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Buttcoin purse posted:So was that $5K for just a graphics card!? Sure was. The priciest I could find in the handy look-up table section of the magazine (as opposed to the short-blurb entries) is the Matrox SM-1281 for A$10,650. This was a time when RAM expansions could run you a thousand dollars per megabyte. Heck, a Microsoft serial mouse was $300 (but plenty of cheaper alternatives, obviously). I'm disappointed that the monitor section doesn't list how heavy they are. And the section on network adapters is bewildering (and nothing over 10Mb/s, with speeds often listed in the kbps range).
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Aug 16, 2019 04:35
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Gromit posted:Matrox SM-1281 for A$10,650  Wow, a 3D accelerator in 1990. I guess AutoCAD was probably the only software that could take advantage of it, apart from some other CAD software I've never heard of?
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Aug 16, 2019 06:33
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Here's some obsolete technology for you. I've been building an 8 bit computer out of TTL chips.
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Aug 16, 2019 07:43
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Cojawfee posted:Here's some obsolete technology for you. I've been building an 8 bit computer out of TTL chips. More like a loavesboard. Do you have video of this thing in operation? Unperson_47 has a new favorite as of 08:13 on Aug 16, 2019 |
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Aug 16, 2019 08:06
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Cojawfee posted:Here's some obsolete technology for you. I've been building an 8 bit computer out of TTL chips. Nice! Is it your own design or is it based on some historic thing?
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Aug 16, 2019 08:10
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Here's someone that mounted it on the wall in a deep box frame. Looks pretty neat! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUzBsoBgcSY
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Aug 16, 2019 08:16
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Horace posted:Horace was my first video game! The calculator watch was kinda like the Casio ones... I think it looked a lot like this: In the event that I discover time-travel, you've saved me £10. an actual frog posted:So I'd never heard of this and did a cursory search, Gromit posted:I have the 1990 Australian Personal Computer Hardware Buyers Guide on my bookshelf and it is a terrifying array of under-specced computers for premium dollars. Not cheesy at all, but it's amazing to see how many different manufacturers there were back then. Anyone remember graphics cards made by Number 9? Their Pepper Pro-1280 had 256 colours (a trade-off for the amazing 1280x1024 resolution) which was a steal at AUS$5,000. Where there any display devices that could handle that resolution at that time?
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Aug 16, 2019 08:33
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Shut up Meg posted:How? There were a few choices, so long as you had $4-$5k to drop on a high res monitor. A ColorMAX cost over $14,000 with a screen size of 485mm (19 inch), but it had a much higher horizontal frequency than most of the others in the lower price bracket. Monochrome had higher res options like 1600x1280, and Hitachi had a weirdo 2048x2048 display but for all I know that thing flickered like a strobe light.
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Aug 16, 2019 08:43
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Cojawfee posted:Here's some obsolete technology for you. I've been building an 8 bit computer out of TTL chips. Are you that chap who did a big YouTube series on how he built it, or are you doing a follow-along of that yourself?
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Aug 16, 2019 08:53
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Remember the time before Apple pushed Retina displays and the only high‐pixel‐density monitor was that one IBM LCD from like 2001? That was the worst. Fakeedit: these things
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Aug 16, 2019 09:09
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Gromit posted:There were a few choices, so long as you had $4-$5k to drop on a high res monitor. A ColorMAX cost over $14,000 with a screen size of 485mm (19 inch), but it had a much higher horizontal frequency than most of the others in the lower price bracket. Mind blown: I was rocking SVGA (800x600) in 1994 and that was the best you could get on the standard consumer market. I guess 1280x1024 in 1990 is like 16K today.
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Aug 16, 2019 09:16
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Shut up Meg posted:Mind blown: I was rocking SVGA (800x600) in 1994 and that was the best you could get on the standard consumer market. We had this in 1989. But basically nothing that could use it to its full extent. Even the "normal" VGA was kind of useless since by the time VGA games became normal, an IBM PC XT Model 286 with 640 kB of memory and a 20 MB Winchester drive just wasn't cut out to run them. 
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Aug 16, 2019 09:30
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Shut up Meg posted:Mind blown: I was rocking SVGA (800x600) in 1994 and that was the best you could get on the standard consumer market. There has been exactly two absolutely mind blowing things I have seen in the PC game development. The second was in 1999 when I installed my first non-lovely 3D graphics card (Voodoo 2) and booted up some game which I had tried to play before getting one. ...And the first one was in ~1995 the first time I got new monitor and I could finally boot up the Pirates Gold! for the first time and experience the glory of the true color SVGA. After those, everything else has been "nice" to "meh" in the ways they have relatively upgraded the then-current visual experience.
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Aug 16, 2019 09:45
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Der Kyhe posted:There has been exactly two absolutely mind blowing things I have seen in the PC game development. The second was in 1999 when I installed my first non-lovely 3D graphics card (Voodoo 2) and booted up some game which I had tried to play before getting one. That's a really good point. I'm struggling to find something that was a big WOW for me in more recent times. I think my first was the TV tuner in my friends dads black apple desktop, then ripping CDs. It's a stretch but maybe OS virtualisation and 4K resolution are more recent things I was excited about when I first used it.
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Aug 16, 2019 09:56
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Shut up Meg posted:I was rocking SVGA (800x600) in 1994 and that was the best you could get on the standard consumer market. No way, well maybe that's the best you could get from a chain store or something, but I'm looking at PC Magazine from 24 Sep 1991 and you could get an ATI (I just picked a known brand) VGA Integra for $189 supporting 1024x768, even non-interlaced! I'm sure that by 1994 I had some kind of Tseng ET4000-based card that could do 1024x768 but in combination with my monitor I could only get interlaced. An ad later in the magazine has that card for only $129, apparently at 1024x768 it's only 16 colors (like my card was IIRC). This magazine also has an ad with a picture of a box from Microsoft which says on it "The Microsoft Office". I don't remember it having "The" in its name but it's right there on the box  Also Microsoft Mouse (bus or serial) only $89, or $149 with Windows 3.0!
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Aug 16, 2019 10:15
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Buttcoin purse posted:No way, well maybe that's the best you could get from a chain store or something, but I'm looking at PC Magazine from 24 Sep 1991 and you could get an ATI (I just picked a known brand) VGA Integra for $189 supporting 1024x768, even non-interlaced! I'm sure that by 1994 I had some kind of Tseng ET4000-based card that could do 1024x768 but in combination with my monitor I could only get interlaced. An ad later in the magazine has that card for only $129, apparently at 1024x768 it's only 16 colors (like my card was IIRC). I hate it when I have to be reminded just how old I am.....You are correct, this was 1991 when I had that monitor and it came on a machine with Windows 3.0
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Aug 16, 2019 10:27
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Humphreys posted:That's a really good point. I'm struggling to find something that was a big WOW for me in more recent times. I think my first was the TV tuner in my friends dads black apple desktop, then ripping CDs. It's a stretch but maybe OS virtualisation and 4K resolution are more recent things I was excited about when I first used it. SSDs for me. I jumped on that wagon pretty late because i tend to wait quite some time between upgrading my PC and holy poo poo does it make a difference. Everything is just so much faster its insane. I bought a laptop with an HDD in it last year because it was cheaper to upgrade it to an SSD myself and for the two days i used it before the SSD arrived i was pretty sure i just dumped my money down a garbage hole because using it was just terrible. The moment i put in the SSD everything was fine. Felt like a modern machine worth the money. I don't have any spinning platters anywhere in my computers now.
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Aug 16, 2019 10:45
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Shai-Hulud posted:SSDs for me. I jumped on that wagon pretty late because i tend to wait quite some time between upgrading my PC and holy poo poo does it make a difference. Everything is just so much faster its insane. SSD would probably be my third one if I had to pick another one to my list, or "getting first faster than 10 Kbit internet connection which is 24/7 connected" when moving from buttfuck hillbilly town to university campus in a larger city. But on the other hand, they had little to do with the visual presentation and direct user experience so the "whoa what _the_ gently caress"-factor wasn't as huge.
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Aug 16, 2019 11:50
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https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/1162197839318900736
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Aug 16, 2019 12:28
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Ok ok, I think I've finally figured out what's missing from audiophiles' dream setup....everything has to be run through the apollo computer then through the gently caress off thick isolation cables, that's why there's still distortion and/or not enough warmth.
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Aug 16, 2019 13:10
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LifeSunDeath posted:not enough warmth. That's just because no one has ever loved or even liked them.
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Aug 16, 2019 13:18
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Humphreys posted:That's a really good point. I'm struggling to find something that was a big WOW for me in more recent times. I think my first was the TV tuner in my friends dads black apple desktop, then ripping CDs. It's a stretch but maybe OS virtualisation and 4K resolution are more recent things I was excited about when I first used it. I remember being amazed by the Voodoo Lights screensaver, and the reflective floor in Unreal when you were in the spaceship at the start.
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Aug 16, 2019 14:05
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU quote:We embark on the restoration of a very rare and historically significant machine: the Apollo Guidance Computer, or AGC. It was the revolutionary MIT-designed computer aboard Apollo that brought man on the Moon (and back!). Mike Stewart, space engineer extraordinaire and living AGC encyclopedia, spearheads this restoration effort. In this first episode, we setup a makeshift lab in his hotel room, somewhere in Houston. The computer belongs to a delightful private collector, Jimmie Loocke, who has generously allowed us to dive in the guts of his precious machine, with the hope of restoring it to full functionality by July 2019, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing.
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Aug 16, 2019 15:02
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Jabor posted:Are you that chap who did a big YouTube series on how he built it, or are you doing a follow-along of that yourself? Nah, I just bought his kit and have been following along. It was expensive, but I'm using what I learned last semester in college so I can pretend I'm bettering myself.
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Aug 16, 2019 15:05
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Humphreys posted:That's a really good point. I'm struggling to find something that was a big WOW for me in more recent times. I think my first was the TV tuner in my friends dads black apple desktop, then ripping CDs. It's a stretch but maybe OS virtualisation and 4K resolution are more recent things I was excited about when I first used it. Running Warframe in 4k has been the most recent Wow! for me. Before that, it was 2xVoodoo2s in SLI mode playing Unreal and before that the first time I used SVGA. I had a MacIIfx with 64MB RAM and a RasterOps 2MB video card connected to a proprietary, to that card, 21" 1024x768 Radius Monitor back in 1991, and it was mindblowing. (it was also about 15,000$ worth of hardware including the two 120MB SCSI hard drives). I still have that machine.
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Aug 16, 2019 16:11
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Der Kyhe posted:"getting first faster than 10 Kbit internet connection which is 24/7 connected" when moving from buttfuck hillbilly town to university campus in a larger city. I'm going to agree with this one. When I got my first DSL line, it wasn't really all that much faster than dialup, but it was always on. The Internet ceased to be a thing you sat down and deliberately did (by making the modem connection to start and then hanging it up when you were finished), and it started to be something that was just always there. It's a little crazy how big of a sea change that was, especially since the "actually doing stuff" part of it wasn't any different.
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Aug 16, 2019 17:36
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Humphreys posted:That's a really good point. I'm struggling to find something that was a big WOW for me in more recent times. I think my first was the TV tuner in my friends dads black apple desktop, then ripping CDs. It's a stretch but maybe OS virtualisation and 4K resolution are more recent things I was excited about when I first used it. Something recent I wasn't expecting, and which is far more in the subtle-transformative style than the wow style, was when I went from using 22 or 24-inch monitors to having a 30-inch screen. Sitting close, or leaning in as I played a game, some switch flipped in my head from "seeing a picture" to "looking through a window" because the screen filled my vision.
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Aug 16, 2019 19:12
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Der Kyhe posted:...And the first one was in ~1995 the first time I got new monitor and I could finally boot up the Pirates Gold! for the first time and experience the glory of the true color SVGA. Those generational leaps in video were the things that amazed me the most. I remember we got Prince of Persia and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego Deluxe Edition, but we had a really old system with Hercules graphics so Prince of Persia was playable but black and white dithered, and Carmen Sandiego just wouldn't run. Then a few months later we finally got a new 386 (only SX I guess) system with VGA and suddenly we've gone from black and white to 256 colors in Prince of Persia, and Carmen Sandiego Deluxe was in the high resolution VGA mode of 640x480x16 so that was amazing in a different way. Even just being able to run DOS tools in color was a great novelty (I think text modes under Hercules had 4 shades of grey rather than just black and white) even though I'd seen it before a little on borrowed PCs. Then a few years later downloading the shareware versions of Wolfenstein 3-D and DOOM from BBSes and seeing that VGA put to much better use was great. Getting a 3D accelerator card was good but I don't think it was as dramatic as going from monochrome to color, it was more just an evolutionary step for me. Maybe going to VR would give me the same thrill but I gather it can mess up your eyesight.
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Aug 17, 2019 01:45
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Buttcoin purse posted:Getting a 3D accelerator card was good but I don't think it was as dramatic as going from monochrome to color, it was more just an evolutionary step for me. As someone who played Quake a lot before having a 3d accelerator card, I personally felt like the improved texture quality, frame rate, and resolution that a 3d card brought is what really brought that game to life. Like I honestly didn't feel like it was that much better technically than Doom or DN3d until I saw it running properly. Funny, the first game I played on my PC after I got a 3d card was a 3rd person shooter called Outwars. It was a pretty forgettable game, but it was the first game I played before and after a 3d card. I was completely blown away by the improvement in quality, just like you were with the previous generation upgrades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCsmxjzUV_g
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Aug 17, 2019 02:00
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I think I was spoiled by arcades and being a tech fan. Computer games never gave me that "oh gently caress" moment. But what did was color depth (not sure if that's the right term). I had a Performa Mac for 5 years and I just accepted that computer games weren't the thing there. So I had floppies full of dumb photos and backgrounds and random web images. The experience of the web was also different because there was a lot the thing couldnt do. No mp3s so it was Midi for me. In 2000 I upgraded to whatever was mid-cheap from HP. Started copying over files and I look at a favorite cartoon image... all the dithering was gone. That poo poo popped and looked entirely different. Then I open some bookmarked pages... embedded music! Flash/Shockwave elements! Javascript! The water on this page I've been on all summer has a shimmer effect now that responds to the cursor! poo poo was wild.
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Aug 17, 2019 02:17
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Buttcoin purse posted:Those generational leaps in video were the things that amazed me the most. In order to get Lego Island to run, I had to end almost every task running on the computer. So getting ready to play it consisted of making sure I carefully closed everything running except for explorer.
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Aug 17, 2019 02:27
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Buttcoin purse posted:
Also this...thing. http://wiki.skullspace.ca/index.php/Virtuality_SU2000
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Aug 17, 2019 02:43
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Lowen SoDium posted:As someone who played Quake a lot before having a 3d accelerator card, I personally felt like the improved texture quality, frame rate, and resolution that a 3d card brought is what really brought that game to life. Like I honestly didn't feel like it was that much better technically than Doom or DN3d until I saw it running properly. Oh yeah you're right, I remember Quake being just a brown mess at 320x200. In fact I just tried it under DOSBox, and it's like "oh that small collection of pixels off in the distance is shooting at me". I remember having some hope of setting my machine to slightly higher resolutions but I think the FPS was too low on my 486 or whatever it was at the time. I didn't really touch Quake again until much later with new third-party engines and high-resolution texture packs (and I've played it a bit that way in the last few years and quite like that), but one day I want to try it out on a Pentium 2 or 3 machine with some older 3D accelerator, I mean I'm not going to buy a Voodoo  but I have some lovely 3D cards I've salvaged from the trash along the way and I don't really know what they're capable of or what they were giving me when I used them.Cojawfee posted:In order to get Lego Island to run, I had to end almost every task running on the computer. So getting ready to play it consisted of making sure I carefully closed everything running except for explorer.  I got to borrow that game for a day or two, and I remember it seemed really cool but I could only get a few FPS out of it (maybe that was only when I was exploding things?), it was horrible! I've never actually tried any of those games since, I bet I could actually play it now..Phanatic posted:Also this...thing. Holy poo poo, the amount of cards stuffed into that chassis, and it only needs a 250W PS?
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Aug 17, 2019 03:05
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Oh yeah. Disabling the mouse to free up 7kb of RAM to play a game was a thing alright. I recall looking at the requirements for Balance of Power and accepting the fact I never was going to have 512k of RAM and Windows 1.0.
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Aug 17, 2019 04:25
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Krispy Wafer posted:Disabling the mouse to free up 7kb of RAM to play a game was a thing alright. It was great when MS-DOS finally caught up to letting you define multiple menu options at boot time (I think at least DR-DOS had that earlier) so you didn't need to have boot floppies for different games. I remember games which had setup menu options for setting up the boot floppy for you. quote:I recall looking at the requirements for Balance of Power and accepting the fact I never was going to have 512k of RAM and Windows 1.0. The BoP I had had a runtime version of Windows 1 built into it. As hard as I tried I couldn't get it to do anything other than run BoP 
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Aug 17, 2019 05:02
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Buttcoin purse posted:The BoP I had had a runtime version of Windows 1 built into it. As hard as I tried I couldn't get it to do anything other than run BoP Wait, so it came with Windows 1.0? I recall seeing 1.0 as a requirement, but at that time in my young life I had little to no knowledge as to what Microsoft was. I used to get them mixed up with MicroProse all the time.
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Aug 17, 2019 05:09
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Krispy Wafer posted:Wait, so it came with Windows 1.0? I recall seeing 1.0 as a requirement, but at that time in my young life I had little to no knowledge as to what Microsoft was. I used to get them mixed up with MicroProse all the time. In the early days of Windows Microsoft realized that they were stuck in a vicious cycle where nobody would write applications for Windows because nobody owned Windows because Windows didn't have any apps. Their clever scheme to bootstrap the development of Windows apps was to let application developers bundle stripped-down versions of Windows with their products that were crippled to essentially only run the product it shipped with. That way developers could write applications that would run on Windows (instead of having to cook up their own GUI) without having to worry about their customers already owning Windows and Microsoft could get an app ecosystem going. It ended up working exactly as planned. You can read more about it on the Digital Antiquarian blog's excellent 9-part history of 16-bit Windows (part 5 covers this so-called "run-time" version of Windows). Edit: while we're on the topic, this is a good excuse to post this wonderfully bizarre ad for Windows 386 (a version of Windows 2.0 enhanced for 386 CPUs). Don't miss the super-cringey rap at 7:00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noEHHB6rnMI Mr.Radar has a new favorite as of 05:26 on Aug 17, 2019 |
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Aug 17, 2019 05:21
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Buttcoin purse posted:It was great when MS-DOS finally caught up to letting you define multiple menu options at boot time (I think at least DR-DOS had that earlier) so you didn't need to have boot floppies for different games. I remember games which had setup menu options for setting up the boot floppy for you.  I remember rebooting constantly to swap from games that used the CD-ROM drive to games that needed mouse and sound!
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Aug 17, 2019 05:25
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Cojawfee posted:Nah, I just bought his kit and have been following along. It was expensive, but I'm using what I learned last semester in college so I can pretend I'm bettering myself. What's your feeling on the overall quality of the kit? Worth the price, or would you just buy the parts and follow the videos if you were doing it over again?
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Aug 17, 2019 10:34
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Buttcoin purse posted:Oh yeah you're right, I remember Quake being just a brown mess at 320x200. In fact I just tried it under DOSBox, and it's like "oh that small collection of pixels off in the distance is shooting at me". I think my original "wow!" moment was Doom. It looked so lifelike and immersive, compared to the 2D games I played before it. So when I tried Quake, I was perfectly fine with the brown 320x200 aesthetic, and I prefer the chunky 256-color gritty look if I'm replaying a 90s FPS today. I think it perfectly fits Quake's setting and atmosphere. Quake gave me a second "wow!" moment, because of the fully 3D environment and models. I had played Descent and other primitive 3D games, but Quake brought it all together and perfected it. Duke3D also impressed me. The graphics were not quite Quake quality, but it was cartoony and colorful and the levels looked like real places, rather than some alternate fantasy dimension. It made you feel like a badass action movie hero. E: scratch that, the devs of Ion Fury don't deserve your money. KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 11:16 on Aug 17, 2019 |
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Aug 17, 2019 10:59
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