|
Mak0rz posted:I found a link to the entire Tenchi Muyo series on my favorite ROM website back in the day and I streamed the whole thing in like one or two sittings on lovely rural dialup. It was about postage stamp sized yeah. I remember when Microsoft released the ASF codec, you could use it with anything that supported windows media codecs to encode and decode, and it could fit a watchable resolution episode into ~130 megs, which was totally workable even on 33.6k dialup. Everything about fansubbing changed within 6 months.
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 03:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 07:09 |
|
|
EoRaptor posted:I remember when Microsoft released the ASF codec, you could use it with anything that supported windows media codecs to encode and decode, and it could fit a watchable resolution episode into ~130 megs, which was totally workable even on 33.6k dialup. Everything about fansubbing changed within 6 months. Max speed we ever got was maybe 10KB/s (even that was rare because our lovely lines/service meant connection speeds were always a crapshoot) so that would still take about four hours. I can't hog the phones for four goddamn hours my sister is waiting for a call from her bff over in the other town!
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 03:48
|
|
|
My 2x SCSI LaCie CD-R paid for itself sophomore year of college, burning people's Network Neighborhood-shared collections of MP3s onto CDs that people could play in their cars at $10 a pop. Kids today will never know the stress of watching the buffer meter drop dangerously low as your computer decides to update its virus definitions or something.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 04:33
|
|
|
Pham Nuwen posted:a 45 MB episode of dragonball z that's the size of a postage stamp on your 15" monitor Complete with blurry, piss-yellow, profanity filled subtitles.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 04:53
|
|
|
Twitch posted:Complete with blurry, piss-yellow, profanity filled subtitles. gently caress yes
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 04:54
|
|
|
Twitch posted:Complete with blurry, piss-yellow, profanity filled subtitles.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 05:04
|
|
|
My collection of DBZ episode are on VHS tapes recorded from OTA in Cantonese thank you very much. Do I win anything?
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 06:37
|
|
|
oohhboy posted:Death to .rmbv. I never seen one that didn't make me want to shiv the person who created it. Pham Nuwen posted:a 45 MB episode of dragonball z that's the size of a postage stamp on your 15" monitor Ahhh, memories. I wanted to rewatch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex a while back, so I duly dug out the DVD-R I burned it to, stuck it into my PC (the DVD drive is like 3 computers old now, I just keep moving it across) and loaded up one of the 130~MB .rmvbs I'd kept for the last nine years! Then I closed it and went and got a new copy that wasn't unwatchably awful.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 11:19
|
|
|
The_Franz posted:remember the people who collected giant binders of 1cd xvid movie rips and swore up and down that they looked just as good as a real dvd*? Don't doxx me please
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 12:22
|
|
|
I remember I enjoyed the hell out of watching the first 2 episodes of South Park on RealPlayer in their entirety on a computer screen, even if they looked blocky as poo poo and you couldn't really make out their faces.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 13:30
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 13:36
|
|
|
Negrostrike posted:I remember I enjoyed the hell out of watching the first 2 episodes of South Park on RealPlayer in their entirety on a computer screen, even if they looked blocky as poo poo and you couldn't really make out their faces.  but Quicktime movies of the space battles on Babylon 5.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 13:44
|
|
|
The_Franz posted:remember the people who collected giant binders of 1cd xvid movie rips and swore up and down that they looked just as good as a real dvd*? I recently watched a copy of Fear And Loathing that had been kicking around since my sophomore year of college, 2006ish. It was 700-800 MB and I'd always thought it looked fine. Turns out a 19" CRT can hide a lot of faults that become apparent on a 42" TV. It wasn't unwatchable, it just looked like poo poo because I finally noticed "how blocky and smeared darker and high motion scenes were"
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 15:25
|
|
|
Doubleposting for something I found at a thrift shop yesterday: (please excuse the mess, I just finished putting up drywall in this shed so there's dust everywhere) It's a first-gen iMac. I installed OS 9 on it largely because I want to run old games and poo poo, and also because I have plenty of Unix systems already. What software should I put on there? I've got an FTP server set up on the local network so I can pretty easily transfer poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 17:33
|
|
|
I saw Jesus vs Santa from a Vivo file. Think it was 160x120 and around 30 megs lol
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 17:41
|
|
|
Isn't OS9 a giant loving tire fire?
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 17:41
|
|
|
Chairman Mao posted:Isn't OS9 a giant loving tire fire? I mean all the pre-X Mac OSes were kind of tire fires because they relied on each application to decide it's done running for the time being and hand back control to the OS so the next program can run. As for OS 9 specifically I don't know. The mouse is just as bad as I remember it, and the keyboard just as mushy!
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 17:46
|
|
|
Technically? Yeah, probably - it's the very last revision of a very dead dead end. The UI is neat, though; Apple has arguably gone downhill in predictability and consistency ever since.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 17:49
|
|
|
Mak0rz posted:I found a link to the entire Tenchi Muyo series on my favorite ROM website back in the day and I streamed the whole thing in like one or two sittings on lovely rural dialup. It was about postage stamp sized yeah. There is a pretty good chance that I was hosting those episodes...
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 18:57
|
|
|
Lowen SoDium posted:There is a pretty good chance that I was hosting those episodes...  These were streaming in-browser, which blew my mind at the time. No need for RealPlayer or somesuch nonsense.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 19:38
|
|
|
RISC OS has been properly open-sourced under Apache 2.0. The Register has a nice little history article if you're not familiar.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 20:55
|
|
|
Mak0rz posted:
So this was a LONG time ago so I am likely going to get some of the details wrong, but here goes. Between 1996 and 2004, I did a lot of PC repair/upgrade work around town as an under the table cash operation. On of my regulars was a gynecologist who loved playing PC games. He had a LAN set up in his basement that was a conveyor belt of PC upgrades. He would buy two new 12 MB Voodoo cards to SLI in his PC, and the two 8MB cards would be moved down in the the next lowest machines, and so on. These upgrades seemed to happen almost weekly, so even the lowest end machine wouldn't have any parts much older than 2 months in it. I used to hang out at his place a lot and play games with him and several other guys who are also in their late teens. Quake 2, Tribes, Everquest, Total Annihilation... Doc had a T1 run to his house back when normal people would have been happy to have a 33.6 modem. And in an area that wouldn't see broadband for several years to come. That T1 was eventually upgraded to T3, which almost 45Mbps. Serious bandwidth. But Doc just used the connection to play games. And there were only 6 PCs in the LAN room. 2 more if you counted the pieced together machines in the other basement (more on this later) He had no concept of latency or bandwidth. The T1 was doing just fine. To him, more expensive = better than. Doc's house was huge, as you would expect a specialized doctor with a successful practice to be. It actually had 2 separate basements (that I know of). One was the game basement that had the LAN and another room with a TV and some consoles. The other basement was where his movie theater was, and a semi-finished area that had a tanning bed and all of the network gear for his LAN. Also, in this room was a folding table and a couple of PCs that were scrapped together from spare parts so we could have 8 people playing. Anyways, I one day scrapped together a 3rd PC and installed some servers on it for hosting my own files and stuff. I took the machine and tucked it away behind some of the wires and stuff being stored there and hoped no one ever found or messed with it. I think it lasted about 2 years before someone shut it off... or maybe a part died on it. I am not really sure, because I never physically touched it again. Side note: Today I am a Network Engineer, but back then networking was not something I had a real deep grasp on. But even then, I knew it wasn't a great idea for EVERY MACHINE ON YOUR NETWORK TO HAVE A PUBLIC IP ADDRESS! Doc didn't like firewalls because he didn't know how to forward ports and he wanted internet players and friends to join his hosted games. I remember one time after telling him that he needed a firewall, I watched him reinstall Windows ME on a machine and connect it to the network with it's public address. It was online for about 30 seconds, then it rebooted and there was a new admin account on it. Back in my late teens and early 20's, I was in to anime and I was into Tenchi Muyo (there is nothing you can say to me that I haven't already said to myself). I remember finding the site https://www.mytenchi.com and watching a few episodes. It's been so long, I don't remember the file format. But I do kind of remember them playing in browser. I don't remember how I got in touch with the owner of that site, but to wrap up this Grampa Simpson style story, he was trying to get more host for his files. Well it just so happened that I had a file server with about 44Mbps of unused bandwidth. I set him up with an account and he uploaded the files. I know he hosted those files on that server for quite a while. But one day his site disappeared. I don't know if he shut it down on his own or if he was contacted by some lawyers. I have a lot of little stories about Doc. Some of them are even on topic. I will post some of them later. Lowen SoDium has a new favorite as of 21:09 on Oct 23, 2018 |
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 21:04
|
|
|
Yes. Yes please bring more of those delicious tales of yestercentury. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 21:18
|
|
|
In 199X, our town was hit by a very heavy hail storm that caused a lot of damage in the area. The day that it hit, Doc was out of town. I was at his house playing games with Jeff, the guy who had actually introduced me to Doc. It was pretty common for people to be over at his house playing games whether Doc was home or not. Doc actually encouraged this. He would leave the door in to that basement unlocked 90% for people to come and go as they pleased. The hail storm knocked out power, demolished roofs, totalled cars, and left enough huge chunks of ice around that some roads were impassible. Docs house was relatively untouched. Jeff and I each called our parents to be told that we were probably better off stay where we were for the night rather that drive risky roads. Doc called make sure that his BMW was pulled all the way in to the garage and said it was fine for us to stay the night. Jeff and I made our way to the theater room as it had biggest couches to sleep on, and Doc's wife didn't want us staying in the up stairs part of the house (she was not a fan of us). I mentioned in the last post that Doc had a home movie theater. It was a very nice set up, and assuming that he has upgraded the projector and the receiver, I would expect it is a nice set up today. The projector was a 3 CRT based absolute unit of a projector. I couldn't tell you what the specs of this thing were, but I can tell you that it was very bright for a CRT projector and very huge. I do know that Doc had a Faroudja line doubler that he was very proud of. Mostly because it was very expensive. I am sure it made the image look better too. He also had various game consoles including a Japanese Playstation 1 with a few import games, a DVD player and a Laserdisc player. The center seat in the front row was a reclining seat and there was thin console/table that separated it from the next couch. That table had a panel on it's side that had a cluster of ports on it. A couple of Playstation controller ports, some SNES ports, I think some Sega Genesis ports. All of these ports were connected up to long runs of cable in the floor that ran all the way to system component racks built into the walls. The semi-finished room with the tanning bed and the This area was some of the worst cable spaghetti I have ever seen in all my life. Layers and layers of cables covered devices. While trying to find my way to back of the receiver, I found an abandoned and forgotten Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and a Philips CDi. After figuring out what was connected to what, we played some of the PS games then moved on to movies. DVD was incredible to watch for the first time. So crisp and smooth looking. Interactive menus. We watched Con Air, making Nick Cage on of the first faces I would ever see in all of DVD's digital splendor. Lost in Space (1998) was another DVD we watched that night. I remember that it's behind scenes and alt scenes stuff blew me away. Finally we decided to watch some stuff on Laserdisc. Doc's Laserdisc player as pretty high end. I mean, I guess they all were, but this one not only had an auto flip feature, but it also had enough video playback buffer that it wouldn't even skip during the flip. Aliens Resurrection was our first laserdisc movie for the night. The image quality was nearly on par with DVD on this setup, but Laserdisc lacked the extra features that DVD had. Nothing interesting happened to make this in to an actual story, but it was really neat to get to play with and watch movies on this very high end set up in a time when the home theater experience was a luxury for the very wealthy. I will end this with a short unrelated story about Doc. Doc would play games all night long and would sometime actually fall asleep in his chair right in the middle of a game. One time I came over after the end of a late shift of my McJob to find Doc asleep with Everquest running. His hand still on the keyboard holding the forward button. I don't know how long he had been like this but his character was in the ocean, swimming towards nothing. I decided I would come back the next day. Lowen SoDium has a new favorite as of 22:58 on Oct 23, 2018 |
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 22:52
|
|
|
Wow didn’t know Ernest Cline posted here
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 23:01
|
|
|
Empress Brosephine posted:Wow didn’t know Ernest Cline posted here
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 23:20
|
|
|
I used windows movie maker to make one of those anime music videos, I cut up the first episode of Tenchi Muyo (where he first met Ryoko and spent the episode trying to escape from her) set to I Ran, and shared it via kazaa  If anyone still has that tucked away, upload it to youtube or something. I lost the original something like half a dozen computers ago
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2018 23:38
|
|
|
I'm enjoying the stories butEmpress Brosephine posted:Wow didn’t know Ernest Cline posted here lmao drat
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2018 00:00
|
|
|
Don’t let the burn stop the stories
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2018 02:02
|
|
|
Those stories are way better reads than Ready Player One. Not that it's hard to accomplish such a thing anyway.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2018 02:20
|
|
|
Empress Brosephine posted:Wow didn’t know Ernest Cline posted here Ernest Cline wishes he had a friend named Doc when he was a teen. As I had said before: To Doc, more expensive = better than. Every single game we played was 3d accelerated except for Age of Empires. And I think almost everyone of the PCs at this time used a 3DFX Voodoo 1 or 2 card. For those who don't know, the Voodoo 1 and 2 were both 3d pass through cards. You would still have a 2d card like a Matrox or Cirrus Logic, and you would also have a Voodoo card. You would run your VGA out of your 2d card into your Voodoo card, and connect your monitor to the Voodoo card. The Voodoo cards did absolutely nothing until you started a game that used them, then they would basically cut of the video signal from the 2d card and output their own image. The TL:DR of that is that your 2d card has zero effect on 3d games. Doc wasn't having that. He ordered some super ridiculous video card that had to have been meant for CAD or graphics design. I remember exactly 4 things about it: 1: It was full length PCI. That means that the card was meant to run the full depth of a computer case. Full length cards had a handle shaped bracket on the front end that slid into a slot on the front of the case, to stabilize them (why don't we have this today on heavy video cards?) 2: It had 24MB of RAM. This was a stupid amount of memory at the time. 3: It had a fan on it. This was also pretty unheard of at the time. 4: It cost $2000. That's how you know it was better than Cirrus Logic at running Quake 2 (with your Voodoo 2 card enable). I still remember Doc holding the thing by the handle shaped bracket, slowing moving the thing around in the air making airplane noises...
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2018 14:45
|
|
|
Quake 2 was the preferred game when I first started going to Doc's house. We mostly played CTF, but some times played some other mods like Jailbreak, Chaos Mod, and Action Quake. Games were played were played locally at first. The only machine that had Internet access to begin with was Docs. Before he had the T1 installed, Doc had an 2 channel ISDN modem on his PC. He would download mods and skins, set them up on his machine and then tell everyone to copy the quake2 dir from his machine to their machines. He was running LANtastic on the PCs. I am not sure what LANtastic offered over the built in networking functions of Windows 95/98/ME. All of this was set up before I was doing any tech work for him and long before I got in to networking. LANtastic was configured with completely open network shares of the root C drive on every machine. One day when we were play Quake 2, we noticed that Doc was making some incredible shots. Like 360 mid air no scope head shots with the railgun. Doc wasn't bad at Quake 2, but he wasn't this good. Jeff opened the network share to Doc's machine and started poking around. He didn't find PAK9.pak, but he did find some strange keybinds in Doc's config file. Z was bound to enable aimbot and X was abound to disable aimbot. Jeff nudged me with his elbow to show me what he had discovered. I said "watch this" and edited the file. bind z dropweapon bind x kill In the next game Doc ran up to me, threw his shotgun at me, and then fell over dead. For someone who had just been caught cheating, Doc was pretty upset and kicked everyone out of the house. The ban only lasted a few days. He excused his cheating by saying that he needed an edge to beat us younger players who had faster reflexes than he did. This was the last time that we ever caught Doc cheating against us, but it was far from the last time I saw Doc cheat. The last few times I saw Doc, he was playing Age of Mythologies and America's Army. He had cheats programs for both of them. His Age of Myth cheats would let him see the whole map, give him self resources, set unit's health. There was even a button that make won the game for him, instantly. I think the America's Army hacks were standard wall hack and speed hack stuff. I remember wondering if hacking that game would be considered a federal crime. Doc told me that his hacks where custom written for him and he had to pay for a new version every time they broken from a game update.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2018 17:48
|
|
|
Lowen SoDium posted:1: It was full length PCI. That means that the card was meant to run the full depth of a computer case. Full length cards had a handle shaped bracket on the front end that slid into a slot on the front of the case, to stabilize them (why don't we have this today on heavy video cards?) I can't remember if it was my last GPU or my last Mobo ( Bought both at the same time. ) but I did get an Asus-styled bracket like that to support my gpu. It didn't slot into the front of the case, but is attached to the back with the same screws used to fasten the GPU to the backside of the case.  Ah, turns out it's something Asus ships with their Republic of Gamers ( blughghgh ) motherboards.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2018 19:07
|
|
|
SubNat posted:I can't remember if it was my last GPU or my last Mobo ( Bought both at the same time. ) but I did get an Asus-styled bracket like that to support my gpu. I have seen those before, but the full length cards I was talking about look like the first card in this image:  That handle looking thing slots in to a grove that was in the front end of the case. That way, the card is supported from both ends.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2018 19:21
|
|
|
Lowen SoDium posted:Z was bound to enable aimbot and X was abound to disable aimbot. Jeff nudged me with his elbow to show me what he had discovered. I said "watch this" and edited the file. Oh my god that is loving awesome
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2018 20:38
|
|
|
This is nowhere near as old school as that, but when I dabbled in Counter Strike Source, the first time I saw an admin kill a cheater with lightning at the start of each round, I so delighted that I couldn't stop laughing. I was really bad at that game, but hooked for more than half a year.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2018 22:21
|
|
|
Was going to state cool and in the second year there I moved out of the dorms with some friends at work. Now back to the apartment that was really the floors above a flower shop converted to apartments DSL was now available to customers but the requirements were strict. You had to be within a mile or two of a switching house at that time unlike today. The closest switching house to our house was the main reason I investigated it; it was right next door. Full speed as advertised. Getting everyone on board was easy; hey do you want to throw in some money to share non-suck internet? Buying Ethernet adapters and enough cable to connect everyone was cost absurb in 1999 (and what wireless?) but luckily my best friend (who was part of the crew) was a tech support which was not just doing phone work but walking out and solving problems. It happened to be a benefit because the whole campus was going through an Ethernet refit. The network it was replacing was 10BASE2 (or 5?) over BNC cables. BNC is unlike Ethernet in that every computer needs to be directly connected to another computer and create a long chain until the end where a terminator is needed. Like a token ring but.. not a ring. So we had access to dozens of pci/isa adapters and miles of BNC. We estimated how many cables and how long they had to be. took those plus some spares. Basically there was need for two small cables, one medium cable and then the anaconda-mega-loving-long cable from upstairs all the way to my room. Setup a dedicated win98 internet sharing box and it and the modem lived in my room (I gained/was cursed by now, even today, I could not sleep without loud as gently caress computer fan noise. Please see the pc fans of 1999.) A friend of my best friend wanted to move in and he was given a junky throw away Dell which was still acceptable at the time. . To connect him, we needed to add him the string and the tech Dept already threw out all the cable. He roomed on the same floor as me but beyond the distance of a medium cable. We just had extra mediums and smalls, no loving death-snake-long cables. We figured out that a medium could connect him if we continued the line upstairs by running it outside a window, down a floor, and into the room right below which happened to be the same room as the new guy. During one frigid PA night we did our dark run. Did it at night so the landlords did not see it or hear the windows opening since they worked in the flower shop (utilities including heat fully paid with rent would piss them off as we fumbled for the cable outside) . We got it done and the landlords only asked one time what the hell that cable was.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2018 23:44
|
|
|
When I finally got a CD burner in 2002, things were stable enough that burning a CD was never a difficult process.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2018 00:17
|
|
|
The release of Half‐Life 2 was closer to the fall of the Soviet Union than to the present day.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2018 02:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 07:09 |
|
|
Platystemon posted:The release of Half‐Life 2 was closer to the fall of the Soviet Union than to the present day. The release of GTA: Vice City is closer to the year it is set (1986) than to the present day.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2018 03:09
|
|
