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Commodore 64 Racing Destruction Set https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw3R-_flF4Y Track editor with stuff like a gravity setting make this game the poo poo. Skip ahead to 2:00 or so to see the race. Years later the "Welcome to Gamespy" sound and let's get on with the killing. might as well find and link it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihl9wA4YACs
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Dec 21, 2015 22:26
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 06:29 |
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The 123 slash commands still work in modern excel. I don't recall if I've verified 2013 but they work on earlier versions. Just his slash and they do their thing. Also someone mentioned napster. I got DSL fairly early in its existence around the time napster was blowing up and still open game for any music. It blew my mind that I could get that free music, in minutes. Some songs I didn't think I'd ever hear again. Magic time.
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Dec 29, 2015 01:10
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My old tower has one of these. The inputs are great, quarter inch, midi, RCA, optical, but ironically sound of the card itself just got surpassed by more modern cards. It isn't as good as my current on board. Loved the remote too for volume.
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Jan 22, 2016 02:43
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stubblyhead posted:
We played the hell out of Way of The Exploding Fist too.
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Jan 22, 2016 22:13
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Having sprites was one of the bullet points they sold the c64 with. I've mentioned it in other threads but the programs that made music using the floppy drive head stands out as one of the weirdest things about that platform. Having to get the drive head aligned (Sears would take it in and presumably ship it somewhere) was something you had to do. Wonder if the drive head music caused this? Also my first computer after the c64 was an IBM Pentium 75. Iater put a 133mhz (?) evergreen chip in it and maybe the first voodoo. Great box that served me a long time. It shipped with win3.11 , later upgraded to win95 using floppies iirc, and win98. The default screen saver in 3.11 was text saying Windows 3.11 which was preserved on upgrade. Everyone said you don't want to upgrade but install fresh but I didn't want to lose stuff so did it anyway.
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Jan 24, 2016 07:53
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Dazzle the natives! We had this. I recall liking it. Learned just now from the wiki they surprisingly re-released it in 1993 for PC which is a bit mind boggling for a C64 game released in 84. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Cities_of_Gold_(video_game)
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Feb 1, 2016 21:11
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I picked this up for PC and played it for a long while. Fun game. Ended up getting CC3, playing it and downloading a Vietnam mod over the course of a few days (like 60MB) which was pretty good too. The one thing that did suck was that your infantry would cut and run if they ran out of ammo. In CC3 they'd scrounge for weapons and ammo, including enemy weapons.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Combat:_A_Bridge_Too_Far I played some multiplayer too and climbed some online ladder for a while but don't remember which version. I got CC4 via :files: later on which was decent but CC2, shortcomings and all, was probably my fave. One thing I wonder about - with so much of gaming existing basically on Steam is piracy a much smaller problem today? Going all the way back to our C64 piracy was the norm rather than the exception for myself and the people I knew. Today I'd rather just support the dev and have the convenience of Steam but I wonder if it's still rampant for people who don't want to or cannot buy the games they want to play.
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Feb 4, 2016 20:46
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PRESIDENT GOKU posted:The convenience of piracy comes not from getting the game, but from not paying for it. Piracy is still alive. But it makes more sense that where there's a will the software is being cracked.
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Feb 5, 2016 00:58
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Keith Atherton posted:My first boss and a coworker designed all the Win 3.1 icons. They are also responsible for the desktop themes including the infamous Hot Dog Stand. I did a ton of toolbar icons for Word and Excel early. I do recall Lotus 123 being THE spreadsheet program. It was the first I used and still use the slash commands in Excel which came up a few pages back. E: I worked for a good while for a company that owned and operated fast food restaurants. I was their "computer guy" but also maintained cost-of-goods-sold spreadsheets, massive macro driven sheets that took all the ingredients purchased data, sales data and ultimately spit out a number that told you if you were wasting food or skimping or had theft issues or whatever. That sheet and its macros was invaluable. I should have copied it when I left. Realistically there's some website that is free that could do the same but it was slick as hell. Sten Freak has a new favorite as of 00:55 on Feb 6, 2016 |
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Feb 6, 2016 00:47
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Can't find it on youtube but in addition to the maze egg above as if you had clippy the paperclip do an animation 200 times or so in a row he flicked you a bird.
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Feb 6, 2016 05:51
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Regarding the audio software stuff. Around 2000 or so a friend bought a CD off ebay of cracked music editing and creation software. A few roommates went together and scraped up $95 or whatever it was, knowing it was a gamble but considering that if the CD had a fraction of what the auction claimed they'd score. It did in fact come loaded with SoundForge, Acid (2.0 I think) with shittons of acid samples, a few sequencer programs, plugins for everything and tons of other audio one off cool sampling programs and stuff. All of it stored in .rar files with accompanying crack exes to unlock everything. That disk got copied and passed around Tallahassee to the point that a year later or so they overheard some guys at a party talking about this amazing disk of cracked audio software they had and they were able to trace it back to the purchase they made. It was amazing but I'm not sure a lot of it would even run on Win10. Acid was probably my favorite of all of it. Going back much farther one of the first audio programs we had was on C64 which was a voice synth program where you could get it to say anything but you could only use consonants to make your words. I guess there was a simplicity of execution reason for this.
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Feb 10, 2016 21:24
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http://simulationcorner.net/index.php?page=sam I'm thinking this is the C64 voice synth we had. Download it there, 39KB. And the phonetic alphabet it used https://github.com/s-macke/SAM/wiki/Phonetic-Alphabet
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Feb 10, 2016 22:39
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Someone mentioned evergreen CPUs. I had an actual IBM box with a pentium 75 which I upgraded using an Evergreen chip. Something like 133mhz maybe? I don't recall exactly. I do recall RAM was expensive. Put a voodoo2 in it I believe. Eventually gave it away. Also from quite a few pages ago regarding porn on floppies. I had a C64 game floppy which had a file hidden somewhere, may have simply been on the root, which was a really really low def 2 or 4 color pixelated harcore porn loop, maybe 3 seconds long of some gal riding a dong. I loaned the disk to a friend who found it and pointed it out to me. The weird part is that as I recall that was a factory floppy. Probably 99% of the stuff we had was pirated so it may have been but I recall at the time wondering how in the world porn got on a factory disk. Who knows but it was the first I saw and the only I saw for a long time. I But I kinda lost interest in computers for a stretch after the power supply of our C64 died for the 4th or 5th time and we just stopped repairing it, and didn't get a computer again until the 3.11 era and that P75 which I got from work as it was an extra. I bought AMD stock a long time ago when their 1ghz Athlon was king and I was a true believer in their products but as a company they have poo poo the bed for over a decade. It was not a wise investment. Sten Freak has a new favorite as of 20:52 on Feb 16, 2016 |
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Feb 16, 2016 20:50
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theultimo posted:That was funny how much Intel was behind back then, ocing a p3 to stay compatible with athlon and still having to recall them because of overheating issues. It's really sad how far and has gone down the tubes  It's ugly. E: If you look right at the very itty bitty start of that graph AMD's stock price has gained more value than Intel's. Probably if you go back a few years from the start of this graph AMD beats them for a couple years but the decline since has been definitive. Sten Freak has a new favorite as of 21:39 on Feb 16, 2016 |
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Feb 16, 2016 21:35
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Part of me wants to go back and play Raiders of the Lost Ark on Atari. I just remember it was a major pain in the rear end. Tsetse fly biting you slowing you down and no idea what to do but I was a kid.
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Feb 17, 2016 00:37
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Keith Atherton posted:It's strange that typing came up as a topic. I had a high school class that was called Introduction to Business or something like that in 1984. A big part of it was typing on IBM Selectric typewriters. The teacher would put a paragraph on the overhead projector and you had to type it exactly, without looking at the keys. If you got caught looking at the typewriter keys you got failed immediately on the test. For college I did have an electric typewriter that had a small LED screen that served as a spellcheck window and used a floppy to store files. Once you were ready you fed paper into it and it'd print everything out. PCs were a thing by then so this thing just bridged the gap between typewriter and WordPerfect. No idea what it was called but it was pretty terrible looking back. On the other hand I'm so grateful the internet was not around to waste my time back then.
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Feb 17, 2016 20:15
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There's a commercial from a while back that shows the inventor of the USB walking through a room while people cheer and hi-five him in slow mo like a sports star or something. USB did do away with so much pain but I got a little irked when I saw it because of the physical design of the port itself - a connector that can fit both ways. How many times have you had to reverse a cable, particularly on a new machine or piece of hardware or if you're in IT and have to deal with racks and new configurations all the time (haven't worked with hardware in years but still)? It's a huge improvement but a notch or other obvious indicator or better yet the ability to insert in either orientation would have made it perfect. Sten Freak has a new favorite as of 16:58 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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Feb 23, 2016 16:55
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Sometimes the port is on the back of a machine in a rack, under a desk, in a dark space. That's a lame design.
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Feb 23, 2016 17:00
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Seeing the phone base for that terminal brings another tech improvement which is a massive disappointment to mind: Phone call quality is basically steaming dung now. In the days of everyone using a land line quality was so so so so much better. AT&T claimed "Hear a pin drop" (or whatever that slogan was) and it was almost true and shows the quality of the call was a big deal pre cells or voip for everyone. and all. And I text 100x more than I talk like everyone else but goddamn I miss the days of landline quality. The quality of an audio connection apparently is not considered anymore for devices or the backbone to support them.
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Feb 23, 2016 18:43
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Upgraded my vid card this weekend which got me thinking about their physical growth. I believe first dedicated card I recall was a VooDoo2. I tend to buy a mid level PC, then upgrade the video card after 4 years which gives me another 2 or 3 of good use out of it so I've upgraded quite a few cards since that VooDoo and every one has gotten a little thicker but this latest card was double the length of my old card. It fit, but I had to reroute cables as it stretches from the back of the tower to almost touching the drive bay housing.
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Mar 14, 2016 17:43
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drunk asian neighbor posted:My motherboard died last month and I didn't feel like replacing my processor at the same time so I picked up the only in-store mobo for my outdated i5 (socket 1155) processor for like $40. The packaging and marketing stuff has gotten absurd too. Every port with a dust plug, rubber protector on the socket pins (or whatever that term is), came with a massive movie-style poster, and instead of a sticker it came with a little painted metal badge and yes I did stick it on my case. E: oh and I had not used my optical drive in years but tried the disk for drives which failed for some reason. Downloaded latest (10 days old or so) from their website which worked to remind me you always just toss the media and install from the web. Mechanism Eight posted:That awkward period in the early 2000s where manufacturers had to suddenly deal with balooning thermal load really was wild. Suddenly it was all copper heatsinks, delta fans, blower coolers, phase change...
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Mar 14, 2016 23:41
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Yeah the plugs are pretty cool, and the pin protector neat. I did forget the worse offender: plastic protection film on the fan center caps. Do those do anything?
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Mar 15, 2016 04:35
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^And ugh those drat hard to manipulate ribbon cables which stuck around for a lonnnnnnnnnnnnng time. Also bent quite a few pins but thankfully never broke any. The first software company I worked for protected their product with a piece of hardware that you put in an ISA slot. They stopped it after I started working for them so I don't know any other details than they did it and stopped because they sold to the public sector and government agencies would steal the product from them (they did).
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Mar 15, 2016 20:06
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Psuedo related refresh rates on CRTs below a certain #, I think 60hz or lower, would basically flicker for me. I could glance at a monitor and tell it was set below 75hz. It always weirded me out that it bothered me but not the people around me. Also I guess LCDs refresh in a different manner because 60hz on an LCD is fine. Anyone else have a problem viewing low refresh rates on CRTs? Also my Samsung LCD TV turned green but the solution was to clean the pins on a board for 2 ribbon cables (!) with alcohol which fixed it. And ^that is probably the biggest difference between 25 years ago and today. It's not so much the hardware but the fact that the information to fix it is so readily available. Information that you couldn't' dream of having back then is available in seconds. Kids don't know how good they have it today, hobby, home/car repairs, whatever
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Mar 16, 2016 22:53
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I think it was lost in conversation above but even in the early days AOL had all their hosted content plus the ability to search the net and actually get on the web using this. At the very beginning did AOL have no access to the internet? My earliest days on it were probably around 1996 or so, it's hard to say though. I remember arguing with a couple older nerds how AOL was superior because it had the internet plus all that AOL content. But looking back I do not recall using anything but a few chat rooms. I do remember seeing lol for the first time, having no clue what it was. The AOL chatrooms I recall were just people sending porn gifs to each other as you could just push them to people. A lot of it shock stuff like poop and worth.jpg. I also remember trying to go to a URL, entering it then hitting search which wouldn't take you there as you needed to hit enter and calling tech support.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:56
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Buttcoin purse posted:worth.jpg? The internet seems to have forgotten. Maybe I need to search archive.org, do they have a shock images section? Jeez I hope I can keep my child away from the internet smut of tomorrow as long as possible 
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Apr 14, 2016 17:41
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There was (is?) a SL goon grief vid on youtube which showed up in a favorites or SA old stuff thread which was a new corporate logo reveal the company was holding in SL. It was a virtual conference room with about 25 or 30 avatars standing around and a woman av a the front giving a little speech about the logo before using a control to pull down a curtain with the logo behind it. But some goon found the event, discovered there wasn't security in place or whatever, and put a picture layer between the logo and the curtain of a fat dude with no shirt on. So she gives the spiel and then pulls the curtain down (which had a built in mechanical gear winding noise) to reveal the fat guy picture. I'm probably not doing it justice but it cracked me up. A few of the employees started chuckling and I think the goon or goons were making comments like "Nice logo!". The woman took it in stride and just said Who put that big guy up there? and moved it out of the way. It wasn't some big rage thing but just timed and executed perfectly. Found this site of C64 games emulations. Not sure how much works but there is a shitton of C64 stuff out there. http://legacy.c64g.com/ Finally, messing with printers a little today made me remember just how picky printers and their drivers used to be.
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Apr 19, 2016 18:52
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The C64 demo that was hot when we got ours was the Christmas music and scenes of snow falling on houses. Unrelated there was -the- .wav repository website late 90s and beyond. I thought it was soundwav.com but that's some app site. Movie, TV shows and other short sound files in wav format. Anyone remember that? Also there was a time it was really difficult to find Simpsons sound files. I guess a small internet with zealous copyright enforcement. This was pre YouTube of course. Anyway I recall the only "I was saying boourns" wav I could find was some little kid saying it which was hilarious in itself.
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May 1, 2016 02:55
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The newer server OSes are infuriating really. I had to google how to shut one down which requires mousing into the bottom right-hand corner to get a UI with a gear icon.  Also regarding dot matrix printers they really are good for high volume, cheap printing. I worked on law enforcement software for a while and most police stations would have one hooked up to the primary terminal for incoming messages. By law they had to print every inbound message sent to their agency under some condition , maybe all messages but I don't recall. Anyway they'd hook up an Okidata which feeds tractor style paper from a box on the floor. We did one state where we rolled out new hardware too and replaced their trusty dot matrix printers in most agencies with a fancy bubble jet printer which would only hold a ream or less of paper and use expensive ink and I'm sure break way more often than the workhorse Okidata printers. Oh well.
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May 3, 2016 22:32
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DrBouvenstein posted:God, I hate regular Server 2012. 2012 R2 is fine, it's basically the server version of upgrading to 8.1. You can boot/log in straight to the Desktop, and you get the Start Menu back. The 2012 R2 (and 8.1) start menu is actually really useful, right-clicking gives you a ton of easy options like restart/shutdown/logout, Control Panel, Task Manager, Command Prompt, etc... We have to keep servers at all versions to ensure our software works in all server versions (at least one of each supported ver) so upgrading is not an option.
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May 4, 2016 16:21
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And back then, even as a dumb teen you'd have at least half dozen phone numbers memorized, maybe more. Today I know my number and my parents landline from when I was a kid. I don't even know my wife's but will recognize it.
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May 27, 2016 17:53
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3 motherboards ago (an Asus supporting an Athlon of some flavor) had mp3 play functionality that you didn't have to boot into the OS to use. I had a fancy pants soundcard so I never disabled it to be able to use this feature as it was off when a soundcard was turned on. I think I still have it and am curious to see how it works. e: this was a long time ago so I could be remembering it wrong but that is the functionality as I remember reading about it - keyboard driven commands from a DOS screen to play media
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May 31, 2016 20:21
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The EQ question shows (I think?) that the way we listen to music has been really dulled down. Not only do most people listen to audio that has undergone some compression but the devices have gotten far more simplified. Systems of the past typically had EQs, often cars and definitely home audio component systems. Most devices today (phones I guess) have volume. Do they even have bass treble sliders? I don't think my phone does - I've never seen it but never looked for it to be fair. The most recent time I listened to music at length was through my phone bluethoothed to a jawbone box which sounds OK but is basically crap compared to even a low end full sized system from the 80s. I still have a nice stereo system but never use it. Do kids today even have "home stereo systems"? E: ANyone remember quadraphonic sound? http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2008/01/quadraphonic-the-forgotten-sur.php
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Jul 13, 2016 16:05
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Cojawfee posted:Kids today have iphone docks with speakers. Equalizers probably died in the 90s because of car stereos. People have an unamplified head unit in their honda with 2-4 lovely speakers. In order to be able to listen to the music, the record company has to compress the song into something car stereos can play. I think having more dynamic range has been coming back recently but it didn't help that we went from lovely car stereos to poo poo quality MP3s. There's like a 20 year span where people accept listening to terrible quality music. I was thinking about this after my last post and one way to look at it is there was a 10 year high point when CDs were everywhere, car and home, but the mp3 player had not yet been invented. Prior to CDs people ran cassettes in their cars so mobile sound was poor then too, though I don't know how a compressed file would compare to a good fresh tape.
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Jul 13, 2016 20:43
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The earliest cable box I recall had an analog dial in the middle. There was the in-between channel hack for a bit but what I also recall was sticking a piece of thick plastic, like 1" wide, into the top edge of the box between the front panel and the case and moving it back and forth until you hit a sweet spot to get free HBO. Probably in combination with moving the dial to a certain position. How that could even do anything is beyond me but I recall that very specifically. Early 80s timeframe. E: seems like this came up earlier in the thread I think my schools called those purple dittos memographs also. The thing I remember about them is that had a very specific smell. Dick Trauma posted:Hooking up a Pong console to the back of our tiny Sony B&W seemed pretty drat futuristic back in 1976. I'm sure the landfills of the 1980s are peppered with heaps of these things.
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Aug 17, 2016 17:27
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 06:29 |
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Efexeye posted:I want to buy cheap and lovingly learn to restore a Creature from the Black Lagoon, the game I learned to love pinball on Pages back but  My college arcade had one of those and I played the poo poo out of it. Soon as I saw the pics of those old pinball machines I looked for it. Also a robot football (loosely based) game of some kind where you could upgrade your robots and they'd blow up if you didn't get a 1st down. Excellent game as well.
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Sep 19, 2016 21:08
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