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Hi first time poster in this thread. Since the old Computers thread in Games forum is pretty much dead, might as well come here and spam my old computer stuff. The past two days has been dedicated to resurrecting my Amiga A1200, after it has been ignored for the Atari STs and Commodore 64  A new CF card loaded with Classic Workbench, running WB 3.1 as well as WHDLoad for games. However since it is a stock A1200, it doesn't have enough RAM to run WHDLoad games.
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Dec 23, 2018 08:57
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FilthyImp posted:I'm actually quite pissed at Sprint because their base plans throttle you to loving SD quality streams and poo poo. I was all set to jump ship to their service but gently caress that loving bullshit.
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Dec 23, 2018 11:49
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Platystemon posted:When the iPhone was first released, AT&T’s billing system was unprepared for the advent of unlimited data. The_Franz posted:Yep. The whole reason for the seemingly arbitrary 160 character message length limit is because they just packed the SMS data into some unused space in the packets the phone was already receiving anyways.
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Dec 23, 2018 13:29
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You Am I posted:Hi first time poster in this thread. Since the old Computers thread in Games forum is pretty much dead, might as well come here and spam my old computer stuff. That Willy Beamish game was dope
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Dec 23, 2018 13:54
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mobby_6kl posted:That's ridiculous, the iphone wasn't the first EDGE (or 3G, lol) phone by a long shot. How did they not run into this before? It was one of the first, if not the first, with unlimited data plan. I know I was keeping track of my data usage at the time. Iirc, I had a 300 MB plan and it was $0.50 - $2/mb after that. And text messages are not free. They use a signaling channel, but very inefficiently (until Edge), and need exclusive access to it. Including setting up and closing down the connection, it means you need exclusive access for several seconds per message. Each transmitter only had one such channel, so even though a text message could be sent asynchronously, there was a very limited number of messages that could be sent per tower per day. Edge allowed sending texts over GPRS, removing that limit, but until then there was a very good reason to limit the usage.
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Dec 23, 2018 14:06
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You Am I posted:Hi first time poster in this thread. Since the old Computers thread in Games forum is pretty much dead, might as well come here and spam my old computer stuff. Never don't post Amiga stuff.
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Dec 23, 2018 16:08
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Casimir Radon posted:LGR's Christmas Clone is back again.This time around he looks at a Christmas themed hidden object game that seems way better than you would ever imagine it to be. This has made me want to pick up a hidden object game from the latest GOG sale. They're cheap as heck and I have a 4-year-old for whom the spooky-but-old-lady-friendly genre might actually be kinda fun for us to run through together.
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Dec 24, 2018 08:54
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https://twitter.com/CoolBoxArt/status/1077272696877137921
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Dec 24, 2018 19:45
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doctorfrog posted:This has made me want to pick up a hidden object game from the latest GOG sale. They're cheap as heck and I have a 4-year-old for whom the spooky-but-old-lady-friendly genre might actually be kinda fun for us to run through together.
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Dec 24, 2018 19:53
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Platystemon posted:When the iPhone was first released, AT&T’s billing system was unprepared for the advent of unlimited data. This was also the era where Apple was charging $20 for software updates because "it's an accounting rule."
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Dec 24, 2018 19:56
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Casimir Radon posted:I picked it up a couple weeks ago. It's actually fun like he said, and pretty addictive. I would have loved it as a kid. GOG doesn't have the Xmas one, but they do have a gloopy pirate ghost themed one that should fit the bill, and it's a buck forty, so I just grabbed it. I just think it's funny that I've never looked at these before because I thought they were like those "find the crap" posters and therefore "not really games." Having a kid around changes things: I'd rather her have something she can participate in bite sized chunks on rather than just placidly stare at whatever kaleidoscope of cartoon violence is usually on my PC screen. Ok, tech relics: One piece of Tiger electronics currently survives on my shelf, and I have never beat it, and generally don't try very hard at it, either. It's this thing:  I sort of miss big-assed single-tasking bits of game hardware with fat tactile buttons. I had a friend who had a baffling piece of old hardware about half a sheet cake in size with a 4x6 or so grid of large, backlit buttons of many colors that claimed on its face to play 25 or so games, but given the limited feedback you can program into a 4x6 display, and the lack of a manual of any kind, we never figured the damned thing out.
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Dec 24, 2018 20:33
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The Tiger Out game had my entire family, and extended family, enraptured for like six months.
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Dec 24, 2018 20:35
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doctorfrog posted:I sort of miss big-assed single-tasking bits of game hardware with fat tactile buttons. I had a friend who had a baffling piece of old hardware about half a sheet cake in size with a 4x6 or so grid of large, backlit buttons of many colors that claimed on its face to play 25 or so games, but given the limited feedback you can program into a 4x6 display, and the lack of a manual of any kind, we never figured the damned thing out. In hindsight it's astonishing how simple those things were, and how popular they were. I never had one of these, but I saw the commercials for it all the time as a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT_GppaR_ao According to Wikipedia, this was the best-selling toy of 1980.
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Dec 25, 2018 05:09
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I inherited a Merlin from my brother in the mid 80's. It was pretty fun to mess with, took six AA's (they lasted forever), and was shaped like the world's least ergonomic telephone. It taught me that Tic-Tac-Toe was a solved game, how to play Blackjack (up to 13 instead of 21, but the fundamentals were there), you could program little tunes on it, and had a prehistoric version of Lights Out called Magic Square. https://archive.org/details/hh_merlin
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Dec 25, 2018 05:17
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Fallom posted:This was also the era where Apple was charging $20 for software updates because "it's an accounting rule." This was in order to not get sued by their shareholders because at the time they used the GAAP accounting method for the iPhone which split revenue and profits over the 24 month period it was considered viable. This was different from the accounting method for their iPods, where they took the profit and revenue al at once. But since the two products shared nearly identical software, they needed to express to the shareholders that the iPod didn’t “lose” an undisclosed amount of money by gaining free features over time. This was a few years after Enron/WorldCom poo poo and falling afoul if transparency laws was probably decently scary enough to justify charging customers for updates until they could prove that the iPod Touch would be a success/change their accounting rules for it.
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Dec 25, 2018 05:46
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doctorfrog posted:I inherited a Merlin from my brother in the mid 80's. It was pretty fun to mess with, took six AA's (they lasted forever), and was shaped like the world's least ergonomic telephone. It taught me that Tic-Tac-Toe was a solved game, how to play Blackjack (up to 13 instead of 21, but the fundamentals were there), you could program little tunes on it, and had a prehistoric version of Lights Out called Magic Square. I got a Merlin for Christmas in 1979 Man that thing was fun. I programmed it to play songs
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Dec 26, 2018 12:06
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Last Chance posted:Only for iPod touch.
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Dec 26, 2018 12:57
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Somebody has a new favorite as of 01:33 on Dec 27, 2018 |
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Dec 26, 2018 14:05
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code:
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Dec 26, 2018 15:05
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Here is a shameful tech relic of my own. When I got my first computer (a baller Gateway 2000 Pentium 75) I didn’t understand how the directory structure and hard drive worked, but I loved playing doom. I knew how to install doom, because it tells you in the manual, so for like the first month in order to play doom I would dutifully navigate to the CDROM drive and install doom, re-set up the sound and all that just to play it. Realizing I could just run it from the hard drive was 
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Dec 26, 2018 15:53
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doctorfrog posted:GOG doesn't have the Xmas one, but they do have a gloopy pirate ghost themed one that should fit the bill, and it's a buck forty, so I just grabbed it. I just think it's funny that I've never looked at these before because I thought they were like those "find the crap" posters and therefore "not really games." Having a kid around changes things: I'd rather her have something she can participate in bite sized chunks on rather than just placidly stare at whatever kaleidoscope of cartoon violence is usually on my PC screen. I had that thing too and I was never really interested in it either.
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Dec 26, 2018 19:01
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Here is a shameful tech relic of my own. When I got my first computer (a baller Gateway 2000 Pentium 75) I didn’t understand how the directory structure and hard drive worked, but I loved playing doom. I did the exact same thing with Doom. I came from console gaming and didn’t get “installing” games on a PC at the time.
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Dec 27, 2018 22:43
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In my early days as an ISP support tech in the mid-90s, I clung to the teminology of "loading" a program into memory in order to run it, which was the way you did it in the old floppy-based days ("load" and "run" were two separate operations, and it wasn't until hard drives became standard equipment that programs were designed to be launched in a single command). I would tell customers to "load Netscape", meaning "load it into memory and run it", and they would say in confusion, "...But I already loaded it!" —meaning "installed it onto their hard drive". I would roll my eyes at their bewilderment and try to educate them on the useless minutiae of persistent and volatile memory. I was not good at customer service.
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Dec 27, 2018 23:03
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Data Graham posted:I was not good at customer service. A classic that I encountered was someone elderly ringing up saying the mouse cursor won't move any further. After about five minutes I realised that they had the sensitivity wound down, they had run out of mousepad and didn't know to lift and go again. Best was my grandma saying she got a computer for free from a neighbour. The screen just keeps saying no signal. I asked if she had a laptop or computer with a separate monitor and box. "No just a Monitor and Keyboard, no tower" Thanks grandma, thats exactly what you have, you do not have a computer.
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Dec 28, 2018 08:51
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I used to do dial up support in the early 2000’s, precisely when the only people with dial up were old people and people who live in the boonies. It was as bad as you imagine. I went round and round with a lady for 3 days trying to get her dial up working. Finally she has the thought to tell me that her computer was in a flood the day before her dial up quit working 
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Dec 28, 2018 20:26
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:I used to do dial up support in the early 2000’s, precisely when the only people with dial up were old people and people who live in the boonies. I did tech support for an ISP in the mid-2000s, and we had people still on dial-up as well as customers on broadband. A lot of the older folks on dial-up were great, though - they had to call us to delete mail from their account when a relative would email them pictures or video that choked out their connections and our dumb system had no way for them to avoid it. A lot of them were totally used to the process and were nice and patient about it. The broadband customers were the ones that usually had the stunningly dumb and/or weird issues.
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Dec 29, 2018 09:36
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Had a rude, entitled customer call me because his computer wouldn’t come on. He was a big wig at one of our biggest clients and a total rear end. Said printer was on but computer wouldn’t power up. Asked him to verify that everything was plugged in, and he said it was. So I drop everything to make a visit to his house. Sure enough everything was plugged in. He had plugged the printer into the wall, and the surge protector into itself. When I pointed out that the surge protector can’t power itself he got even ruder. My boss wouldn’t even let me charge him for the visit. Dick.
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Dec 29, 2018 13:24
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Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:Had a rude, entitled customer call me because his computer wouldn’t come on. He was a big wig at one of our biggest clients and a total rear end. Said printer was on but computer wouldn’t power up. Asked him to verify that everything was plugged in, and he said it was. So I drop everything to make a visit to his house.  is the only tech support solution
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Dec 29, 2018 13:26
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I just remembered when I was doing my work experience week back in school and we installed a new VDU terminal in some social worker's office and she was all beaming and told us she was very happy to finally get a computer and could get rid of her old-rear end typewriter. Never mind that it was a terminal instead of a computer, but she looked so crest-fallen when we had to inform her there was no way to get hard copy out of a display terminal  I guess at some point they must've* installed a group printer somewhere on the floor but she'd already had someone take the typewriter away. *) Although it was the city so possibly not 
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Dec 29, 2018 15:57
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Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:Had a rude, entitled customer call me because his computer wouldn’t come on. He was a big wig at one of our biggest clients and a total rear end. Said printer was on but computer wouldn’t power up. Asked him to verify that everything was plugged in, and he said it was. So I drop everything to make a visit to his house. Holy poo poo, I had a customer run through basically this same thing on the phone. When I told her the power strip needed to be plugged into the wall she replied with, "But the box said it powered up to 5 devices!" When I got her to plug the power strip and successfully boot the computer she hung up on me.
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Dec 29, 2018 23:18
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My dad brought me this beast today. He picked it up an an auction for nothing.  The selection of movies it came with was nice at least. I haven't even touched the machine yet. I'm going to assume there's bad belts in there or a bad stylus. I don't know how much effort and money I want to throw at it just to watch a skipping version of Star Wars for five minutes.
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Dec 31, 2018 06:03
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That fuckin faux-wood finish. Like we wanted even our A/V boxes to pretend to be furniture.
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Dec 31, 2018 06:08
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Data Graham posted:That fuckin faux-wood finish. Like we wanted even our A/V boxes to pretend to be furniture. If it's good enough for LGR, it's good for the rest of us 
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Dec 31, 2018 06:12
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Is that the thing it sucks the disc out of the cartridge and you take the empty cartridge out?
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Dec 31, 2018 06:13
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Cojawfee posted:Is that the thing it sucks the disc out of the cartridge and you take the empty cartridge out? Yeah, it has a vinyl record in there, just with a lot denser grooves. Years ago I made a video of putting one on a turntable for a laugh. nothing interesting happens because the stylus is WAY too big https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI1ZX9W99iA Techmoan has a video on the format I believe.
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Dec 31, 2018 06:18
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CEDs are rad. They don't actually make the stylus vibrate like a vinyl record would. Instead, the disc is actually conductive and the distance between the disc surface and the stylus creates a varying amount of capacitance. That's where the A/V signal comes from. I should see if my player still works. Most of my discs are in rough shape from previous owners.
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Dec 31, 2018 06:28
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wa27 posted:Yeah, it has a vinyl record in there, just with a lot denser grooves. Playing it backward isn't much more interesting, it's just "Paul is dead" and "I buried Paul" over and over.
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Dec 31, 2018 07:04
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Data Graham posted:That fuckin faux-wood finish. Like we wanted even our A/V boxes to pretend to be furniture. That kind of split when the futurism trend made everything aluminum and glass and whatever. The advent of cheaper plastics meant we could make our electronics look like they blended in with the wooden furniture, to give them a touch of class and to ensure they weren't out of place in our living rooms. Then everything was a black box meant to look distinctly Tech, and now everything techy is supposed to be made visible.
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Dec 31, 2018 07:37
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Data Graham posted:That fuckin faux-wood finish. Like we wanted even our A/V boxes to pretend to be furniture. I watched the old series Connections with James Burke about a year ago, and his thing was that plastic was seen as cheap crap when console TVs were king, so manufacturers would envelop them in woodgrain to entice buyers who wanted middle-class furniture at lower-class prices, or just electronics that matched their heavy wood furnishings. Manufacturers would deliberately design stuff to be similar in form to something made out of wood, in spite of the fact that being injection molded meant they could take any shape and color. Eventually, all that fake woodgraining started looking cheap too and shrank to inset panels and stuff like that, then vanished, and slowly things could take weird shapes and colors since they didn't have to look like heirloom furniture anymore. If it's all true, it sort of reminds me of how rich people names are supposed to slowly filter down to poor people, and acquire the same kind of cultural disdain that woodgrain ended up getting. edit: beaten
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Dec 31, 2018 07:39
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Speaking of radios this seems to have been fairly popular since I see it on TV every once in a while. The one I have used to be my grandmother's and it's cool because it's got three (mechanical) presets:  It's also got inputs for phono and deck (so, basically anything, it isn't as if the amp knows what's connected) and an extra speaker to make it stereo.
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Dec 31, 2018 07:41
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