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Ah the Norton Commander, Linux has the Midnight Commander which is pretty much the same in many ways and is still pretty useful if you remote connect via SSH and some-such. Amiga had Directory Opus which I felt always was a bit more functional because you had the rows of scriptable buttons. There's also sort of an spiritual successor for the original Directory Opus, called Worker - also for Linux. Feels at first like a very convoluted and outdated mess but it grows on you. Directory Opus is still made for Windows, I think. No idea if it even still does the 2-pane thing though.
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Feb 9, 2016 04:34
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One of these Heaven's Gate people was the brother of the woman who played Uhura on the original Star Trek series. They're not all dead, since I found the website was still active and looked around on youtube a little, I found at least two people who are apparently not only active on the internet but still pretty convinced that old dude was the messiah or something. That cult existed for a long time before they decided to kill themselves, just like the Jim Jones people. Look it up kids if you find such craziness interesting, that was about a thousand dead people (Jonestown massacre).Fasdar posted:Did the internet short circuit cultism more generally? It only seems to crop up re: scientology and evanegelicals, both of whom are groups that tightly control internet access. Are there hot cults I'm missing out on?? I have the feeling people who are susceptible to cults spend their days nowadays in the Youtube comment section, talking about the zionist world conspiracy and how jet fuel can't melt steel beams in all caps. That whole UFO crap specifically seems to have somehow died with the 90s, and the world has kinda changed since 9/11.
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Feb 12, 2016 10:41
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I think Flashpoint warned about having such a copy protection but was it actually real? When companies get too excited about "creative" copy protection schemes it usually backfires.
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Feb 12, 2016 13:28
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Also Theme Park, that was Molyneux too. Even the games universally hated on the internet were pretty good, they just couldn't live up to the hype that he caused around them. If it weren't for the hype they would've been pretty decent for their time. I don't even really believe he hyped them so much for selfish motives. There are people a lot worse in this industry.
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Feb 13, 2016 18:48
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The Kins posted:You could one of those weird people who use pimped out Amigas for things other than playing old Amiga games. As one of those people there are actually only very few of these people, most of them just buy the parts for some weird hipster nerd cred and have no idea what to even do with them. Also don't kink shame. The most interesting thing to have a pimped up Amiga for in the 90s was to run 68k Mac emulation. (beyond that was image/video processing/realtime splicing and editing and other special niche uses which were very useful if you needed it but irrelevant for the average user) As the Mac has very OS friendly software compared to the Amiga, it was very very compatible and basically worked with almost all software. For people not being able to imagine how that looked like, just imagine it like running a VM on a modern computer. (and yes, you could switch back and forth between MacOS and AmigaOS and they'd run at the same time and AmigaOS could directly mount MacOS partitions while they were in use and stuff) The fun thing was that a beefy Amiga was actually faster at running MacOS than the average 68k Macs around at that time, especially if equipped with the 68060 (the beefiest and last 68k CPU before Motorola gave up on 68k to do the PowerPC) which never was used in Macs. The 68060 had some hardware bugs in early revisions that you needed workarounds for to make MacOS work properly, though. Also Apple actively sabotaged the 060 working properly with System 8 because they didn't want anyone to make 68060 accelerators and wanted to push the PowerPC Macs which the earliest ones of were not very impressive performance-wise. For a short while, a well equipped Amiga was the fastest Mac you could buy, and that was after Commodore folded. Or if not-so-well-equipped, the cheapest Mac you could buy. (I guess you'd call that a Hackintosh nowadays) There also were the BSDs, and I think NetBSD is still maintained for the Amiga. Still not a great deal, especially considering how Apple itself was almost dead at that time. An Amiga equipped in this way can run games like Duke3D or Doom or stuff like Full Throttle/Day of the Tentacle no problem though. It is always kinda neat to see my A2000 bought in 1987 pulling off things like running a fully-voiced Full Throttle, but tacking a 32-bit CPU onto a 16-bit System is not the most efficient thing you can do if you can imagine. (later Amigas were 32-bit) If anyone wonders where to clock a 50 Mhz 68060 performance-wise, In real usage scenarios I'd put it somewhere between a very fast 486 and an early Pentium with having more in common with the Pentium than with the 486 feature-wise, being already 3.3V, being superscalar and also having advanced features like (sort of) an internal temperature sensor and power management. Contrary to the Pentiums, the 68060 doesn't run hot and doesn't need any cooling at stock clocks whatsoever, not even passive. Not a bad CPU at all - just a bit too little, a bit too late and a very lame FPU. Very popular for embedded applications, which is why Freescale (the former semiconductor subdivision of Motorola) still occasionally made improved (die-shrunk and bugfixed) batches of them occasionally, I guess to honor contract obligations. Just like intel "made" the 386 until 2007. So how many of the people reading in this thread actually had one of the non-intel x86s in the 90s? Over here I didn't know a single person, for private use. I'm always wondering how far-spread they really were.
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Feb 15, 2016 03:27
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Centripetal Horse posted:I had a few, and they were not terrible. What was wrong with yours, if you remember? Nothing, never had one except AMD in the early, crazy Pentium 4 years. I was just wondering how widespread they were. Now, many years after the fact I got an Cyrix 5x86 I put on an Industrial 486 Board and it's a neat little CPU, except maybe the weak FPU where intel always seems to have known their poo poo better. I also have an K6 III+ around and that's a nice computer also, even though pretty underpowered compared to what else was around at that particular time. In my circle of aquaintances all these non-intels had the reputation of being very bad and I can't quite follow where that even came from. Underpowered compared to often much more expensive CPUs, yes, but bad as in unreliable etc., no, on the contrary. Often they had neat little features intel CPUs didn't have, like various power saving stuff&setting the multiplier via software etc. My theory is they were often paired with cheap and lovely mainboard chipsets/lovely-made boards which was the major cause for many computer problems.   I sometimes play Daggerfall on this. Casimir Radon posted:I think it would be fun to buy an A1200 someday. I think that about a lot of old computers. It's a neat hobby, just don't become a hoarder. Also some general electronics knowledge and soldering skills are very helpful, else you'll have a hard time keeping the old machines running without relying on random kindness of strangers. (which are sometimes indeed very strange)
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Feb 15, 2016 06:59
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Aix posted:I had an AMD 486 clone in the early nineties, didnt seem any different from the intel 486s at the time. Maybe it just felt that way cause i had lots of RAM (16MB). Wasnt much cheaper either. Got it from Escom before they bought Amiga, what a weird store. I remember them being huge into having all their store brand computers all black and red I had exactly the same tower and screen for my 486 from ESCOM, just in beige! Isn't it funny through what pains they went to keep the Amiga going after Commdore went broke? They went through this huge effort to get the production of Amiga 1200s and Amiga 4000s up and running again and they also succeeded doing so. They almost didn't even have the plans to produce the AGA Chipset with, through sheer luck H&P (which later on did the AGA chipset, because of financial troubles CSG/MOS had) still had the production masks. Then there was the planned Walker and afaik even talks with Phase 5 to design a PowerPC Amiga, but then bam, ESCOM also filed bankruptcy. (not because of the Amiga, mind you. That business was actually kinda lucrative) I have a whole lot of IC Stock from them and also a whole lot of Amiga custom ICs branded "AmigaTech", which stands for Amiga Technologies, that whole subsidiary ESCOM kicked off. Also this was what the Amiga Walker was supposed to look like:  Yeah. It's nothing special on the inside either, basically a A1200 with a faster CPU.. and yes, already back then the reaction mostly was "wtf?". Buttcoin purse posted:That stuff sounds great, kind of like how I used to hear about how powerful OS/2 was, but I stuck to Windows and hooray, Windows won It sounds conceptually interesting to upgrade a computer like that just by putting in a faster CPU card, it just wasn't really as good in practice. I mean, you put the card into the Amiga 2000, the onboard 7 Mhz CPU gets disabled and the card takes over, so far so good. The chipset still is 16-bit and running at 7 Mhz and your memory controller is there so all your memory accesses are, too. A 50 Mhz, 32-bit 060 already has a bit of cache but nothing worth mentioning in the great scheme of things and such a CPU is just as fast as it can fetch instructions from memory so it'll be not a whole lot faster than the original CPU in such a setup. So what do you do? You put some fast 32-bit memory on the accelerator card of course, so the CPU has something to work with. This makes the card more complex and expensive, as you need a lot of housekeeping with the memory, there's nothing ready you can buy for such a niche use case so you need to program your own logic and spin your own in PLDs, at that time for that speed these would be AMD (they didn't only make CPUs) MACHs, expensive but doable. Then with a computer as "advanced" as this, you want a harddrive. You could add a HD-Controller to the Amiga, but it still is a 16-bit computer from 1987 so HD access from the viewpoint of the CPU will be slow over the slow bus. A 1995 Computer will not have lots of RAM and AmigaOS doesn't know what caching is so again, your computer will be just as fast as the HD accesses will be. What do you do? Put a HD-Controller on the accelerator card which can do DMA. And so it just goes on and on and you basically build a second small computer inside the first computer. Architecturally, you still have to work with the 16-bit, 7 Mhz chipset anyways and as faster as the CPU gets, the more obvious it gets how slow the rest of the computer is, the more complicated it also gets to negotiate a window to have the CPU talking to the chipset. It's kinda neat to get it to work and there is a considerable speed boost, but conceptually it's just an over-engineered dead-end. Highly diminishing returns and all. Also, as you can imagine it takes some considerable engineering skill to do this properly and as a result there were lots of accelerators who had hardware bugs or didn't run nearly as fast as they should be able to because they just weren't done that well. Cojawfee posted:How would that even work? Did it just hijack the signals meant for the 386 or something? The lower CPU was basically disabled and yes, I don't think that worked with every 386, I think you needed a C-Step CPU that you could turn off, else you'd have bus contention that'll destroy both chips and more. I think they didn't fit on non-capable chips. The speed mainly comes from the L1 cache they had, a whole whopping 1 kb! AFAIK of all companies Texas Instruments made the fastest of these 386/486 CPU things as after upgrade parts. They were Cyrix' design, just had a much bigger cache. They were still limited by the external bus of the 386 and a "proper" 486 was a lot faster. The cache also was a problem with some mainboards. Smoke posted:I have a feeling not knowing you were running something non-Intel was a bit more common than it seems. I start to think this, too. Buttcoin purse posted:I guess I got them because they were cheaper, and I don't remember any problems with them. I probably used the 6x86 for probably 4-5 years before upgrading. Maybe I blamed Windows 95 for the 6x86's stability problems but probably not, I think it was fine when I wasn't installing bad software on it or getting pings of death. I probably didn't use the 5x86 for long, I was working at a computer store and was upgrading (or at least changing!) hardware all the time. It's a pity that the 5x86 could run at 50 Mhz FSB but barely any mainboard/chipset of that time could do it reliably. It gives quite a boost on memory throughput. You could also set it to 1x Multiplier via software, so no need for a turbo button. It was more of an aftermarket CPU upgrade tho and of course sucked in comparison with a good Pentium.
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Feb 15, 2016 19:25
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As long as we're monkeys with ten fingers the desktop isn't going anywhere in favor of devices much smaller, impractical and worse to handle. Maybe for people who only post selfies to their facebook but these weren't really serious users to begin with. Just because something doesn't dominate an entire market doesn't mean it's "dead". Also if you're working in a somewhat healthy way you're at no risk of screwing up your bones, and I say that as an emacs user.
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Feb 16, 2016 22:54
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Jerry Cotton posted:This myth is a relic but won't go away. The desktop has been dead for the past 20 or so years yet full-size keyboards and mice sell really really well for some reason. All those desktop PCs are probably running the *BSDs which have also been "dead" for 20 years. If something doesn't have a major market share and is used by just about anybody it's obviously "dead", not worth using, and couldn't possibly be useful to anyone in any situation ever. I encounter this stance especially with computing-related things all the time. IT is way too obsessed with wherever things are or are not dead at any particular moment. It's like people hate having options. (Thank god there are a few corporations that work hard on that problem) The internet and this compulsion of some people to having to agree with each other seems to have put that into overdrive. Well in a way desktop does still also mean form factor somewhat, at least for me. With "normal" PCs that's a plus because you can pick components for your usage scenario and also upgrade, which is not possible or at least fairly limited with higher integrated devices. My last main PC I had for six years which only worked for me because it was upgradeable by it's nature. I probably would still have it if I didn't need some particular features that just weren't economical to fit onto that particular aged platform. Never would've been able to do that with a higher integrated and also usually more expensive Notebook for example. I'm aware this is more of an "enthusiast" thing and upgrading isn't nearly as exciting as you usually get what you actually paid for nowadays, but still. (Also nowadays notebooks seem really flimsy to me and I wouldn't trust them to survive that long if not handled like an raw egg. I've got an 286 and a 386 Notebook and they both are built like tanks. The 286 one has been dropped by someone and is missing a corner and it doesn't even matter) I've thought myself typing too, I have no idea how fast I am or if I'm doing it right but I don't need to look at the keyboard or the screen and people have commented "wow you type fast" so it's probably fast enough. It's not really that important, you don't really need to type fast for many things, especially with people like programmers. Secretaries need to type fast. I've known a dude who typed faster than me but hit the wrong letters like half the time and kept going back and forth, it made you uncomfortable to watch that. Still somehow fast. Buttcoin purse posted:I don't know, I used to get bad cramps in my right hand, I think it was from the way I used the mouse. I think that less gaming and more using Emacs and other things that encourage keyboard use are probably why I don't get those problems any more. I had these gel things for your wrists for a while which actually caused my hands to feel all sorts of weird until they figured out that they actually make matters worse, I stopped using them and did nothing special regarding ergonomics since then, just taking breaks now (actually getting up and away from the computer and walking around a little) which is healthy anyways, not only for your wrists. For reliability I'm using a Model M. Also usable as a club. Isn't it funny how people nowadays use these overtly very well designed and approved complicated GUIs and touch interfaces which take five minutes to do anything useful with but I type a word into a terminal window or use a keyboard shortcut which takes me all of two seconds and I'm the one doing it backwards? Mice have their uses but they're really not effective at quickly relaying lots of information into the computer.
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Feb 17, 2016 10:57
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Well, 20 might be stretching it but that was an arbitrary figure anyways. The point is everything has always been dead and the worst way to go about things, and every cool kid on the block has to use the new thing. I am critical of that. There's this dude I know who makes pixel graphics on his A4000 with Deluxe Paint for another dude I don't know for an iOS game. If the tool suits, why not? Also I'm especially critical of things that at the end of the day and even though being impressive technology, are just impractical for hairless apes to use because of how their bodies are put together. That won't change for the foreseeable future either. Not everything that can technologically be done also makes sense and there are also always lots of people who stand to profit from reinventing the wheel every few years.
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Feb 17, 2016 11:56
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feedmegin posted:Their Athlons were great. Intel slung a ton of money at various OEMs to not take them up as server chips; it was Intel's marketing muscle and dodgy business practices that stopped them taking off, not AMD's engineering. Even though it wasn't by far the first incident, the run for the magical 1 Ghz made truly clear to me how shady intel is.
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Feb 17, 2016 12:56
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I've got no idea how anyone can do extensive file operations with the standard windows explorer. It looks fancy but completely useless. I can just advise everyone to take a look at any dual-pane file manager. It's an old concept but it just makes so much sense. Does Windows at least have Virtual Desktops/Screens hidden somewhere now or are you still limited to one like some caveman?Powered Descent posted:For anyone who's still a fan of good keyboards, there's an entire keyboard megathread that's surprisingly active. Cherry and Topre mechanical keyswitches get most of the attention but a few of us worship at the altar of the buckling spring and love our Model M / Unicomp boards. I've had so many keyboards over the years (very expensive and very cheap) and all of them just eventually got used up, broke somewhere or weren't really throughly cleanable without damaging them so had to be replaced. Not the Model M. I'm sure it'll still be here long after I'm gone. Also love the clicking. Maybe I'll take a look at that thread, maybe someone can tell me where I can find/have made some custom keycaps for that monstrosity:  (not mine, but looks pretty much the same. Mine is still new. It absolutely dwarfs the normal Model Ms both in size and weight.) It's a 122-key Keyboard for an IBM 3197 terminal, with a bit of trickery you can hook it up to a normal PC, could not get it to work with Windows though. (with Linux it does, just needs a better keymap and some fudging here and there, didn't have the time to really take time with it yet) I'ma have so many shortcuts and macros. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 00:16 on Feb 18, 2016 |
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Feb 18, 2016 00:14
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UIApplication posted:Is there any kind of pass thru for this socket/whatever to usb? It "talks" PS/2, I soldered a simple cable adapter. I didn't really have time to look into it a lot yet and I'm sure there's probably more information on the internet than what I can provide. You'll probably have a lovely time getting it to run with anything other than a PS/2 port and Linux though, Windows AFAIK hasn't got a way to customize keyboard mapping and with the scancode (only scancode 3, the controller rejects any request to change) and mapping it has that'd mean it would behave like an 84-Key keyboard if you can get it to work at all. (I couldn't in Windows, there was some driver-level issue, gotta admit I didn't try very hard in Windows though)
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Feb 18, 2016 00:52
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Keith Atherton posted:I have the family IBM PC XT from 1984 in my basement that my Dad kept all these years and gave me. It still works perfectly - dual 5 1/4" drives and a 10 MB hard drive. I need to research if I can do anything with it. The Batteries for the clock in these old systems usually isn't a non-rechargeable lithium coin cell like today (which is dry) but still a Nickel/Cadmium (or, less common and less toxic, nickel/metal hydride) rechargeable Battery. If they completely discharge (as they do in unused computers) They often start leaking and what they leak is toxic and pretty corrosive. You should open up the computer and see how bad the damage is, if there is any. In bad cases it can look like this:  (The blue "Varta"-labeled bin is the battery)  For example, it eats it way along the ICs legs (like of this NEC V20/8088 clone) until it eventually rots the bonding wires of the die or even the die itself. It also dissolves copper traces on the PCBs.  It's fixable though if caught early enough but takes quite a bit of work. The batteries, if soldered, are easily removable without soldering by bending them back- and forth until they snap off. They do not need to be replaced necessarily usually. Such damage is often fixable but it's better not to let it go that far. Also wash hands throughly after contact with the battery gunk and dispose of the battery properly, that stuff is pretty bad for you. Ni/Cd Batteries are forbidden in most electronics in europe at least for good reason.
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Feb 18, 2016 08:16
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Data Graham posted:Also, on topic: remember filename extensions? I liked the way how Directory Opus (from now on called DOpus) on the Amiga already handled identifying files by things like byte patterns at the beginning of the file, not some file extension. That was still at a time when the PC still had mostly MS-DOS and those very terrible naming limitations. The Amiga Workbench (which is a bit like the Windows Explorer) had the .info files, which basically told the OS on a by-case basis what to do with a file and would also carry things like program parameters for executables, so Metadata, basically. (A bit like a shortcut in windows I guess) That was kind of a mess. A cool concept was the whole datatypes thing on the Amiga though. The datatypes sytem worked basically in a way that programs didn't need to individually know how to handle filetypes, but basically used external libraries for that purpose which you could install. So you'd just copy the .jpg-library to your system folder and then all your graphics programs would know how to open .jpgs without having being programmed for that functionality. Doesn't sound like a huge plus nowadays but back then it was as filetypes were still pretty much in flux. Sadly wasn't really used by lots of programs. ColoradoCleric posted:Well link us to something For Windows? No idea. I used Windows- and then Total Commander many, many years ago but I've got no idea if that even is still updated. I've googled since I last talked about it in this thread and Directory Opus for Windows is a thing and is even made by the original Amiga developers. People say good things about it. Never tried it. For Linux I use Worker which is a spiritual successor of DOpus. The interface looks convoluted and horrifically outdated but you can make it look nicer. It's all about customization and it will grow on you. It's still actively developed and can even do the file identification thing the original did (or use libmagic) so no reliance on extensions. Worker makes the most sense if you use external lightweight applications to actually handle the files but really needs to be customized to get it "just right". Then there is mc etc... most people knowing the OS know those.
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Feb 18, 2016 20:56
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The Microsoft Sidewinder was cool, I think the first force feedback joystick? It came with a power brick. Felt very solid. Many years later I bought A Saitek X52 Pro because I was into Flightsimming and X for a bit but couldn't believe how flimsy and badly built that thing was, especially for the price.
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Feb 18, 2016 21:31
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Data Graham posted:Classic MacOS worked a lot like this, what with resource forks and the Type/Creator Codes. That poo poo was pretty dope conceptually. Neat. I always like to learn more about the classic MacOS. I don't have any nostalgia feelings for it as I just didn't have any exposure to the 68k Macs but I really like the look and feel of the OS and think that it held up well, something you sadly can't really say about stock AmigaOS. I've picked up a very good condition Performa 475 I upgraded a little with a faster 040 and it's a Machine that's just so well put together engineering-wise. (except the power supply, that thing is nothing to write home about, even considering the time it was made) Some other day I'm gonna get a PowerPC Mac but I do need a bit more room for that. Another neat feature of the AmigaOS, or rather another neat part of it, was ARexx. It's an interpreted scripting language. Nothing special and it didn't even originate from the Amiga, but it was extremely useful. The most useful part about it was that most applications were written with ARexx in mind and besides letting you write things like macros they would allow communication with scripts through so-called ARexx Ports, which meant that ARexx scripts could utilize high level functions of different programs from the "outside" by calling them like functions. So for example, you could write a script that'd take Values out of a TurboCalc Spreedsheet (think Excel for the Amiga) and plot a graph with them in Personal Paint. (graphics program) The programs didn't need to know of each other for that, it could all be done within script. You could go for example extra fancy, poll data from some serial or parallel-connected measurement system, have the data entered into a spread sheet which would perform calculations on it, plot a graph from it in personal paint and automatically email you if the in the spreadsheet calculated data was outside (or inside) specific defined bounds. Lots of automation possible with this stuff and Amigas were very popular for that in some professional circles. That it was also so widespread and popular with developers of professional software gave their software special value as it'd also expand what your computer could do through scripting. I mean, you can do similar stuff nowadays of course but for that time, it really was great. On the Amiga, it also just worked so well and was so simple to set up, you didn't even need to know much about programming. It's kind of a pity that a lot of this knowledge is kinda lost these days and people see the whole platform as a glorified games console, even if it could do (and in fact did) a lot more.
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Feb 19, 2016 14:14
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feedmegin posted:Old-style MacOS hung around a lot longer than that. My first job involved porting code to MacOS 9 on an iMac; an OS without protected memory, in the year of our lord 2000! Mess the code up and the whole machine froze and needed a reboot, just like it was still the 80s. I know but I didn't really have any exposure to PowerPC Macs either, I had a PC like a normal person. They would've probably been a better choice to get for exploring the classic landscape instead getting that Performa, because how backwards compatible everything is. I just loved that Performa case too much. Pizza box! Also it sounds outlandish for the year 2000 but really wasn't. In 2000 there were still lots of people rolling with Win9x and although there was memory protection, it wasn't complete. An errand program was still perfectly able to bring the entire System down. I think everyone using these OSes witnessed that one at least once. feedmegin posted:Edit: Rexx was an IBM thing, by the way. OS/2 had it too. Yes, it didn't originate, like I said. Also hahaha OS/2. This brought up memories from a local computer shop guy trying to sell me on it. Thank you. Kinda miss the days where you'd go shopping and just kind of hang out at the computer store and actually knew the people there and chat somewhat. You sometimes got terrible advice but it was nice.
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Feb 19, 2016 17:17
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feedmegin posted:No it really really was, because Win9x did have protected memory and if you were running only Win32 programs, as most people were by 2000, it mostly just worked; if it bluescreened for me, it was usually a driver issue. If you were running DOS or Windows 3.1 stuff, then sure I guess. The issues with Win9x "partial" memory protection were not that small, especially early on - but okay, i concede the point that absolutely no memory protection is pretty bad. For the less technically involved people who might not know what this even is about now and are looking for a simple explanation: In a system with no memory protection every application is able to access memory wherever it wants, even in the memory space of other applications. Security concerns aside (like scanning memory for passwords, manipulating programs while they are running etc.) this is not a problem in itself in a closed system where every application is behaving well, which well let's just say is not a given. So a badly written or buggy program can corrupt the memory of other tasks running at the same time, even the OS. Usually this simply leads to crashes when it happens (for seemingly no reason, sometimes it was not that easy to connect a bad program to a crash as the crash could happen seemingly elsewhere and even after the program was closed because the program damaged some memory regions when cleaning up for example) but in particularly unlucky cases can also lead to data corruption in programs that had nothing to do with the offending program, making stuff malfunction in odd ways and maybe even cause data loss for the user. As you can imagine this is bad because you would have no assurance if a program is well-behaved or not without really going in-depth and watching what the program was actually doing while it was running, which needed special expertise and tools and usually was beyond the scope of the average user. The lack of memory protection also was sometimes used in positive ways, as it made it easier to do 3rd party patching to bugs in programs or OS functions while they were running, circumventing copyright problems which would arise if you'd manipulate and distribute the programs/libraries itself. The Amiga software landscape has a whole plethora of such patches, some well-written, lots less well-written, which kinda kept the OS updated, fixed bugs and introduced new functionality over the years, before and even long after Commodore folded. Also programs would sometimes communicate with each other by sharing pointers. While it's not strictly necessary, memory protection should also have hardware support of the CPU, in case of 68k we're talking mostly about the existence of an MMU, (Memory Management Unit) which was still an dedicated, external chip up to the 68020 and optionally internal from the 68030 onwards. Motorola would sell CPUs without internal FPU and/or MMU up to and including the 68060. These were simply chips where in testing after manufacturing, either the FPU and/or the MMU proved to be defective, they then were simply disconnected on the die with a laser and then packaged as economy chips, as their customer base often didn't need an FPU or an MMU. As chip yields got better and demand for the "economy class" CPUs was always high, (especially from customers building embedded stuff were things like memory protection are not an issue because you're just running one program, EDIT: especially the 68020 was alyways in high demand as you'd find anywhere from fighter jets to printers - the demand here is still so high that a company started producing a clone recently) sometimes you would buy such a cheaper CPU and get a fully fledged one anyways that just had it's packaging reprinted, better to sell a CPU for less than to sell no CPU at all and all that. In the x86 world there were no such shenanigans AFAIK and they were a bit ahead of the curve by already including an MMU on the die from the 80286 onwards, which was needed for example for protected mode (virtual memory) and OSes like UNIX which had memory protection. As you might imagine after the explanation, lifting a OS from no memory protection to memory protection WHILE maintaining legacy compatibility is not straightforward nor that easy. All modern CPUs and OSes have memory protection features and MMUs are still a thing in modern processors even though they evolved quite a bit as you can imagine and allow a whole lot of other advanced stuff you really want. If nowadays a program somehow brings your entire computer down, it's *very* likely that the program isn't directly to blame but just exposed an underlying hardware defect/malfunction. I don't have anything to say to that but didn't want to let it stand uncommented. It was an interesting read, thanks for all that information! Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 03:48 on Feb 20, 2016 |
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Feb 20, 2016 03:39
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Nah, I get what he means. Nowadays if you buy a computer there isn't much of an selection. The bigger numbers are better but more expensive, the lesser numbers less good and cheaper. That's all. They're all good, there are no surprises, they all perform to the same specs, it's a pretty homogeneous market. You can quickly google that stuff. Back then you had to explore a lot more, the more expensive hardware wasn't always the better one you could get for your application scenario and there were lots and lots of options from lots of different manufacturers which offered different things. Also computers were a lot more expensive and could be hopelessly outdated and outperformed in a span of 8 months, staying at the bleeding edge wasn't something many people could afford. It's not like this was great but it was certainly more interesting in a way.Centripetal Horse posted:Now, I have a computer so powerful that it would have seemed like alien technology during my Computer Shopper days. I have disk space and RAM in numbers that would have sounded completely farcical to me, back then. "A whatabyte?" I'd trade it all in a heartbeat to get back that feeling of desire, and excitement, and giddy fantasy. I miss that feeling. If somebody would've told me I'd watch movies and tv-shows at my leisure realtime over the internet or just store them all on a tiny and silent harddrive and watch them from there I would've been like "yeah whatever dude". You can pick a computer which can do all this already for a sub 100$ sum. It's actually absolutely insane. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 04:11 on Feb 20, 2016 |
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Feb 20, 2016 04:00
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What would you Mac specialists say would be a good PowerPC Mac of the 90s? Imagine you had unlimited money.
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Feb 21, 2016 02:00
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Commodore had a bizarre talent for creating competition to their own product line but at the same time making it so bad that it wasn't even a real competition. E: The C16 didn't do that bad over here though, you could get quite a bunch of games. It was just not overall a very capable machine, even though it had some neat features like a 121 color palette. (no sprites though) It also was sold into the eastern-bloc states and has sort of a cult following over there. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 02:58 on Feb 21, 2016 |
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Feb 21, 2016 02:53
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The problem is, Notebooks are difficult to maintain and just won't last and you may have trouble acquiring spare parts. At least more modern notebooks, that is. Power supply maintenance in these old computers is pretty much always necessary. My A2k I've got in '87 and mentioned a few times in this thread has had so many parts replaced in the power supply, it's just barely original anymore. A well maintained power supply will last you forever though and some of these older power supplies (if put well together to begin with) are very easy to maintain. (If you know how) They're just often pretty wasteful, but well, so is the connected hardware usually. If you collect this sort of thing, usually the power supply is always on borrowed time and replacing it with a modern ATX power supply, while often advised all over the internet, is often not really a good idea as these weren't built for the kind of consumer such an old computer usually is. Modern computers do a lot of point-of-load regulation (generating the voltages that are needed locally right where the consuming components are) and usually only really need a power supply which can deliver lots of Amps on the +12V rail. Older computers sit almost exclusively on the +5V (or +3.3V if they're a little newer) rail which are barely used and usually laid out pretty pathetically in modern power supplies. Even if the ATX spec says something different these power supplies tend to do weird things if there's barely any load on the +12V and can go out of spec on the other rails. Just because you can make the mainboard plug fit doesn't mean it's always a good idea. These newer power supplies which do DC-to-DC conversion for these lesser rails might be a little better for that but they're hella expensive. A PicoPSU or something like that might be a good and cheap option if the computer doesn't need lots of Watts, but for a PowerPC these won't really be an option. Really like the 7600s design, I'm not a big fan of towers. A bit more power wouldn't hurt though.
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Feb 21, 2016 05:02
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Powered Descent posted:Every now and then I think about replacing it with something a little more modern, but there's no actual reason to. No idea about the Mini's power consumption but a good reason might be that. Sadly many of these old computers aren't very practical to use in many roles because they just eat so much power, for what some of them eat in a 24/7 setting in a year, you can get something that consumes a lot less power often. computer parts posted:Fortunately, a slowdown of technological progress and a massive decrease in defects has made two of those problems irrelevant. Nowadays? No idea. Notebooks are bad maintenance mojo, as long as they're in that form-factor that'll never change. Already starts when they've got active cooling and pull all the environmental dust in, eventually you'll have to clean that. Most notebooks have a very finite number of times you can take them apart and put them back together until something plastic irrvariably snaps off. The more modern they are, the more flimsy the casing seems to be. These just are not built to last a long time.
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Feb 21, 2016 06:16
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You'd have to handle a $249 notebook very badly for it to not last 4-5 years. (or it would have to have an inherent design/manufacturing problem - which happens) I've got a netbook from what is it, 2008-2009 in almost mint condition and still working perfectly. I'm more talking here about buying old G3 powerbooks used and then intend to keep them as sort of retro machines for many, many years. I would not bother with it, these things will not be comfortably maintainable if they're used in any regular way. Same is true for todays notebooks 10-18 years down the road. You'd be suprised which things become problems on even well-made computers at such a timespan. from connectors to simple power switches. Time is your biggest enemy there.
Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 12:56 on Feb 21, 2016 |
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Feb 21, 2016 12:53
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Where I live you can get one for 50$ if you shop really carefully. The G5 doesn't register for me as "retro" TBH though. Lots of the older PowerPC macs like the aforementioned 7600 you can pick up between 10-30$. They were never expensive over here as they were not really widespread and I guess there just is little nostalgia.
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Feb 22, 2016 07:09
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Apple really does have a knack for cases it seems, the Performa 475 I have here doesn't have a single screw. You can take this thing completely apart (and put it back together) in 5 minutes with your bare hands. There are some very nice PC cases but I've never seen something quite like that, and that thing is from '93 - '94 which was a time when you could be happy if the inside of computer cases wouldn't slice your hands off. Cooling is a bit meh and so is the power supply but hey!  If that isn't neat I do not know what is.
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Feb 28, 2016 15:01
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I also have/had screwless and tool-less (this distinction is important, they still have screws, you just do not need a screwdriver) cases, my current one is a bit older Lian Li big tower case which also is screwless for expansion cards and drives. It's nice but not as nice as that Performa. Well if you do not design every single part of the computer, there are limits to what you can do, so it's understandable. I'm probably the only one but I liked Desktop cases. I also like the non-flashy and unassuming, professional-looking beige/white look of these old cases like the Performa. A lot of these modern tower designs really are ludicrous or get old very, very quickly, IMHO. You can trick out the Performa a little bit by moving a few jumper resistors around and clocking the board to 33 Mhz. Not really much of an overclock in the common sense as you can find the same chipset in 33 Mhz machines, this especially improves graphic performance. The CPU normally on those things is a 25 mhz rated LC040. (without FPU) Now the 040 already get toasty and aren't great overclockers, so I replaced mine with a full 040, 33 Mhz rated part. These need to be passively cooled to really stay stable (especially in a case like this) so I also desoldered the CPU-Socket and soldered the CPU directly onto the board. In parts so that it can transfer some heat into the ground plane of the mainboard (Sockets don't transfer heat well at all in my experience) but mostly so I can fit a bigger heatsink and still close the case. Also replaced all the caps on the mainboard and power supply, (which all were in various states of leaking) fit a better fan and also a network card. The harddrive sadly bit it a while ago and I'm still looking for something that's as low power and doesn't cost an arm and an leg, as the power supply doesn't really have much headroom and the original harddrive was very low power considering the age. Love this little thing and it's simple OS, if I was an eccentric author I'd use it as a typewriter or something.
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Feb 29, 2016 11:24
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Of course you can, in some cases the emulation is even more compatible and flexible than the original systems ever were. It's just fun screwing around with the old hardware. If you're just interested in playing the old games and couldn't care less about the hardware there's usually no reason to do so though. (Last time I checked, and that was quite a while ago, PPC emulation at least also wasn't really feasible. I could imagine that this has changed, too)
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Mar 4, 2016 11:21
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Marshall Louis posted:Not sure if this one has been included yet: This game was so loving broken on the Amiga and I did not get it and got bored quickly, imagine my suprise playing the PC version for the first time and seeing the AI actually do anything (AI was completely passive on the Amiga). Also there was no time compression on the Amiga and so you'd travel forever between the isles. What a broken heap of garbage. There's also a remake. I only saw some screens a while ago and it looked quite good. Is it playable like the original or did they ruin it?
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Mar 4, 2016 11:55
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Browsing is a league in it's own, that's also where all these low powered machines fall flat which do absolutely fine otherwise. I hate how Browser-centric the average user experience has become. Often it plain isn't necessary and doesn't really even improve usability. I sometimes wonder how much energy worldwide is wasted just because of lovely coding and bad internet habits.Marshall Louis posted:EDIT: Steam still has a demo mission for the remake Will have to check that out. Yeah, I can imagine they ruined it. That's the usual experience. One very noteworthy exception for me is that new Pirates! Game they made a while ago. It has a few annoying things but overall really feels like an improvement and expands in logical places over the old games. I still enjoy playing it now and then and haven't really returned to the older Pirates! versions since I have it.
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Mar 4, 2016 17:28
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Thing is, you just often really don't need that extra performance they have. The most interesting thing in fact is the lower power consumption in many cases. I had a first gen i7 as desktop until about two months ago. I was pretty happy with it until I exchanged it. I wanted to run windows in a VM with VGA-Passthrough and just wanted a bit more oomph for that, else I wouldn't even have bothered. I had that thing for about six years.
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Mar 4, 2016 19:02
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Speaking for myself, I'm perfectly fine with not buying a computer for several grand which is hopelessly outdated ten months later, thank you. Only thing I'd really like to see now is dedicated graphics cards which are actually useable for high-end stuff getting more economical regarding power usage, so I don't see my power consumption jump almost sevenfold when I play some game. That poo poo is crazy. Some CPUs could also use some work there, they like to cite idle power consumption but idle means often the computer might as well be off.
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Mar 4, 2016 19:24
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If you don't need the high mobility Laptops just aren't necessary. It's that easy. You can also put together incredibly cheap (and admittedly, low powered but even sometimes fanless) mITX machines for a lot less than what an entry-level notebook would cost. (if you're willing to browse ebay etc. they might get even cheaper and have a lot less risk of being half-destroyed garbage like used laptops off ebay often are) If we're only talking about the computer itself and not the screen etc. these are also very light, small and good to transport if you get a tiny case. Might be an idea if you know you're just going between like two places (and then stay at them for extended periods of time) and have things like TVs/Screens and a keyboard stowed away and ready at both. Sounds overtly complicated but I'm sure such scenarios are actually pretty common. Of course they're not for taking to class or whatever, but hey!
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Mar 5, 2016 14:34
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I'm from germany too and for a while around the late 90s early 00s you couldn't throw a stone in the bigger cities without hitting the window of a computer store. They all died. There are still a few around but I think they're only around because they also sell online. (I personally have gotten wary from buying from small stores off ebay etc. because they make a huge fuss about returns or do other shady crap) I've also got a relative living in the US that comes back to visit sometimes and every single time I got this fantasy regarding cheap merchandise and I look up stuff online to see if he can bring me something from the states cheap and the result besides some rare exceptions always ultimately is that it's not worth the bother, only when the dollar is particularly weak. (The Euro is pretty weak itself right now in relation to the US-dollar which makes this even less worth it) One wtf thing computer related you're somehow not getting here is these small and complete x86 based systems like the Liva X. Somehow you just don't get them here and people also don't seem to be interested a lot which is kinda funny because power is outrageously expensive here. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 01:03 on Mar 6, 2016 |
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Mar 6, 2016 00:58
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The C128 Plastic model (there was a cheaper, metal one) has also a carrying handle  You can pull it out, feels fairly solid. You have to know that the Mainboard inside sits in a massive metal cage so it's pretty heavy. (Fun fact about that - The mainboard often won't work outside of this massive metal cage because of lack of grounding/interference)    On the backside you also have these hooks where you can put it on a cord and sling it over the shoulder, on the underside you can snap the keyboard into the case for transport. The plastic hooks are not very solid and on many units you see they have snapped off, I don't know if that was from carrying though as I can't imagine why anyone would want to carry around a C128 like this.   It's a strange little computer, or rather two computers in one. One part C64, another part an all around more powerful Z80-powered 8 bit machine with RGB (digital RGB, like EGA) capabilities shipped with CP/M right around the time where the Amiga 1000 was released. (you can see the case even looks similar to the Amiga 1000) Commodore wanted to make a serious 8-bit machine for business and apparently didn't really trust itself to pull it off, so they also put in a complete C64 in it for compatibility. CP/M is nice and all but slow on this thing and also you couldn't get a lot of software, so the most useful thing as end-user you could do with the C128 part is running GEOS I'd say, especially if you had a RAM Module. (Wonder if anyone remembers/knows GEOS) Again a perfect example for Commodore competing with it's own products. (and failing) I don't think you had the plastic version in America or at least if you had it it wasn't widespread. You mainly had the cost-reduced metal version which didn't have these mobile features AFAIK but had some improvements in graphic capability of the C128 Part IIRC. E: Also this thing needs active cooling because of the cramped case and the fan is LOUD. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 01:53 on Mar 7, 2016 |
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Mar 7, 2016 01:48
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I was just reminded of this after having forgotten all about this for a while. I'm sure many people know this already but maybe others have forgotten about it, too. http://www.oocities.org/ They have quite a bunch of geocities pages archived. You can find lots of "personal homepages" from people who're probably long dead by now! Somehow this also reminded me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7-8DNE0ZTc and this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y6T9UlwICc UO was my first and last (thank god) MMO, which was when I was still having dial up. I didn't even know there were more songs like these two. UO was great for griefing and generally playing cleverly in the beginning, then they regulated it just too drat much and people started to take everything too drat serious instead of just having fun and marveling at the wonder that tons of people from all over the world could play together at the same time. (well not quite, the official "shards" were by country, but you could select whichever you wanted) That's where I quit. Doesn't seem like it ever got better. (Well I bet MUDs etc. weren't any better but didn't really care about them) A friend later really really tried to get me into that Matrix MMO but I was just like "nah". UO I played with an external 28.8k modem first which managed around ~3 kb/s, (still have the modem) Then for a short time 56k and then ISDN which was a *lot better* latency-wise than my DSL line later ever was. I'm on cable now. You could "bundle" the two ISDN lines and reach about 14,4 - 14,5 kb/s on average on downloads which would cost double with the phone company but that really made these nightly download sessions better. This just makes the memories flood back. Around that time (mid- to late 90s) I usually had two PCs (not rarely the older one I got about a year prior and a newer one which was "bleeding edge") because it was just so much more convenient to have two PCs to do stuff because you'd be surprised how easy it was to completely occupy one with relatively (for today) simple tasks. For example, my first Pentium (which was screaming fast compared to my 486) could play back mp3s in realtime but would hover around at ~80% CPU utilization while doing so, which didn't really gave you a chance to do much else with the computer, it still was amazing to be able to download music in such small files at such a good quality. It was different than today though, even with ISDN downloading a song would take about 3x the time it's playtime, as rough estimate. Later on I got my 600 Mhz (I think? Or 500) P3 Coppermine and that thing served me a long time. Outrageously expensive. 440BX Chipset, best Chipset intel ever made with a great mainboard from Tyan I got from the computer store down the road. Gave that computer away a few years later, regret that a lot now. I did a lot of great things on that machine. This was also around the time when PCs started to "just work" and hardware didn't have bizarre problems anymore. I think I played System Shock 2 on that computer. Skipped an absolute horrid job on release. No regrets. Wish I could still get that excited about vidya. Or maybe not.
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Mar 9, 2016 23:57
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You haven't truly lived if you didn't have an angry ghost following you around going OoooOooooOoo
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Mar 10, 2016 00:41
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Also there wasn't really any experience with how to do such a game and because of that there were many loopholes, bugs and outright exploits which kept things interesting. Completely unlike to MMOs of today where they have everything down to an exact science, which actually just helps to make things boring IMHO. Also honestly, I don't think people took everything as serious as they do now. This might be rose tinted glasses but the 8 to 12 hours a day shut-in autistically creating excel spreadsheets about everything didn't really seem to be such a thing back then or at least he seemed to be a rare creature, now it seems to be the only way you can even play such a game and get anywhere. Well, if you can call that enjoyment. I personally prefer having a life outside of the game.
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Mar 10, 2016 02:39
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I kinda want to install some emulator, get the old client from somewhere and just walk around a little for old times' sake.
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Mar 10, 2016 04:03
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