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Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

I just wish old speakers held up as well. The technology and manufacture tolerances now are just too far ahead for any 20+ year old speaker to keep up.

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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Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

GWBBQ posted:


Good speakers will always be good speakers. New technology might surpass them, but if they sound good when you buy them, they'll sound good decades from now.

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

Noblesse Obliged posted:



Ever since, tennis gives me a raging headache.

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)

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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)

Oh, and he invented the D-pad. How's that for awesome?

Sadly, he got hit by a car and died soon after retiring :(

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:

One and a half inch black and white screen. Mono sound. Only picked up the really strong broadcast channels. But it was awesome and the batteries lasted a fair amount of time for the time.

I found it in the attic recently. It still turns on and tries to show stuff, but outside of somehow attaching it to a converter box it's useless now.

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

FrancisYorkPatty posted:


My mom and dad still own one and keep it in their attic

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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?

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

FrancisYorkPatty posted:

gently caress. Trinitrons.

b0nes posted:

Silicon Graphics graphics workstations and supercomputers.

Practically any movie that came out in the 80's or 90's and used any kind of special effects was probably made on an SGI machine. They costs thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars back in the day, and were serious investments for studios like Industrial Light and Magic and Lucasfilm.
But the computing age and things getting dramatically cheaper, plus the ongoing use of cheap Intel and AMD processor farms for rendering quickly made these obsolete. SGI filed for bankruptcy a few years ago, but they are still around. I think they got bought by Cray.

♫ We gotta move these refrigerators. We got to move these color TV's

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

bossy lady posted:

Speaking of Trinitrons, I had a Sony GDM FW900 24 inch CRT monitor way back in the day:



It weighed about 100 lbs and increased the temperature of my room by about 15 degrees but it had amazing colors and made games look so drat beautiful. Also 2304 x 1440 resolution :dong:

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

axolotl farmer posted:


The WV beetle came with a windshield washers that ran off the air pressure in the spare tire.

What?

Tell me they also provided an air pump.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

Invisble Manuel posted:

I always wanted one of these:



It was a black and white video camera that recorded video to standard audio cassettes,



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

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.



Released in 1994, it ran the Magic Cap operating system by General Magic, a spin-off of early-90s Apple, and, like pretty much everything developed at Apple in the early 90s, it completely failed in the market. The company was run by Bill Atkinson (original Mac developer, creator of the Mac's QuickDraw API, MacPaint, and HyperCard) and Andy Hertzfeld (also one of the original Mac developers). The operating system started with the Desktop Metaphor and took it to its illogical conclusion:




For example, let's say that we want to access the Internet. Well, the Internet is the world outside of our house, of course, so first we step out of our office into the hallway...



and then out of the hallway to the outdoors...



and then into your ISP's office building!



Then you could set up your Internet access and plug the built-in 2400 baud modem into a phone line and exchange e-mail and stuff. Fancy e-mail written on post cards with pictures and animations! Provided, that is, that your recipients also had a Magic Cap system.

What was supposed to be a distinguishing feature was a built in GUI designer and scripting language, TeleScript, so that you could develop applications directly on the device. Sony, who licensed Magic Cap for their Magic Link devices, decided to leave in the GUI designer...



but disable the scripting language, on the grounds that customers wouldn't understand programming. So you could stick buttons all over the place, but had no way to actually make them do anything.

Wow it's like an early point and click game. Yeah I can see why that failed, it'd get tedious in a hurry.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

Wanamingo posted:

The mako was actually based on a real vehicle called the LAV-25.

Anyway, though my only knowledge of it comes from the internet, I think that the GameLine for the Atari 2600 deserves a mention.



Essentially, it was an oversized game cartridge with a phone jack in the side of it. The way it worked is you would plug it into your wall, and then call up the company. You'd then order the game over the phone, and it would actually download into the game cartridge. The GameLine itself cost $60 to buy, plus $1 for each game you downloaded. The downloads would expire after a limited number of plays, so it was more analogous to playing on an arcade than anything else. However, the GameLine was released in 1982, which was right before the videogame crash -- by 1983 a single dollar was actually pretty expensive for just a few plays, considering you could just buy the game for not much more. It had a total of 75 games available throughout its life, and almost none of them were any good. There was only a single exclusive game made for it, but the service was discontinued in 1984 before it could be released.

It seems so primitive now, but the technology was just crazy ahead of its time. The guy who invented it had actually planned using the technology as a way of letting people download and listen to music through their TV, but after that fell through he repurposed the idea. It never panned out, but he planned to expand the GameLine so that it could do things like email, check the stock market, and home banking. The company that made it, CVC, would eventually go on to become America Online.

Talk about being ahead of its time. I guess that would be Steam's great great grandfather.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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. :smug:"



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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

KuruMonkey posted:

Maglite disagree. Gotta have that reassuring heft for private security guards that aren't allowed a truncheon, but are allowed a torch... :britain:

Maglites are in a whole other league. Those aren't flashlights to me, those are maglites/beating sticks.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl
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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

Wanamingo posted:

That's genius compared to this, though.



It was a remote control which was just a flashlight. You shined it at one of four light sensors on the TV, and that was it. It was hard to use since you needed to have a direct line of sight with the TV, and the sensors could be finicky. It was also incredibly annoying since a beam of sunlight moving across the room could turn it on.

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl
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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

Magic_Ceiling_Fan posted:



Also, does anyone still use a wristwatch? I still wear one daily because I like to hike, and taking your phone is sort of against hiking etiquette.

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

spog posted:

I recall that they were something odd like 1.5Mb per disk instead of the standard 1.44Mb

MS did something clever to squeeze out a little extra space on each disk - thus meaning that you had to make sure you took care of all 25 disks as you couldn't copy them and make a backup set.

EDIt: 1.7Mb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

GruntyThrst posted:


I don't think there's been any super revolution in air cooling, is what I'm saying.

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl
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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

You Are A Elf posted:


Also, how about console TVs and stereos that were made to look like, and blend in as pieces of living room furniture?



Man, that's swanky.

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

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

madlilnerd posted:

But does anyone still use a bedside tea maker? My parents had one like this:

and used it for years. It has a compartment up top that you put tea and water and milk (maybe? That sounds gross but I swear it did) in and then in the morning when you want a cup of tea before you get out of bed it will make one for you.


Yes, I'm English.

They still make them though, the Teasmade brand is still going, and Lakeland sell one for lonely singletons that only makes 1 cup. I don't know anyone with one though.

Make a version that will do coffee and that'd be a smash hit over here in the USA.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl
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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

Deathcake posted:

Did someone say Trinitron? :v:



Why, you may ask, is that giant loving monitor sitting under my table? Because I don't know how to get rid of it. The beast finally started dying a couple years ago (the screen started flickering and making terrifying electrical sounds) and I honestly don't know how the gently caress to get rid of it. I don't think I can bring it to the dump since I'm certain it has chemicals/metals in it that need special disposal. I can't sell it or give it away because it's probably going to start an electrical fire and/or explode if plugged in again. I'm sure as hell not going to risk carrying it down into my basement (or any stairs at all). All I can do is let it take up a good chunk of floor space.

I actually bought it a few years back from a dude on Craigslist. I drove 45 minutes to get this bad boy because I needed a replacement CRT monitor fast (I'm an illustrator and didn't want to chance getting a cheap LCD with lovely color/contrast). I pay the guy, pick it up, and immediately buckle. The guy asked me if I needed help carrying it to my car, but I said no, because I knew I'd need to carry it OUT of my car by myself when I got home. That thing had to be at least 40 lbs. Then I get to my car and the damned thing almost doesn't fit through my car door. I almost couldn't fit a MONITOR in my car.

But damned if that monitor didn't give me the crispest picture, richest contrast and perfect color. When it died, I finally spent the money on a quality LCD monitor. A month later, my dad calls me into the kitchen and asks, "Deathcake, do you have any idea why the electric bill dropped so much this month?" loving thing had been jacking our electric bill up by around 25%. I am not even kidding.


Absolutely justified.

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

razorrozar posted:

Anybody remember this piece of poo poo?



This thing was a wet dream for ten-year-olds. Imagine being able to play 52 games without having to change a cartridge!

And then you stuck it in and found out you actually couldn't play any of them, because they all sucked.

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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 :allears: 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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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.

I want to see Blu-Ray drives and writable media drop some more in price because I have a lot of videos recorded to DVD-R's that I'd love to consolidate onto a 30 GB disc. Just did a price check and they have gotten pretty cheap. Hmmm.

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?

Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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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Landerig
Oct 27, 2008

by Fistgrrl

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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