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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. What do people from those countries think of beige?  Perhaps the soviet PC color is better than beige because it doesn't turn yellow? Maybe they won the cold war after all?
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Feb 3, 2016 03:43
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I love beige.
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Feb 3, 2016 03:57
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Remember when the cables inside your PC were oppressive to African Americans? (oddly enough the master connector is black and the slave connector is white?)
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Feb 3, 2016 05:38
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Buttcoin purse posted:Remember when the cables inside your PC were oppressive to African Americans? A lot of the time the master connector was blue, so I'm not sure how to fit that into the paradigm. Aliens?
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Feb 3, 2016 05:42
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I don't think it mattered how you hooked it up as long as the jumpers were set right. Right? I have not done that in a very long time.
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Feb 3, 2016 06:44
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Depends on the cable, some of them had different wiring on the master and slave plug and supported setting the drive jumper to "cable select" Others had the same wiring on both plugs and you had to set the master and slave jumper correctly on the devices, and most of the drives had a whole bunch of jumper pins with no explanation of which jumper did what. Old computers were awesome!
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Feb 3, 2016 07:22
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The world before plug and play was a dangerous one
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Feb 3, 2016 07:27
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theultimo posted:The world before plug and play was a
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Feb 3, 2016 08:14
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Gonzo the Eggman posted:As I recall, "MDK" was an acronym for one of two things: "Mission: Deliver Kindness" or "Murder Death Kill" Martians Deny Kidnappings! Re: soviet bloc computers  Elwro 800 Junior was an interesting yet failed attempt at making a ZX Spectrum-compatible school computer in the final months of communist regime in Poland. With suite of translated programming languages (Logo and Pascal), Basic interpreter, network capabilities, ZX work mode, CP/J as operating system, the machine remained a fail-prone curiosity. Teacher's computer even had proper built-in floppy drive. That weird handle thing? It's here because the cases were repurposed from notorious kiddie electronic piano made by the same company. Elwro actually was an incredible company forced to make computers in the dumbest country in Eastern Europe. Their train-controlling computers were working flawlessly well into 00's, the last Odra 1305 being shut down in 2010 
laserghost has a new favorite as of 08:33 on Feb 3, 2016 |
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Feb 3, 2016 08:17
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What the hell did the master/slave relationship even do in IDE connections? I was well into the SATA era by the time I was using two drives at once.
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Feb 3, 2016 08:22
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theultimo posted:The world before plug and play was a dangerous one
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Feb 3, 2016 08:23
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Casimir Radon posted:Several months ago I got the midi daughterboard for the SB-Live for my retro machine and hooked it up. Something weird happened and the ribbon cable started melting. The SB-Live was fine, and there wasn't any visible damage to the daughterboard, is it possible for there to be a short inside the ribbon? Prob a bulging/dead cap w/issues causing something to rust and fry in the fluid I would inagine Or your psu took a dump on the card
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Feb 3, 2016 08:29
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theultimo posted:Prob a bulging/dead cap w/issues causing something to rust and fry in the fluid I would inagine
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Feb 3, 2016 08:33
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Mak0rz posted:What the hell did the master/slave relationship even do in IDE connections? Interestingly, Wikipedia says "Although they are in extremely common use, the terms "master" and "slave" do not actually appear in current versions of the ATA specifications. The two devices are simply referred to as "device 0" and "device 1", respectively, in ATA-2 and later." I guess they're like SCSI target/ID numbers, in that SCSI devices (at least in the olden days) would have some dip switches or some other kind of selector allowing you to pick which SCSI ID to use in the range 0-7 (although I thought 7 normally referred to the SCSI host bus controller card in your PC). This is because naturally if you have a cable with more than one device on it, you need to tell the devices what their device number is, so the computer can then say "hey, device number <n>, do <thing>" (or at least that's one way of solving that problem). In terms of IDE/parallel ATA, what really affects you is the "device 0"/"master" on the primary IDE channel is normally viewed as the first disk by your operating system if it's giving you a list of disks, assigning drive letters, etc. I think DOS does something weird like go through all the disks in order and assign drive letters to the bootable partitions, and then go through them again and assign drive letters to the non-bootable partitions, like C: might be on disk 0, D: might be on disk 1, then E: might be back on disk 0. I don't care enough to check if that's correct. So I guess when IDE first came out, they decided that instead of numbering the disks they should use the words "master" and "slave", maybe they really were racist? Or maybe it's because that's what the disks were called on some other old IBM system. FDISK in MS-DOS 3.3 doesn't tell you you're looking at the master or slave disk, it says "1" or "2". I don't know the logic behind why some hard disks used to not only have jumper settings for "master" and "slave" but also "I'm the only disk".
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Feb 3, 2016 09:09
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  This was a weird game.
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Feb 3, 2016 12:49
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Casimir Radon posted:Several months ago I got the midi daughterboard for the SB-Live for my retro machine and hooked it up. Something weird happened and the ribbon cable started melting. The SB-Live was fine, and there wasn't any visible damage to the daughterboard, is it possible for there to be a short inside the ribbon? I'm not an electrical engineer, so I don't really know anything, but that seems pretty weird to me. If something is drawing too much power, probably due to something being shorted out, I would have expected that you'd see something fried on one of the cards. Surely the wires in the cable are attached to an chip, and what's the chance that the chip can handle more current passing through it than the cable? I guess there might be more of a chance of a short where the connector is attached to the cable rather than in the cable itself. But again I would have imagined it would have messed something else up too, including possibly a fuse in the power supply, if there was a short.
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Feb 3, 2016 12:58
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Wicker Man posted:This and the original roller coaster tycoon. Good stuff. Speaking of Rollercoaster Tycoon, there's the OpenRCT2 project to rewrite it as oss, which now even allows you to play multiplayer on a single map. It's pretty nifty.
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Feb 3, 2016 13:08
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Buttcoin purse posted:Interestingly, Wikipedia says "Although they are in extremely common use, the terms "master" and "slave" do not actually appear in current versions of the ATA specifications. The two devices are simply referred to as "device 0" and "device 1", respectively, in ATA-2 and later." Old Western Digital hard drives wouldn't work at all if it was alone on an IDE cable with a jumper set, you'd have to pull the shunt completely off to make it work. It might have been a motherboard thing, I'm not sure because we were building real cheap lab computers at the time this happened. Thought the first drive was dead, then it happened again. Real head scratcher that one.
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Feb 3, 2016 13:32
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"black boys rape our young girls but violet goes willingly"
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Feb 3, 2016 13:38
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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. The US uses a lot of Olive Drab Green (OD Green) too. A lot of military hardware is colored as such because in a temperate to lush environment it's hard to spot. I get the feeling that the soviets used it a lot in case an object could be commandeered for military use.
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Feb 3, 2016 13:59
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The whole ATA interface was extremely haphazard from the get-go. First ATA drives started appearing circa 1988/1989, way before the manufacturers could agree on a new standard, and everyone rushed out their rough idea as to what the next big thing should look and work like. ATA drives made before 1990-1991 generally didn't master/slave well, especially as most manufacturers pushed a short-sighted and a seriously flawed idea that a "master" (drive 0) connector should be in the middle, and slave (drive 1) at the end of the cable. This was carried over from the dying st506 interface, and introduced electrical crosstalk if you had only one drive - the cable wasn't terminated and a flailing end would introduce data transmission errors. This was reversed in early 90s, rendering a whole army of 40MB IDE steppers "sort of" incompatible-ish with later cables/paddle cards/drives. And 40MB IDE steppers are what most people ran in those days. Cutting edge is sharp, avoid contact.
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Feb 3, 2016 14:06
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GAY 4 ORGANS
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I was glad the day I removed the last ide cable from my computer.
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Feb 3, 2016 14:08
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Germstore posted:I was glad the day I removed the last ide cable from my computer. In theory, you can still hook up your 40MB Miniscribe drive from 1988, using a PCI paddle card, and have Windows 10 access and read it. 
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Feb 3, 2016 14:14
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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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Casimir Radon posted:Several months ago I got the midi daughterboard for the SB-Live for my retro machine and hooked it up. Something weird happened and the ribbon cable started melting. The SB-Live was fine, and there wasn't any visible damage to the daughterboard, is it possible for there to be a short inside the ribbon? I had that happen to the cable between an SB-Live and the drive bay plate with headphone and MIDI ports. There were no guides on the pins and I was working in the dark under a desk so one plug might have been backwards or off by 1 to the left or right. The cable melted, but the hardware was fine afterwards. I am glad that Creative's overpriced hardware and sub-lovely drivers are mostly a relic now. I'm pretty sure their drivers were responsible for 99% of the BSOD screens I got on Win XP and they were broken on Vista and 7 if you tried to use them in exclusive mode.
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Feb 3, 2016 15:59
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sour mayonaise posted:
They're doing an HD remake of this, and if the Day of the Tentacle one is any indication it's going to keep the exact same style instead of pulling a Monkey Island and having brand new art that looks like poo poo
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Feb 3, 2016 17:59
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.JPG) When digital cameras were still a novelty in the late 90s, you could take this greasy cocksucker out with a box of floppies and snap away without worrying about running out of space for your pictures in stunning 1024x768 resolution.
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Feb 3, 2016 18:29
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Buttcoin purse posted:master/slave stuff So that's it? It just is basically telling the computer "Yo your ribbon cable says disk0 should be on this connector and disk1 should be on this one and rest assured that's where they are!!" A lot of computer design decisions just seem so stupid to me, but I bet they made a lot of sense 30 years ago. Oh well. Germstore posted:I was glad the day I removed the last ide cable from my computer. You said it man. Those ribbon cables were such a gigantic pain to deal with in every sense of the word. When I built a computer with SATA connections and a modular power supply I was pretty impressed at how clean it was and how much dust it didn't collect. garfield hentai posted:They're doing an HD remake of this, and if the Day of the Tentacle one is any indication it's going to keep the exact same style instead of pulling a Monkey Island and having brand new art that looks like poo poo Honestly I just want a GOG release of the original 
Mak0rz has a new favorite as of 18:43 on Feb 3, 2016 |
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Feb 3, 2016 18:41
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Holy poo poo this place owns
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Feb 3, 2016 18:57
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God dammit Bleem, Sega had enough problems.
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Feb 3, 2016 19:08
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garfield hentai posted:They're doing an HD remake Wait what https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kgj_rPON80 Oh my god
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Feb 3, 2016 19:15
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Has anyone mentioned AfterDark screensavers? Flying toasters were the poo poo.
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Feb 3, 2016 19:16
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Powered Descent posted:Wait what This is like exactly what I'm on about when I say that I prefer 320x200 for 256-color graphics for stuff like DotT, Wolf3D, etc. You can arbitrarily pump up the resolution all you want nowadays until it's straight vector, but it does not improve the experience.
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Feb 3, 2016 19:24
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Satori was the best After Dark saver. followed closely by starry night.
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Feb 3, 2016 19:33
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Lunatic Fringe, fool
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Feb 3, 2016 20:01
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Uhm excuse me, I'll think you'll find VoodooLights was the best. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuYs94x7oyU So pretty and fluid 
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Feb 3, 2016 20:19
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fonducci posted:
tbf the first digital camera I had was 320x240, so that right there is a huge improvement.
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Feb 3, 2016 20:22
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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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_YiZzi9PkU Still love the music to it.
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Feb 3, 2016 20:31
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Powered Descent posted:Wait what For what it's worth, the HD remake of Grim Fandango has been out a few months now.
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Feb 3, 2016 20:45
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Mak0rz posted:So that's it? It just is basically telling the computer "Yo your ribbon cable says disk0 should be on this connector and disk1 should be on this one and rest assured that's where they are!!" There's bit more to it. Before IDE there was a bunch of controller cards and drives and the drive was basically dumb with the controller doing everything. IDE (integrated drive electronics or something like that) put more logic on the drive. Basically, the controller was now just a dumb interface between the drive and the host. This came with the advantage that you didn't have to get a new controller card whenever you got a new hard drive as the controller would translate between drive-specific metrics, timing, etc and logical addressing towards the host. There really used to be a master and a slave; the master would have priority of the cable and the slave was allowed if the master wasn't busy doing stuff. As everything was done using those terrible ribbon cables, there basically was a line for everything instead of a signaling protocol. One of the pins meant "master is speaking" and when that was high, the slave has to remain silent. You can think of that pin as a 1 bit addressing line. That's also why, when EIDE introduced something as decadent as a second port on the host adaptor (EIDE was basically just two IDE adaptors on one card), you were always advised to use a configuration with two masters each on their own cable, basically for the same reason you shouldn't use an external drive on the same USB port as your mouse. SCSI was a ton smarter and more expensive. It used 3 pins for addressing, allowing ids 0-7 (4 pins and 0-15 in later versions). Like IDE, it also prioritized access (with 7 being highest and often the controller). Regarding drive numbering: DOS partitioned disks into 4 parts. Because with a 10 MB harddisk who would need to partition it further? (I used to have a 5.25" full height, i.e., double a normal old-fashioned CD/DVD drive 10 MB harddisk. It sucked.) As people wanted to add more partitions, DOS introduces a special type partition, an extended partition, which could contain more partition tables. This would be the extended partitions. These would not be bootable (unless you had OS/2's awesome boot manager) and would be indexed after the others. Anybody remember 4DOS and 4OS2, the alternative command interpreters for DOS/OS/2? It was quite amazing what you could make them do with things like a command history (and not just F3 to repeat last command) and built-in ANSI.SYS for color codes. That, plus awesome tools for scripting your AUTOEXEC.BAT so you didn't have to alter it to boot for your favorite himem, XMS mem, EMS mem, real-mode configuration. I still remember the difference between those...
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Feb 3, 2016 20:58
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