Tech Relics: Now integrating PIII processors for the wank factor.

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Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

I remember having one of those "hundreds of games in 1 CD" disks way back when. Had a lot of Id/Apogee demos on it (a few Keens, Raptor, etc.). What makes me remember this particular CD is that the demo of Doom 1 that came on it was edited to have a bunch of random voice clips play instead of the normal enemy death/open door/etc noises. I distinctly remember the "Dick dick dick dick dick dick" line from Reservoir Dogs and the "Put it in your pants! Just put in in your pants..." from True Romance. Was really weird. Also I'm pretty sure one enemy's death noise was replaced with "What's your name? gently caress YOU, that's my name!" from Glengarry Glen Ross. To young me it was glorious, like when I bought my first Adam Sandler CD.

Also buying Doom WADs on floppies when I used to go to the Meadowlands Computer Expo.

Also this: http://www.amazon.com/Virtual-On-Cyber-Troopers-Pc/dp/B00003IEED

The PC version came on a gold-plated CD that also played the (awesome) soundtrack if you put it in a regular CD player. I remember buying a 2nd joystick and a y-cable for that old joystick serial connection so I could play twin sticks like in the arcade. That game was really far ahead of its time for a number of reasons.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2015 18:47

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:51

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

oh poo poo you guys remember Metal Marines? The PC version was sweet because it's basically an RTS except you drag your units across actual Windows windows instead of scrolling to the enemy base. Loved that drat game.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2015 18:54

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

KiteAuraan posted:

Windows 95 version with the voice overs.

hooooooly poo poo my later childhood

Anyone remember Amazon and Yukon Trail? Yukon was meh IIRC but Amazon was fun as hell. Taking pictures and poo poo.

The Dr. Brain games were fun as poo poo and I wish I could track those down as well.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2015 05:10

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

The General posted:

Dr. Brain.... did you have to explore a castle like place with puzzles and poo poo? I remember Simon being the game to open the castle door.

That was one of them, yeah. I think there was Island of, Castle of and Time Warp of Dr. Brain. Time Warp was the best for poo poo like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-VtQNHbmU (actual recorded instruments for the music, pretty rare back then)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDrme12fjx0

# ¿ Dec 22, 2015 05:24

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

laserghost posted:

I actually bought the full versions of Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall 2097 through one of those screens.

Also my memory of 3DFX cards is hazy - part of me remembers being super excited to upgrade from a Voodoo3 to a Voodoo5, but I also recall every 3DFX card I ever had to be a buggy piece of poo poo

# ¿ Dec 22, 2015 14:27

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Sono posted:

Trent Reznor getting banned repeatedly from Compuserve for impersonating Trent Reznor.

Wait what?

# ¿ Dec 25, 2015 03:52

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:

I have this as "stress.exe", still with a modification date from 2000. It somehow still works fine on modern Windows.

I'm pretty sure it just takes a screenshot of your desktop and then lets you mess with that screenshot. It's basically MSPaint with fancy brush effects.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2015 04:39

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

sinking belle posted:

what the christ is that

# ¿ Dec 29, 2015 20:27

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Segmentation Fox posted:

Does that mean that keeping local digital copies of music is also an internet relic?

I hate to say it but it's getting there. I still use Winamp to manage my huge music collection, but even Google lets you upload up to 20,000 songs and access them for free from anywhere. I used to have a 64GB SD card in my old phone and was wary of my new phone (16GB with no expandable storage) but Google Music has made that a complete non-issue. It even lets you download songs onto your devices off their servers.

e: as far as actual music management and display options though, I've tried a ton of programs across multiple OSes and nothing does what I want except Winamp:

The only things I don't like are the wasted space in the top middle and on the right between the tracks and the artwork, but I've been using this exact setup since Winamp switched to the Modern-style skins and added in the Media Library window, and even before that I had a plugin to do something similar.

Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 19:04 on Dec 30, 2015

# ¿ Dec 30, 2015 18:52

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

I mean my car only has a CD player and I hate those FM transmitters so I still buy CDs, they just cost $1.99 at Goodwill instead of $14.99 at Tower Records. Last time I went was 50% off CDs, picked up Led Zeppelin 1-4, a 2-cd Yes compilation, and albums by Talib Kweli, Tribe Called Quest, Head Automatica, and Witch for like $15 total =)

# ¿ Dec 30, 2015 20:36

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

mrwuss posted:

just drive around with earbuds in like all the other cool kids

I see this all the time and it's baffling how loving dangerous it is

Casimir Radon posted:

I have a cassette adapter. I'm not kidding.

I wish my car had a tape deck, those adapters are way better than FM transmitters.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2015 21:09

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

DarkMalfunction posted:

Why did all old computers use that crappy white plastic that always went to a shade of piss yellow if left in sunlight?

Great fun could be had if leaving a stencil with rude messages on top of a computer for a decade or two.

It wasn't just computers - good luck finding a Super Nintendo that's not yellowed to poo poo these days

# ¿ Dec 30, 2015 23:52

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

thathonkey posted:

nah this was just an adapter to allow you to go on the internet, i forgot it has a phone jack as well. it just takes up the expansion bay, i think they made a hdd expansion as well but you couldlnt use both at once:

I used that thing for 1 game: SSX3. After a certain point it was worth more than the system itself on eBay/Gamestop (I might be wrong but I think it might have been needed to play :filez:

back in the day?)

Same thing with the Gamecube modem attachment; I can't remember why it was so valuable though, and the only game I can think of that used it was Phantasy Star Online.

Come to think of it, the Gamecube had a lot of peripherals that are now much harder to find/worth more than the actual system: the modem, the Wavebird, the black 251 memory card...

Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 02:04 on Dec 31, 2015

# ¿ Dec 31, 2015 01:58

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Also for the Wii, IIRC there are 3 specific games that can be used to mod a Wii to play :filez:

, and only 2 work anymore: the original was Twilight Princess, and nowadays it's Smash Bros (which drives the price of it even higher than it's already-super-popular status), and...Lego Indiana Jones. I haven't checked to see if that game is worth a ton nowadays because of that (doubt it though).

# ¿ Dec 31, 2015 02:04

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Data Graham posted:

It's a short-lived satisfaction though. For the real slow-burn kind, I'll take "buying my first optical mouse that actually worked (and wasn't one of these bastards:)"

These things were awesome and made me feel like I was in THE FUTURE

like if I moved my mouse off the pad a little AI hologram would pop up on it and tell me to put it back

it never happened tho

# ¿ Dec 31, 2015 16:15

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Oh man, what about Palm Pilots? I had the III, the Vx, and whatever the last one they made (Lifedrive maybe?). They were awesome and I played a shitload of games on them instead of listening to class in high school.

Also the Treos were amazing - smartphones before there were smartphones. A friend of mine used to openly cheat on exams with his because none of his professors realized that it was possible to access the internet on a phone (IIRC he also ran up insane data charges because the rates were something crazy like $.10/Kb or equally absurd back then)

horizon posted:

Retro games wall - all playable, and more round the other side if I recall.

It was pretty cool, if you live near one you should definitely check it out

I distinctly remember going to Epcot at Disneyworld as a kid and there being a similar setup except way bigger, and I think it was all Sega products.

e: found it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innoventions_(Epcot)

quote:

Innoventions first opened in 1994 which prominently displayed Sega Genesis, Sega Game Gear, Sega 32X, Sega CD, and Sega Pico games in an arcade style.

Goddamn that place was the poo poo

also lol 32x lol

Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 18:53 on Dec 31, 2015

# ¿ Dec 31, 2015 18:49

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Iron Crowned posted:

They had a steel core and were fun to throw at people/things

I saw a kid huck one through an inch-thick plate glass window. Those things could easily kill someone if thrown at their head.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2015 20:00

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Riosan posted:

Same for the N64. My dumbshit self dropped it on concrete years ago and that thing still works.

I never understood why the Super Nintendo and N64 were so stable but meanwhile the Genesis froze up if you so much as breathed on it - even the NES was more stable than the Genesis and that thing had a known design flaw

like my SNES got pulled off the stand it was sitting on multiple times by the weight of the AC adapter and the game never even froze once

# ¿ Dec 31, 2015 20:16

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

pls resize that gigantic image thx

e: :69snypa:

# ¿ Jan 2, 2016 10:43

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Buttcoin purse posted:

Was it TwinAx? i.e. not even regular 10Base-2 coax like we used for Ethernet before RJ-45 (10Base-T)?

Both houses we lived in growing up my dad wired up using 10Base2. Thank god for wifi extenders because the whole house is hardwired with 10Base2 even today. I bought them the upgraded Fios router and a couple wi-fi extenders for the house because it was getting ridiculous.

e: he's one of those weird old-school computer nerds that is now getting too old to keep up with modern computers, like his brain is too full of PDP and Fortran and poo poo to figure out why programs are called apps in win10 and that kind of dumb crap

e2: also don't they use twinax for SATA nowadays?

Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 05:55 on Jan 3, 2016

# ¿ Jan 3, 2016 05:34

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

I liked the default UI, especially if you changed the colors to either silver or olive.

I have one coworker who, at every upgrade from XP to 10, the very first thing he does is change the UI and background back to the same gray bar/blue background it's been since '95.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2016 15:48

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Also SATA is the same connection whether you're using a laptop or desktop-sized HDD. I've saved multiple people's laptop contents by being able to just plug their HD into my computer and go from there (I used to have an IDE cradle that did the same thing, but you get my point)

# ¿ Jan 4, 2016 17:21

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Speaking of SLI, I still have a hard time believing that GPU SLI for gaming is good for anything other than giving Nvidia another $2-500 for no reason.

e: though I think you're talking about a different SLI

# ¿ Jan 4, 2016 17:25

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

I was the badass with the Sound Blaster Pro :smug:

Years later I upgraded to the Sound Blaster Live! I remember the MIDI tracks from Final Fantasy VII going from "sounds like it's being run off an SNES" to "sounds more accurate to real instruments than the original PSX version." EAX was the poo poo back then.

It also had 5.1 inputs, back in the day where you were lucky if your motherboard had onboard audio, period. Annoyingly, I had a set of Cambridge Soundworks satellite speakers that were wired as quadrophonic, not 4.1, I could never get surround sound to work , it just doubled the left and right channels to the 4 speakers (not that there was much that supported it back then, but DVDs and a couple of games and a Winamp plugin...) The gen1 Live! boards had some weird DAC issue that made the "rear channel" speakers output kind of lovely, too - for years and years I hosed around trying to diagnose that issue and never even thought it could possibly be the sound card itself.

Also, that screenshot makes me wonder how often Video Game Design Superstar Cliff Bleszinski is asked to autograph a 3.5" floppy version of Jazz Jackrabbit

e: I guess both Creative and EAX still exist? I didn't know that. The EAX demo that came on the driver CD used to scare the poo poo out of my mom with the thunder/lightning demo. I also have the following laying in a drawer:

(Zen Touch, 40GB)

(Zen Xtra, 40GB, removeable battery which was awesome)

(Zen Micro, 6GB, have 2 of these in black and green)

All but 1 of the Micros still work. Hell, I still use the Xtra on long flights because the battery life is great and my phone doesn't have removable storage. I also definitely owned a few of the Creative MP3-CD players. My friends were blown away by 200 tracks on 1 CD, and the fact that they read ID3 tags? Awesome.

e2: while I'm on the topic of old and awesome MP3 players, who else owned this loving thing:

bonus with super-awesome case:

The Rio Riot. I wanted so loving badly to love it. I knew my dad spent a ton on it for me, it had 20gb of space compared to the gen-1 iPods 5 or 10, looked sweet as hell, nice big display, etc. But it crashed loving CONSTANTLY. Not to mention an MP3 player that looks like a Game Gear should at least have Snake or something on it. It basically had a d-pad and a scroll wheel on it!

Oh yeah and transferring 20GB of MP3s at USB 1.1 speeds was an all-night affair. Not to mention that MP3s above 160kbps were basically unheard of, so it was a much larger number of smaller files. Oi.

Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 00:16 on Jan 5, 2016

# ¿ Jan 4, 2016 23:59

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Quantum of Phallus posted:

Buddy , as a big sound nerd ,this post is extremely my poo poo.
I remember when we got our first tricked out Dell with a 5.1 sound card back in the early 00s. Oh my goddddd.

Oh and I had a Creative Zen vision M. I think it has maybe a 60gb HDD. The thing weighed a loving ton but I stored all my music at the time on it. When it broke...

Ok so do you remember these bad boys:

I used those things for...13 years? I still have them, it's just the cables going to the speakers are at this point more solder and electrical tape than actual wire. Someday I'll open them up and replace the wires entirely; clean off all the gunk from the million times I glued/taped the speakers/volume control to various things, etc.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 00:21

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Quantum of Phallus posted:

Buddy , as a big sound nerd ,this post is extremely my poo poo.
I remember when we got our first tricked out Dell with a 5.1 sound card back in the early 00s. Oh my goddddd.

Oh and I had a Creative Zen vision M. I think it has maybe a 60gb HDD. The thing weighed a loving ton but I stored all my music at the time on it. When it broke...

I mean I'm not a huge sound nerd but I was downloading MP3s at 320 whenever possible way back when, and was an early adopter of VBR. The Creative players always sounded better than the competition, though whether that was placebo or not :iiam:

Ugh I wanted a Vision M so bad but I think at that point I was loving about with MiniDiscs for some idiotic reason so I spent money on that dumb dead technology instead

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV they sure are! VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 00:34 on Jan 5, 2016

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 00:29

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

For the record I was too young for these:

and these:

But had several of these:

and one or two of these:

e: lol the evolution of the MP3 player is a long and sordid journey

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 00:41

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

blugu64 posted:

Oh man, having a B: drive.

e: why is it that C: is the default and A: is the default for 3.5" floppies?

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 00:50

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Pham Nuwen posted:

My freshman year of college (2005) I got one of these new in box at a yard sale for $20. Worked beautifully for years, great sound, reasonable interface. My only complaint was that it didn't act like USB mass storage. You were expected to use some hosed in the head Windows program to transfer music, and I was a Linux guy through and through. Luckily I found a Linux utility to do it; it was half assed but frankly no worse than the loving Windows tool. I still have the player but the screen stopped working at some point; it was set to shuffle all at that point so it's still marginally useful but I don't bother these days.

I also got a free Zune in a contest or something but gave it away to a friend when I failed to sell it on Craigslist (nobody even wanted to pay $30 for it, and it was brand new)

once again Champion Music Player/Llama Simulator WinAMP saves the day. I had a plugin that let me manage my music on it in a much easier fashion. Also you could technically use it as mass storage if you took the files you wanted to transfer, put them in a .zip, renamed it to .mp3 and put it on the player, then reverse the process at the destination.

Winamp loving ruled. When I finally caved and got an iPod I was King of Music for a while since back in the day it was a massive pain in the rear end to get music on/off an iPod if you weren't using iTunes on the 1 computer you registered it with, but Winamp let me access all my friends' iPods and load/unload music onto them.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 01:23

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Data Graham posted:

But they sure as hell have four of the six resistors I need

yeah but only 1 of them is in the right place, 2 are mixed in with fuses and the last is in a pile of other components on top of the drawers.

Oh and the system says they should have over 10 of them in stock.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 04:37

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Hillary Clintons Thong posted:

I love the onion article that is like "Radioshack CEO doesn't even know how they're in business"

http://www.theonion.com/article/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-how-radioshack-still-in-b-2190

I worked there til the very end, too. The store I worked at not only still exists, but still exists as a standalone radio shack instead of how they've mostly been rebranded as sprint/radio shack. A friend of mine and I made out like bandits near the end - sealed Galaxy and Moto X phones for like $200 each, enough batteries and that kind of stuff to last me till the end of time.

One store had to close so fast they didn't have time to ship a lot of the cheaper poo poo out. I bought the entire contents of all their parts drawers for $120. It filled a large garbage bag and I still haven't finished sorting through it almost a year later.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 05:21

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Hillary Clintons Thong posted:

but radioshack batteries are the worst

Fun fact they actually test as well as Energizer/Duracell, and considering they were called EnerCell for years without getting sued, I wouldn't be surprised if they came from the same factory. Hell, very often the watch cell batteries were literally Energizers.

thathonkey posted:

when i heard radioshack was closing i went to the nearest one and asked if i could have everything in the whole store for free and they said ok. so now i own like a dozen RC helicopters.

yeah the parts thing was luck on my part because i got it all at once but once most stores got really low they literally did grab bags where you paid them $5/10/20 and they gave you a bag of varying size and let you go to town, if anybody needs like 500 screen protectors lmk

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 05:35

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

thathonkey posted:

the first "songs" I had on a computer were MIDI files i dunno where i got them they were mostly movie themes like indiana jones and jurassic park mixed in with classical pieces

http://www.vgmusic.com/

I spent so much loving time/bandwidth on that website, there are probably at least 2 or 3 files on there that I made even

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 05:36

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

On the satellite note, in the late 90's a friend's father had a satellite card programmer. Satellite boxes know what services you have or don't based a little credit-card-sized card with a SIM-card-style chip on it. This guy had a little box (connected via 9-pin serial) that he could use to reprogram the cards and unlock everything. I'm talking not just HBO and Showtime, but PPV movies, the porno channels, the whole shebang. Every couple of months DirecTV would send a signal that would fry illegally programmed cards, but he had a big stack of them and would just hop on the web, find the newest codes, and make a new card. I'm surprised he never got caught doing it, I feel like DirecTV would have made an example of him, since he was selling the unlocked cards online.

When I lived in Boston I always dreamed of doing a similar thing with the MBTA (bus/subway system) cards, but apparently it took an entire team from MIT to crack those and IIRC the NSA or FBI got involved real quick.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 23:45

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Mak0rz posted:

Unwrapping this at Christmas nearly made me poo poo myself:

box says AGP tho, but mine was the PCI edition because my computer was lucky to have more than one PCI slot, let alone AGP:

It is a bit silly how fast we went from cards that look like actual PCI/AGP cards to stuff like this:

Same thing with memory (both these images are DDR4 too so they're both top-of-the-line right now):

RAM

vs

EXTREMMMMMMMMMME RAM

Taking cosmetics into appearance when dealing with internal PC parts is one of the dumbest things I've encountered and I will never stop thinking it's retarded. Go apeshit with your Death Star or Dr. Who phone booth computer cases, but when you start weighing the merit of a component based on if the color scheme of the fan enclosure on your GPU matches the RAM heatsink colors and fan LED colors, it's dumb as hell.
I bought some more RAM yesterday on amazon and I literally saved $5 by getting the same exact model sticks in red instead of black, white or blue.

Also cooling fans with LEDs in them need to die a fiery painful death

# ¿ Jan 7, 2016 22:11

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

OMG JC a Bomb! posted:

elmo_pimps_hoes.wav

terminator_goes_to_mcdonalds_drivethrough_FUNNY.ra

e: which reminds me that we're at 30 pages of talking about how awful some old tech was and nobody has mentioned RealPlayer/RealOne

I'm pretty sure I have some porn vids on my computer that are .rm files even today (thankfully VLC plays Real files)

e2: gently caress me, RealNetworks still exists

Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 19:53 on Jan 8, 2016

# ¿ Jan 8, 2016 19:04

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Mak0rz posted:

This was the best when I got it because I finally could play NES, Gameboy, and Genesis emulators with it because they only need 4 buttons! I also played through all of Ultimate Doom with that fucker somehow. I later upgraded to a Gravis Gamepad... PRO:

My gameport white pad spontaneously died on me one day so I replaced it with the black USB version! ...which also eventually died.

Those controllers were the loving best. I guess the OG Gravis Gamepad was iconic enough to be the icon Wikipedia uses for its Video Games portal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Video_games

I had one of these too! Could not get it to work worth a drat at all. I have no idea why.

I dunno if Gravis had some deal with Epic back then or if they were just that ubiquitous as far as gamepads went but I swear the documentation for like Jazz Jackrabbit and a few others specifically mentioned the Gamepad.

e: I guess it was id not Epic since it came with shareware of Commander Keen

e2: no wait I was right:

quote:

The GamePad also appears in the video game Jazz Jackrabbit as a power-up; it appears in the same game as an advertisement in the background, which reads "All kids love Gravis GamePad". The shareware demonstration version of the game noted that the Gravis Gamepad was the official gamepad of Jazz Jackrabbit.

Also holy poo poo the Pro looks like a PSX controller. Did it come out before or after the PSX? Wonder how nobody made a stink about that.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2016 06:25

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

Mak0rz posted:

I'm pretty sure the Playstation controller came first. There are countless "four face buttons, four shoulder buttons" controller designs like that one as far as I know.

Yeah there are tons but I think the PSX controller really solidified the standard controller layout we have now. Look at like the Sidewinder or the Genesis controller - they were getting there, but nowadays all the Logitech and such gamepads look basically exactly like a PS2 controller.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2016 06:52

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

laserghost posted:

People considered Street Fighter 3 a failure? That series was awesome and Third Strike is my favorite SF game ever. EX+a, on the other hand...

# ¿ Jan 11, 2016 00:39

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:51

Snow Cone Capone: Jul 31, 2003

A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:

Sounds like Zelda Classic. So many years later and still no cease and desist, somehow.

what.php indeed

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 02:46

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > Tech Relics: Now integrating PIII processors for the wank factor.

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