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Alienware is having a thing about turning 20 at E3. From 1999  Oh the decadence of having both a Voodoo and TnT2 card in a system.
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Jun 15, 2016 04:02
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WebDog posted:I gave that Johnny Castaway method a go. I think it hooked the keyboard and mouse in some way and waited for inactivity to begin a timer before starting the screensaver, at which point it would just run the module full screen. Really not much different than the way windows has a screen saver application (control panel application at least) that will run .scr files, if you think of the .scr the way you would an after dark module. I would be thrilled to get AD running properly on Windows 10. I worry about the color modes that AD ran in, however. I think it was all 256 color, 8 bit mode, so it might mean that the screensavers would look crap even if they did work.
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Jun 15, 2016 05:15
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WebDog posted:Alienware is having a thing about turning 20 at E3. Ah yes, memories of seeing the latest gaming rigs advertised in Maximum PC that I would never, ever buy
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Jun 15, 2016 05:33
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EugeneJ posted:Ah yes, memories of seeing the latest gaming rigs advertised in Maximum PC that I would never, ever buy A 21" CRT monitor for over a grand 
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Jun 15, 2016 05:37
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WebDog posted:Alienware is having a thing about turning 20 at E3. Nice to know my GPU is worth more than that entire rig at the bottom. Still amazes me how much even basic computers used to sell for.
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Jun 15, 2016 05:38
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god drat "THE AREA 51" is 5k in todays dollars. I used to dream of having a computer like that, slaving away at $5.15/hr at a Dairy Queen in '99.
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Jun 15, 2016 05:41
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:god drat "THE AREA 51" is 5k in todays dollars. I honestly don't know what someone would do with that much processing power. Play 4k Rift games while compositing video and rendering Anime models? Oh the halcyon days of "Well I can burn a CD OR browse the web / listen to WinAmp can't do both!" And "Hold on I need to allocate more Vmemory"
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Jun 15, 2016 05:44
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Oh I didn't know they still had a model named that, I was just saying that computer in '99 adjusted for inflation was $5k I just thought alienware was reduced to selling outside of base px's to new privates who likely didn't even game.
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Jun 15, 2016 05:46
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:god drat "THE AREA 51" is 5k in todays dollars. And now, in just 17 years time, even a low end smartphone is a supercomputer by comparison.
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Jun 15, 2016 05:46
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Connor the Conure posted:I would be thrilled to get AD running properly on Windows 10. I worry about the color modes that AD ran in, however. I think it was all 256 color, 8 bit mode, so it might mean that the screensavers would look crap even if they did work. I've found an installer that's been modded to work but the issues is that it hooks into Windows display properties in a way that's been long depreciated. Problem is AfterDark hooks into Windows as a driver of somesort to power some of it's other features.
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Jun 15, 2016 06:02
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WebDog posted:Some of the screensavers did have to drop down to 256bit mode for when they loaded in custom bitmaps. Other modules sometimes displayed images locked at 640x480 but most ran with very little issue when I had it working last. Did you follow some kind of guide? I tried this earlier, even with compat mode settings, but Win10 just kept refusing to run it, telling me it's not capable of running on my PC. I'm wondering if it's because I'm on a 64 bit system and AD was made for 16/32 bit arch?
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Jun 15, 2016 06:15
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The last system it worked fine on for me was Windows 7 32 bit. It might work on Windows 1032bit but I'm suspecting other elements that have changed deep within Windows would cause other issues. There's this cryptic guide but on my system the installer doesn't even work and with the others I can't figure out how to force the screensaver off Starry Night.
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Jun 15, 2016 06:22
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Regular Nintendo posted:Is there video of this Someone already posted videos of the engine and editor, but if you meant the impossible, overlapping spaces the best demonstration I've found is this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQYsFshbkYw&t=1060s I think the concept is called non-euclidean space, where several rooms can occupy the same 3d coordinates in space but which room you see depends on which adjacent rooms you enter them from. It was easy to do in 2.5D games where the engine only deals with a list of sectors. You can see how the staircase would clip into the rooms above and below but it just disappears when the camera is looking at a different sector that overlaps. It's a neat effect. It's worth watching the entire video all the way through, it explains how those old engines worked pretty well!
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Jun 15, 2016 06:23
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:Oh I didn't know they still had a model named that, I was just saying that computer in '99 adjusted for inflation was $5k http://www.gamespot.com/articles/alienware-area-51-review/1100-6423801/ Pretty sure that what my teenage self would have thought a future awesomeputer would be like.
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Jun 15, 2016 06:40
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childhood.ico (well more like puberty.ico) 1997-2001 were objectively the golden age of gaming and no one will ever be able to convince me otherwise
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Jun 15, 2016 07:52
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ColoradoCleric posted:Found the program, called drempels, turns your desktop into a groovy psychedelic moving picture. It was really cool and had hotkeys to tweak the visual output. Completely forgot about it until I saw the web addy and recognized it immediately. I think I ran a similar version of it that worked with Winamp's audio visuals.
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Jun 15, 2016 08:13
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This poo poo blew my mind when I saw it on a demo disc way back when: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JCGZFQZkdc (I even cheated on an art project by tracing around skeeter with charcoal and said it was a portrait of my uncle)
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Jun 15, 2016 10:08
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WebDog posted:Oh the decadence of having both a Voodoo and TnT2 card in a system. Apparently their 'exclusive technology' is having an AGP and a PCI slot? 
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Jun 15, 2016 10:14
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Dr. Wang posted:I really loved reading through this thread and I think I finally have something to contribute: Related note.....what are ways of salvaging old thrashed hdds?
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Jun 15, 2016 10:35
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8 track betamax posted:Related note.....what are ways of salvaging old thrashed hdds? if you have old IDE hard drives, they make little docking stations you can get for like $30 that let them plug up as a SATA drive and i think they may make EXTRA FANCY ones that might let them work as USB external drives. maybe something like this. YMMV on whether or not you're able to pull anything useful off them, depending on whether or not the drive is well preserved or trashed out. i have one of these and have been able to pull things like old pics and text documents and videos off old drives fairly reliably. but depending on what you want to do with it, then it might not be your best bet. e: when i used mine, i was pulling old drives out of some computers i had circa 1999 ~ 2005. couldnt say if they'd really work with older than that, but i had good results. Iron Prince has a new favorite as of 11:08 on Jun 15, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 10:47
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I hated those HP cases that weren't flat on top. How am I supposed to pile stuff up on top of it? My family had one, and I usually don't get rid of old computers so easily, but with that stupid case I was quite happy to just image the hard disk and get rid of it. Connor the Conure posted:I would be thrilled to get AD running properly on Windows 10. I worry about the color modes that AD ran in, however. I think it was all 256 color, 8 bit mode, so it might mean that the screensavers would look crap even if they did work. In my head, getting it to run "properly" means under an emulator, so color depth will be taken care of. I haven't actually done any work on this yet but I'm confident I'll be able to get it to work. I guess with that scheme I posted where you use DOSBox as the screensaver, you could run anything in DOSBox as the screensaver, so maybe you could just run a DOS game that had a self-running demo. Wolf3D and DOOM had these right? You could make a .BAT file to run a different game each time Anony Mouse posted:childhood.ico Not retro enough for me. Where we're going, we don't need icons! Iron Prince posted:if you have old IDE hard drives, they make little docking stations you can get for like $30 that let them plug up as a SATA drive and i think they may make EXTRA FANCY ones that might let them work as USB external drives. maybe something like this. I've got a thing like this (by the same manufacturer): http://www.vantecusa.com/en/product/view_detail/266 I don't think the "eSATA" icon is accurate, but otherwise it's what it says - you can plug in regular or 2.5" IDE drives or SATA drives, then plug it in to your USB port. It has a separate power brick with a switch and adapters for plugging in old and new power connectors. I assume none of these work if your drive is one of those really old ones where I think you had no choice but to enter the cylinders/heads/sectors geometry into the BIOS? I thought the ability to automatically detect the geometry from the drive might have been a newer thing than the original IDE standard but could be wrong. A lot of these external docks/enclosures/adapters have limits on the maximum hard drive size they support too, like 750GB, 2TB. I've never seen one that couldn't take the biggest IDE drive I've seen (320GB).
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Jun 15, 2016 11:05
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feedmegin posted:Apparently their 'exclusive technology' is having an AGP and a PCI slot? They also appear to have one of the earliest third party system coolers in there which at the time appears to be a dedicated fan setup to vent hot air out of the system. Later on they pioneered water cooling which was apparently fishtank pumps that had to be refilled every few months and risked bursting and leaking.
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Jun 15, 2016 11:27
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WebDog posted:Alienware is having a thing about turning 20 at E3. I remember this exact ad quite well from when i was a kid and coveted having one of these nice gaming pcs... I recall poring over those specs for the models dreaming that i might one day own one. Alienware was nice for a while it seems but i never got one.
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Jun 15, 2016 11:47
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Man, I don't even remember Alienware making straight-edged beige boxes. I thought they burst on the scene fully formed with translucent glowing egg and spaceship shaped things.
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Jun 15, 2016 12:47
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I can't be the only sucker that bought a lifetime subscription to GameSpy.
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Jun 15, 2016 12:54
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Data Graham posted:Man, I don't even remember Alienware making straight-edged beige boxes. I thought they burst on the scene fully formed with translucent glowing egg and spaceship shaped things. pretty sure that was the original
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Jun 15, 2016 12:55
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Jun 15, 2016 13:04
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WebDog posted:Apparently early on they did the same with soundcards so you'd still be able to play games that needed older tech. I can only imagine how loud one of those things were. My point is having an AGP and (several) PCI (no PCI-E yet) slots was absolutely standard practice at the time. 
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Jun 15, 2016 13:37
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Anony Mouse posted:childhood.ico RPG Maker! That's still going strong on Steam I think, wildly enough. I spent hours working on weird lil games
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Jun 15, 2016 13:48
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FilthyImp posted:Oh do they ever. Take a gander What in the hell is that? I remember when they went from the colored flat cases to the bulgy rounded ones. I ended up buying one of the latter. Strange how I lust after flat metal cases now.
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Jun 15, 2016 13:57
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DOOM came out 3 years before that though? Not really all that old, but I guess that means more people will remember these: Stair Dismount and Truck Dismount.
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Jun 15, 2016 14:13
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feedmegin posted:My point is having an AGP and (several) PCI (no PCI-E yet) slots was absolutely standard practice at the time. Which segues me into WinG, a precursor to DirectX. Windows 3.11's graphical device interface wasn't meant for much more than displaying static windows so WinG was a bit of a clever hack that overrode this and allowed direct hardware access, much like you could in DOS. It also meant DOS games could get ported into Windows and retain their lost speed. All was going pretty smoothly, until the Lion King came out. The Lion King was poised to be the Xmas hit of 1994 with Compaq and Disney teaming up for a big flashy deal with the game pre-installed on their new system that featured the new Cirrus video chip. In the rush to meet deadlines this hadn't been tested at all with WinG. Cue Christmas being ruined as no one with their brand new PC's and hit game could run it without a BSOD and a PR disaster for Microsoft, Compaq and Disney who had spent a fair chunk advertising this great deal. It lead directly to DirectX being developed along with working with developers to crash test games to ensure they wouldn't ruin any more future Christmas's. Buttcoin purse posted:DOOM came out 3 years before that though?
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Jun 15, 2016 15:34
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FilthyImp posted:Oh do they ever. Take a gander Jesus christ. I just built a computer that's somewhere between the $2400 model and the $3100 model. Closer to the $3k end. Cost me around $1500 and over $200 was for the monitor I think. Of course it's not shaped like a gaould mother ship or whatever. I mean obviously Alienware is overpriced, but just having recently dealt with a lot of the components they are listing is just blowing my mind on how much the surcharge is. A loving 780 in a in a $2400 computer. Like 970s arent even that much more expensive, unless there is some dumb reason to get a 780 over a 970, I don't know I'm not super knowledgeable about GPU architecture or anything poo poo a dvd drive? A bluray drive cost what, $50 on amazon. I'm just astonished. Edit 5 just saw this was published in 2014 if that makes a huge difference in prices, whoops CHICKEN SHOES has a new favorite as of 16:48 on Jun 15, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 16:43
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Anony Mouse posted:childhood.ico I see Anachronox  A fantastic, yet underrated game from ION Storm (Austin). The same guys that brought us the original Deus Ex. Not to be confused with ION Storm Dallas, which gave us Daikatana
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Jun 15, 2016 18:32
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I bought a cheap, used USB Floppy drive off eBay used to finally tackle the horrendous amount of disks I have around, maybe getting rid of some crap (Who am I kidding, I'm a terrible hoarder) and seeing how many disks still actually work/are usable. It's a bit easier with Linux than with some ancient disk tools on a old computer. Sometimes the magnetic powder on the disk platter dissolves or otherwise goes bad with age and completely covers everything when inserted into a disk drive and will also ruin every disk you insert afterwards, so you have to carefully clean the drive if that happens. (If you hear a grinding noise when inserting a disk, congratulations! This just happened. Remove the disk as quickly as possible) Surprisingly, most disks I have checked so far are still perfectly fine and readable, a weird exception to that were an unopened box of ten "Vebratim" HD disks, where every single disk had a surface that was visibly damaged in that way. Bizarre. I haven't made my way to the older DD Disks yet but I'm going to assume that these will also have held up just fine. There's not a lot of interesting things so far, just bootdisks and *em* backups. On one disk, I found a savegame folder from UFO: Enemy Unknown with the files being dated early '95. I loaded it up in DosBox and it was apparently me running an attack on an alien base right as the mission started. (first turn) Mix of flying suits and personal armor soldiers, all with laser rifles. Why this was here on this unlabeled disk I will never know, but there it is. My only base is also really badly designed and on Iceland for some reason. Ah the time before the Internet told you how to play the games right.
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Jun 16, 2016 02:24
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Did they say "Vebratim" verbatim?
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Jun 16, 2016 03:00
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Has this been posted already? Nice screenshots from old rear end software from the days of old rear end. http://www.danielsays.com/ss-gallery.html I'm particularly impressed by how seemingly sophisticated this version of Corel WordPerfect Suite for MS-DOS (from 1997 what the gently caress!) is.    Seems to be just as powerful as Office 97 for Win9x.
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Jun 16, 2016 04:17
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God drat, yeah. There was something really solid-feeling and satisfying about high-resolution MS-DOS programs with their own bespoke UIs. For a long time some people (myself included) kept on going "I don't need no drat Windows  " because there were usually DOS equivalents for most apps/functionality and Windows was seen as a resource-hungry crutch.
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Jun 16, 2016 04:40
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Negrostrike posted:Has this been posted already? Nice screenshots from old rear end software from the days of old rear end. awesome site. It just reminded me of MS Office's retarded cousin, MS Works 
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Jun 16, 2016 04:45
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Last Chance posted:awesome site. It just reminded me of MS Office's retarded cousin, MS Works I had a crap load of Works documents that wouldn't work in Office XP or whatever. All those terrible 10th grade English essays, lost (for 3 or 4 years).
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Jun 16, 2016 04:54
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