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I had an AMD 486 clone in the early nineties, didnt seem any different from the intel 486s at the time. Maybe it just felt that way cause i had lots of RAM (16MB). Wasnt much cheaper either. Got it from Escom before they bought Amiga, what a weird store. I remember them being huge into having all their store brand computers all black and red For some messed up reason I got it with OS/2, I think all software was optional back then so that mustve been expensive? Still ended up with Win3.11 obviously Aix has a new favorite as of 09:38 on Feb 15, 2016 |
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Feb 15, 2016 09:26
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Police Automaton posted:The most interesting thing to have a pimped up Amiga for in the 90s was to run 68k Mac emulation. That stuff sounds great, kind of like how I used to hear about how powerful OS/2 was, but I stuck to Windows and hooray, Windows won  quote:So how many of the people reading in this thread actually had one of the non-intel x86s in the 90s? Over here I didn't know a single person, for private use. I'm always wondering how far-spread they really were. Yeah, I had a Cyrix 5x86-100 system and then a Cyrix 6x86-P120+, which I still have and hope it'll power on one day so I can get my files off it  I guess I got them because they were cheaper, and I don't remember any problems with them. I probably used the 6x86 for probably 4-5 years before upgrading. Maybe I blamed Windows 95 for the 6x86's stability problems but probably not, I think it was fine when I wasn't installing bad software on it or getting pings of death. I probably didn't use the 5x86 for long, I was working at a computer store and was upgrading (or at least changing!) hardware all the time.
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Feb 15, 2016 09:31
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Buttcoin purse posted:That stuff sounds great, kind of like how I used to hear about how powerful OS/2 was, but I stuck to Windows and hooray, Windows won OS/2 Warp was way better than DOS at running DOS games because you got more 
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Feb 15, 2016 09:35
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theultimo posted:Game Console Infomercials are amazing 20 years or more later I got this classic in the mail back in the day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBF3X3ZaS2Q
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Feb 15, 2016 09:43
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Jerry Cotton posted:OS/2 Warp was way better than DOS at running DOS games because you got more  The smilies thread fails to explain that smiley So I assume OS/2 Warp provided a virtual sound card to your game, like Windows XP didn't unless you installed VDMSound?
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Feb 15, 2016 09:48
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Buttcoin purse posted:
Huh? Why would it need to be virtual?
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Feb 15, 2016 09:50
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because DOS games had their own built-in sound drivers and a protected memory OS presumably wouldn't let its processes access hardware directly
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Feb 15, 2016 09:57
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hackbunny posted:because DOS games had their own built-in sound drivers and a protected memory OS presumably wouldn't let its processes access hardware directly Can't really remember, I was a stupid teen and everything just worked  e: "Unlike Windows NT, OS/2 also always gave DOS programs the possibility of masking real hardware interrupts, so any DOS program could deadlock the machine this way." 
3D Megadoodoo has a new favorite as of 10:04 on Feb 15, 2016 |
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Feb 15, 2016 10:02
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hackbunny posted:because DOS games had their own built-in sound drivers and a protected memory OS presumably wouldn't let its processes access hardware directly Yeah, but no: Jerry Cotton posted:e: "Unlike Windows NT, OS/2 also always gave DOS programs the possibility of masking real hardware interrupts, so any DOS program could deadlock the machine this way." Nasty. I guess that's the same tradeoff that Windows 9x made - the convenience of DOS stuff working - vs. Windows NT which had proper protection so one DOS app couldn't take down the whole machine, but therefore actually broke lots of DOS things. I guess I assumed that if OS/2 was so awesome it would have been more like NT.
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Feb 15, 2016 10:57
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Halah posted:Are they really worth more now? I have one sitting in the basement. I think I still have the box and all the paperwork, too. We used the infrared data thingy to pass test questions back and forth, then some dude figured out how to create games and it was like a nerdy game boy after that. I'm pretty sure all that poo poo's still on there too. Yessssss  Halah has a new favorite as of 15:54 on Feb 15, 2016 |
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Feb 15, 2016 12:16
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Cojawfee posted:Yes. It's total bullshit. You can spend 100 dollars on a TI-84 or whatever, or you can spend another 30 dollars on an nSpire that has a color screen and rechargable batteries. I don't know how they can justify that. You'll have to take this with a grain of salt since I'm not American, but I heard (in the US at least) that the TI-83/84/whatever was the only graphics calculator that is allowed in the SAT, so Texas Instruments basically have a monopoly on high school calculators. They can charge as much as they want until something changes because everyone needs one.
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Feb 15, 2016 13:01
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Aix posted:I had an AMD 486 clone in the early nineties, didnt seem any different from the intel 486s at the time. Maybe it just felt that way cause i had lots of RAM (16MB). Wasnt much cheaper either. Got it from Escom before they bought Amiga, what a weird store. I remember them being huge into having all their store brand computers all black and red wow really that tower was produced in the early 90s? it looks so modern still compared to... well... everything else from that era. what is that red spot? a badge?
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Feb 15, 2016 13:16
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Buttcoin purse posted:I remember playing Castle Adventure on it. We also had 3-Demon. Man, it was so slow on our PC that it took about 30 seconds for a ghost to chomp you. I think I mentioned previously a shareware collection of games we had, which were all ASCII graphics. It had a lunar lander game, too, called "Eagle Lander". Re: Copy protection in games. I remember one of the Leisure Suit Larry games asked you a series of trivia questions that was supposed to determine how old you were. The number of questions you go right determined the amount of "pixelated nudity". There was actually a graphic of a woman and, for each correct answer, a piece of clothing would disappear. I remember another LSL game would ask you to look up a woman in Larry's little black book, which was included in the box. Gonzo the Eggman has a new favorite as of 13:27 on Feb 15, 2016 |
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Feb 15, 2016 13:17
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Ah yeah we were discussing the LSL stuff earlier in the thread. That reminded me of something, technically this was on PSX but the first 3d Metal Gear Solid game that came out had some sort of codec code you needed to progress past like 1/3rd of the game written on the back of the box or on the manual or some poo poo. that's cool i guess but i had rented it from blockbuster and didnt have the original box nor manual so i was just really confused and got frustrated and thought the game was complete bullshit until a friend told me what's up a few years later
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Feb 15, 2016 13:23
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Paying for a game (albeit less than the price of buying the game) without a manual? That's just dumb 
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Feb 15, 2016 13:34
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Jerry Cotton posted:Can't really remember, I was a stupid teen and everything just worked 
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Feb 15, 2016 13:38
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I liked Space Quest V's copy protection. In that game you have to travel to a bunch of different star systems with different coordinates, only the coordinates were given in the manual, not the game itself. If you put in random ones then you'd just go to star systems and get destroyed instantly by aliens (IIRC)
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Feb 15, 2016 13:39
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Funny how the numbering for the LSL games skipped one; I think it was LSL4: The Missing Floppies.quote:Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies is the name for a never-made fourth installment, often regarded as an in-joke. The name, used by official sources and fans, refers to rumours that the reason for the cancellation of the game was the losing of the game's original production floppies, after which the developers refused to remake the game from scratch. Other sources claim that it was nothing but an internal office prank. The franchise's installments were numbered as if this installment had been published; the actual fourth installment was Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work. 1000 Brown M and Ms posted:I liked Space Quest V's copy protection. In that game you have to travel to a bunch of different star systems with different coordinates, only the coordinates were given in the manual, not the game itself. If you put in random ones then you'd just go to star systems and get destroyed instantly by aliens (IIRC) Space Quest V was a parody of Star Trek. It was also the first in the series not designed by "the two guys from Andromeda", as only Mark Crowe worked on the project. It was also the first game not developed by Sierra On-line but by Dynamix. Gonzo the Eggman has a new favorite as of 13:53 on Feb 15, 2016 |
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Feb 15, 2016 13:42
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The Kins posted:I remember hearing a story that IBM's customer support department, set up and trained to help multi-million dollar corporations with their IT stuff, was completely unprepared and ill-equipped for home users calling and asking about how to get DOS Doom 2 working with sound in OS/2, causing a whole lot of problems. I guess it was Warp 4 then that came with ready-made config files for like 40000 DOS games.
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Feb 15, 2016 13:43
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i remember cracking software using a hex editor following carefully laid out instructions under a warez ascii header in a readme.txt graciously provided by the cr3w to flip some variables flags basically the equivalent to "licensed = true" or "checkForDisc = false"
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Feb 15, 2016 13:45
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Police Automaton posted:So how many of the people reading in this thread actually had one of the non-intel x86s in the 90s? Over here I didn't know a single person, for private use. I'm always wondering how far-spread they really were. My 386 was made by AMD. And yesterday I found a bunch of ISA cards from that period, usual stuff, like FDD and HDD controllers, because who would ever think about putting those on motherboard? The Claptain has a new favorite as of 14:25 on Feb 15, 2016 |
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Feb 15, 2016 14:22
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Anyone remember Celeron? Yeah, more like I was baffled when trying to get GTA 3 to run on my then-gf's computer. I mean, all of the numbers matched up! Literally the ONLY difference was that when it called for an Intel CPU, I was running a Celeron.My god, what a difference that was.
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Feb 15, 2016 14:27
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wayne curr posted:Maybe it's time to switch back to AMD now that they're releasing a 32 core CPU This will never cease to make me laugh 
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Feb 15, 2016 14:29
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Anyone remember Celeron? My parents bought me a computer for "games." It was an emachines with a 900mhz celeron, 128 MB of ram, and 4mb of video memory. It somehow ran the ut2k3 demo poorly and even ran gta3 somehow. I remember thinking the demo level of ut2k3 was a snow level because my computer couldn't load the ground texture.
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Feb 15, 2016 14:50
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Police Automaton posted:So how many of the people reading in this thread actually had one of the non-intel x86s in the 90s? Over here I didn't know a single person, for private use. I'm always wondering how far-spread they really were. I had one from evergreen technologies the 100mhz 486
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Feb 15, 2016 15:05
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I was at my parent's house over the weekend and I found a bunch of old tech manuals from the 70's and 80's. I don't how thrilled you'll be able database card things, but I took some back home with me:  EDIT: Read through some of them. In 1977 my father was working on some sort of direct storage drive(???) and the FIRST EDITION card is here. Apparently the maximum capacity was 317.5 million bytes so...lol that's cute. Scornful Sexbot has a new favorite as of 15:26 on Feb 15, 2016 |
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Feb 15, 2016 15:22
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Cojawfee posted:My parents bought me a computer for "games." It was an emachines with a 900mhz celeron, 128 MB of ram, and 4mb of video memory. It somehow ran the ut2k3 demo poorly and even ran gta3 somehow. I remember thinking the demo level of ut2k3 was a snow level because my computer couldn't load the ground texture. I knew something was up with my then-gf's PC when an mp3 playing would stutter as I scrolled through any given website.
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Feb 15, 2016 15:25
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I knew something was up with my then-gf's PC when an mp3 playing would stutter as I scrolled through any given website. Oh she was using Linux?
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Feb 15, 2016 15:36
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Anyone remember Celeron? Celeron is Intel. It is just their budget alternative to a Pentium. In fact, they just released new Celeron CPUs last month. My Windows Home Server came with a 64-bit Celeron (which I had no idea existed back when I purchased it in 2009 or so). Seeing as it's just a file/backup server, it's more than sufficient.
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Feb 15, 2016 15:38
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GI_Clutch posted:Celeron is Intel. It is just their budget alternative to a Pentium. Oh, I know. I mean, the logo is (or at least was) practically the same. In fact, it was THIS that made me confused as to why her computer sucked so much. "But... but isn't this Intel, really?" Yes... and no.
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Feb 15, 2016 16:26
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They brought back Celeron a few years ago, I heard they were pretty decent. The original celerons were complete garbage though.
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Feb 15, 2016 16:33
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GI_Clutch posted:Celeron is Intel. It is just their budget alternative to a Pentium. In fact, they just released new Celeron CPUs last month. My Windows Home Server came with a 64-bit Celeron (which I had no idea existed back when I purchased it in 2009 or so). Seeing as it's just a file/backup server, it's more than sufficient. And the Pentium brand is now the budget alternative to the Core series. The Celeron is now the sub-bargain chip line.
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Feb 15, 2016 16:56
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The_Franz posted:And the Pentium brand is now the budget alternative to the Core series. The Celeron is now the sub-bargain chip line. The lowest end Pentium hits the same price as Celerons.
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Feb 15, 2016 17:06
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On the flipside, the original Celeron line gave us the eminently overclockable 300A, which ended up being decent value for the money after you turned the speed up. Not that I had one; I went from a Cyrix 486/66 to a used Pentium2 300 (with a voodoo 2). At least my later Athlons lived a bit above their rated speeds.
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Feb 15, 2016 17:06
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I just remembered my Cyrix 386 to 486 "clip on" upgrade. THE SPEED!!! You literally opened the box, shoved the "486" CPU down onto the 386 CPU soldered onto the main board and stuck the little heat sink on it because 486's ran so hot :-P.  Don't know what they cost, someone gave it to me for upgrading a hard drive, they bought it but they had a socketed 386.
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Feb 15, 2016 18:20
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How would that even work? Did it just hijack the signals meant for the 386 or something?
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Feb 15, 2016 18:22
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Jerry Cotton posted:Can't really remember, I was a stupid teen and everything just worked Windows NT/2000/etc. was much better protected (real mode DOS ran in v86 mode, i.e. a 8086 hypervisor, with software emulation of the missing opcodes and privileged instructions - i.e. slow as gently caress!), but it had its DOS emulation sins too. for example full-screen graphics bypassed the video driver and let DOS talk directly with the VGA BIOS. this is why some games wouldn't run windowed, and why some of those games could lock up your machine (on my machine: Worms and Sim City 2000) hackbunny has a new favorite as of 18:28 on Feb 15, 2016 |
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Feb 15, 2016 18:26
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Do people even use graphing calculators in a real application? I can't think of anything where a graph on a calculator is actually helpful versus some professional tier modelling software that probably exists. And it seemed later after high school that graphs could suck a dick next to just solving some equation/calculus or whatever.
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Feb 15, 2016 18:27
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I want to do something dumb like build a watercooled 486. I found a site one time where some Danes were standing around an overclocked one out in the cold.
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Feb 15, 2016 18:28
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Sylink posted:Do people even use graphing calculators in a real application? I can't think of anything where a graph on a calculator is actually helpful versus some professional tier modelling software that probably exists. At this point they're just an educational legacy. Students use them because that's what the teachers know, and new teachers learn them (or already know them from using them in school) because that's what the students and older teachers already know so it would take a pretty significant reeducation effort to move to something else.
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Feb 15, 2016 18:36
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