|
Powered Descent posted:I genuinely hope that GOG will someday release a complete After Dark collection as their first not-exactly-a-game product. I'd buy the hell out of it. Boris the cat has been absent from my screen for too long. If all you want is Boris, Japan has you covered: http://en.infinisys.co.jp/product/flyingtoasters/index.shtml It's not the original code and it feels a bit off compared to the originals, though  After Dark is the only reason I have a couple retro macs around the house, I like to fire up Lunatic Fringe, You bet your head, totally twisted and the simpsons savers from time to time.
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2016 09:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 15:00 |
|
|
Not really a computer relic, but if you want a nice screensaver for a modern computer take a look at http://www.ubernes.com/nesscreensaver.html I can run four NES games tiled on my 2010 macbook without causing the fans to spin up and you can take control in the middle of a recorded movie if you need to waste a couple minutes playing old nintendo games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg3_4rty8CI
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2016 12:40
|
|
|
That cassette deck owns, unfortunately most of them don't work very well after 40 years If someone made a retro replica of that exact mechanism I'd be first in line to buy one though
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2016 13:24
|
|
|
The beauty of duke and the build3d engine was that they included the level editor with retail copies of the game, it was very capable and rendered the level in 3d while you were editing it and did it all on a regular pc. In comparison, DoomEd was written for NextStep and required a really expensive workstation to run. It didn't take long for the .wad format to get reverse engineered and third party tools to appear, but build.exe was easy enough that any 10 year old could figure it out and try to build a copy of the school, house, bedroom or whatever. It was fun to make deathmatch maps with overlapping sectors that created impossible spaces, that confused the hell out of my friends.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2016 21:18
|
|
|
Regular Nintendo posted:Is there video of this Someone already posted videos of the engine and editor, but if you meant the impossible, overlapping spaces the best demonstration I've found is this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQYsFshbkYw&t=1060s I think the concept is called non-euclidean space, where several rooms can occupy the same 3d coordinates in space but which room you see depends on which adjacent rooms you enter them from. It was easy to do in 2.5D games where the engine only deals with a list of sectors. You can see how the staircase would clip into the rooms above and below but it just disappears when the camera is looking at a different sector that overlaps. It's a neat effect. It's worth watching the entire video all the way through, it explains how those old engines worked pretty well!
|
|
#
¿
Jun 15, 2016 06:23
|
|
|
The largest computer webshop in Norway used to run this ad on TV, I desperately want those DIMMs with activity LEDs on them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWkT4mU6Abo Underbody neons make the computer go faster 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 2, 2016 18:11
|
|
|
 Is this the webcomics thread now
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2016 15:32
|
|
|
Those videos are outdated, this is the current bleeding edge of computer music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwuCQ3u2N_A
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2016 15:57
|
|
|
The trick to make EQ not suck is to always use negative bias, especially with digital eq where the signal will clip really harshly if you max the volume, and only do subtle changes. I use a big fat lowpass filter for casual listening because it makes my tiny computer speakers sound much bigger than they are, the tradeoff is that my max volume is much lower than it could have been but that's ok. It's one of the perks of having an ancient firewire studio sound interface I guess 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2016 18:14
|
|
|
Remember the swap trick? Most of those old consoles including the Saturn only checked the CD copy protection once at boot, and since were top loaders you could tape or glue down the lid sensor button, open the lid without the console knowing after it had checked the copy protection and replace the original CD with your burned copy. You had to time it just right so the console was finished checking but hadn't had time to reposition the laser and read the game executable yet 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2016 07:55
|
|
|
Not this one?  
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2016 08:37
|
|
|
Look at all the rust, it should be illegal to treat electronics this poorly 
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2016 17:25
|
|
|
Humphreys posted:There was an FPS in the late 90s early 00s that actually used your folder structure for maps. And photo files in the folders as bitmaps for walls etc. I tried googling a fair bit but cannot find mention of it. The only thing that comes to mind is psDOOM which let you murder your computer process by process https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html http://psdoom.sourceforge.net (it was abandoned 16 years ago so good luck running it)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2016 07:08
|
|
|
Why did they stop making weird phones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brL1TFsaEFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL9FzUdd_7U
|
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2016 09:49
|
|
|
Hot drat Techmoan always finds the best hifi junk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJo13FP4UpI
|
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2016 13:21
|
|
|
I've been fascinated by Burrell Smith after reading some of the folklore stories, but what happened to him is really sad He developed schizophrenia in the 90s and dropped out of the industry completely http://www.cnet.com/news/burrell-smith-macintosh-hardware-wizard/ http://tradertim.blogspot.no/2007/07/lonesome-tale-of-burrell-smith.html 
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2016 19:19
|
|
|
Vibration and odd shapes are unlikely to be a problem for audio CDs that spin at the normal 1x speed, they only spin the disc at around 200 to 500 rpm. The fun starts when you stick it in a high speed 52x computer drive that is full of warnings about not loading cracked or misshapen discs because of the risk of explosion. The speed never increased above 52x because if you go much higher the plastic immediately disintegrates even with a perfectly round undamaged disc due to air resistance and resonance vibration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs7x1Hu29Wc&t=370s
|
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2016 06:35
|
|
|
Original_Z posted:We also had a few Macs when I was in elementary school, we couldn't access the actual system but some sort of shell called "Finder", which had a list of approved programs you were allowed to use, needless to say none of them much fun (although we were able to entertain ourselves with the speech to voice features in some word processing software). If you wanted to get into the real Mac, you had to exit Finder, which required a password. Somehow we figured out that if you just kept hitting keys you would eventually just exit Finder anyway, kind of interesting how we were able to find a bug like that. It wasn't really that interesting, other than being able to play the picture puzzle games, but one day we put Finder in the trashcan to see what would happen. The computer never worked again and somehow no one ever figured out it was our fault. Finder is the regular file browser on Macs, it sounds like you're talking about At Ease, a bundled add-on interface that restricted what users could do with the system 
|
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2016 15:11
|
|
|
Xbox modding was a glorious thing, like the fact that you could actually buy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Lso4tMvKs I still have mine, it was the best media centre ever until it ran out of oomph when everyone switched to HD videos It still is a pretty nice way to play old 8- and 16-bit games 
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2016 21:12
|
|
|
I remember when that video was new, it didn't take long before motherboards included emergency temperature power cut features And AMD fixed their poo poo pretty well with the Athlon 64, it's a shame they never managed to regain their lead after they finally lost the performance crown to the newer Pentium M based intel chips. The whole intel/AMD relationship is pretty weird, there's a ton of technology and patent sharing going on behind the scenes even though they are technically fierce competitors.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2016 20:48
|
|
|
I hope it survives, more people should visit and support their local arcade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f20SDLMbxwU
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2016 06:51
|
|
|
Three-Phase posted:My understanding is that the slam tilt mechanism is just a springy piece of metal that completes an electrical circuit like a switch. If the coin box is slammed, that metal strip flexes and opens the electrical circuit, causing a slam tilt (game ends, complete system reset including loss of all credits). Yup, the slam tilt is supposed to be quite hard to trigger, it's there as penalty for idiots who really abuse the machine by picking up the front and slamming it on the floor. I'm glad it exists, because on my home pinball I rewired it so that I can trigger it by pushing the coin return button on one of my coin mechs to quickly reset the machine if I don't want to keep playing  The number of regular tilt warnings is configurable by the operator, modern pinballs from the 80s and forward has a lot of configurable options like how long the ball save should be active, the score requirements for extra balls, max number of extra balls etc. Tilt warnings are cool because it makes the risk vs reward an extra exciting challenge when playing tournaments. You *might* save your ball by nudging the machine hard but you could also lose your ball AND the entire bonus for that ball, which is a disaster during tournament play.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2016 07:58
|
|
|
It only looks decent, it performs like complete crap. The only sort of saving grace controller-wise is that you could connect PS3 pads to it. But that didn't solve the awful bluetooth range, the horrible uneven performance.. simple 2d games kept stuttering, the tiny lovely fan kept whining.. awful! I've kept mine on a shelf though, it's a good reminder to never trust the crowdfunding hype
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2016 20:56
|
|
|
Uncle at Nintendo posted:Refresh rate on arcade monitors are only 15hz, also they are much lower resolution than even an SD CRT. When I tried arcade games on a standard CRT TV (like one you had in the 90s) everything had a slight fuzziness too it and it just looked wrong. Also if you go the MAME cabinet route you need a special video card so you can run Windows at 15hz and 320x240. you mean 15khz horizontal, the vertical refresh rate is generally anywhere between 50 and 60hz depending on the games resolution You no longer need a special card, this genius programmer has made "CRT emudriver" which is a custom ATI driver for old Radeon cards, "GroovyMAME" a custom version of MAME that syncs perfectly to arcade resolutions and also if you're willing to risk breaking your GPU there's a custom firmware hack that lets you boot the computer directly in interlaced 640x480 so that the 15khz monitor can display it. http://geedorah.com/eiusdemmodi/forum/viewtopic.php?id=295 http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,151459.0.html I've hosed around with it for months trying to get it perfect, and eventually got to the point where I can no longer tell the difference between my original arcade boards and the same game running in GroovyMAME. Also most old arcade games run 256x240 instead of the 320x240 we're used to from the DOS VGA days. I was surprised to learn both the NES and SNES use the same resolution!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2016 21:04
|
|
|
Uncle at Nintendo posted:Should I use groovymame even if I am already using the special ArcadeVGA card? I'm probably not great at explaining, but the 15khz monitor doesn't limit your horizontal resolution since that's just depending on how many pixels you send during a single horizontal sweep of the beam, the limiting factor is how many times you can sweep the beam from left to right without blowing up the circuitry that generates the control signals for the magnets that direct the beam 15 000 sweeps per second / 60 frames per second = 250 lines. You need some blanking time in between so the usable lines are probably a little lower. The graphics card can display 640x480 by interlacing like they do in broadcast television, where the horizontal resolution is 640 and the vertical resolution is still 240, but the graphics card sends even and odd lines for every other refresh cycle so it adds up to 480 over two frames. (I'm unsure if it is also able to nudge the beam slightly up and down for the half-frames, I don't think arcade monitors do this but maybe some TV displays do since they are designed for interlacing) As far as I know the ArcadeVGA card simply scales higher resolutions down to fit into the vertical line limit, so 1024x768 becomes a scaled 640x480 interlaced signal and text is almost completely unreadable. Arcade monitors also have a really coarse shadow mask / aperture grille which further limits how useful a higher resolution can be. I love how chunky it is, you can clearly see the red/green/blue phosphor stripes on mine  To answer your question, yes you should absolutely try GroovyMAME. Especially if your arcade PC runs windows 7, I think the guy who sells the ArcadeVGA still recommends XP because old mame versions used directdraw which works well with his cards but that stuff is about to become unsupported by plain MAME anyway. I have an ArcadeVGA too and non-interlaced games work great on it with GroovyMAME. Interlaced and vertical games are pretty hit-and-miss though. You should consider ebaying a card that is compatible with the CRT emudriver, they are dirt cheap.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2016 07:06
|
|
|
Yeah, another cool thing is that you can get square 1920x1920 displays now that are great replacements for 4:3 monitors since you can play both horizontal and vertical games without needing to rotate the screen. My dream monitor would be a 4096x4096 oled capable of black frame insertion for low persistence. Combined with a fake CRT effect done by a modern graphics card I don't think you'd be able to spot the difference then (apart from the display surface itself being flat instead of curved, but you can hide that pretty well behind a glass plate) Check out http://www.testufo.com/#test=blackframes for an explanation of what makes LCD so different from CRT, the basic idea is that LCD monitors keeps displaying the picture constantly while a CRT scans the image from top to bottom with large areas of the display actually being dark (it happens so fast your eye doesn't notice) and that doesn't cause as much motion blur when your eyeball is tracking a moving object. If your LCD is fast enough to strobe the image without noticeable flicker you can get near CRT performance. http://www.testufo.com/#test=eyetracking ..it's really weird
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2016 09:15
|
|
|
That's a neat scanline effect, it isn't that far off from the real thing It's hard to make generated scanlines actually line up to the game resolution though, if it isn't some clearly defined common format like 640x480 or 320x240 Here's my CRT, it's hard to get a good picture since the camera goes out of sync. The dimming isn't visible to human eyes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3dInbZ-6bA
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2016 21:09
|
|
|
How hard could it be to make a modern stackable console... Not happy with 30fps gaming? Just bolt four PS4s together for 120fps!
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2020 22:59
|
|
|
 This was such an unobtainable dream computer when I first read about it in a 1993 issue of MacFormat. It only took 25 years but now you're mine! All the sites that had copies of the weird DSP software seems to have disappeared from the net, I would really like at least the "sAVe the disk" utility from https://lowendmac.com/sable/06/0405.html quote:This system extension takes the place of several (now lost?) Apple patches and also fixes some bugs Apple never touched at all. Most notable is a bug-fix that speeds up programs that play lots of sounds, such as games. Every time a new sound channel is allocated, the "DSP Preferences" file is updated; what this means is that every time you fire a shot in Marathon, your hard disk is accessed - that's crazy! sAVe the Disk fixes this problem and more!
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2020 18:12
|
|
|
EL BROMANCE posted:Also if you were into electronic music, the MIDs could replicate the original pretty well. Just disable the vocal line on Robert Miles’ Children and you’re good to go! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y7EEbrbRRc I'm taking requests I guess Yamahas XG standard could have been amazing if it had gained some more traction before games switched to prerecorded music. It's a bit weird that MIDI hasn't changed for some odd 40 years Also something magical happens when I play canyon.mid after playing a fancy XG midi file, it keeps all the insert effects. The main reason why MIDI sounded lovely in the olden days is that the playback was completely "dry" with no effects to speak of. Maybe a little reverb and chorus if you had a fancy sound card, but the Yamaha and Roland modules can do a ton more effects like distortion, delay loops, filter sweeps and so on. It makes a massive difference! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1OHtddIMj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEakwWr2plw
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2020 19:52
|
|
|
I bought a bootleg VCD copy of Theodore Rex once while on vacation in Thailand, it is one of my prize possessions. Maybe I should find my own weird PSX vcd player and see if it still works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY7gsUL9Xkk
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2020 16:11
|
|
|
The ones I found on eBay went for $900 or more, I wouldn’t admit to spending that on dead tech either
|
|
#
¿
Jul 11, 2020 21:06
|
|
|
 The Apple PC compatibility card is a magical device
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2020 21:59
|
|
|
Degauss can only do so much, with strong enough magnets or heavy physical abuse you can deform the actual shadow mask inside the tube permanently
|
|
#
¿
Sep 12, 2020 21:51
|
|
|
At least techmoan is pure as the driven snow
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2020 21:13
|
|
|
Cheap 90s ABS plastics will have crumbled to dust in another 50 years, retrobrighted or not. I’d be surprised if 3d printing tech wasn’t good enough to make perfect case replicas by then though. But not as surprised as I would be that human civilization survived 50 years into the future.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2020 16:56
|
|
|
The chattering sound of the heads moving is charming, but I don’t miss the constant whine of the drive bearings at all Some of them sounded like a dentists drill or constant nails against chalkboard, it was awful
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2020 08:31
|
|
|
I like how philips solved this problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNvxESKLAcA I wonder if you could get them with taller towers that held more tapes
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2020 09:16
|
|
|
It's kinda rad that ATX has stuck with us for nearly three decades even if the slot design sucks for cooling. I think it would make sense for an updated standard to make it mandatory for the case to provide fan cooling for pci cards and a hardware sensor standard where each card could report temperatures and control the system fans at firmware level so you could do away with the giant separate gpu fan shrouds that end up blocking a bunch of slots or suffocating if you cram too many high power cards in there. Rack servers are much better at cooling in that sense, it's just one big wind tunnel from front to back and server expansion cards typically don't have any fans of their own.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2020 14:36
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 15:00 |
|
|
modern molex is a lot less awful than the old white connectors, they have this handy extra bit of plastic that forces the connector out when you squeeze the sides AT power plugs and bare pin headers can gently caress off forever though, anything where you can insert the plug upside down or accidentally shift it from side to side and end up blowing up the computer
|
|
#
¿
Dec 25, 2020 10:13
|
|