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I keep finding the weirdest poo poo at my parents' house. Why do they have a drawer containing (among many other odd things) Windows 98 Developer Platform (discs 1 and 14 only), an MSDN-labeled copy of Windows XP, a Mac OS 9 install disc, and the games Dogz, Catz, and Oddballz? The developer stuff must've made its way home from my dad's office, but they've definitely moved since 1998. Someone boxed that poo poo up and took it on a moving truck so it could still be in a dresser in a spare bedroom almost twenty years later. The games were mine, of course. Before the Petz series became DS shovelware, it was a series of ugly games with animals made out of circles!  That's the original Dogz from 1995. You could pet them, throw a ball for them, teach them tricks, and paint them different colors. To a bunch of ten-year-old girls, this was absolute heaven, so my friends and I loooooved this poo poo. I think later versions let you breed them. I didn't like Catz as much, and Oddballz... well, I looked for a video of it to see how well I remembered it, and some people streaming it aptly described it as "some sort of absurdist torture sim."
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Jan 8, 2016 22:29
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Oh my god, that boot magazine has an exact ad for my first halfway decent PC! My dad bought it off some lady he worked with for super cheap, definitely no where close to the $3,149 it says in the ad, but it was still a pretty decent system at the time. My dad's work PC at the time was a Pentium 2 MMX, so this must have been around 1997-1998. My first PC was a compaq presario 486, so going from that to the P166 was pretty mindblowing at the time. That bitch was great, and I eventually threw in a voodoo 2, and I remember half-life and quake 2 going from barely cracking 20fps in 640X480 (maybe even less) on the stock matrox MGA to rocking a buttery smooth 60fps+ in 800X600 on the voodoo2. I had that thing forever, upgraded it to win98se, 64MB of ram, and had it until I built my own an Athlon 900 pc with a geforce 2, I can't even convey how much of an insane upgrade that was at the time, just pure 
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Jan 9, 2016 00:15
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slidebite posted:Literally have been using this joystick for almost 20 years, no joke. It's on top of my computer 2' away from me. I have a couple others as well (including a Thrustmaster Warthog) but I keep going back to it as my quick plug in and use joystick. It's actually pretty good and honest to god as close to indestructible as possible. I had one of these it was great. Microsoft made really good peripherals dunno if they still do
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Jan 9, 2016 00:18
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I know it's been said but the Microsoft Sidewinder pad  was the best controller since this, king of PC gamepads, the Gravis Gamepad 
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Jan 9, 2016 00:39
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Jan 9, 2016 00:50
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slidebite posted:I still have a few boxes of these top of the line 5.25" floppies for the really important stuff  There's probably an army or nuclear plant somewhere that is going to stop working if they don't get some new 5.25" floppy disks. Yeah I got one of those. Free Commander Keen (shareware episode) included! Turns out I don't really like gamepads. This means that even though I bought whichever Grand Theft Autos didn't come out for PC for my PlayStation 2 (Vice City Stories maybe? some other one?) I haven't played them. I just want to use a mouse and keyboard  Is it just me?
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Jan 9, 2016 00:55
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Buttcoin purse posted:I just want to use a mouse and keyboard No, there's a long line of weirdos that refuse to use a controller, even for games where they are the better choise, because reasons.
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Jan 9, 2016 01:19
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spending the early 2000s waiting for flash animations of stick figures wrestling to load, w/ papa roach as the soundtrack i played the poo poo out of rayman and shareware arcade games on one of these bastards, but it doesn't compare to...  you could set the analog stick to move only horizontal or vertical with that little switch. highly recommended for confusedly playing through the first tenth of Omikron.
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Jan 9, 2016 01:25
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Code Jockey posted:I know it's been said but the Microsoft Sidewinder pad I had one that I pretty much only used to play Road Rash 2. Now that I think of it, my wife at the time might have used to play some arcade games, too. I'm thinking of getting another one (or whatever the USB equivalent is) for those games I get on Steam and only realize after the fact that the game is really meant to played with a controller. Darksiders with keyboard and mouse is pretty bad, for instance.
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Jan 9, 2016 01:53
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quote:I had one that I pretty much only used to play Road Rash 2. Now that I think of it, my wife at the time might have used to play some arcade games, too. I have a dual analog stick Logitech that gets me by, but I sometimes have to use a 3rd party program to map keys. The xbox controller seems to be the easier option for most games.
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Jan 9, 2016 02:31
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Grandaddy to all cockbox controllers, moreso than the Dreamcast: Simpler times  
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Jan 9, 2016 03:00
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Ka0 posted:Simpler times The days when you didn't need a cooler on your video card, and CPU coolers looked like this:  (if they even had a fan!)
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Jan 9, 2016 03:41
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I had one that I pretty much only used to play Road Rash 2. Now that I think of it, my wife at the time might have used to play some arcade games, too. Made an excellent emulation controller for me back in the day, it had enough buttons to do SNES, which is all I cared about. Seconding the 360 controller for PC usage - it's great, lots of buttons, and "just works" with basically everything nowadays. I used to hate 360 controllers, they gave me hand cramps, and was a diehard Dualshock 3 fanboy, but I've grown used to it. Haven't tried the xbone controller on PC. e. How in the gently caress did those pass-through 3D cards work, anyway? The add on card did the 3D rendering, the other card did 2D?
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Jan 9, 2016 05:58
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Code Jockey posted:was the best controller since this, king of PC gamepads, the Gravis Gamepad This was the best when I got it because I finally could play NES, Gameboy, and Genesis emulators with it because they only need 4 buttons! I also played through all of Ultimate Doom with that fucker somehow. I later upgraded to a Gravis Gamepad... PRO:  My gameport white pad spontaneously died on me one day so I replaced it with the black USB version! ...which also eventually died.  Those controllers were the loving best. I guess the OG Gravis Gamepad was iconic enough to be the icon Wikipedia uses for its Video Games portal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Video_games LOVE LOVE SKELETON posted:i played the poo poo out of rayman and shareware arcade games on one of these bastards, but it doesn't compare to... I had one of these too! Could not get it to work worth a drat at all. I have no idea why.
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Jan 9, 2016 06:09
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Buttcoin purse posted:The days when you didn't need a cooler on your video card, and CPU coolers looked like this: My 486/DX 33Mhz didn't even have a heatsink.
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Jan 9, 2016 06:11
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Mak0rz posted:This was the best when I got it because I finally could play NES, Gameboy, and Genesis emulators with it because they only need 4 buttons! I also played through all of Ultimate Doom with that fucker somehow. I later upgraded to a Gravis Gamepad... PRO: I dunno if Gravis had some deal with Epic back then or if they were just that ubiquitous as far as gamepads went but I swear the documentation for like Jazz Jackrabbit and a few others specifically mentioned the Gamepad. e: I guess it was id not Epic since it came with shareware of Commander Keen e2: no wait I was right: quote:The GamePad also appears in the video game Jazz Jackrabbit as a power-up; it appears in the same game as an advertisement in the background, which reads "All kids love Gravis GamePad". The shareware demonstration version of the game noted that the Gravis Gamepad was the official gamepad of Jazz Jackrabbit. Also holy poo poo the Pro looks like a PSX controller. Did it come out before or after the PSX? Wonder how nobody made a stink about that.
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Jan 9, 2016 06:25
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Also holy poo poo the Pro looks like a PSX controller. Did it come out before or after the PSX? Wonder how nobody made a stink about that. I'm pretty sure the Playstation controller came first. There are countless "four face buttons, four shoulder buttons" controller designs like that one as far as I know.
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Jan 9, 2016 06:29
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I always thought the idea of screwing a stick into the cross pad was a cool idea, though I'm sure in practice it was garbage. Mind you this was a world before thumbsticks. A sad 2d world.
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Jan 9, 2016 06:31
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Mak0rz posted:I'm pretty sure the Playstation controller came first. There are countless "four face buttons, four shoulder buttons" controller designs like that one as far as I know. Yeah there are tons but I think the PSX controller really solidified the standard controller layout we have now. Look at like the Sidewinder or the Genesis controller - they were getting there, but nowadays all the Logitech and such gamepads look basically exactly like a PS2 controller.
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Jan 9, 2016 06:52
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Don't think I've seen this mentioned so far, the infamous Quake shareware CD. This sold for $10 shortly before Quake was released. The amazing thing about it, was that it contained full versions of every id software game made to that point, including Quake, that you could purchase and unlock via a phone activation system. Needless to say it was cracked almost immediately. I was lucky enough to have a copy, and kept it with the crack on a 1.44 floppy tucked into the sleeve.
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Jan 9, 2016 20:51
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the case to the full version looked a lot like that iirc it was paper/cardstock of some sort and opened up to reveal the plastic cd holder instead of a standard jewel case
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Jan 9, 2016 21:08
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Oh here is a crazy ID thing; so right when Doom 2 got announced the PC world went pretty much Doom crazy - you could go into a bookstore and find multiple unauthorized Doom walkthroughs. My dad got one for me randomly. In the back of it, it included an interview with Carmack, who was spouting off ideas about his next game, that would be fully polygonal. That game became Quake, but the interview also featured reference to technologies that didn't hit until MUCH later; rag-doll physics, full physics engines, lighting and shadow, dynamic deformation.... All of this in a book released a few months after Doom 2.
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Jan 9, 2016 21:26
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I absolutely hated having to do any kind of service on those goddamn things. Not only are they are a pain in the rear end to take apart, it seems like a good portion of the interior structure is composed of razor blades. No model of computer was more consistent about literally making me bleed while working on them. Sorry, this was pages ago, but were you the same goon who posted in a similar thread about repairing the old iMacs? How you had to make sure to discharge the CRT before you could get at something as simple as the motherboard? It kind of blew my mind when I read it. I mean, its so obvious when you think about it just looking at the old iMac, but the fact that the stupid thing could kill you was pretty amazing.
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Jan 9, 2016 22:00
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Snuffman posted:Sorry, this was pages ago, but were you the same goon who posted in a similar thread about repairing the old iMacs? I almost killed myself disassembling an old Mac monitor in my 5th grade classroom. I didn't know about capacitors yet so I figured if it's unplugged, it's safe. Luckily I was poking around with a piece of wire instead of my fingers... The rest of the class was watching a movie so it was dark in the room, at least until the fucker arced. Scared the hell out of me, and of the teacher who probably saw visions of her imminent firing. Luckily nothing ever came from it except my lasting respect for high voltages.
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Jan 9, 2016 22:19
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Totally unrelated Mp3 player chat, also from pages ago... I remember in 1st year University, all I wanted was a Diamond Rio:  Man...32MB, though? That wasn't enough! It HAD to be better than my CD player (with skip protection...LOL). Finally settled on this bad boy:  MiniDiscs. They were going to be the FUTURE. Through some sort of compression recording magic, I could fit 1 1/2 hours of music on the thing. Of course, this was just before they made miniDisc players that could actually plug in to your PC for easy drag and drop. No no, I had to plug the audio out from my soundcard to my minidisc player, queue up 1 1/2 hours of music in winamp and record...for one and a half hours. Also had to make sure ICQ was off so I didn't get and random "uh-ohs" in my music. It was pretty slick, the player intellegently inserted track breaks when it had dead audio for longer than 2-3 seconds, so I just had winamp insert a pause after each track. The compression could go higher but the sound quality suffered, being the post-Napster-AudioGalaxy-Kazza era no one cared about sound quality. My classmates marveled at how cool the minidisc player was. I had so much music! it was SO small! The discs looked SO cool (they still do!  ) Then iPods came out a few years later, high capasity mp3 players took the world by storm and miniDisc was dead. I gave my miniDisc player to my sister (I got an iPod4  ) and she gave it to a homeless person, apparently. Don't worry, she gave him my miniDisc music collection of VGRemix's, Default, Moxy Früvous, Nickelback and Great Big Sea. A fate truely worse than being homeless. Snuffman has a new favorite as of 22:47 on Jan 9, 2016 |
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Jan 9, 2016 22:45
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Snuffman posted:Sorry, this was pages ago, but were you the same goon who posted in a similar thread about repairing the old iMacs? I worked at a recycling place refurbishing computers, and worked on literally dozens and dozens of old CRT iMacs, but other than them being a minor pain in the rear end to disassemble I didn't have to do anything particularly special with them. With practice it got to the point I could tear down and reassemble a jelly iMac in just a few minutes, and it mostly just required being careful. The eMacs were much worse to work on, but at least there were fewer of them. The iLamps were the worst, though. I did post about my beloved widescreen Sony CRT monitor at some point in the recent past, and the fact I decided to not try to repair it after reading horror stories not just about electrical discharge but about a faulty repair turning the CRT into a stealth X-ray weapon. Perhaps that is what you are remembering?
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Jan 9, 2016 23:56
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i bought quake 3 and arena as a pack at a best buy in the early 2000s, was great for playing ctf against bots while watching reruns on my 20 year old CRT TV.
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Jan 10, 2016 00:12
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saw a CD copy of Quake 1 at Goodwill today, made me think of u thread
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Jan 10, 2016 00:14
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also, i bought UT2004 on steam the other week. i'm still using the same "performance mousepad" i bought for playing it over ten years ago.
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Jan 10, 2016 00:14
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Holy poo poo Macworld Boston. It was by the wharf, I remember being there and somehow acquiring a press pass goddamn I'm old
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Jan 10, 2016 00:59
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Buttcoin purse posted:How about things you attach to parallel ports? I remember back in 1998 I had just inherited a 120 MHz Pentium system from my dad's office and I wanted to get into the burgeoning CD piracy field. The guy at the computer store convinced me to get a SCSI internal 4x burner and a SCSI controller card. It cost me and my brother both our life savings at that point, about $500! Plus the blank CDs... oh god it was painful. But on the plus side it meant fewer coasters AND I could plug in a SCSI Zip drive and external HD! In retrospect I had no business opening up a PC and fiddling around but somehow I managed to figure it out. My brother and I both worked at a record store so we always had a ready supply of music to copy. In fact we really didn't take advantage of that enough. I vividly remember when I was working the cash, some kid would walk in, buy a few CDs and a blank tape (later, CDRs) and then ask "What's your return policy". (Full cash refund with receipt) It dawned on me how hosed we were as a retail enterprise.
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Jan 10, 2016 01:36
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No browser tabs.
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Jan 10, 2016 01:58
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Your Dead Gay Son posted:No browser tabs. I remember running shareware ad-driven Opera, partly because it was the first browser to do tabs.
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Jan 10, 2016 02:11
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I used Maxthon/MyIE until other browsers got tabs.
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Jan 10, 2016 02:16
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Buying keyboard templates for games at shops, and they didn't really fit your keyboard properly unless you had a genuine IBM Model M keyboard: 
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Jan 10, 2016 03:16
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Remember those radiation shields people used to put on CRT monitors? I didn't, either, until I came across this picture in a terrible real estate listing for a disgusting house: Bonus speakers-on-monitor getup. Looks like someone used a digital camera manufactured around the same time as that beige beauty. It's a current listing, up for 180+ days--can't imagine why.
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Jan 10, 2016 09:04
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you were warned posted:Remember those radiation shields people used to put on CRT monitors? I didn't, either, until I came across this picture in a terrible real estate listing for a disgusting house: Do you live in eastern Europe?
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Jan 10, 2016 09:33
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It's not that the walls are beige, they are absolutely brown. Decades upon decades of tobacco will do this to your walls and computer - the worst thing about this aren't the filthy walls and everything, it's the smell (notice how the "white" wood paneling has unevenly turned yellow, this place hadn't been scrubbed down in 15+ years)
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Jan 10, 2016 10:01
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GAY 4 ORGANS
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maybe it's the result of CRT radiation, hence the shields.
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Jan 10, 2016 10:03
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you were warned posted:Remember those radiation shields people used to put on CRT monitors? I didn't, either, until I came across this picture in a terrible real estate listing for a disgusting house: y'ever look at a photo and know exactly what it smells like?
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Jan 10, 2016 10:11
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