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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:Probably depends a bit on what you're doing, but I can see a sound card with a bunch of different inputs/outputs being quite useful. A quick Google shows a lot of sound cards with 5.1 surround out for example. The quality of the sound shouldn't be an issue, a DAC is a solved problem these days and there shouldn't be any noticable difference between any two DACs, except for build quality of course. Or for that "warmer" sound that audiophiles praise so highly, around 2002 there was a short-lived attempt to make vacuum-tube-based sound cards for a computer.  https://www.geek.com/blurb/aopens-vacuum-tube-audio-card-547921/ https://www.cnet.com/news/warming-pc-sound-with-vacuum-tubes/
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Jul 4, 2019 05:07
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T-man posted:I'm amazed nobody's made a gimmick device to connect a modern PC up to old tape recorder storage ala the commodore 64. Imagine getting a retro-modern game on tape that runs in windows 10. You could just use software with the soundcard, no need for a gizmo.
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Jul 4, 2019 05:31
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I'm not looking for practical, I'm looking for nostalgia fueled million dollar kickstarter garbage to accelerate capitalism's downfall the revolution will be caused by DRM-locked juice pods
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Jul 4, 2019 06:22
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Geoj posted:My first "real" computer (a 133 MHz non-MMX Pentium I) had that same card, or one very similar to it. I just bought a Radeon RX 580 with 8 GB GDDR5. As much RAM as on the motherboard...
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Jul 4, 2019 06:53
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ryonguy posted:Is it really necessary even for that? Or is it one of those audiophile "wood knobs give a warmer tone" thing? I was thinking like audio engineers and other professional sound people. I doubt you can mix a album or a movie using the onboard sound card that comes in most computers. But even for super hard core gamers, it's goingt o be your headphones/speakers that will have the most effect. Speaking of that I have amazing JBL headphones but I never use them because I find using headphones for a long time uncomfortable, but the speakers i have are literally 20 years old and so it sounds like missile command when my phone gets a text or whatnot.
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Jul 4, 2019 08:23
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I remember also getting excited about building my first computer with one gb of ram, in 2007. One gigabyte! Untold riches! I also remember upping that to three gb inside of a month. What was a dream in 2000 was, sadly, not sufficient for 2007 standards.
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Jul 4, 2019 08:28
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Gromit posted:When Street Fighter 2 came out it was total madness, with some arcades having banks of them. What's crazy is just how ubiquitous that cabinet and its upgrades became. I was seeing SF2 cabs in Pizza Huts, Bus Stations, Drug Stores, Car Washes and even in loving Blockbusters/Video Stores. If you read about how Capcom was almost ashamed of the combo system or how they responded to faster fighting rounds, it's like the thing succeeded to spite them. twistedmentat posted:I am still amazed that having a separate sound card today is basically only for people who do stuff with audio.
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Jul 4, 2019 08:44
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Sound cards seem to have been mostly displaced on the high end recording market as well. External interfaces are the thing now. They have benefits, not the least of which is being able to put a bunch of inputs and outputs on it without having those dumb looking drive bay front plate things.
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Jul 4, 2019 09:25
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Also to avoid noise, which does happen on some onboard outputs. That's the entire reason I'm using a USB DAC.
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Jul 4, 2019 10:55
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twistedmentat posted:I was thinking like audio engineers and other professional sound people. I doubt you can mix a album or a movie using the onboard sound card that comes in most computers. But even for super hard core gamers, it's goingt o be your headphones/speakers that will have the most effect. Also, for surround sound for consumer use, HDMI is probably one reason nobody cares about having lots of 3.5mm jacks for surround sound now.
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Jul 4, 2019 12:31
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KozmoNaut posted:Also to avoid noise, which does happen on some onboard outputs. That's the entire reason I'm using a USB DAC. The downside to making my own (floating ground) headphone amp as a hobby project: finding out just how incredibly noisy the "ground" reference in my gaming tower is. A USB soundcard didn't quite solve it, but a TOSLINK DAC was utterly quiet. Of course, isolating the two parts from each other with a meter of optical fibre probably counts as papering over the real problems, but ... eh, it works.
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Jul 4, 2019 16:01
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Computer viking posted:It's a shame Dahir Insaat has removed all their old videos: it was a wild selection of "designed by a bored highschooler"-ideas, lovingly rendered, and then stretched into far too long product pitch videos. The restaurant was honestly one of the most plausible ones. A few pages back, but some intrepid goon hosted them on Google Drive a few years back. https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/mobile/folders/0B8ENGke08-ClaDVZZnFRTHZXWkk
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Jul 4, 2019 21:02
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mystes posted:HDMI is probably one reason nobody cares about having lots of 3.5mm jacks for surround sound now. I just throw that poo poo to my 7.1 headset now, sadly.
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Jul 4, 2019 21:11
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Grraarrgghh posted:A few pages back, but some intrepid goon hosted them on Google Drive a few years back. That's definitely a start, though it's missing a number of them - e.g. this gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp7mM2TP_1A (I love the lovingly rendered Veyron in the last segment) I'm not sure if the "immense drones tethered to generators on trucks as a way to move heavy goods" one is in there either - but the ones he has got are great. 
Computer viking has a new favorite as of 00:30 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 00:24
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Yeah I had my Lego Technics fight my army men and Matchbox cars too. When I was six.
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Jul 5, 2019 00:39
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Stick with it for the bonus fun-sized car-towed druglord assassination unit at the end. And yeah, that's sort of the feeling I get here - especially given how it dwells way longer on the "impressive" parts than needed to get the point across. It's a really weird combination of middle school fantasy and competent animation work.
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Jul 5, 2019 00:42
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For some reason that video made me want to play Metal Wolf Chaos again.
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Jul 5, 2019 00:43
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JazzmasterCurious posted:I just bought a Radeon RX 580 with 8 GB GDDR5. Our family had first PC as a "loaner" from the government office, it was 386-something laptop my father was supposed to take to work every day. "Unfortunately" the local government office did not have any support for that so it more or less sat on my room so I could play pirated games. Technically it was owned by the government but it was more or less dropped off to my dad who gave it to me since "I might find it interesting because he didn't". My first own was a 486/SX 25Mhz with 8 MB of memory and an unheard of 420M hard drive. That was actually a model with extra memory and stupidly large drive. I did not even have enough disks to fill that bad boy at first, and it was a powerhouse at the time. Ran everything and the first thing I had to upgrade for was the Pirates! Gold, since I did not have a SVGA monitor. One thing I miss on that laptop though; it had a thumbscroll-mouse and buttons on the backside of the screen. I actually would prefer that to the horrible touchscreen-thingies and the IBM clitmouse we have today. I think it was Compaq, and since it was "top of the line" at that time, it wasn't that huge. EDIT: Also my first upgrade from that 25/SX was kinda funny; I bought 486/100 Mhz with the math co-processor, but the local IT shop bodged up the upgrade and gave me a system with the Pentium 75Mhz because they probably hosed up something. That motherfucker cost ~1000e more at that time so I really did not complain about it. Der Kyhe has a new favorite as of 00:56 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 00:50
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Yesterday I finally applied Y2K patches to our five SunOS 4.1.4 machines at work because I was tired of people trying to set the clocks and corrupting the boot block of the hard drives. Other than that, those machines have been very good. They run old test equipment, you see.
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Jul 5, 2019 01:12
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Der Kyhe posted:Our family had first PC as a "loaner" from the government office, it was 386-something laptop my father was supposed to take to work every day. "Unfortunately" the local government office did not have any support for that so it more or less sat on my room so I could play pirated games. Technically it was owned by the government but it was more or less dropped off to my dad who gave it to me since "I might find it interesting because he didn't".  My first computer was my Dad's office computer too. He wouldn't be needing it at his actual office for a few months, and his employer was fine with people taking their computers home for  work purposes, so I got to spend an entire summer playing shitloads of shareware and freeware games written in BASIC... and poking through the code and learning to modify them and eventually write my own programs.I think I'm a couple years older than you though, instead of a 386 mine was an 8086, an AT&T PC 6300 with a green monochrome monitor. Not my picture but it looked just like this: 
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Jul 5, 2019 06:15
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FilthyImp posted:I actually did the Surround Sound computer thing once using my old desktop and my amp. It was a spaghetti nightmare of 3.5mm to RCA and it really wasn't that useful. how many ears do you have, lol
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Jul 5, 2019 06:28
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The first computer I ever had was my stepdads Tandy 1000 EX. I don't remember much beyond playing a lot of Defender and messing around with a drawing program. We wound up selling it to help pay for some unexpected medical bills. We bought a Packard Bell 486 DX/2 in '95, which I used and abused heavily. Somewhere I came up with a Pentium Overdrive processor and upgraded it to 24mb of ram, probably from my friend who had all kinds of computer stuff laying around. Lots of Doom, Quake, and Warcraft II was played on that machine. I'm not sure what happened to it. My own personal first PC I got my senior year, it was a Pentium 133, 32mb of ram. It was given to me after I helped a family friend pick out a new computer and helped him set it up. I dropped out of college and went to work for my grandfather in '01. He was a metal scrapper (back before that was a synonym for meth tweaker). One day, while hauling a load of #1 steel scrap, we discovered Texas Tech had disposed of a big load of old computer equipment at the junkyard, so we traded out a pile of that for some of the steel load. Out of that I salvaged a Pentium 3-450, 128mb of PC-100 ram, an Intel i-740 graphics card, the aforementioned AWE32, etc. The first ebay purchase I ever made was a working motherboard to tie it all together. Later I upgraded to 384mb of ram and an original Geforce DDR, and I also kept feeding my ever-growing need for drive space for  . There was also a bunch of other stuff I salvaged out of that, like one of the fabled Celeron 300's that could be OCed to 450mhz, stuff like that.I think it was '05, my friend with all the computer stuff laughed at my rig, and gave me his old janky overclocking rig. It was a Duron 1100 (originally a Duron 600 OCed to 1100 but he wouldn't part with the rig until he replaced it with an actual 1100, he said it was too flakey), 512mb of ram, Geforce 3, etc. Around this time I also updated to Windows XP, after using a TechNet copy of Windows 2000 he had given me back when it was hot new stuff. In '07 I bit the bullet and bought an actual new system with new hardware. And here I am today, no longer playing swap meet parts hoarder but buying new.
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Jul 5, 2019 09:08
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Powered Descent posted:My first computer was my Dad's office computer too. He wouldn't be needing it at his actual office for a few months, and his employer was fine with people taking their computers home for Back then this was probably a big win/win, it's not like everyone already knew how to use a PC, or they were easy to use. My dad just brought home a laptop occasionally (a 286 with an orange plasma screen), and I got to use a PC in his office when he sometimes went in on the weekend, but when we got our own at home, I'm sure dad learned all sorts of stuff about HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE from trying to get my games to run that was later useful at work. Poor guy!
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Jul 5, 2019 11:44
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When I was a kid my parents had a shop in a mall that had a Radio Shack. That was the first place I got my hands on a computer, even if it was just a TRS-80 Model I running "13 Ghosts" from a cassette. My best early computer brag is that I played the first computer arcade game, "Computer Space" in early 1972. There was one in the doorway of the local Target and it was so strange looking that few people did more than just gawk at it as they passed by. I was transfixed by the little black and white monitor playing the attract mode, as well as the weird array of control buttons. That left me primed for the explosion of arcade games in the late seventies and my god I sacrificed an untold number of quarters to the cause. EDIT: I mean, look at this thing. In 1972 it was like a flying saucer dropped down out of the sky into suburban Oklahoma City. 
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Jul 5, 2019 17:48
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I don't know if it's still true but I've heard that companies like trying new products out in Oklahoma City because the population roughly mirrors the country as a whole, demographically, e.g. the US as a whole is 12% black and so is OKC (I'm making up numbers).
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Jul 5, 2019 17:53
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JazzmasterCurious posted:I just bought a Radeon RX 580 with 8 GB GDDR5. Right, but that's not all that unusual. Going back to the dark ages of CGA graphics video cards have always had their own onboard RAM. A sound card with 32 MB of expandable RAM - at a time when average system RAM was between that and maybe 128 MB if you were loaded and had a high-end system - was certainly an oddity.
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Jul 5, 2019 18:10
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Jerry Cotton posted:For some reason that video made me want to play Metal Wolf Chaos again. Good news: https://store.steampowered.com/app/820630/Metal_Wolf_Chaos_XD/
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Jul 5, 2019 18:15
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Jabor posted:how many ears do you have, lol I was trying HD audio poo poo at the time (rainy night Dark Side of the Moon bullshit), and wanted to see if it did anything for the vidja games (it didnt and poorly faked 7 channel audio is bad).
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Jul 5, 2019 18:18
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Lole laffie roftlelotr at playing computer video games on an International Business Machines -compatible home computer system, just lål löl reh.
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Jul 5, 2019 20:22
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My mom worked at IBM, so those were the only computers I got to play with growing up. “Oh, that’s not bad, IBM made great computers!” Yeah. No.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr quote:Time described the PCjr as "one of the biggest flops in the history of computing", with critics comparing it to the Ford Edsel and New Coke. The Tandy Corporation's clone of the PCjr, the Tandy 1000, was a more successful product, due to its cheaper cost, easier expandability, and wider PC compatibility than the PCjr. The graphics and sound specifications of the PCjr became more synonymous with Tandy as a result, leading to computers and software supporting them being referred to as "Tandy compatible". Krispy Wafer has a new favorite as of 17:10 on Jul 8, 2019 |
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Jul 8, 2019 17:08
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That reminds me of how everyone in Russia apparently knows the NES and all its games under the name of a famiclone called Dendy
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Jul 8, 2019 17:21
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The Dendy is a weirdly fascinating story because it's an entire infrastructure including cartoons, tv shows, even an official mascot all built up completely independently from Nintendo. Russians got bootlegged games from Asia to such an extent that when the real ones came in later they were dismissed as knockoffs.
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Jul 8, 2019 18:29
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Killingyouguy! posted:That reminds me of how everyone in Russia apparently knows the NES and all its games under the name of a famiclone called Dendy OH MY GOD I thought I was making the Dendy up. Everyone I tell about it just sort of raises an eyebrow but we were fully playing Super Mario Bros and some kind of soccer game on one of those. Hell yeah.
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Jul 8, 2019 19:46
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Krispy Wafer posted:Time described the PCjr as "one of the biggest flops in the history of computing", with critics comparing it to the Ford Edsel and New Coke. The Tandy Corporation's clone of the PCjr, the Tandy 1000, was a more successful product, due to its cheaper cost, easier expandability, and wider PC compatibility than the PCjr. The graphics and sound specifications of the PCjr became more synonymous with Tandy as a result, leading to computers and software supporting them being referred to as "Tandy compatible". How badly has the corporate design by committee-team to gently caress up, if your competitor-made clone offers better support for your hardware than your own piece of crap? Maybe it has to be co-chaired by the guy who sold his Apple stocks for 800 USD and the other guy who left the Beatles just before their first LP.
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Jul 8, 2019 19:46
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Der Kyhe posted:How badly has the corporate design by committee-team to gently caress up, if your competitor-made clone offers better support for your hardware than your own piece of crap? Maybe it has to be co-chaired by the guy who sold his Apple stocks for 800 USD and the other guy who left the Beatles just before their first LP. Making it worse, the PCjr used all proprietary ports and had a weird "sidecar" expansion system. It also had the distinction of being a PC made by IBM that was not 100% IBM PC compatible. Its almost like they purposely designed it to be a flop.
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Jul 8, 2019 20:01
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stevewm posted:Making it worse, the PCjr used all proprietary ports and had a weird "sidecar" expansion system. It also had the distinction of being a PC made by IBM that was not 100% IBM PC compatible. Don't forget the wireless chiclet keyboard that was awful to type on and had major connectivity issues if there were any light sources in the room that emitted IR. They at least switched to normal keys when there was a backlash against the original keyboard but by then the PCjr's reputation was already trash. Sweevo posted:The Dendy is a weirdly fascinating story because it's an entire infrastructure including cartoons, tv shows, even an official mascot all built up completely independently from Nintendo. Russians got bootlegged games from Asia to such an extent that when the real ones came in later they were dismissed as knockoffs. If you haven't before, watch the Dendy Chronicles series on YouTube. It's by a Russian who grew up mostly after the fall of the Soviet Union recounting his memories of the Dendy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kne6AKyYUuM (There are English subtitles in case they don't activate automatically.)
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Jul 8, 2019 20:09
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I have vague recollections of the PC jr, but as a Mac family it also lead to an early 90's SNL commercial for a parody product, the Macintosh Jr with the tagline of "the power to crush other kids" which I thought was hilarious at the time.
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Jul 8, 2019 20:10
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Mr.Radar posted:Don't forget the wireless chiclet keyboard that was awful to type on and had major connectivity issues if there were any light sources in the room that emitted IR. They at least switched to normal keys when there was a backlash against the original keyboard but by then the PCjr's reputation was already trash. Yeah, there was basically nothing positive about it. You have to wonder, did they do any type of market research on this thing? I feel like it was just plain IBM arrogance; which they where well known for. "We are IBM, we don't have failures."
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Jul 8, 2019 20:14
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I never understood the complaints about the keyboard, but reading that Wiki article I realized we got the second revision with a decent keyboard. My mom probably got a good deal on that POS. Our next PC was a PS/2 model 30 which was also weirdly incompatible with stuff, but was at least a decent computer for the time.
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Jul 8, 2019 20:22
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Krispy Wafer posted:Our next PC was a PS/2 model 30 which was also weirdly incompatible with stuff, but was at least a decent computer for the time. At least the model 30 was still ISA so it was only "weirdly incompatible", not "massively and intentionally incompatible" like the higher-end models that used MCA. Wikipedia says MCA was similar speed to PCI, and had PnP, but being high-end and not popular would have meant that they were really expensive. I gather they would have been pretty popular in big businesses, I think you could replace most things in them without a screwdriver, and floppy and hard drives just slotted in without needing to attach cables.
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Jul 9, 2019 04:29
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