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While I never did play MDK, I have watched a Let's Play of it - which might be the best way to experience the oddness now. Worth a peek if you saw the ads back then and mildly wonder what it was like, I guess. http://lparchive.org/MDK/
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Feb 2, 2016 11:18
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That looks remarkably familiar - did Microsoft licence their Win 3.1 Golf game from them?
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Feb 4, 2016 15:02
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The Kins posted:Yeah, the Microsoft Golf games for Windows used the Links engine. Huh, archive.org has a copy of the exact version I played (the Multimedia Edition from 1993). Time to set up Windows 3.11 and a sb16/opl3 in dosbox.
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Feb 4, 2016 17:30
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0toShifty posted:I remember spending a lot of time with these programs on my Packard Bell. Huh, that's a mild rebranding of the old SoundBlaster 16 software - I remember playing with those in Win 3.11.
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Feb 8, 2016 17:14
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Pham Nuwen posted:I divide our generations into people know it's called IRC vs those who think it's called mIRC. Torrents or Napster/Kazaa/WinMX/eMule.
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Feb 14, 2016 17:59
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On the flipside, the original Celeron line gave us the eminently overclockable 300A, which ended up being decent value for the money after you turned the speed up. Not that I had one; I went from a Cyrix 486/66 to a used Pentium2 300 (with a voodoo 2). At least my later Athlons lived a bit above their rated speeds.
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Feb 15, 2016 17:06
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It be completely fair to laptops: We have a department full of junky old laptops, and even the uninspired HP ones tend to make it to replacement age (at ~ 6 years) with hardly more than blowing the dust out of the fans sporadically. My personal laptop is a thin little ultrabook. It's not very upgradeable, but I've got other machines for gaming and number crunching, and it's powerful enough for office/lightroom/light R/YouTube. I've had to make use of the warranty on it, but having a guy show up the next day to replace the motherboard was acceptable enough. I expect it'll survive undramatically for some more years, and at some point around the 5-year mark I'll probably be tempted to pick up a new model (OLED in a laptop is deeply tempting). Of course, I wouldn't give up my gaming PC at home, nor my workstation (or my servers) at work - but I also wouldn't give up my 1.4kg bag-friendly laptop: Having a fast-enough machine with a good keyboard and a desktop OS I've set up myself that I can bring along easily is great. And if I only ever did the things the laptop can do - I'd be tempted to collect my workspace on a single fast-enough computer instead of having two, and it would probably be the one I could carry.
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Feb 22, 2016 14:42
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I'll admit that lenovo's 3-year next day in place warranty has spoiled me a bit - having to send a laptop off to be repaired (which always takes bloody forever) is incredibly annoying, and a good reason for having a desktop handy. (For no clear reason Lenovo Norway gives you the nice business warranty by default on the T/X/W series, even as a private person buying through a random webshop.)
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Feb 22, 2016 17:01
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Hmm, I thought phone quality was, overall, still getting better. Just recently I was talking to someone and noticed that it actually sounded much better than it normally does, and it's been like that ever since. Maybe I'm just ~hearing things~, though. Cellphones have recently started doing voice over data in better quality, under assorted branding. Availability depends on phone / network / country /signal strength, but it's apparently much better when it works. You can also get a similar experience with any VoIP app, e.g. Skype.
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Feb 24, 2016 17:54
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Powered Descent posted:I actually prefer to make calls via the Signal app instead of the regular phone-call way. Come for the paranoid encryption, stay for the superior sound quality... It's not bad. I think Skype might have better sound, but signal has better privacy and I already use it for messaging - so yes. I seem to remember hearing that cellphone sound quality is typically even worse in the US than Europe, but I haven't had the opportunity to compare. Any international travellers that have noticed a difference?
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Feb 25, 2016 03:05
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Robnoxious posted:Don't fool yourselves kids, a cell call or VOIP will ALWAYS sound monumentally mud compared to a pure landline connection. Haha no. VoIP is no more or less than streaming low-latency mono audio. As a best case, imagine using uncompressed 16bit/44.1kHZ "CD quality" audio. That's a perfectly manageable 88 kB/sec each direction, and if you think analogue phone lines (with their bandpass filters and silence detection and multiple levels of amplification) will end up sounding better than that, you will have to come up with a very good argument. Of course, VoIP doesn't use uncompressed audio. That doesn't mean it has to sound much worse - if we look to mp3 for an estimate, even a very manageable 24 kB/sec (192kbit) will sound quite good, and that's on music and in stereo; I expect the dedicated mono voice codecs will do equally well with even less. Land lines handsets tend to have better speakers and microphones than cellphones, though - I'll give you that.
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Feb 25, 2016 15:18
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IIRC, cellphone roaming charges in the EU will be capped at some low rate this year and completely abolished next year. I wouldn't be surprised if that schedule is mysteriously delayed, of course.
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Feb 26, 2016 15:13
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Ftpsearch.ntnu.no was quite nice for a while, too - it indexed a lot of weird FTP sites. They eventually turned into FAST and got bought by Microsoft, but by then Google had become a better alternative.
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Mar 9, 2016 17:47
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High refresh rate shouldn't change how lower-fps media looks; what you don't like is probably the optional interpolation? 4k is equally harmless future-proofing , and I guess it's nice if you ever plug in a computer?
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Mar 16, 2016 19:11
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60 Hz matches the refresh rate of many LCD screens and TVs (PAL/NTSC stuff aside). If the game presents a full new frame for every screen refresh, things are smooth. If it presents a frame every second screen refresh, things are also reasonably smooth. Anything else can feel kind of jittery and unpleasant (with vsync) or gives bad screen tearing (without vsync). Thus 30 and 60 fps as standard targets. Computer CRTs towards the end tended to run at higher refresh rates, like 75 or 85 Hz, and you ideally wanted your games to run synced to that - there's nothing special about 60fps except its ubiquity. Oh, and I assume you are all trolling, but just in case: Your eyes don't have a refresh rate, and their response time depends on what exactly you measure.
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Mar 18, 2016 15:23
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Mak0rz posted:Is it? I thought the reasons for the NTSC and PAL standards were that power is most efficient at approximately 55Hz, but the problem with 55 is that it can only be factored 5 or 11 times, both of which are pretty low numbers. To remedy this, some regions went with 50 and some went with 60 because both are more divisible. There isn't a single best power frequency, really. Lower frequencies are, to a point, more efficient for long-distance transmission and better when you are driving motors (which is why Norwegian train lines were standardised at and still use 12.5Hz), but higher frequencies make for smaller transformers and steadier lights. These days you can work around most of these problems by throwing solid-state electronics at them, but even a hundred years ago I doubt the difference between 55 and 60 Hz mattered much. The 50-60 Hz region was just where the different power consumers found a compromise after decades of running different frequencies for different uses. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 17:27 on Mar 18, 2016 |
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Mar 18, 2016 17:09
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drunk asian neighbor posted:As far as I've ever been able to find, my first/last name combination is entirely unique. Anybody with a combination that remotely resembles mine spells it totally differently. I still had to add 85 to my firstname.lastname to get the gmail address, and I joined back when you needed an invite for it. Never understood how that happened. One of the benefits of being from a small country: my mom grabbed surname@gmail.com, while I put an initial in front to match some other usernames.
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Mar 23, 2016 14:21
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Norway went kind of all-in for ISDN for a few years in the 90s, so it wasn't a bad alternative up to DSL caught on - a couple of dollars extra per month, same minute price as modem dial-up, 64kbit instead of 56kbit, and you could use the phone while connected. (You could also bundle both B-channels for blazing 128kbit action and double the price).
Computer viking has a new favorite as of 23:27 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 31, 2016 23:10
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Mak0rz posted:I guess a computer viking would know a lot about Internet service in Norway. GutBomb posted:I had ISDN when I lived in Sweden in around 2000 and it had per minute usage charges for use 7am to 7pm weekdays, then half price for other times. It was ridiculously expensive. Replaced it with DSL and it was so much faster for about a tenth of the cost of ISDN.
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Apr 1, 2016 01:30
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Buttcoin purse posted:I guess Sound Blaster is like DOS and Windows: you could get better products, or cheaper products, or maybe even both better and cheaper at the same time, but there's definitely a benefit to going along with everyone else rather than using something that's a bit unique, not as compatible, etc. True, but only up until the Live! series. I had an early one, and between the hardware incompatibilities (though that was probably Via's or nvidia's fault), the crashy drivers, and the lack of Linux/BSD drivers (creative are not great at publishing hardware documentation) I was never too happy with it. These days I use a cheap USB DAC/headphone amplifier. Works on absolutely everything, sounds good, and unlike several built-in soundcards I've used it doesn't have weird screechy background noise when I scroll webpages. (I can only assume that most motherboards have very mediocre noise shielding.) Computer viking has a new favorite as of 11:07 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 11:03
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Pham Nuwen posted:Old Internet was also a lot more friendly to slow connections for obvious reasons. Modern web sites basically just poo poo if you're anything less than 500 kB/s or so, thanks to massive amounts of useless Javascript bullshit and 5MB images scaled down to 300x200. http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm ?
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Apr 11, 2016 02:09
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error1 posted:Why isn't there a HTML standard for a default "next page" action that browsers can use? Then you could use the back/forward buttons on your mouse or keyboard shortcuts without having to hunt for the link to the next page, instead of disabling the forward button when you're at the the most recent page in your history. There is, and it has existed since HTML4: <link rel="next" href="page2.html" /> in the header. I believe it was one of the things opera used for its half-magical prev/next page buttons.
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Apr 12, 2016 14:02
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error1 posted:I've wasted 30 minutes trying to get this to work on safari, chrome, firefox and opera and nobody seems to support it anymore, apart from using it to prefetch stuff. Apparently it's mostly used by search engines and content indexers to figure out the ordering of documents? Yeah, I think presto opera was the only browser I've used that gave you a "next page" button/shortcut; presumably it wasn't useful enough often enough to be picked up by the others.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:23
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Better than that awkard period when entire websites were 1 flash module! I used a webpage two days ago that was 100% flash. A restaurant, of course.
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Apr 27, 2016 19:18
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8 track betamax posted:Are there any modern sprite-based 3D shooters? Well, there's OpenLieroX. 
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Apr 28, 2016 10:05
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Mak0rz posted:I remember searching for/downloading no-CD cracks and trainers for various games and being in a cold sweat the entire time like I was defusing a bomb. I have at least once fired up a virtualbox VM solely to run a keygen.
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Apr 28, 2016 14:48
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alphabettitouretti posted:I recently built a new system for someone and the mATX board had both COM and parallel ports, alongside the usual USB3. What the hell good are those interfaces today? Serial still pops up here and there. Random networking gear, large projectors, arduinos, random lab equipment. It's extremely simple to handle and fast enough for moving text, so there is a small niche. Parallel, though - the only thing I touch that uses it is an ancient but still perfectly good Brady label printer. Those things are expensive, so it'll stay until it eventually dies.
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Apr 29, 2016 15:04
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Mak0rz posted:Sometimes they even copied each other! You know, it's been about a decade since last time I got to link this. Enjoy or something. I was just a bit late for the C64 and amiga, but I'm old enough to have fond memories of the OPL-3 in the soundblaster 16. Time to dig up openTyrian again, I think; it emulates it rather well. edit: Oh wow, that keygen collection is something. Let's dig through their Razor1911 collection. 
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May 1, 2016 00:16
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What on earth is that? One-hole punch for nonstandard binders? Leather punch without adjustable hole size?
Computer viking has a new favorite as of 01:17 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 01:12
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BattleMaster posted:yes and I've mostly heard them called "single-hole punch" to differentiate them from the three-hole punch Three hole punch? I hadn't even considered that this was one of the fields with many competing standards. Oh well, the two-ring iso standard isn't the greatest. Buttcoin purse: Type cover. It's not great, but it's a proper keyboard with key switches and separate hard plastic keys, large enough to feel like the bad end of ultrabook keyboards instead of the good end of phone toys. If you were stupid enough to not buy one, then yeah onscreen keyboard. The MS one is a reasonable implementation, but that's not saying much. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 01:28 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 01:22
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I forgive a lot of the mediocre UI decisions in W10 for the progress they've made in window management. The quarter-screen snapping (with sensible keyboard shortcuts!) is excellent, being able to drag/move the spilt between two half-screen windows is very long overdue, their exposé clone thing is useful, and I've even used their virtual desktops. Settings / control panel is still a huge mess, though. And yeah, the calculator is a good example of the downsides of modern apps. At least it looks and works well on a touch interface, I guess? Computer viking has a new favorite as of 00:10 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 00:04
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Casimir Radon posted:When's the deadline to upgrade for free? I don't really want to but that's got to be coming up soon. Good thing they didn't make it during the school year. 29th of July, so you still have some time. There is also a persistent rumor that they'll extend it indefinitely (since they haven't quite gotten the uptake they wanted), though don't bet on that.
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May 6, 2016 00:13
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steinrokkan posted:Of course these letters were banal as gently caress. But in the end you got functional long-distance friendships. With forums and Twitter you get - and yes, this is a hyperbole! - goonmeets, shitposters and trolls. A goonmeet - even the horrid worst-case ones - is more social than a postcard saying "weather nice, huband still dead".
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May 6, 2016 23:27
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RVWinkle posted:Would that be "Blue Book"? As far as I can tell, High Sierra never got a color-coded book. The blue book seems to define one of the data+music variants. I think High Sierra expects US-ASCII characters, while ISO9660 has some way of specifying which 8-bit charset you are using; except for that they are mostly the same. (The Joliet extension bolted on Unicode support, Rockridge added longer filenames and pathnames, and El Torito enabled booting a PC from a CD. There's a 2013 revision of ISO9660 that adds at least the Joliet parts to the official standard.) Computer viking has a new favorite as of 00:41 on May 15, 2016 |
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May 15, 2016 00:34
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Kaizoku posted:goPHer Log, as opposed to weblog Back in 2003, an army mate used his SonyEricsson to send photos and small text updates to his phlog - "phone blog". IIRC it was hosted somewhere that could accept MMS updates, which I guess was kind of neat.
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May 24, 2016 13:48
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kilogram posted:Man, I feel kinda sorry for this old man, it's like we're disappointing him every time we open up a web page I think his idea is that you should (actually, graphically, with multiple windows and lines) show how two or more documents are connected. If you cite a scientific paper, it would show that as a separate window with lines and highlight blocks showing "this part here refers to that part there" instead of an obtuse link to a landing page for the quoted article. I don't know if you could do "live" embedding as well? It's like some weird hybrid of reviewer comments in Word, a visual diff tool, the hover-previews of links in imgur comments, and normal web pages ... and I can actually imagine a few cases where it might be useful. Still, it's deeply niche and web pages seem like a more convenient structure.
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May 24, 2016 17:40
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It hovers in a weird room between crazy and inspired. Unlike actual crazy people, the technical and practical parts make enough sense and they haven't invented too many new words. On the other hand, it still reads as a bit ... off the beaten track. As a contrast, consider this oddball who I sporadically run into on Norwegian forums: http://bendiklaland.info/documentiveinformals.html He has more than once tried to find programmers for some project that would, uhm, let you construct algorithms through different kinds of structured art, or something. It's kind of hard to parse. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 22:47 on May 24, 2016 |
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May 24, 2016 22:37
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It seems to go together with weird neologisms and peculiar diagrams - it feels like they try to force too many layers of meaning and structure (that only makes sense to themselves) into every sentence and the leftover parts bubble up as HTML formatting. It is strange how similar it ends up being, though. In related news, his art page (".png" up top) is interesting.
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May 25, 2016 00:23
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I haven't played around with it too much, but dosbox does indeed seem to have decent opl2/opl3 emulation. If you really want to play MIDI files in proper '90s FM synth style, you could try installing windows 3.1 and a midi player in dosbox set to emulate e.g. a SoundBlaster 16?
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May 30, 2016 15:19
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Germstore posted:Wall Art Decor. Words fail me. Probably? It's vaguely well known and I'm sure someone out there would buy a framed copy to hang by their retro (or current) gaming PC.
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Jun 7, 2016 16:54
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