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I dabbled with POV-Ray as well, but was very much a WYSIWYG kind of person at the time, and couldn't get friendly with the idea of building visual scenes in some cryptic markup language. Like, not being able to just click and drag to position objects was an absolute dealbreaker. I did end up using it later on for its radiosity capabilities, to showcase the models I was making in Milkshape 3D. Ambient occlusion renders using Brazil were very en vogue at the time, and since Bryce only did directional lighting, that was my poor kid's way of joining the party. (not mine, but renders like these took modelling forums by storm) 
snorch has a new favorite as of 19:45 on Feb 24, 2023 |
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Feb 24, 2023 19:41
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Mar 3, 2023 23:25
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I believe CMOS chips are more sensitive to it. I always ground myself when opening up my C64, because they’re not making any new SIDs and I’m not taking any chances.
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Mar 6, 2023 21:23
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Oh wow I was just wondering about that recently actually, like, I remember pretty much drowning in clipart compilation CDs. Who draws all that?
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Mar 15, 2023 00:56
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Mar 15, 2023 09:48
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Down the absurd obsolete retro video gear rabbit hole I go. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G0koSkR7K0Y
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Apr 7, 2023 07:07
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I have the MT100 and the XG/MIDI sounds are great (I had their XG soft synth on my PC for MIDI back in the day as well) though the real reason I got it was to house the VL physical modelling synthesis card, a tech relic in its own right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm_NA13lM8A As a technology it was great but they abandoned the whole concept some time towards the turn of the millennium, probably because the market for it was too small and the hardware too expensive to make affordable/profitable. I use mine with my WX5, which they sadly also don’t make anymore. 
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Apr 28, 2023 17:51
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Just found a video I took of mine a while back: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=owOlpO36yqU That blown bottle MIDI sound is peak 90s aesthetic.
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Apr 29, 2023 04:18
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I never understood why dolphins were seemingly considered “cyber”.
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May 17, 2023 17:57
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Yeah I guess a lot of it boils down to easy rendering, and I think especially a lot of the early stuff has a strong coder art vibe. You can get a checkerboard by simply XOR'ing one of the bits of each X and Y coordinates together respectively, and the marble pattern thing was something you could easily make using Perlin noise. Prime example at 17:25: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5xwLFRdewgE On a related note, this is my teapot. 
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May 18, 2023 23:19
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poo poo like that was hilarious next to the "single chip on a PCI card" stuff even at the time.
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May 24, 2023 01:59
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If you really want a hardware rebirth clone you could also just grab the Behringer x0x clones: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-gVWISU4tzM
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Jun 1, 2023 16:50
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I tried to do one of those in our school computer lab on a C64 and the teacher shut it off before I could save it, because she thought it had been left on by mistake. It was probably riddled with typos and wouldn't have run anyway, but 
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Jun 22, 2023 22:10
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I don’t see anything wrong with keeping multiple systems in RAM and just pointing the everything to different virtual memory addresses. I guess the proper solution is just virtualization.
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Jun 25, 2023 21:04
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On the topic of Netbooks, I've got an older Asus that has an NVidia Ion I can't quite coax into working anymore. Through some combination of display switching it seems to have completely forgotten about the Ion and defaults to the intel graphics instead. Even reinstalling the drivers, this machine pretends there's no such thing as nvidia graphics on board. I think I'll have to try and find an old Windows where all the Asus support software still works as well, I refuse to let this old gaming craptop forget its identity.
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Jun 27, 2023 17:07
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The ST is famous for that Atari-tight MIDI timing, to the point that other gear would be compared to it well into the 90s and even today
snorch has a new favorite as of 02:00 on Jul 9, 2023 |
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Jul 9, 2023 01:51
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Their book on how to make a hit is basically the blueprint for how pop music is made today. It’s also cool because reading between the lines it described how they wrote 3AM Eternal, long before it had been released:quote:If you have difficulty in forming a tune in your head or you feel a bit inhibited, flick through your copy of the Guinness Book of Hits and pick any Top Five record that takes your fancy and see if you can sing the chorus of it along to the track.
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Jul 10, 2023 17:05
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Thanks for the tip, gonna finally organize my old iPod backup.
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Jul 14, 2023 18:18
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I've toyed with the idea of actually emulating the analog signal path, but it's just always easier to fake the artifacts more directly with blurs etc. A CRT simulator in the spirit of Engine Simulator would be pretty schweet though.
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Jul 14, 2023 22:48
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I decided the degauss simulator needed a proof of concept, so here goes. Fullscreen for maximum effect: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/csSBz1 e: video for the shader-impaired https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Z8uB5xLmE snorch has a new favorite as of 03:05 on Jul 17, 2023 |
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Jul 17, 2023 01:36
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Is that what the richies were buying while the plebs enjoyed their ZX80s?
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Jul 28, 2023 17:24
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By popular demand posted:That is a handsome computer case. Pounded in the butt by MEGA ATX
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Aug 3, 2023 09:12
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Oh man that brings me back to the first Christmas gift I think I ever purchased with money, a DVD player for the family circa 2003. IIRC it was one of the cheapest I could find on Amazon and it turned out to not only be region free (super important since we were a bunch of Americans living in Germany) but would also play pretty much any well-formed VCD. This being before the era of affordable DVD burners it almost felt like some kind of  superpower.
snorch has a new favorite as of 09:54 on Sep 17, 2023 |
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Sep 17, 2023 09:39
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My old work used Pidgin and Jitsi for internal IMs via XMPP, though I’m sure they have since switched to something a little more hip. I was a Trillian man myself; just like the ICQ “uh-oh!” its message sounds are forever etched into my brain.
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Sep 25, 2023 06:04
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Real connoisseurs use milkdrop. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6UXKyz4nOfI
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Sep 26, 2023 10:23
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If you're a mixtape junkie the DJ chatter is just another part of the music. Jeez that just unlocked a memory of the massive collection of 56kbps shoutcast stream rips. Streamripper wasn't perfect at splitting the tracks, since it goes by when the id3 tag changed, so each song would usually have a little bit of the last song on it. I burned the best ones on CDs and listened to those a lot while travelling, so my headcanon includes those little "intros" as being part of the song.
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Sep 27, 2023 14:23
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-8e3DHV7M
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Oct 12, 2023 19:47
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Just wanted to share a dream I had: I was at some computer museum and they were phasing out an exhibit on these crazy kabuki-style teletype battlestations from the late 70s/early 80s, and letting us call dibs before they sell everything for scrap. They were these self-contained workstations decked out with world clocks, printers, auxiliary graphical displays, and all sorts of dials and knobs and bells and whistles. Imagine if you will some combination of these images, but centered entirely around a TTY terminal :      Thanks for dreaming with me 
snorch has a new favorite as of 11:39 on Oct 18, 2023 |
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Oct 18, 2023 11:36
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If you don’t undress sexy elf lady you’re not using all your geforce.
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Oct 18, 2023 19:48
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Geez I’m getting a flashback to when our dad snuck my brother and me into E3 in ‘95 when we were 4/6 years old (he was managing the Ubisoft booth, who were showing off Rayman that year). Eventually someone said we couldn’t be there and we got stuck in some daycare side room to watch disney movies, but for a couple of hours we were in kid heaven. Apparently it was their first year! Things I remember: Lots of gimmicky controllers, racing rigs, some kind of skateboard thing you stand on. Donkey Kong Country 2, Thinkin Things, huuuge Sega booth, geodesic domes. Also I remember getting super freaked out by some of the people in costumes, especially Spiderman, but also the “live” talking Crow T. Robot that they had bantering to the crowd at one of the booths. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fC9ZJWHFjhc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l8sg25vqso0
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Dec 5, 2023 19:26
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Just doing some tidying and found what must have been one of the last SD camcorders ever sold: The interesting thing about it I think is it solves almost all common camcorder issues, such that by MEGAPIXEL era standards this thing is basically the ultimate camcorder: - 60gb hard drive stores up to 20 hours of DVD-quality video, or 40 hours in LP mode. - 25x optical/4000x digital (lol) zoom - Each video is a plain MPEG2 file which can be downloaded at USB 2.0 speeds Of course we enjoy all of this convenience and more with any modern digital camera and smartphone, but for anyone used to the mess of tapes and capture cards, this would have been revolutionary. And of course, having perfected it, we threw it all in the trash and made our lives hard and expensive again by demanding HD everything.
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Feb 6, 2024 23:04
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I’ve been trying to find the model of a laptop I used to have. It was the first computer that was ever “mine” as an 8yo kid, a hand-me-down or yard sale find or something like that. The one thing about it, which I have never seen before or since, was that the whole screen could be detached and driven by a single thick cable from the laptop. The back of this color LCD was removable, such that you could place the screen on an overhead projector to present your screen. I thought this would be easy to track down, but my googlings are turning up nothing. Does anyone remember these?
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Feb 8, 2024 10:08
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Beve Stuscemi posted:Calculators I totally remember those too from the same era. This one though was a laptop, of the chunky black variety, sporting a 386 or 486 running windows 3.1. It’s really driving me nuts that on top of not being able to find the specific model, there seems to be no googleable evidence of such a thing ever having existed. Mine? I got bored of solitaire and took it apart to see what’s inside, using a hammer and a flathead screwdriver 
snorch has a new favorite as of 17:02 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 8, 2024 16:53
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Still no luck on finding anything about the OHP laptop, but I was able to unearth this other thing from my foggy 90s tech memory: It’s a personal organizer that has no keys, because you talk to it! It worked about as well as you'd expect for a Siri with early voice recognition tech running on 90s embedded hardware. Apparently they made a few different versions over the years, here are some pics I found from an ebay listing:    Looking up the company on the box, it looks like they got bought out by a waste management company of all things. Also while researching it I found this cool page showcasing interesting tech design throughout the decades: https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection snorch has a new favorite as of 02:11 on Feb 10, 2024 |
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Feb 10, 2024 02:00
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Throwback to when I was lauded a boy wonder computer genius for “fixing” our neighbour’s “broken” laptop by typing “win” in the command prompt. I feel like if i’d known about autoexec.bat I probably would’ve been handed an honorary computer science degree and a lead job at Microsoft.
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Feb 14, 2024 18:34
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I was in Seattle for a couple days and had to go check out Re-PC (ended up visiting both locations!) after seeing Gravis' video. My haul was mostly cables and an obihai box for the telephone I was hoping to bring back into service, but the whole place is just such a nostalgia trip in its own right that it's worth it for the museum factor alone. Some highlights: Teletypes!  Kindness aid  Early adopter  I was already excited to see a running NES and Genesis side by side, but what really blew me away was the dreamcast dev kit  This video still image capture device comes with FREE Kai's PowerGoo  This  phone was sadly not for sale. Not sure why Thrustmaster chose to design their pedals like this but it clearly never caught on.  This was labeled working except for the tape deck, almost bought it for $80  Minicomputers, in the museum section  I'll definitely be returning next year 
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Feb 15, 2024 05:04
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If anyone wants their own PDP-8 at home there's this, sadly no tape drive though: https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8 First off, that rules. Also they did have an original boxed copy of Photoshop 3.0 if you're really craving the full godawful asset creation workflow of the 90s experience.
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Feb 15, 2024 20:18
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Every time I see that logo this plays in my head
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Feb 19, 2024 01:57
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Just want to appreciate how those organizers were inferior to pen and paper in pretty much every way. Just a lame tamagotchi for business yuppies.
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Feb 22, 2024 19:14
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Milkdrop with an analog processing step would absolutely rule.
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Mar 8, 2024 21:00
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