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Ein cooler Typ posted:I've got this monstrosity too drat it felt cool being the only kid with the full 'Aircraft Carrier Config' as we called it. Then we played some games and it was lovely and not worth the hype. Especially the games that required both 32x and SegaCD
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 14:27 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:33 |
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Melmac posted:Honestly I don't think I've ever had a hard drive die in my 20+ years of computing. Same here. I remember one drive starting to fail so I moved all the content over to a spare. Another reason that those huge towers came in handy. I still have Zip disks that load up and never failed.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 15:02 |
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Bonzo posted:Same here. I remember one drive starting to fail so I moved all the content over to a spare. Another reason that those huge towers came in handy. I had a goober in my department come up to me and asked if I had a zip drive he could test a disk on, he's been to every drive he could find but none would open the disk. He killed all our drives with the click of death.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 16:11 |
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Bonzo posted:I still have Zip disks that load up and never failed. I never had one fail either, but I always made a point of keeping them in those plastic cases. I've only had two hard drives fail while still in active use. One was defective from the start and caused read errors two days out of the box and the other was in a 286 that my dad used for running Quickbooks until 2002 or so. It lasted over a decade in an environment that was dirty, humid and had extreme temperature swings, so I'd say that was a pretty good run. Humphreys posted:drat it felt cool being the only kid with the full 'Aircraft Carrier Config' as we called it. Then we played some games and it was lovely and not worth the hype. Especially the games that required both 32x and SegaCD Sure it was huge, expensive and needed somewhere to plug in those three huge AC adapters, but you could play Night Trap with slightly
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:04 |
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Ein cooler Typ posted:I've got this monstrosity too God drat man dust and organize your game station. Just the shelves, though. I realize it's futile to try keeping a Sega Genesis/32x/CD combo's cable situation under control. Edit: I was always jealous of anyone that had the old grey Zapper. I was stuck with the safety orange model Mak0rz has a new favorite as of 17:16 on Jan 25, 2016 |
# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:13 |
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I had an external zip 100 drive in college, but only one computer lab had zip drives installed so I had to carry around the disks and the drive. Still didn't have to use 1.44 disks like a filthy pleb.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:41 |
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Here's my contribution to hard drive failure chat. Sometime around the turn of the century, I picked up a Quantum Bigfoot drive. I knew about their reputation as being very prone to sudden death, but hey, it was cheap, it was enormous (20 gigs!), and I wasn't planning to use it for anything important, just as a place to dump files and media that I hoovered up from people at LAN parties. At the ones I went to, most of us had a publicly-shared folder full of . The easiest strategy was just to grab anything that looked remotely interesting, then go through it all later and figure out what was worth keeping. Saved you precious gaming time during the party, but it took a lot of "scratch space". This was hardly mission-critical, so I figured when the Bigfoot inevitably died on me, I wouldn't be too broken up. It never died. It soldiered on even as higher-quality drives in the same machine bit the dust. I eventually took the Bigfoot out of service because the enormous 20 gigs stopped being enormous. I've kept that drive around in my pile o' parts (it's easy to spot, it's the only 5.25" hard drive I've ever had), and every few years I dig out a PATA adapter, plug it in, and see if ol' Bigfoot is still alive. It is. That beast will outlive us all.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:49 |
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That is a big fuckin hard drive
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 18:35 |
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I wonder why there's an AT&T chip on it.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 18:39 |
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Any mid-nineties Mac gamers around here? ah marathon, made by a (at the time) relatively unknown game company called bungie
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:23 |
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Never played Marathon. Played Myth: The Fallen Lords poorly.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:26 |
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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 lost my collection of PCGAMER mags going from Apr 1997-sometime in 2003? But I still have every single demo disc from that period. I think the apr 1997 one had the Curse of Monkey Island on the cover, and the demo disc had Monkey Island 1 & 2, which you could call Lucasarts and give them your CC over the phone to get an activation code. It took a while to convince my parents to go for it, but once I showed my mom CoMI she loved the humor and was all for me playing them. Anyone remember the insane little stories they had on the last page of each PCGAMER, at the very bottom right? They were a few sentences each, and one "storyline" would span months IIRC. When people would write to PCGAMER, they'd deny there was text there and show an "example" that had nothing there, saying that reader must have been crazy. If I can find an old issue I'll scan it, 'cos it was definitely pretty weird.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:48 |
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Police Automaton posted: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. Totally agree, but gently caress Seagate.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:49 |
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Is there an affordablish option on tape drives if I decide to lose my mind?
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:59 |
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Feedback Agency posted:When I was a kid my dad used to pirate PSX games off Usenet for me to play. I remember him getting pissed that I didn't like Small Soldiers (probably because he spent so much loving time downloading a whole CD's worth of data.) Man I hated the gently caress out of the sequel. utter garbage. The thing I liked was you were fighting in space in those dopey as hell spacewalk suits. In comes the sequel where the designers forgot the cold war poo poo stuff worked great. gently caress the storyline. Also the tanks were easily the closest to feeling that I was in full control of its movement at high speeds. In recognition of your awesomeness I found this link recently. Someone has a copy of battlezone 1 online updated to work on modern machines with no graphics bullshit and networking games actually is very drat easy without having to use heat online. http://www.battlezone1.com/ Btw remember the game browser/server wars? That was until every single multiplayer game need to be hosted on official servers beyond your control.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 20:00 |
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Wouldn't tape drives need to be stored in ideal conditions or something. Not that
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 20:21 |
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EVIR Gibson posted:Man I hated the gently caress out of the sequel. utter garbage. The thing I liked was you were fighting in space in those dopey as hell spacewalk suits. In comes the sequel where the designers forgot the cold war poo poo stuff worked great. gently caress the storyline. gamespy only recently gave up and died, the leader of said server browser war
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 20:54 |
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Your Dead Gay Son posted:Wouldn't tape drives need to be stored in ideal conditions or something. Keep them warm to stay fresh I put them on a radiator in the utility closet All good
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 20:56 |
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mrwuss posted:gamespy only recently gave up and died, the leader of said server browser war Game spy is the origin of this dead gay forum. Low tax worked there until he was fired for sexual harassment.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 21:12 |
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Return Of JimmyJars posted:Game spy is the origin of this dead gay forum. Low tax worked there until he was fired for sexual harassment. was he the bad comedy forum manager?
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 21:20 |
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Return Of JimmyJars posted:Game spy is the origin of this dead gay forum. Low tax worked there until he was fired for sexual harassment. Gamespy forums had its moments. Getting invaded by a poo poo ton of WWII Online geeks was particularly hilarious. Bad Ash was probably one of the greatest trolls I've ever seen.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 21:36 |
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Casimir Radon posted:Is there an affordablish option on tape drives if I decide to lose my mind? Curious about this too. I learned to stop trusting hard drives when my dumb rear end decided to store all the photos I'd ever taken on a single drive, which poo poo itself randomly one day. I recovered maybe 60%. After that, I moved to having all of my data at home stored on a network server, which is backed up to cloud storage. Some stuff, like my My Documents folder and code projects [ie stuff I need back ASAP if I lose the disk, and can't wait for a multi week cloud restore], are backed up to my dropbox. I haven't had a disk fail since then, except in my 10+ year old RAID array, and due to another being in a USB enclosure which fell off my desk.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 21:50 |
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Played a lot of Agent USA when I was a kid. Never completed the game though, I don't think I had the hand-eye coordination at that age to avoid the bad guys as things progressed. Operation Frog was another title by the same publisher, but I don't think it was ever released for IBM. I played it years later on an Apple IIgs. Pretty sure it required a mouse to make the scalpel cuts and poo poo at the right place, and I don't think mice were commonplace on PCs until much later. We certainly didn't have one until we upgraded to a 386.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 22:28 |
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stubblyhead posted:
do you get to dissect any more animals besides frogs? I'd play the poo poo out of this
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 22:52 |
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Going through my old CD drawer, I found I still have a original Freespace DVD that I got with my Diamond Viper V550. . I don't think I ever got around to playing it. First thing I did was buy Carmageddon 2 and never ever uninstall it.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 23:03 |
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pepito sanchez posted:i almost forgot about this: holy gently caress I had that setup, was a dumpster fire the pro move back then was when a new console was coming out, sell the console you had cheap to one of the kids that invariably didn't have that particular console and the games at less of a discount I had basically every console from the NES through the Dreamcast at launch and the only one my parents bought for me was the NES e- also about the browser wars, I kinda miss All Seeing Eye Seizure Meat has a new favorite as of 23:11 on Jan 25, 2016 |
# ? Jan 25, 2016 23:05 |
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Mak0rz posted:do you get to dissect any more animals besides frogs? I'd play the poo poo out of this Nope just frogs. Looks like it was released for PC at some point, cause you can play it online through an embedded dosbox thingy. http://playdosgamesonline.com/operation-frog.html It's not the most intuitive thing ever, but I'm sure you can figure it out.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 23:07 |
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 23:31 |
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an actual frog has a new favorite as of 22:19 on Jun 24, 2020 |
# ? Jan 25, 2016 23:34 |
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I didn't get my first PC until 2003, so from 99-03 I used that loving browser it actually wasn't too bad, and one of my quake clan members (lol, clans) even made a workaround for me so I could use the IRC
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 23:40 |
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Code Jockey posted:Curious about this too.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 23:53 |
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EVIR Gibson posted:Man I hated the gently caress out of the sequel. utter garbage. The thing I liked was you were fighting in space in those dopey as hell spacewalk suits. In comes the sequel where the designers forgot the cold war poo poo stuff worked great. gently caress the storyline. loving sold. Ty.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 23:58 |
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Mak0rz posted:do you get to dissect any more animals besides frogs? I'd play the poo poo out of this Other animals like... people? Life and Death was an awesome game despite the CGA colors.
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# ? Jan 26, 2016 00:00 |
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pepito sanchez posted:i almost forgot about this: Maybe I was a dumb kid who didn't know any better, but I really liked my Tower of Doom. Road Rash CD, Sylpheed, superior console versions of Mortal Kombat 2 and Doom, and learning a ridiculous number of control combinations to play Wing Commander: Pre-Flight Functions D Move the cursor to select option A Begin selected action B Skip entire conversation/animation A or C Skip one line of conversation S Start game/Pause In-Flight Functions D Move the ship left, right, up and down A Fire gun AB Launch missile B and up or B and down Speed up or slow down B and left or B and right Roll left or roll right. Bx2 Apply afterburner burst (keep pressed the second time for continous afterburners) S^ or S\/ Cycle views (External views and Cockpit) S and up or S and down Cycle views (Starboard/Rear/Port/Cockpit) SAB Toggle Missile Camera (on/off) BC Autopilot SBC Eject from ship VDU Functions (3 Button Controller) SA Cycle through Left VDU modes (Weapon/Gun/Damage) SC Cycle through Right VDU modes (Communications/Nav/Target) C Cycle through avaialble options SB Lock/Unlock target (If in Autotargeting mode) SB Select Reciever/Send Message (If in Communications mode) SB Display Nav map/pause game (If in Navigational mode) A Accept Nav point and return to cockpit (if in Nav map) VDU Functions (6 Button Controller) X Cycle through Left VDU modes (Weapon/Gun/Damage) Z Cycle through Right VDU modes (Communications/Nav/Target) C Cycle through available option Y Lock/Unlock target (If in Autotargeting mode) Y Select Receiver/Send Message (If in Communications mode) Y Display Nav map/pause game (If in Navigational mode) Y Accept Nav point and return to cockpit (if in Nav map) I also forget the exact trick, but I think it involved inserting a cartridge while a CD game was running, and it would cause the foreground of the cartridge to play over the frozen background from the CD game. The kids at school could never figure out how I had so many Mortal Kombat levels they'd never seen before.
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# ? Jan 26, 2016 00:01 |
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Speaking of sega Saturn someone posted this in the dark souls 3 thread and wow what a loving weird game: virtual hydlide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT8jqgbVcdE
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# ? Jan 26, 2016 00:04 |
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Feedback Agency posted:When I was a kid my dad used to pirate PSX games off Usenet for me to play. I remember him getting pissed that I didn't like Small Soldiers (probably because he spent so much loving time downloading a whole CD's worth of data.) Ohhh gently caress I miss action/strategy If u were a serious player of bz1 you played on heat.net and you loving knew who LoC were
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# ? Jan 26, 2016 00:24 |
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Cool, a disk that's probably hardly been used, I'll peel the label off that and format it. I mean I'm assuming someone threw out the token ring adapter a long time ago. Germstore posted:I wonder why there's an AT&T chip on it. Because Bell Labs invented heaps of amazing stuff? Police Automaton posted: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" Yeah I don't think there's a manufacturer that still exists that hasn't sold me bad hard drives before. I got a PC with two 40G WD disks, they both failed kinda quick. Who knows how hot they would have gotten in a case that had an Athlon XP in it and probably not many fans, though! Powered Descent posted:Quantum Bigfoot lol, well I would have thought that they should be more reliable, because hey, shouldn't it be easier to build things better if you don't need to make them as small? There's something to be said for economies of scale though, I wonder how much more it cost to have to be able to build two different sizes of drives, platters, heads, etc.? Some real content: snow on CGA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GGw_HvmK7g
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# ? Jan 26, 2016 00:54 |
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For the guy a few pages back talking about hard drive failure and seagate. All I can say is gently caress seagate. Fair play to the IT guys who've never had a drive break.
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# ? Jan 26, 2016 01:24 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:33 |
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Loom The 13 years old French speaking teen I was had a hard time playing this. Was playing with a dictionary to understand the game and the walkthrough I got from a friend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNfDY8z3evs Wasn't able to think about the word "Loom" as something else than "Fruits of the loom"...
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# ? Jan 26, 2016 01:51 |