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Yeah Funyuns posted:While I don't collect it, I like retro solid state audio equipment and will buy the occasional piece at a pawn shop or used electronics store. Nothing says quality like a 60 pound stereo amplifier. Best of all it's cheap because tube gear is what most people are after. Ahem, 70's and 80's speakers, if they were well made and not low end crap could easily hold up today if you didn't crank them ridiculously. The only real issue with the age would be surround rot, if they were foam surrounds. Cloth surrounds should be fine and foam surrounds can be replaced. I myself have a soft spot for older televisions. I own a Zenith Chromacolor II, made in 1976. it works fine and the built in rabbit ears are still intact. For solid state sets, Chromacolor II's were probably the best sets Zenith made. The System 3's while okay were not as good, and the quality went downhill from there. For 1990's TV's, I haven't found a better one then the 20" 1991 RCA Colortrak 2000. The auto programming is annoying, and the A/V inputs being mapped to channels is a bit weird, but the picture is by far the sharpest I have ever seen on a standard definition set. S-Video looks amazing. I actually used one as a PC monitor and over S-Video small text is readable up to 1024x768.
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 03:41 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:03 |
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GWBBQ posted:
Yes and no. Not much can go wrong with speakers, but crossover caps drying out and surround rot are the two biggest headaches. Both are repairable however.
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 04:09 |
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Konjuro posted:I still have an old 21 inch CRT monitor kicking around. I call it the Desk-Buster because it is literally too heavy to sit on most newer computer desks. Ah I think I know why that monitor is so heavy. Does it have one or two faint black horizontal lines in the picture, and if you were to smack the side of it, would the colors go funny for a second or so? If yes then you have a Trinitron monitor. Gateway 2000 monitors used the Trinitron design far as I am aware of. It gave you excellent brightness and sharpness, but the tradeoff were those one or two horizontal lines, and the things were heavy as gently caress due to the aperture grille design.
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 16:45 |
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Noblesse Obliged posted:
Yeah that's nowhere near the very best. I think one of the developers of it died indirectly because of it. (He got fired and was later hit by a car IIRC)
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 18:20 |
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Your Computer posted:You're probably thinking of Gunpei Yokoi, a fantastic man who, along with Shigeru Miyamoto pretty much made Nintendo as successful as it is. He supervised a lot of the old famous games, including Donkey Kong and Metroid. He invented the Game&Watch and the Game Boy. (And the Virtual Boy.. I guess every genius has a bad idea every so often) Yep. One can speculate had the Virtual Boy not prompted him to retire, he might not have been on that highway that day. Who knows. Fearless_Decoy posted:In the mid 1980s, my dad was enjoying his new middle-upper class paychecks so he went and splurged on one of these: If you really wanted to you could just wrap some bare wire around the antenna and plug it into the RF out on a convertor box, if anything just to see if it still works properly.
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 18:56 |
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Konjuro posted:Yes, it is indeed a Trinitron. Plugged my laptop into and it still works perfectly. Oh yeah, a 21" Trinitron. Desk buster is very appropriate. I once lugged home a free 32" Sony Trinitron, by myself. (Free to anyone who could lift it) Beautiful picture but it sat for 3 weeks on my living room floor before I decided to just sell it. I mean I could have reinforced the TV stand with 4x4's, or maybe just built a new one out of reinforced concrete, but I decided to let it go to a new home, where it probably still sits like the living room monolith.
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 19:37 |
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FrancisYorkPatty posted:
I have to ask, how the hell did they get it into their attic? Did they use a winch? For obsolete computer parts, I'd have to go with the Intel Celeron 300a which I believe is the one they added the cache to. Highly overclockable and because the cache ran at the same speed as the CPU, it could rival or beat its more expensive Pentium II brothers. I had a slot 1 motherboard for years. Through the use of a slocket I got it to accept late model Pentium 3's. That board could run on anything from a lowly Celeron to the Tualatin P3's with the right slocket.
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 21:14 |
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E the Shaggy posted:The future of gaming is cramming all new systems into slots in your old systems! The SVP. The road Sega didn't take. What if instead of the 32X they had made an SVP adapter, a one time $100 purchase that allowed you to play SVP enabled Genesis games?
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# ¿ Jul 14, 2012 01:01 |
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FrancisYorkPatty posted:gently caress. Trinitrons. b0nes posted:Silicon Graphics graphics workstations and supercomputers. ♫ We gotta move these refrigerators. We got to move these color TV's ♫
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# ¿ Jul 14, 2012 04:05 |
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bossy lady posted:Speaking of Trinitrons, I had a Sony GDM FW900 24 inch CRT monitor way back in the day: And we have met the Deskbuster 3000. LCD's have gotten good enough, but a well made CRT will still kick their rear end at resolution and color rendering.
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# ¿ Jul 15, 2012 17:17 |
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axolotl farmer posted:
What? Tell me they also provided an air pump.
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# ¿ Jul 15, 2012 20:34 |
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Invisble Manuel posted:I always wanted one of these: That's amazing just on a technical level if nothing else. I always thought of cassettes as mini VHS tapes. Looking it up on Youtube, the PXL 2000 did have audio. Landerig has a new favorite as of 23:59 on Jul 18, 2012 |
# ¿ Jul 18, 2012 23:44 |
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kimbo305 posted:There was a Yak-bak-like toy that was shaped like a hockey and had a telescoping megaphone on one end that you could pull out. Anyone remember what it was called? I know what you're talking about. I had one as a kid. It didn't record, it just worked kinda like an electronic megaphone and I think you could alter your voice with it. drat I can't remember what they called it.
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# ¿ Jul 19, 2012 04:04 |
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:I remember being super excited when I got given a CDR drive and then super disappointed when I discovered that the only way to make it work was to 1) only ever burn at 1x speed and 2) click "burn", tiptoe out of the room then leave the house for 4 hours otherwise it would jitter and gently caress the disc. Getting a 16x buffer underrun protected drive was an amazing experience - "I can burn discs and be in the house, holy poo poo!". Oh man my first CDRW drive ran at 4X maximum, came with Adaptec Easy CD creator, and when you started burning a CD, you couldn't do anything else with the computer. Well, *technically* you could if you wanted to gamble with the buffer running out, and there were times when it came close. (Down to a nail biting 20% one time when I wasn't doing anything else.) Now I know I can burn a CD or DVD without much fear of buffer underrun, but still I tend to not do much else on the computer while it's burning. I just leave it alone to do its work.
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# ¿ Jul 30, 2012 17:35 |
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cowtown posted:Here's something I had in high school, although I have no idea exactly why I thought I needed one: the Sony Magic Link PIC-1000! Like a PDA only huge and heavy. Wow it's like an early point and click game. Yeah I can see why that failed, it'd get tedious in a hurry.
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# ¿ Aug 1, 2012 02:26 |
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Wanamingo posted:The mako was actually based on a real vehicle called the LAV-25. Talk about being ahead of its time. I guess that would be Steam's great great grandfather.
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# ¿ Aug 4, 2012 15:25 |
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Zombie Rasputin posted:How about playstation games on your dreamcast? Bleem is why I still have a grudge against Sony. It's an example of "We may lose but we're bigger then you so we'll keep suing you until you go bust. " Can't even fire up my copy for nostalga purposes. Because of the way they coded it, it will not run on any OS newer then the Win 9x platform.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2012 01:56 |
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SimplyCosmic posted:That brings up another somewhat obsolete technology: D batteries. Still used in big flashlights, larger portable radios, lanterns, etc. But perhaps flashlights that use D cells themselves are starting to become obsolete. I'm thinking of those crappy Everready flashlights with the colorful plastic casing and the white switch that feels uncomfortable. You probably know the type. You buy it, 6 months later you have to start messing with the switch and partly unscrewing it to get it to light. If you leave batteries in them they'll quickly lose charge and corrode. Compared to a good LED flashlight, well I have an Energizer flashlight in my truck that I haven't changed in 3 years and it still lights up nice and bright. Oh and as for 9 volts, don't forget smoke detectors.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2012 18:20 |
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KuruMonkey posted:Maglite disagree. Gotta have that reassuring heft for private security guards that aren't allowed a truncheon, but are allowed a torch... Maglites are in a whole other league. Those aren't flashlights to me, those are maglites/beating sticks.
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# ¿ Aug 6, 2012 01:23 |
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Ultrasonic remote controls These were used before IR remotes took over in the 1980's. If you've ever heard a remote control being called a clicker, this is where that nick name came from. All it was were buttons that hit tines which emitted a sound frequency that the TV would pick up and act upon.
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# ¿ Aug 6, 2012 03:23 |
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Wanamingo posted:That's genius compared to this, though. That's not all that different from how modern IR remotes work. Of course it's much more sophisticated now, but the principle is the same.
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# ¿ Aug 6, 2012 21:02 |
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vxskud posted:I'm pretty sure thats a picture of the only person who bought one. Ashens also bought one, and seems to have predicted its doom.
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# ¿ Aug 7, 2012 21:11 |
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Oh yeah, RAMBUS Ram. Intel's early 2000's effort to achieve market domination with their Socket 423 P4's. RAMBUS RAM, which ran hot, was expensive, had to run in pairs, and all slots had to be filled with either RAM sticks or terminators. I still have a couple sticks of it and two terminators just in case I find a system that needs it.
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# ¿ Aug 21, 2012 13:22 |
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Magic_Ceiling_Fan posted:
Hell yeah. It's quicker and easier to just glance at my watch rather then pull my phone out, press the button and wait for its screen to display the time. Also, I never forget my watch, while the phone I tend to leave at home on occasion.
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# ¿ Aug 21, 2012 17:53 |
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Ensign_Ricky posted:All this PDA talk going off and on for the past however many pages, and you all seem to have forgotten the granddaddy of them all...The Newton! Technically that wasn't the first. I present a look at the Amstrad Penpad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ38F9GnDQM
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2012 15:47 |
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spog posted:I recall that they were something odd like 1.5Mb per disk instead of the standard 1.44Mb That takes me back. You could actually format any standard 1.44 MB diskette to DMF and get that slight bit of extra space. I did that for a version of Windows 3.1 that was stripped down to run off of one diskette.
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# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 01:37 |
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SimplyCosmic posted:Speaking of CPUs, how common is overclocking these days? I'll still do it if it's not a huge PITA, meaning no ridiculous heatsink, and no water cooling. Really water cooling should be obsolete. It's nothing but problems, and if you get a leak inside your PC case, god help you.
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# ¿ Sep 2, 2012 00:55 |
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GruntyThrst posted:
Heat pipes, and bigger fans that run quieter. I used to use a regular 80mm fan that I stole out of a dead power supply to keep my CPU's cool, because the stock fans were noisy and didn't work as well as the 80mm. I kept having to make adapters for the new heatsinks, but I stuck with that 80mm fan until recently when fan sizes surpassed it.
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# ¿ Sep 2, 2012 04:19 |
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What have I done... To try and re rail the thread, I like candlestick phones, like this one: Instantly recognizable by the average person, and very anachronistic. I have a Western Electric one I bought as a joke when someone kept bitching at me to get a new phone. Just to mess with them even more I acted out the "Can you hear me now? Good!" bit with it in front of them.
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# ¿ Sep 2, 2012 19:42 |
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You Are A Elf posted:
Yeah. Then twenty years later you decide to replace it with a more modern TV only to realize that heavy son of a bitch isn't leaving your living room without a fight. Could be worse though. It could be a Curtis Mathes monster: Once that behemoth ends up in your living room, it's not leaving for a very long time. Landerig has a new favorite as of 21:31 on Sep 15, 2012 |
# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 21:27 |
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madlilnerd posted:But does anyone still use a bedside tea maker? My parents had one like this: Make a version that will do coffee and that'd be a smash hit over here in the USA.
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 23:43 |
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Whoops. I knew about the single serve coffee makers, but didn't think one of those would be small enough to fit on a bedside stand.
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# ¿ Sep 16, 2012 02:37 |
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Deathcake posted:Did someone say Trinitron? You could list it in the free section of craigslist. I'm sure someone will take it off your hands to get the copper inside.
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# ¿ Sep 16, 2012 04:48 |
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razorrozar posted:Anybody remember this piece of poo poo? I've been rather fascinated by Action 52 for a long time. There were a lot of unanswered questions, such as the size of the ROM (2 MB when NES games typically didn't exceed 256 KB. The Sega Genesis version, programmed by a more competent company clocks in at 1.99 MB) The music, some of it which was good or decent, and the weird jumping controls that improved in later games. I've found answers to most of these questions. The huge ROM size can be partly attributed to many many game tiles and sprites that were not used in the game, including a title screen for The French Baker. The sound engine was stolen, as was most of the music. The menu code was likely stolen from another 52 in one multicart. The only explanation I can think of for the jumping is the team of three college students who programmed this started out with one jumping engine, then very late in development came up with a better engine, but it was too late to go back and redo the games. Also noteworthy is NES emulation these days is pretty flawless. Even so, Action 52 can behave wildly different depending on which emulator you play it on. On some, it may run better then it does on the NES and you can play the two games that crash on the NES. On other emulators, games may have no enemy sprites, or sprites that float in a weird diagonal fashion, or they crash as soon as they load. Or like Cheetahmen, have the game freeze with the hit sound playing repeatedly, the character stuck in their walk/run animation, and the color palettes randomly changing.
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# ¿ Sep 16, 2012 16:26 |
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razorrozar posted:This explains the actually half-decent music. But are you saying there were other 52-in-1 carts? Like on Atari or something? Oh hell yeah there were other XX in one carts for the NES. Hell, the guy who thought up Action 52 said his inspiration came from a 40 in one pirate multi cart.
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# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 05:08 |
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Mu Zeta posted:I had 31 in 1 for the NES when I was a kid. It only had two good games but they were really good - Balloon Fight and Excitebike Oh Excitebike I would spend hours on that track editor. Tried Excitebike 64 hoping it had a track editor as well. Nope, at least not to my knowledge.
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# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 05:12 |
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Avenging_Mikon posted:There are a LOT of people who just will not buy software in a downloadable format. Just, they refuse. I do not understand it, but I will not hesitate to continue to take their money at work. I think that attitude will continue for a long time, since even in college-aged kids who use iTunes for music and movies have a disconnect when it comes to software. Optical drives are going to be around quite a while yet, and removable media more so. Personally, I'd rather keep isos or exes of programs on an external drive rather than downloading them whenever I need to reinstall. I think one of the reasons for this aversion to digital downloads is that they are intangible. When you have the physical media that your program resides on, complete with official label and in many cases, complex anti counterfeiting holograms, you have physical proof that you own the product. If you saved the receipt from where you bought it that's even better because you have proof of where and when you bought it. Being a physical hard to counterfeit object is also why paper money will be around for a very long time. With a digital download, you have *zero* physical proof. Any and all proof that you own a copy of the song or software is all digital, and digital data is not as trustworthy as an actual physical object. Now that said if the price is low enough, digital downloads are worth the risk, real or imagined.
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# ¿ Sep 22, 2012 19:55 |
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Konstantin posted:I personally think Blu-Ray is dead in the water. Technologically sophisticated customers are already switching from physical media to online streaming, and average people will follow them. The idea of spending $30 on a physical copy of one movie is going away, and Grandma is far more likely to buy an Apple TV than a dedicated Blu-Ray player. Revolutionary technology always crowds out evolutionary technology, for example, it doesn't matter how good a consumer-level digital camera is, it still isn't competing with an iPhone. One downside to flash drives is as far as I know, you can't really write protect them. SD cards you can, but it's more a feature of the drive then the actual card. A disc is much harder to accidentally erase. Also, aren't flash drives susceptible to magnets as well?
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# ¿ Sep 23, 2012 15:59 |
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mystes posted:Also present in this image: index color modes. Thankfully we don't have to deal with that anymore. Have you viewed an animated GIF lately?
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# ¿ Sep 24, 2012 01:58 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:03 |
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mystes posted:I meant actual indexed color video modes. Oh yeah. 640x480 @256 colors. Even better if the program required 256 colors to run properly and looked weird in High or True color mode. But yeah, GIF's really need to die out. Increases in bandwidth have compensated for their awful compression, and you can do wonders with color dithering, but you're still dealing with an image format that's over 20 years old.
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# ¿ Sep 24, 2012 04:12 |