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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I also had some external SCSI CD ROM cases that used push buttons to set it. I found a video of a scanner that has that! SHould be queued to the right time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA4rRJMZKkE&t=870s
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Feb 19, 2023 09:33
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I remember chucking out those beefy HP scanners. Sadly with them being used in business they were pretty much dead by the time I was putting them into eWaste. There's been one of those Canon USB flat bed scanners for sale at a local charity shop for a few months, kinda been tempted to buy it
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Feb 19, 2023 10:43
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I still use a ScanJet 4c sometimes. Adaptec SCSI card in a Windows 7 32 bit machine runs the HP DeskScan II software!
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Feb 19, 2023 10:52
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Raluek posted:i forgot about these. i worked at a computer store for 7 years, we had a display with a selection of these and i dont think i ever remember a single one being sold PC/104 was big in industrial settings because you could buy boards with all kinds of crazy inputs for controlling equipment. There was zero reason to buy them as a home user, and they weren't marketed towards home use at all so it's odd to have them displayed in a shop.
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Feb 19, 2023 12:17
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Rexxed posted:I still use a ScanJet 4c sometimes. Adaptec SCSI card in a Windows 7 32 bit machine runs the HP DeskScan II software!  I have an old Epson SCSI scanner hooked to an Adaptek 2940UW PCI card running Win 10 64 on an Ivy Bridge machine and the old Epson scanning software still works. 25+ years later and it’s still thrumming along. Amazing.
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Feb 19, 2023 15:22
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After an ill-considered ditching of most of my pre-Pentium hardware years ago, a recent sight of a thrift store 386 got me back into collecting and tinkering. I've had a pretty good run of luck over the last month including: -The 386 had some motherboard corrosion from a leaky battery, but after a good cleaning it seems to work but for the onboard floppy/IDE that can be replaced. -Ebay find of an IBM XT at a decent price. 640k RAM but had to replace a few defective chips, and the 30 MB hard drive was barely readable but cleaned right up after a low-level format. -A 486 from an electronics recycler that had some shipping damage but happened to have an unadvertised Pentium Overdrive chip. Also was able to verify another Pentium Overdrive I've had for years still works, so I have two. -Noticing I still had an IBM Type M keyboard tucked away and it cleaned up beautifully. Also I love the existence of the new retro-compatibility stuff, like XT-IDE BIOS enhancement, floppy emulators, and CF/SD IDE adapters. I love the aesthetic of a whirring old MFM/RLL or IDE drive, but they're not gonna last forever.
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Feb 22, 2023 07:42
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Killer robot posted:After an ill-considered ditching of most of my pre-Pentium hardware years ago, a recent sight of a thrift store 386 got me back into collecting and tinkering. I've had a pretty good run of luck over the last month including: Awesome. Xt-ide also works on faster machines and will help break bios limits on HDD size which is another nice use case. I got a 488 dx50 overdrive recently which I used to double a 486 sx25 machine.
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Feb 22, 2023 09:02
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c0burn posted:Awesome. Xt-ide also works on faster machines and will help break bios limits on HDD size which is another nice use case. That's another benefit, the 486 currently has an 800MB hard drive that only is readable as 500 due to BIOS limitations. Down side is that when I tried before I couldn't get the L1 cache to turn on for the Pentium Overdrive, which is gonna ruin its performance. Hopefully once I've got the battery replaced it will take settings better. It looks like I might be able to upgrade its BIOS to ensure support but I'm antsy about flashing the BIOS of a 25+ year old IBM. Worst case, I have a DX2/66 on its way that I can pop in, and save the Overdrive for when I can get my hands on one of the cool later 486 boards for another system. PCI if I can find one that isn't triple digits. I have a VLB board with good CPU support but I think it's dead.
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Feb 22, 2023 09:21
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Sweevo posted:PC/104 was big in industrial settings because you could buy boards with all kinds of crazy inputs for controlling equipment. There was zero reason to buy them as a home user, and they weren't marketed towards home use at all so it's odd to have them displayed in a shop. we sold all sorts of cool surplus, in addition to new computer stuff. unfortunately the pc/104 stuff was not priced to sell, so it didn't
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Feb 22, 2023 11:17
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It was always expensive. It's one of those niche things where people who need it will pay whatever it costs so there's no incentive to make it cheap.
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Feb 22, 2023 13:28
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Sweevo posted:It was always expensive. It's one of those niche things where people who need it will pay whatever it costs so there's no incentive to make it cheap. now you can make them into fun retro dos gaming machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAPFUpOOPlM
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Feb 22, 2023 13:36
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Killer robot posted:After an ill-considered ditching of most of my pre-Pentium hardware years ago I feel you. When I was a teenager and lived at my parents house I had accrued all kinds of 286-486 hardware as well as pizza box sun Microsystems machines and all the accoutrements to run them because they were literally worthless and my work let me take them rather than throw them out. When I moved out they all got taken to the curb 
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Feb 22, 2023 13:43
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Sweevo posted:PC/104 was big in industrial settings because you could buy boards with all kinds of crazy inputs for controlling equipment. There was zero reason to buy them as a home user, and they weren't marketed towards home use at all so it's odd to have them displayed in a shop. I bought one waaaay before Raspberry Pis were a thing at great expense to try and replace a busted 'Moon Cresta' arcade PCB. I had no idea about MAME, all I found in my non-internet savvy ways was a 32bit .exe and I narrowed in on a low powered PCB to run it. Funnily enough, I STILL have the cocktail cabinet and original PCB. With my current skills I really should actually give it a try after 15 odd years.
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Feb 22, 2023 13:48
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:I feel you. When I was a teenager and lived at my parents house I had accrued all kinds of 286-486 hardware as well as pizza box sun Microsystems machines and all the accoutrements to run them because they were literally worthless and my work let me take them rather than throw them out. Yeah, I was moving from one apartment to another rather than out from my parents but it was a similar sad story. But it hit right when I'd gone from scroungingly broke to having decent income so it felt like my future was new hardware instead of getting by on yesterday's, so even if I liked the old XT and PS/2 I didn't need them and just kept some compact newer stuff like an AT minitower and a couple of motherboards. Some of which I think was accidentally thrown out in a later move. I also discarded my last CRT a few years ago, but picked up a classic VGA for this work.
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Feb 22, 2023 17:28
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I did wind up going to a surplus sale at my college not long after I got rid of all my old computers, and wound up picking up an Apple SE/30 and accompanying Apple external caddy-loading SCSI CDROM drive for the princely sum of $20. Even back in like 2000, I knew it was something cool and i vowed to keep it. These days it needs a recap, but still works and has survived multiple moves.
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Feb 22, 2023 17:44
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Killer robot posted:That's another benefit, the 486 currently has an 800MB hard drive that only is readable as 500 due to BIOS limitations. Buying a TL866 programmer was probably my best retro computer purchase.
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Feb 22, 2023 20:59
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Arivia posted:now you can make them into fun retro dos gaming machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAPFUpOOPlM  itch
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Feb 22, 2023 21:14
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c0burn posted:Buying a TL866 programmer was probably my best retro computer purchase. I've thought about that a little, but how expensive/difficult/broadly useful is it if you're not shoveling through lots of retro systems all the time?
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Feb 22, 2023 22:14
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Killer robot posted:I've thought about that a little, but how expensive/difficult/broadly useful is it if you're not shoveling through lots of retro systems all the time? It's definitely not worth it for one system.
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Feb 23, 2023 08:17
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c0burn posted:It's definitely not worth it for one system. I have multiple booting but incomplete ancient systems at this point and probably won't stop here, but little I have on my plate seems particularly BIOS limited other than the XT-IDE stuff I can order pre-programmed and a couple things I could flash but am antsy about. Either way I've spent enough on the various QoL stuff to get restarted on the hobby that I shouldn't get fancy toys I don't need. I'm still at the level of getting nostalgia at the SB16 hiss and picking out which memory chips to replace with DEBUG.
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Feb 23, 2023 09:03
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Full-on 90’s PC aesthetic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGIwcPA1_34
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Feb 24, 2023 12:11
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Bryce was my poo poo. My grandma got it for my 14th birthday, and I no joke read the manual cover to cover. I still have some printouts of my old Bryce renders somewhere. It was by far the most intuitive and accessible 3D software out there. The unsung hero is probably its deep procedural material system, with a vast library of excellent presets to get you started. Eventually I graduated to Cinema4D, and now I’m a professional in CGI for film, using tools that cost thousands of dollars and would have probably melted my feeble teen brain with their learning curve (though to be fair Houdini is much easier to learn these days, free indie license and lots of pre-built starter templates). I can safely say that Bryce, with its easy pathway to rewarding visual results, sparked my ongoing and undying love for 3D graphics.
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Feb 24, 2023 18:12
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Bryce felt like the future. I think I only created canyons with it but it was cool as poo poo. I also played with Kai’s Power Tools a lot but I couldn’t tell you what I even did with them. I just remember it was cool.
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Feb 24, 2023 18:25
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Lol @ Bryce, newfangled nonsense holding your hand with all these  wireframe modelers and glossy manuals POVRAY only rated a passing mention in that video but that was MY poo poo. All modeling was done in math. Draw a sphere with this keyword, give it the following scaling factors along the 3 axes, clip it with a plane and another sphere until you've created a new weird shape, translate/rotate/scale, then map a texture onto it I had a whole disk full of the .POV files I made of Mega Man 2 villains. It's gone now, the one artifact from my youth that I wish I hadn't lost. Because POVRAY is loving still around http://www.povray.org/
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Feb 24, 2023 19:03
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I remember the first time I rendered my own shiny marble on a checkerboard.
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Feb 24, 2023 19:18
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I dabbled with POV-Ray as well, but was very much a WYSIWYG kind of person at the time, and couldn't get friendly with the idea of building visual scenes in some cryptic markup language. Like, not being able to just click and drag to position objects was an absolute dealbreaker. I did end up using it later on for its radiosity capabilities, to showcase the models I was making in Milkshape 3D. Ambient occlusion renders using Brazil were very en vogue at the time, and since Bryce only did directional lighting, that was my poor kid's way of joining the party. (not mine, but renders like these took modelling forums by storm) 
snorch has a new favorite as of 19:45 on Feb 24, 2023 |
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Feb 24, 2023 19:41
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I remember POVRAY got a modeler addon at one point called "Midnight Modeler" (MNM) which I tried to use once or twice but found it really clunky and would rather just use the raw code like I did when all I had was DOS on a 386. The only thing missing, to my mind, was speed (and a video card that could display more than 256 colors. I had to render every output file in 24-bit Targa/TGA which my Trident card couldn't display at all except in grayscale, so I had to dither the output down to GIF so I could see wtf I had spent the last 72 hours rendering. JPEG did not exist yet)
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Feb 24, 2023 19:49
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My first 3D software was a  version of 3D Studio for DOS. The UI sucked, but I managed to make some ok things. Later I used 3DS Max professionally and did some advertising visuals.
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Feb 24, 2023 19:57
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snorch posted:I dabbled with POV-Ray as well, but was very much a WYSIWYG kind of person at the time, and couldn't get friendly with the idea of building visual scenes in some cryptic markup language. Like, not being able to just click and drag to position objects was an absolute dealbreaker. Every Half Life mod thread started with an idea guy thinking he has some amazing idea for a mod. He's got the idea, he just needs a programmer, modeler, and level designer. But don't worry he's got some untextured and way too high poly gun renders, so the mod is pretty much half done.
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Feb 24, 2023 21:15
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I hosed around with poser a lot as a teen. I've attempted to learn real 3D software every few years since and it just refuses to click for me. That's ok, I'll stick to 2D bullshit instead. maybe poser hosed me over on interface understanding? lol
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Feb 24, 2023 22:58
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I took a class in high school where we used poser. Except the teacher deleted all the high detail bodies because they were basically nude. So in order to do anything, we had to first grab the low poly nude person, delete the head, and then paste a high quality head on it. We also used Bryce and that was a lot more fun.
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Feb 24, 2023 23:04
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I'm old enough that I took two years of Computer Science in high school. The first year was on Commodore 64s (with some sort of network-accessible disk arrangement that I forget how it worked) and the second year was on a mix of 286 and 386 machines with Turbo Pascal and Geoworks Ensemble. And my first experience with CD-ROM gaming. I forget what that one was even but was less gameplay than a point-and-click explore demo it felt like. Continuing old computer tinkering, I recently installed Geoworks Ensemble on my newly restored XT, and oh boy does it crawl at 4.77MHz/640k. Though on more powerful archaic systems I got a working Texas Instruments 486SLC today. Ah, lying marketing. It's one of those ones that was just a 386SX with 1k L1 cache to make it much faster than the real thing. Though with a 16-bit data bus and no L2 on the board it's definitely slower than a 486. But it came with a Sound Blaster 2.0: I'll need to install some drivers to see if it's working. I also managed to get an old 486 motherboard I thought was dead working. I do not miss the era of "set a dozen jumpers to tell the board your CPU variant, oh and some of these differ depending on which clock generator is installed on the board, and lord help you if the manual you found online is for Revision E rather than Revision H."
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Feb 25, 2023 08:17
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I think Posy might be my favorite youtube creator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkPSDOjhxwM
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Feb 25, 2023 12:59
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lobsterminator posted:My first 3D software was a Oh wow that takes me back. I think this is still my internal visualisation of "professional grade 3D tools", even though I've played with Blender and the like since.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:00
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lobsterminator posted:My first 3D software was a Ah, classic 3D Studio. I had 3 as a fourteen year old and also dabbled with MAX just before the pre-dancing baby craze when Bones came
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Feb 25, 2023 15:01
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r u ready to WALK posted:I think Posy might be my favorite youtube creator Same. I just wish they posted more than 3 videos a year
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Feb 25, 2023 15:10
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 One of my favorite images it's an actual photo, not a render
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Feb 25, 2023 17:10
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snorch posted:Bryce was my poo poo. My grandma got it for my 14th birthday, and I no joke read the manual cover to cover. I still have some printouts of my old Bryce renders somewhere. It was by far the most intuitive and accessible 3D software out there. The unsung hero is probably its deep procedural material system, with a vast library of excellent presets to get you started. I fiddled with Bryce from some demo CD then graduated to Alias Wavefront Maya, continuing with it at university. Lecturer realised I already knew what I was doing so my extra credit was working on his film, also first paid gig doing 3D! Then I got a job at a studio as the 'wunderkid' and they were a 3DS Max and Blender shop. It REALLY hurt my brain to retrain into that.
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Feb 25, 2023 17:19
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Humphreys posted:I fiddled with Bryce from some demo CD then graduated to Alias Wavefront Maya, continuing with it at university. Lecturer realised I already knew what I was doing so my extra credit was working on his film, also first paid gig doing 3D! Then I got a job at a studio as the 'wunderkid' and they were a 3DS Max and Blender shop. It REALLY hurt my brain to retrain into that. I stopped doing 3D stuff in the latter part of the 2000s. I loved 3ds Max back then. It had a great non-destructive transformation system, kinda like what Photoshop layer effects became later. Every year or two I install Blender and try to get into it but I always give up. I think I would need a period of intense training to learn it, because with my current approach I forget everything by the time I try again so I have start from zero every time.
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Feb 25, 2023 18:00
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Sentient Data posted:
Kids these days have no idea what this is. *shakes fist at cloud*
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