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Anyone know anything about PocketPCs? That's retro computer gaming kind of, I mean they're a type of PC. Honestly I just cant find a better thread for this question, I don't think we have a PDA thread. Nothing about stuff this old in IYG, nothing about retro hardware in SHSC I want to buy some PDAs for playing some old PDA games and just general nostalgia. I had a Palm pro back in the day and an ipaq that had a really garbage hardware flaw where you couldnt press 2 buttons down at the same time. Both PalmOS devices and PocketPCs are really cheap now too so I figured I'd grab one of each to have around. But now that they're all dead I want to get one of the last ones of each, I figure there's probably a late release or a few of each that are going to be the best all around PDAs we'll ever have . Any suggestions for what would be the best PocketPC with the last versions of Windows Mobile that is an actual pocket pc? most of the late windows mobile devices, like the ipaq glimmer, were more blackberry style phones and not pdas from what I can see and I guess by the late 2000s the whole PDA concept was on its way out with the iphone making them all obsolete. Same thing with Palm, what's the last, most powerful actual PalmOS device that still feels like a Palm Pilot? PalmOS/Windows Mobile stuff is really poorly preserved too. A lot of it was shareware with "send check with money order to" readmes that obviously don't work anymore, so I've spent a lot of time archiving it as best I can since not many other people are. There weren't many good games for either, but it's still a part of gaming history and I archive junk because that's what disappears first. There are things like Kyle's Quest, which is really what I'm nostalgic for.  Kyle's Quest was an RPG engine, sort of like RPG Maker, but scaled down for PDAs. The original versions could get you Game Boy quality RPG, and there were dozens. All just made by fans (which made these especially hard to archive, since they'd often be in just random places) It was the only way to play some variation of Pokemon on an early palm pilot which wasn't actually capable of emulating a real GB   (I only had this poorly photoshopped for an inside joke with a friend version and I'm too lazy to bust out the palm emulator to get a better one) There is an Android version of Kyle's Quest but it's not really the same. Playing these old PDA games on an emulator is annoying since they mostly used touchscreen controls and that's why I want to get original hardware to play them. Since this is pretty close to off topic for the thread I guess I'll talk about something related that's more about Retro PC stuff, Windows 95 RPG Maker games. RPG Maker 95 is the least well preserved of all the RPG Maker games. It barely runs on modern Windows, no ones taken the time to rewrite the engine, and it never got an official Western release. No one in the West used it seriously so it was a wasteland of shovelware RPGs made by 12 year olds. I played them all. One of those games was "Evan's Adventure." https://cz0.au/AipEhs.zip This is the actual game, it took me forever to track down.  You play Evan, a young teen living in the world of Pokemon long after the events of Pokemon Red/Blue, when things have gotten much edgier. Ash is dead, killed by his own charizard, and a bunch of other poorly spelled cool to a 13 year old things have changed. You set out to find your girlfriend or something until eventually capturing a Missingno/ghastly that turns out to be the ghost of your mom who is now evil for some reason and you have to defeat her with the power of Jesus  It's bad, but I'm glad I have it archived. There was a huge explosion of stuff like this in the late 90s when the Internet became mainstream, but since the Internet was far more decentralized and fragile so much of its pretty much disappeared.
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Mar 11, 2023 12:00
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I'm hoping eventually I can make a thread here about Retro PDA gaming. Just want to get back into playing around with it so it's not just "here are my 20 year old memories." There are even interesting third PDAs that don't have a lot of information archived anywhere about them. Like, a friend and I also got the VTech Helio. I would pay decent money to get another one of these. It didn't have much for it but it did have a few games. (this website doesn't seem to be completely working? But it's archived on archive.org) The crazy thing about it was, compared to the Palm Pilots at the time it was really capable, I am pretty sure it could outperform any Palm when it was released, but it's vtech so no one was going to take it seriously and they probably never intended for it to be serious anyway. We did manage to get Linux working on it though, https://tldp.org/LDP/Mobile-Guide/html/mobile-guide-p3c2s2-helio.html But, now that's all dead links and the device doesn't even have its own wikipedia page. What is the SA policy on abandonware? Like, really completely abandoned abandonware? Kyle's Quest cant be bought anymore and the company behind it doesn't exist anymore either. And if I made a thread it seems better if I had links to where people can actually play these ancient games in emulators now. BrainDance fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Mar 12, 2023 |
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Mar 12, 2023 09:31
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blatman posted:for the last palm pilot that feels like a palm pilot ur gonna want the sony clie peg-sl10, it ran palm os 4 or something so it still looked and felt like a palm pilot + can run space trader + kyle's quest 1 and 2 but it was probably the last one to use disposable batteries Thanks for this, I didn't even consider how old the batteries would be even though that's probably the first thing to think about when buying old hardware that runs on batteries. I wonder if any use somewhat generic lithium batteries that are still being made for one thing or another. I can buy hardware from Shenzhen pretty easily, been doing that for another project building a retro pc, and there are a lot of misc parts straight from the factory (or just ancient but never used, not that that would help for batteries I'd imagine) like that. It will be a while before I get a thread together because I want to do it right. But I've been on a nostalgia kick lately so it's a good time for me to dive back into it. I went and checked how many Kyle's Quest maps there are on archive.org, right now there are about 4. In my archive I have almost 70 (which may be the entire collection) lol so I'll get something up specifically for that. I'm surprised that hasn't been more well archived because most of the games on PalmOS are really simple, just ports of classic games, but Some of the Kyle's Quest maps though aren't actually that bad. You don't need much hardware for a decent 2d rpg I guess. lobsterminator posted:There was a time when I noticed myself using some of the Palm Pilot letters when writing normally on paper. Being able to write in graffiti has to be one of the rarest skills. Just an incredibly niche written language that was only relevant for the absolute shortest time ever. It still exists for Android but I cant imagine wanting to use it now. BrainDance fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 02:26
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Nancy posted:These are almost certainly terrible but it's the first AliExpress junk I've been tempted to flip a coin over. This is actually the kind of thing that might be at least decent. I buy a lot of Chinese hardware (I live in China.) I have been absolutely burned and learned my lesson by Chinese sensitive electronics. I had a Chinese receiver that sprayed a cloud of electric death around it and started bringing down other electronics (I got a refund and just got a Denon receiver that's been working) But little things like this, when they're not incredibly cheap, I've bought a lot of them that have been fine. I'll try to find out if they're cheaper within China and maybe get one, I had some other hardware that was 1/10th the cost in China as it was anywhere else for the same exact thing directly from the company.
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May 15, 2023 06:02
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Yeah, a HAND486 sounds like it'd be a whole lot more useful. Or maybe I just have a soft spot for the 486, in my mind it's still "the fast one"
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May 15, 2023 08:11
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I didn't have an x86 computer for the longest time I had.... A Vic 20 :/ But my friend had a 386 and that's what started my whole thing. We started a "videogame company" making little qbasic games. But the first computer I actually got was a p2 233, which at the time 1as really good. Then upgraded after begging and begging to the 1ghz thunderbird. I don't actually know how it performed at the time, I just wanted it cuz 1ghz
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May 16, 2023 08:17
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I'm actually thinking of building close to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vsj5OPjsUA https://youtu.be/7D01We2aAu8 As just a stupid project, and then have it (both heavily firewalled, on its own network, and 99% of the time just unplugged from its router) route everything through archive.org as a part of a bigger project where I'm recreating the year 1998 except bigger and better (it's already a PVM with 3 months of 90s and early 2000s recordings and shows, a 120 inch projector, fullsets for every console up to GC being emulated with a 5900x a 4090, soon a mister, and a whole lot more.) I can actually get the parts he had trouble getting very easily because Shenzhen is a place here. But I've heard that some of that very late "officially supported" stuff is a half rear end kind of support at best and often doesn't work how you'd expect it to work in 98se. But then, where is the sweet spot? Where is the "ultimate" in 98se hardware that actually runs well? Or is that late stuff actually running well but people think it doesn't because they forgot how garbage 9x was?
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May 17, 2023 06:59
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wolrah posted:This is not just a bad opinion, it's objectively wrong. There's nothing technically preventing any emulator from achieving perfection, assuming we know how to quantify perfection for a particular platform. There are a few platforms where every single chip is either officially fully documented and/or has been decapped and reverse engineered so we know exactly how they are supposed to work at a cycle by cycle level and can validate emulator output to be perfect at the digital level. It is but it also really doesn't feel wrong. I am very pro-emulation, and I emulate most things, but even with very accurate emulators it often doesnt feel right. I play a lot of NES. And accurate NES emulation is pretty much a solved problem at this point. At the same time though playing in a very accurate emulator (even on a CRT) does not feel like playing on original hardware, especially when it comes to sound emulation. Playing on an actual NES has a kind of analog feeling to it. I know it's not actually analog but, I dunno, it's hard to describe. I had always assumed (but literally just an assumption) that it has less to do with the emulator itself but more to do with the hardware that it's being emulated to. A modern sound card or whatever, no matter how accurately you've translated things, just isn't going to be or sound the same as the nes apu. Because it just doesn't suck as much.
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Jul 1, 2023 05:38
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It might be nitpicking to some people but nostalgia works in weird ways. These are the things that make an NES or whatever feel different from other hardware, the weird quirks of the hardware itself that sorta tell you "you're playing an NES game." I very much prefer the pseudo-analog buzziness of how actual NES hardware looks and sounds and it is an important part of the NES experience to me. If it became possible to accurately emulate that I would jump on it in a heartbeat. I am not going to go all "this is how it's meant to be played!" or anything, it's fine without it and if you don't have nostalgia for it I imagine it really doesn't matter. But still, to me, I am nostalgic for it. To me it's not nitpicking, it's just a quality of the NES that hasn't been accurately replicated outside of the NES itself. And I imagine the same is true for people who have nostalgia for certain old computers. I know that this comes up a decent amount with things that relied on midi back in the 90s, with midi on modern PCs really not sounding as good (maybe? Or just different) as it did in the 90s even though everything is running the same way, not even emulated just on newer hardware. I did have kind of a similar experience emulating a Vic 20 which I have nostalgia for, but I didn't try super hard to replicate the actual hardware so who knows if it's something that could be overcome if I just spent some time with it. BrainDance fucked around with this message at 09:25 on Jul 1, 2023 |
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Jul 1, 2023 07:21
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The Kins posted:Yeah, there's a few out there. One good one is E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution (46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinkaron), which you might recognize from its SNES sequel. I've always been meaning to check this out because I like the SNES game. Then every time I think to do it I look into it and realize it doesn't look nearly as fun as the SNES one.
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Aug 29, 2023 07:13
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falz posted:Following up with myself with a different non physical idea. You can do a lot of wild stuff but you really have to be careful. You can just mod them yourself. I used "Award BIOS Editor" I think. There's a lot of documentation for specific BIOSes out there that would be worth reading if you wanted to do it. About 10 years ago I modded a bios on a laptop to enable some stuff. Somehow, some of the stuff I enabled that seemed completely unrelated to the keyboard or USB or any of that caused the keyboard and any other keyboard plugged in to just not work in Linux, communicating with the bios itself, and GRUB. It did work if it got into Windows though (don't remember how I figured that out) but I ended up trapped since I couldn't do anything with grub. I could have taken the harddrive out and put it in another computer and make GRUB boot into Windows, but what I did was grab a harddrive from a Windows laptop, toss it in, get into Windows and flash a clean BIOS. That was the last time I modded a BIOS. I guess the point of this is you probably can mod a BIOS yourself to maybe do what you want but here be dragons.
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May 5, 2024 06:04
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