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evobatman posted:triple_female_ejaculation.mpg I can see this in my mind's eye
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Dec 19, 2015 16:26
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Dec 19, 2015 16:32
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Bundle of Keys posted:Those download managers that would establish more than one connection to a server for faster downloads, AND would break up the download into 1MB pieces for all your floppy disk needs. 
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Dec 19, 2015 17:03
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programs with banner ads on them
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Dec 19, 2015 17:03
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thathonkey posted:just cranked my poo poo up to 188mhz, time to hit the turbo button and really get these graphics flowing when this sucker hits 188mhz, you're gonna see some serious poo poo. weren't some turbo buttons really a slowdown switch wired in reverse? early emulation (and its "community") was definitely a retro computing thing by now, remember when neogeo emulators were a good reason to buy more RAM? and the loving games were still coming out, so some of the neo emulators would be intentionally crippled not to play them. And the ROM sites back then, downloading lovely copies of misnamed/bad dumps off of someone's geocities page. I definitely associate ZSNES, nesticle and genecyst with late 90s computing edit: if you do not own these games you must delete the roms after 24 hours!!
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Dec 20, 2015 02:16
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On a similar bent to wardialing / phreaking (that I wish I was around more for, the closest I got to it was successfully "red boxing" a small town payphone) there was the big thing of C-band satellite piracy in the 80s. Basically no corporation or company had any real interest in providing people with out-of-the-box satellite television. So people were taking it upon themselves to learn and build their own satellite reception systems, start small businesses setting rural people up with dishes since they couldn't get cable, sell homemade devices, and most infamously hack descramblers to get free programming. Early on all satellite feeds were unscrambled just because up to that point no one had the equipment in their backyard to watch any of it, and the only people with dishes were dedicated earth stations. The channels over satellite were intended to be distributed to cable companies for them to rebroadcast, so there wasn't a real clear need to obscure the signals in any way. As a result, C-band early adopters got free access to all the channels they could pick up, which drove the sales of receivers, dishes, dish pointing motors and so on. Once C-band really started to take off in a consumer way, a lot of programming companies began scrambling their signal so that only cable companies could use it. This didn't make people happy who spent thousands of dollars on their satellite setup to get free cable channels, so a cottage industry of descrambler hacking popped up almost overnight. To be fair they were sort of justified in it because most of the people who started scrambling the satellite signal either wanted arbitrarily more money to sell it to satellite owners, or they straight up wouldn't sell it to them at all. This lead to the somewhat well known "Captain Midnight" hack complaining about HBO's pricing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbruOe6Yii0 People selling "testing equipment" (read: mod chips that let you get free premium channels) for Videocipher II boxes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojj8Zz6Omac One satellite dealer from New Jersey that had the enormous balls to broadcast a program, ON SATELLITE! about exactly how to pirate satellite. The program was called "Piss on VC II" and literally opened with him pissing on a descrambler box. He had an almost pathological hate of General Instruments, the company that built the VC II boxes. Then he fell off a roof and died in 1992. He also sold videos detailing exactly what you had to do to modify a descrambler, in detail, here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyjbtAarEu4 It was estimated that at one point there were more illegally modified VCII boxes receiving programming than real, authorized legal ones, and that the company that manufactured them, General Instrument, was actually complicit in this. They only made money selling descrambler boxes, and what kind of box sells better: one that you have to pay out the rear end to get HBO on, or one that gives you everything for free? I find this poo poo fascinating and would love to see or read a real documentary about it; there's plenty of info out there if you find it interesting, though. Piracy just isn't the same anymore.
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Jan 6, 2016 22:58
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Panaflex posted:General Instrument was actually trying to combat piracy. Through the lifespan of VCII, the standard was modified twice from the initial roll out of VCII. The other two were known as VCII+ and VCRS (Renewable Security). While there wasn't too much difference between VCII and II+ VCRS added a card slot to the module with the idea being once the system was compromised GI could merely send out cards to subscribers that would update the module to whatever new security would be implemented. This never occurred because around the same time was when the small DSS satellite dish systems started hitting the market and GI never invested the R&D into keeping VCRS up to date. They instead developed Digicipher which was an all digital form of up/downlink with encryption. I'll have to find the source of it, but I read about someone claming that a GI executive was caught dealing with some of the more prolific satellite dealers at the time w.r.t. hacks, and it was particularly suspect that no legal action came out of it from anyone. I've heard some of that stuff about the keys before and the ridiculous lengths pirates went to, to get them. Installing a modem to circumvent paying is just nuts to me. Though I guess that was the point where the piracy was starting to lose its cost-effectiveness. I read somewhere that some people in urban areas opted to not "properly" descramble the VC II at all, instead just using a simple video descrambler/sync device for the video and piping the audio in from a local cable system where the audio would have been in the clear. edit: I think some of those earth station operators ended up getting caught and in trouble too when GI came up with keys that would let them trace where the leak happened. I want to say this was in the same article I read the bit about GI being complicit with pirates, I really need to find it. It was in a satellite newsletter PDF, but I don't remember the name of it. powerofrecall has a new favorite as of 05:34 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 05:29
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:In my teens I spent around a year saving up for that exact model of Plextor. It worked especially well with CloneCD and allowed the software to have complete control over writing subchannel data, which meant that you could make perfect duplicates of games even if the disc had copy protection like SafeDisc. It paid for itself pretty drat quickly after I started selling games at school for $5. Same here but I used it to copy and sell karaoke CD's. You had to have a burner that could read and write subchannel data because that was where the graphics/lyrics of a CD+G were stored. Made tons of money off of both people I knew and ebay--copied karaoke CD's were kind of a gray area of piracy no one cared about.
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Jan 8, 2016 17:56
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 Agony reminds me of another inexplicable game, Kolibri on 32x (of all consoles) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds5klrkqvCg I actually owned it and it was probably one of the best 32x games but that isn't saying much. It's by the same people who made Ecco the Dolphin. Like Agony, the art is amazing though. Are "weird games starring animals" a 90s thing?
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Jan 15, 2016 04:30
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Powered Descent posted:There was no reason to use a head cleaner unless your VCR had visibly gunked-up read heads. As someone who used to repair VHS VCRs they weren't really even good for this. If the head clog was due to tape shedding, the right way to clear it (like you mentioned) would just be to play a normal tape until it remedied itself. If the gunk on the heads was of a sufficient composition, dragging a rough cleaning tape across the rotating drum could either gunk up the works worse (requiring disassembly to clean) or just damage the head. The dry-type cleaning tapes in particular would also gradually wear down and widen the head gap, ruining what little picture quality you were already getting out of VHS. They probably worked for people who didn't want to open their deck up or take it to someone, but really if someone had a problem that needed a head-cleaning tape, they needed to service it properly. You know "poppers" and how they used to be labeled as video head cleaners? They really were, you used them in combination with head cleaning sticks. I wonder if the first person to figure out the recreational use of them was a tape-head.
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Jan 16, 2016 05:27
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The Kins posted:An Amiga tool that lets you connect up a VCR to backup data to videotape, with a claimed storage of 85mb (uncompressed) per hour of tape. The things people resorted to before CD burners became mainstream... Also weird but clever, the Alesis ADAT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oScIGyHHIc let you do digital recordings on SVHS tapes much the same way as the old "back up to a VHS" systems.
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Jan 16, 2016 05:30
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Police Automaton posted:What's kinda annoying and sad is that all these "retro-style pixel art games" usually just use these words as code for bad graphics, while the style they claim to copy never really existed that way. This irks me more than anything. Or indie games describing themselves as having "8 bit" graphics when they have VGA-like colors but with Atari-levels of detail in the sprites. I think there would be (is?) probably still a market for games with actual good low-res, low-color pixel art.
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Jan 16, 2016 16:07
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Mr_Angry posted:Back before mp3s and downloadable music became a thing, those of us with our SoundBlaster 16s were rocking out to music from Mod4Win, which for its time was pretty drat awesome. One of the few things I actually paid some money for and to this day I'm kind of sad that I never backed up my library of .MOD files as some of them were pretty good. Here's a screenshot of said product (this shows it running on Vista but I was using this back in the days of Windows 3.1): I had a similar formative experience, but with ModPlug Player 
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Jan 16, 2016 16:13
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The_Franz posted:Most high-performance code is written in C or C++ There was a time not all that long ago that asserting C++ as "high performance" would have gotten you laughed out of the room!
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Jan 24, 2016 19:01
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Your Dead Gay Son posted:Speaking of sega Saturn someone posted this in the dark souls 3 thread and wow what a loving weird game: virtual hydlide You'll never see games quite like this, ever again. I don't know if that is a good or bad thing though.
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Jan 30, 2016 04:38
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The Bible posted:I worked at Best Buy in college and to dial out, you had to hit 91, then 1 + area code and number. If you didn't do it pretty fast, you'd call 911. This is how every PBX I've ever worked with works. Dial 9 to dial out, but if you dial 9-1-1 and then wait a few seconds, the office phone system will assume you want 911 and automatically dial it out. Many phone systems if you dial 9-1-1 and then hang up, it'll register as a 911 call no matter how many or what numbers you dialed first. This is intentional behavior, kind of like a "silent alarm." They will call you back, and if you don't answer, they'll probably send police/EMS, no joke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1 explains how the actual routing of the system works, it doesn't work quite like "normal" phone numbers, so everyone's anecdotes in this thread are probably completely true. powerofrecall has a new favorite as of 03:03 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 03:01
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Germstore posted:24 fps content should absolutely not be interpolated, but pretending 24 fps is somehow more intrinsically cinematic and not just what your brain is used to is dumb. High frame rate has basically been tainted by cheap soap operas and camcorders. People have these two very prevalent points of reference about what footage looks like, so when a TV upconverts a movie to 48fps or higher of course it's gonna look kinda gnarly when a movie doesn't look like "a movie." I've talked to people that can't grasp what an aspect ratio is that still immediately notice motion interpolation and dislike it. It's OK for sports though There is one upside of TVs with like the 240hz refresh rates and that is the fact that 24, 30, and 60 fps all divide into it cleanly. I think this is supposed to benefit mainly movies with the result being cleaner individual frames.
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Mar 17, 2016 00:31
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