hard drive. I ended up just backing up the important stuff - like Quattro Pro and Professional Write, and the files I made in those programs. My XT played games! In 4 colors! I had Reader Rabbit and DuckTales. I had Rescue Rangers and Mario Teaches Typing, too, but they didn't run right. We had long since lost the feelies for DuckTales that would let us get past the anti-piracy check, so me and my brother would have to just guess at the secret code for Scrooge's vault until we finally made it in. And once we did, the program was so slow it was kind of like playing a TAS! But my XT also had a virus! The green caterpillar virus, to be exact. This was a memory-resident file virus that would interrupt your work by showing a green caterpillar made of ASCII graphics on screen exactly two months after infection. But since the battery on my XT's clock card had long since died, my XT always thought it was January 2, 1980, so the virus never triggered. Whoops! I would run Norton Antivirus over and over, but since I didn't understand what "memory resident virus infecting command.com" meant, it never went away.* On my 13th birthday, my dad passed down to me his Packard Bell Pentium running Windows 3.11 (FOR WORKGROUPS). That was the end of my XT. I transferred all my files off of it via serial cable, but kept it around for a while out of nostalgia. One day my mom threw it away while I was visiting my grandma. RIP, my XT. You were da bomb diggety (as we said in the 90's). * Later on, in junior high, I stuck a 3 1/2" disk with a file I'd transferred off the XT into the CNC machine control computer in my school's industrial tech lab. I never got to see if it activated, but my brother claimed that when he was in the CNC module 2 years later, one day there was a little green squiggle crawling across the screen when he was doing his work, and the teacher just told him it happened sometimes and to reboot until it went away. In retrospect it was a dick move, but it was hilarious to me at the time.
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 02:46 |
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SyHopeful posted:My dad has that exact model still. I've been trying to talk him out of it. If you want to buy it, I'll see about shipping it to you. Hah, probably take a freight truck.
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 03:29 |
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The green caterpillar virus sounds like the best virus ever
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 03:45 |
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A Pinball Wizard posted:My XT was PIMP (as we said back in the 90's). It had the full 640k of RAM, a clock card, a CGI graphics card, and a 20MB full-height hard drive in addition to the half-height double-sided double-density 5 1/4 inch floppy drive (360k per disk!). I can still remember the sounds it made when you started it up - first it would roar like a loving jet engine as the case fan and hard drive spun up, then it would check the 640k of RAM in 16k increments so slowly you could watch it count through on the screen, 16k at a time. Then the disk drive would grind, then the hard drive would start loading PC-DOS - but this hard drive would beep in two different tones, for some reason. It was always the same pattern of beeps, too. I wonder if it had something to do with the specific sectors/tracks that DOS was stored on on the hard disk. You've been using PCs for 20 years and you still don't know what a POST is?
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 09:51 |
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Code Jockey posted:The green caterpillar virus sounds like the best virus ever I love non malicious early viruses, they were so obviously some guy coding something silly for shits.
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 12:43 |
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Shugojin posted:I love non malicious early viruses, they were so obviously some guy coding something silly for shits. It may have been a urban legend, but my mom spent 30 years at IBM and said the coke virus, which thanked you for being a loyal customer and popped open the CD drive for a cup holder, caused their IT department so much trouble.
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 15:37 |
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Jedit posted:You've been using PCs for 20 years and you still don't know what a POST is? I never said anything about the POST except it counted the memory really slowly. The beeping I'm talking about literally came from the hard drive anytime it was accessed.
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 15:41 |
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A Pinball Wizard posted:I never said anything about the POST except it counted the memory really slowly. The beeping I'm talking about literally came from the hard drive anytime it was accessed. Like an actual beep from a speaker or just a motor noise that sounded like a beep?
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 15:43 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 04:37 |
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I have very distinct memories of it being an actual beep, but apparently it was just the sound old MFM hard drives made, because it sounded almost exactly like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYEkC7FBXa4 Hey, I was 10 at the time vv
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 16:26 |