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Those old CD-rom drives often had a headphone jack and volume control. Did anyone actually use those? I remember using the output only once or twice, when for some reason the sound card of my PC was absent or not cooperative and i still wanted the Grand Theft Auto soundtrack. But otherwise, who would plug their headphone into the CD-r? You can't hear any game sounds or whatever if you plug it into that output.
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Oct 15, 2021 20:56
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But what's the benefit over just using CD Player in Windows 95 (or media player/winamp in 98) and using the soundcard output? I can imagine it being useful in the DOS era when multitasking wasn't yet a thing, but in my memory the mainstream use of CD-ROM started with windows 95. LimaBiker has a new favorite as of 22:20 on Oct 15, 2021 |
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Oct 15, 2021 22:12
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Dip Viscous posted:I remember my great grandparents having an ancient rotary dial phone with a box hooked up between the phone and the wall that had a keypad for sending DTMF tones. What were those called and how was that possibly better than just getting a new phone? It's better in the sense that it's cheaper and less wasteful. If your grandparents were of the frugal type, that's probably the reason. Phones weren't always cheap and disposable bits of plastic electronics. Also, style. I practically never call anyone anymore, but a black bakelite phone on a desk definitely has some appeal.
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Nov 23, 2021 22:04
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hhfwR6PwDA Crosspost from the PYF buildings thread In the 1960s to 1980s the dutch technology company Philips (Norelco for the USA people) had a futuristic tech museum called the Evoluon. They had all kinds of demonstrations of display technology (such as a giant 2m tall nixie tube), physics demonstrations, and even a very early speech synthesizer. One could generate a single sound, the other could say the word 'Coffee' in several ways (as a question, a statement or as an answer) In the video above you can see how people play around with it.
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Mar 14, 2022 17:56
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barbecue at the folks posted:I wonder what calling a USA landline number from Europe would cost these days. Back in the day I heard about some scene folks actually calling American BBS's to stay in contact and always wondered how they could afford the charges. We have no landline anymore, but VOIP and our old landline number came free with our cable internet. I checked, calling from the Netherlands via VOIP to a fixed phone number in the USA is in the order of EUR 0,15 to 0,20 per minute. Totally doable. So in theory i could hook up a modem to my old 386, plug it into the internet modem's phone jack, and BBS away.
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Mar 23, 2022 19:34
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Armacham posted:Remember the best buy/ circuit city/ etc ads in the Sunday paper Remember those regional classifieds papers?  We had the ViaVia here. It completely disappeared from my memory until i read your post. They were essentially just the classifieds sections of normal news papers, but much bigger and split up per region or city of the country. With the internet getting more popular, the paper version started to get less and less popular until it was eventually shut down. For a while they continued digitally before Ebay (and the dutch version Marktplaats) essentially monopolized the stuff in the early 2000s. I bought a lot of electronics from people advertising in those little papers. What to me was quite spectacular (as a kid in the 1990s), is that you could also advertise on Teletekst/Ceefax in my area. Teletext was digital information sent in the blanking interval space of an analog TV signal. You could transmit 999 pages of 40x25 text or low res graphics.  My regional broadcasting network would offer classifieds. You'd call the office, or fill in a little return mailer, and your advertisement would be put on their Teletekst classifieds pages. At home, you'd (for instance) punch in number 300 to access the main page with a list of categories, then something like 310 for the computer category, and then it'd serve you 10 or 20 pages (automatically rotating through them) of short, tweet length advertisements from people selling computer stuff. If you've never tried Teletekst, click this link: https://nos.nl/teletekst It's the fully functioning, daily updated Teletekst system of the NOS (dutch public broadcasting network). They keep updating it because people still use it. It's even accessible via digital HDTV receivers. I think lots of people use it because since the digitization it's fast and there are no ads/cookie popups/whatever. It's just the barest minimum of information needed to stay up to date with the news.
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Apr 24, 2022 10:54
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And apparently there is a broser based teletext editor! This video was just posted today and shows someone editing a teletext page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBGaNFCPJC4 The editor: https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/editor
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Apr 24, 2022 12:52
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I have a t3100 and a t3200, both 286 machines. Heads up: the power supply is full of Rifa filter capacitors which will blow. It's not a matter of 'if', it's a matter of 'when'. For me the 'when' was on a cold winter night in my bedroom. Despite the cold i grabbed all fans i could find in the house, opened the window, and let them roar at full power for an hour to get the stench out of my bedroom so i could sleep without inhaling the nasty smoke all night. Despite that, i could still smell it the next morning. I recapped one board, but now the whole laptop has already been sitting in parts in the attic for months because i misplaced the box that i put the screws in 
LimaBiker has a new favorite as of 22:11 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 22:03
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No, it doesn't usually bounce. Those super high frequencies usually just pass through the ionosphere straight ahead, or they get absorbed. But over water, there is very little damping of the signal by stuff that's inbetween, and the water surface itself is also good for signal propagation. Trees, buildings and such absorb some of the signals. They can also cause reflections which confuse the phone when there are too many of them. There are very specific situations in which there is a sort of tunnel between two layers of air in the troposphere where SHF phone frequencies can travel through beyond the horizon (tropospheric ducting) or where the signal is reflected by water vapor (tropospheric scattering). That can turn a 10km range into a 100km range, but that is not something highly predictable or reliable. It's one of the things amateur radio operators use for fun. It's pretty interesting to experience how physics can play very weird games. Once i (near amsterdam) had a connection with some germans 500km away, on VHF (just above the FM broadcast band, 144MHz). They sounded as if they were in my own town. Usually my signal doesn't reach more than 50ish km.
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Aug 7, 2022 11:03
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Re: propagation over 90 miles of water It's a bit hard to say for me. If it's always 90 miles, some bending (ground wave effects) has to happen. If it's only occasionally, and depending on the time of year, it's a form of ducting between air layers. I don't know if there are situations in which there can reliably be a duct for prolonged periods of time. It could very well be that above a large lake, there's a temperature inversion for long periods of time working as a big mirror. I have no experience whatsoever in working with SHF radios except for my phone. With phones it's kinda difficult to gauge propagation modes, because you can't hear the specific ways in which signals degrade with different types of propagation, nor the almost instantanious variations in signal when some atmospheric condition changes. The tower's filter box is proper SHF voodoo. The blackest of black arts in RF engineering. Most RF engineers look at it, and then say a little prayer. May it never break, because whoever designed it, must certainly have a deal with some kind of demonic creature that gave them the knowledge.   These are very common little things - LNBs from a satelite dish antenna for television. Every little squiggle is an engineered component of a circuit. The little fan shapes are chokes (inductors). The 'stacks' of lines are bandpass filters, so they act both as capacitors and as coils. The other stuff i don't really know.
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Aug 7, 2022 19:29
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Bargearse posted:I could show up with a degaussing coil or something, and just dispose of them into the boot of my car. You need a bulk eraser for that   Bear in mind that you have to re-format the disks in a special way because you also wipe out the way the disk has been divided into tracks and sectors. Those bulk erasers themselves are tech relics too.
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Aug 29, 2022 16:48
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You could turn it into a crude radio receiver and transmitter, by taking the switching transistors from the power supply, and using the wire from the mains interference filter to wind your own coil. The lack of those wouldn't be immediately obvious to people who don't know what to look for. But the TV wouldn't be functional anymore. And you need a soldering iron and solder. A hot nail could somewhat work as a soldering iron, but you can't really harvest solder from something. Just lead alone (from roof flashing or whatever) won't work.
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Sep 24, 2022 13:15
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Casimir Radon posted:Gotta wonder if someone ever ripped out a CRT and used it to electrocute someone. Wouldn't be that effective. The power supply capacitors, the flyback transformer and the CRT's own capacitance can all give someone a really nasty shock, but because in the case of the capacitors the shock duration is very short, and the flyback is limited to 3mA or so, it's rarely lethal. Mains voltage is available if you have a TV, so that would be much more dangerous and painful. TV repairsmen would, however, chuck charged high voltage capacitors at each other just for fun (Like 'Hey Joe, catch this!'). Not the biggest ones, but definitely enough to zap.
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Sep 26, 2022 16:24
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While i got to admit i didn't watch it to the end, i treat tech youtube stuff like evening filling things that i'd watch on TV if this were the early 2000s.
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Dec 13, 2022 12:08
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r u ready to WALK posted:I'd love to own a giant stupid old stereo rack from the 90s if people weren't trying to sell them for $texas Just be aware that the reason for their existence is just to look impressive and do 'boom'. If that's what you want that's absolutely fine, no judgment here, just don't expect them to sound as nice as the niche audio stuff you can find for those amounts of money. The Kenwoods have a cone tweeter - something most brands already phased out in the late 1960s. Some folks call them 'Kabuki' speakers, perhaps stemming from the performative aspects of having 3 or 4 way speaker systems, huge woofers, and being very present in the room in general. Or perhaps just because some casually racist greybeard thought 'Hahah japanese speaker, japanese word!'. On thinking about it, it might just be the latter... At the very least the search term 'kabuki speaker' might help you find a pair you like if you wanna throw whiskey and cocaine-fueled parties while lounging with some hot ladies/gents in the conversation pit. LimaBiker has a new favorite as of 17:15 on Jan 23, 2023 |
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Jan 23, 2023 17:09
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Is that a projection TV? That's the only way i can imagine them making a CRT curved like that without investing several hundreds of millions of $ in R&D and retooling factories.
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Jan 25, 2023 12:22
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Christmas light wires (especially low voltage LED ones) are thin enough to just feed through the letterbox slot on the front of the house, and through a closed window at the back of the house. Block heaters aren't a thing where i live. We just have cars that start fine at the (at worst) - 10 deg C it might get here. My 1960s amsterdam apartment block did have a DIY'd outlet on the balcony, very convenient for hooking up a laptop or some lights outside on long, warm summers. The person who made it, drilled straight through an asbestos cement facade panel.
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Jan 27, 2023 10:58
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I'm very careful with it, when it comes to chips that aren't mounted to boards, and dual gate mosfets. I've never really bothered with complete PC equipment, though i do make an effort to always grab cards by the metal GND parts while holding the PC's cabinet - and to not touch any of the edge connectors of a card.
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Mar 6, 2023 17:02
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One insidious thing about ESD damage, is that it can be a slow progressive failure. An IC can look fine today, tomorrow, and next month, but then over the course of multiple months or years it'll start acting all fucky and weird. I'm currently trying to fix a Colecovision. It has worked before, though with plenty of glitches i thought was caused by bad contacts with the cartridge (it was vibration sensitive). Left it in a drawer for 3 years, now i bought a new PSU so i could make it 'nice' but it broke while not doing anything. The old computer guys say it's likely the static ram chips that are dead. It doesn't draw anything on screen. Not even garbage data, so they reckon the CPU crashes due to the SRAM not giving it sensible data. I'm gonna work through the service manual (it has one, complete with oscillograms of what to expect at the various data lines!) and see if i can figure out the problem.
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Mar 6, 2023 17:14
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For ESD stuff, being at exactly ground potential isn't the most important thing. The bonding of potentials between you, the things you're working on and your work bench is what's important. You could probably get away with putting an anti-ESD mat on your desk, connecting your wrist strap to the desk, and putting all your sensitive stuff on the mat while it's still in the antistatic bags/foam. That way, no dastardly electrons will jump between your fingers and the sensitive pins of whatever ancient IC you're working with, because they've already figured out where to go via the outside of those antistatic bags, via the anti ESD mat etc etc.  You can get away with a LOT with modern stuff, but not with the old stuff.
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Mar 7, 2023 08:10
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There's a lot of nuance to capacitor stuff. Paper capacitors need to be swapped, without exception, if you want a reliable device. If they're interference or snubber capacitors, they *will* blow up and smell up your room for multiple days. I did some temperature-resistance measurements of a Rifa. At room temperature? 50 Mohm, lovely but won't blow up. Heated up to 65 degrees (very much possible on a hot day in a hot PSU) it dropped to 2Mohm. Eventually it'll self-heat and blow up. Vintage macs often have Rifa interference suppression caps, and they will blow up sooner or later. But you don't do all electrolytics, right? In tube equipment a faulty paper anode decoupling cap can roast a much more expensive output transformer. The DC blocking cap can absolutely murder both output transformer and output tube. I've had dozens of tube radios on my work bench. The number of radios with paper caps that did *not* need the DC blocking cap swapped, is 2. Two. So these specific caps should be swapped on sight because of the bad consequences. If you don't require top notch reliability, you can leave the rest of the caps in place if you only turn it on 15 minutes, once or twice a month. But otherwise, sooner or later due to the effects of heat cycling, the remaining caps will start leaking worse and worse till they go short or in thermal runaway. And even then, some brands of capacitor (especially british ones covered in yellow wax) are just SO bad that the device won't work at all or just make odd noises. I learned my lesson. Left some Philips tar coated paper caps in place in a professional radio receiver. Worked fine for a few years, after like 3 years of regular use one still decided to short out. No damage because the power rail it was connected to, had a high series resistance. Ended up removing the last of them straight away. Now, electrolytics are a category of their own. They are not bad by default. But there are radical differences between brands. Philips brand high voltage ones in their post-1955 tube radios are excellent, outperforming even some new ones when it comes to leakage. And i've found a Tesla brand from the 1940s in a cardboard cylinder which also is still up to spec. But without exception they have to be re-formed and measured if they're good. I only swap around half of the high voltage caps i encounter. Low voltage in transistor stuff? Big PSU smoothing caps are almost always good, and if they're bad you'll quickly hear/measure it as hum/ripple on a power rail. Small ones? Often there are multiple types of cap in a device. Test one or two of each color/brand. If the samples test bad, replace all of the same type. Because often if one goes bad, the rest will soon follow. Recapping itself carries a risk. Quite a few people have damaged boards, forgot what to put where, lifted tracks etc. So if the sample tested capacitors are good, leave them in place. I guess recapping is popular because it doesn't require any thinking.
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Mar 7, 2023 17:26
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Those droplet shaped ones are fun to blow up. The jets of flames have pretty colors.
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Mar 10, 2023 11:36
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If you want to convert the VHF signal of an Atari to UHF, you can probably get away with a non-linear amplifier stage, hooked up as a signal distorter. This will generate a bunch of harmonics that contain the original TV signal. You can tune into one of those. Hell, if you hook up a fast schottky diode right across the antenna output of the Atari, perhaps that will already generate enough distortion products for one to be picked up on UHF. Alternatively, see if you can find one of those 100MHz TTL oscillator cans, make a 'proper' 1 transistor mixer stage like in the tuners of UHF tvs or in those UHF to VHF converters (with a BFW92 or something) and feed it both the TTL oscillator signal (perhaps emitter coupled) and the Atari signal on the base. This will probably work as a mixer and put out the atari signal at 145, 245, 345, 445MHz etc (depending on the Atari's output frequency) and how non-linear the mixer is. LimaBiker has a new favorite as of 08:30 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 08:27
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I like how Datasaab AB is short for Data Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget Aktiebolag, or Data The Swedish Aeroplane Limited Company Limited Company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
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May 11, 2023 16:27
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Dip Viscous posted:Was Mega Bass, like, an actual thing that did something? Comparing it to my other cassette players at the time, it sounded normal when it was on and like the bass was intentionally dropped to nothing when it was off rather than actually making something mega. It would increase the bass response of the amplifier circuits. However - because in general the bass response of playback heads and headphones wasn't great in many portable cassette players, the effect would be that the 'normal' bass roll off would be compensated and the sound would be more neutral with the bass boost turned on. I don't think it was intentional - just a result of keeping the devices relatively cheap. Would you put such a system in a Sony WM-D6 (that super high quality professional thing) and use it with good quality over-ear headphones, you would have way too much bass.
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Jun 3, 2023 09:48
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Lowen SoDium posted:because that would require an RF tuner, but I doubt most modern TVs would have. Most TVs have RF tuners for digital cable or digital over the air TV. Adding analog functionality is only a bunch of code away if it's a software defined tuner. flavor.flv posted:drat, I could actually really use one of those. I'd love to get this puppy going again They're still available pretty easily 2nd hand and from old stock, but if you feel like DIY'ing you can make one yourself: https://www.onetransistor.eu/2015/10/wideband-antenna-matching-transformer.html
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Jun 21, 2023 07:15
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Tape based formats also had the 'gotta rewind' and non random access issues that couldn't be solved. Philips also tried out DCC - digital compact cassette. Essentially the whole minidisc system with something similar to 1st gen ATRAC compression, but on a cassette with almost the same specs as traditional analog cassettes. It had a little slide to protect the tape, and so you couldn't put the digital tape in an analog player. DCC decks had the benefit of being able to also play your analog cassettes, but still it never took off. Tape was already starting to die by that time. It also didn't sound any better than an analog cassette deck of the same price. The first generation of ATRAC compression was not bad to listen to, but also not completely inconspicuous like the compression codecs of today. DAT is uncompressed and better than DCC of course. Analog cassette in the 'price comparable to a digital cassette deck' category had matured by then and turned into something as good as the full size 4 track 19cm/s reel to reels from the 1970s, which is good enough for even audiophiles (though of course no audiofile wants to be seen with a cassette deck if it's not a Nakamichi Dragon.) I have no idea if DCC had any copy protection LimaBiker has a new favorite as of 09:55 on Aug 13, 2023 |
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Aug 13, 2023 09:44
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longview posted:Speaking of DAT – I have a giant pile of DAT72 data backup tapes (and the SCSI drive that takes them), anyone know if those tapes would work in a DAT audio recorder? DAT data tapes work in an audio recorder, but the composition of the magnetic coating is different (rougher) which is not compatible with audio DAT heads from a wear point of view. In other words - it will work, but wear out your heads.
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Aug 13, 2023 13:51
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I think Technics makes a series of black record players, and afaik there's also a Thorens TD160 or 166 that is available in black. Be VERY careful when buying a direct drive Technics like an SL-D2 or similar. They sound great, but they often show variations in speed that do not go away, not even when cleaning all the speed control potentiometers and switches. Listen through at least one full record side at the seller's place before buying.
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Aug 15, 2023 09:18
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Armacham posted:Yeah I'm totally going to spend 25 minutes listening to Steely Dan at a strangers house I mean, it's your own choice, buyer beware.
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Aug 16, 2023 11:03
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Culture difference i guess. Hifi buffs over here are all too eager to show you their poo poo here and check out the thing you're buying. At least if it's 100 euro or more, which those SL-D[n]s are now. For cheap stuff? Don't complain if it ain't perfect.
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Aug 16, 2023 13:14
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I never really had trouble with the quality of headphone jacks in the 90s. Only after dropping my walkman cycling at speed on asphalt, did it have trouble with the jack. Still sad about that - that walkman was the final model Sony made. I still have it, and it has an actual proper service documentation - but it's clipped together with about 10 tiny tabs so it's close to impossible to open without putting a ton of screwdriver marks on the plastic. A spudger isn't strong enough. EL BROMANCE posted:Didn’t people find that recordings from tv had the teletext information saved too before? That’s so cool, I would totally connect to a server from an ansi capable client on my modern computer and zip around Ceefax and Teletext and recreate some random day from 1996 or something. Correct, the teletext data is about 50% there on a video tape. So you need to have a page pass by multiple times and combine the data to get the full page. The folks who were working on it should be findable. I was amazed that when i opened teletext from a tape in the 90s, that i could look back at (slightly messed up) teletext pages of months back!
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Sep 26, 2023 06:58
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I bought something highly similar on a flea market about 10 years ago. Clearly a cheap knock off. Many LED lights everywhere, power indicater, equalizer, the whole lot. Just no CD. I got it working but the quality of the potentiometers and switches was so bad that even after cleaning, everything was unreliable and sucky, and because of the way it was constructed it was too much work to try and remove them - and find new ones. Sold it to the next victim. It didn't sound all that bad. Cheap, but not bad.
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Oct 23, 2023 09:55
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Dip Viscous posted:What is the actual name of that rubbery coating that tons of turn of the century electronics used and always breaks down over the years into a sticky mess? Or do rubbery coatings still do that and I just don't have anything with it that's old enough? There are many different versions. This is one: https://www.cromas.it/soft-touch-spray-paint.html I think they can be either silicone or urethane based.
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Oct 23, 2023 18:32
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I had an issue with a T3200, with jittering lines on the screen (but also normal text etc). The problem was gone after a Rifa RFI suppressor cap popped and i swapped out all of the rifas. I have no clue if they were related to the interference on screen, but you need to check it for rifas anyway. My T3100/e doesn't have them.
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Nov 26, 2023 17:39
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EVIL Gibson posted:Caps are used to keep the power supply constant. I can imagine a lot of different signals that would act strange if they had to deal with large dips in voltage. In the case of the Rifas, they're on the primary side and not smoothing anything - mostly serving to avoid the computer spreading interference via the mains, and to a lesser degree making sure no interference from other devices makes it into the computer. My best guess would be that the cap was arcing slightly on the inside before completely exploding, which creates a ton of interference that messed with the video system. If there is no video at all, just vertical lines, there's a whole different issue. You could try to find a CGA monitor and hook it up to the external monitor connector to see if it's the actual gas plasma display electronics, or the video system.
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Nov 26, 2023 22:32
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Killer robot posted:Got the T3100e disassembled and there's definitely some dirtiness on the motherboard. Nowhere near the video out, but that doesn't mean it couldn't affect it. Looks like moisture damage to me. Brush it clean with IPA + demineralized water (about 75:25) and an antistatic brush, while holding some part of the chassis. Dry thoroughly. Test. No improvement? Unplug and reseat any connectors or flatcables. Tap the boards carefully with the plastic back of a screwdriver. No improvement? Go back to the potentially moisture damaged parts, and check for continuity between board traces and IC legs or something. After that, it gets complicated and requires more in depth understanding of how the system works.
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Nov 27, 2023 19:46
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longview posted:
I think only color plasmas use phosphors. The ones in the Toshiba T3200 and similar appear to be filled with neon gas, and you are directly looking at the neon light. I will verify with a spectroscope one of these days. By eye, the color looks exactly like the color of an NE2 indicator bulb. The display can still selectively wear out. My t3200 has a wider screen than CGA and none of the software that it came with, used the wider resolution. You can vaguely see the outline of the 320x240 CGA resolution that most programs used.
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Dec 2, 2023 00:30
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Killer robot posted:
Certain semi-professional mplifiers and subwoofers are especially bad in that regard, the leakage through the glue can cause all sorts of weird popping and banging noises.
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Dec 2, 2023 11:38
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Be aware that tiny modern replacements without a 'real' brand might last much shorter than the older ones and might have lower ripple current ratings. Especially on the secondary smoothing side of a switching PSU you really have to keep into account the ESR, temperature rating and ideally ripple current, or your newly installed caps will fail in about 5 years. For switching PSUs buy brand name Panasonic or whatever. It pays to grab one of these (clones of a) component tester: https://www.eleshop.nl/gm328a-component-tester.html That way you can quickly check the capacity and ESR of an old electrolytic and see if they're any good still. LimaBiker has a new favorite as of 10:28 on Dec 3, 2023 |
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Dec 3, 2023 10:25
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