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Did anyone actually play Battlecrusier 3000AD when it was still new? It seemed like a very interesting pitch at the time, it didn't pan out to be the killer app that was touted. According to Wiki, it caused one of the largest internet flame wars.
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Apr 25, 2016 05:45
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I sort of remember a small but popular trend of just every webpage being a single huge jpeg and just used image mapping to assign link locations. It seems a lot less prevalent now, but I'm sure it's still a popular technique.
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Apr 27, 2016 21:11
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Faceplate replacements on mobile phones seemed to have a huge boom then bust once everything went touchscreen and got replaced with custom cases, instead. But I remember the window of time where you could just take off the keypads and faceplates and buy any number of custom aftermarket solutions depending on your model of phone. I think even MS said the original 360 came out of the era of thinking folks were really interested in customized face plates due to the popularity of them in phones. I think some of the dollar stores I've stopped in in recent years still like some for various Nokias.
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May 30, 2016 03:35
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I just saw a nearly 10 year old PCI video card at a store today with a clearance price of nearly $60.
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Jun 12, 2016 05:21
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I'm sure there's an awesome modern-day Terminator Mod for GTAV I'll never play that pits you against an almost unstoppable killing machines hiding among the population that track you down no matter where you go and won't stop until you're dead.
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Jun 13, 2016 02:47
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FilthyImp posted:I had a crap load of Works documents that wouldn't work in Office XP or whatever. All those terrible 10th grade English essays, lost (for 3 or 4 years). I ended up buying an updated copy of Works about 10 years ago to try to salvage a lot of WPS files I'd saved and I think attempt to convert them to a more standard format. I seem to think that MS had some sort of Works file opening program for a while, but it also had some issues if I remember correctly. Other than that, I actually 'liked' Works in the 90s. I could get it set up where the layout of what I wanted to do was super clean and conducive to productivity. The 'draft mode' in Works just always felt better for me than anything else and not even Word has a version of that feels right.
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Jun 16, 2016 07:26
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Is ROT13 still a thing? Now that so many forums have spoiler tags and Usenet isn't as active as it was, does it get any use, anymore?
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Jun 16, 2016 08:22
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The frustrating thing about this is that a few years ago I was looking for a list of all the CDs with these on it since and I never found a complete list. I was linked to various sites, even official ones, but I'd always find some sites had what was considered a 'full list', but other sites had a few missing CDs and a few different ones.
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Jul 1, 2016 18:48
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Weren't webcomics and webtoons sort of a start of the idea we were going to be able to microtransaction everything? Indie creators will be able to sell stuff for a few pennies a view and people will pay it. Then that died, but we gradually bought into mictrotransactions for game DLC and freemium apps and now we're just letting them all Patreon, instead. Also, post-9/11 I remember the "American*" Red, White and Blue, flag-inspired motherboards to show your patriotism. (*Not made in America)
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Jul 2, 2016 19:24
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I miss the old Yahoo! News Message Boards. In the halcyon days of the early to mid 2000s they were a place of terrible beauty. I remember Yahoo Personals (Yahoo Dating?) from about 2000 or so. I seem to have a vague recollection of a guy who met a couple of girls through that since it was I think completely free at the time, then they started charging, then they got rid of it. Also, I remember a site called The Complaint Station that was great since it was in that late 90s/early 00 thing where people were posting all sort of product/business complaints and about 1/4th of them seemed to think it was an official line to the companies they were complaining about.
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Jul 3, 2016 06:26
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Kaizoku posted:Counterpoint: Garfield started in 1978. Love Is... started in 1970. Zippy the Pinhead has never been published by the local newspaper anywhere I've lived. A proliferation of total poo poo taking up space for the good has always been a problem with short-form media. I have to admit, I flipped through a couple of college campus newspapers for a while and their local comics really sucked. I don't know why a school that supposedly has a large art school, students getting writing degrees, etc. has no one that can churn out an actual good strip. I know you're all busy with school work and poo poo, but if you can't do better then just put Garfield or the Dinette Set in.
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Jul 3, 2016 18:52
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sinking belle posted:This reminded me that there was this bizarre social stigma about playing a game boy with the sound on at the school I moved to in 1999. Like, it was somehow "babyish" to not have the volume turned off, it wasn't even an "it's annoying to other people" thing. Using headphones was the absolute worst thing you could do because that meant people would see that you really cared about video game noises and that was just awful and sad. Ironically, people wore the headphones with the volume up to keep from hearing people mocking them. It was a vicious circle.
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Jul 15, 2016 21:56
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I think a site called VCDHelper or DVDHelper and now likely something else used to keep a huge user created database of various DVD players, their features, region codes, etc.
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Jul 31, 2016 06:49
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Some companies have made slider cases for the iPhone. Surprised such things aren't more popular. https://www.amazon.com/Sliding-Bluetooth-Keyboard-Hardshell-Backlight/dp/B00507H0LA
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Aug 4, 2016 05:43
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A few days ago I watched a bit of "A Sound of Thunder" and those are some grade-A CG dinosaurs from a movie with a $80M budget and 2005. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BwIMb-NvsY edit: "After Franchise Pictures went bankrupt during post-production, the remaining backers provided only $30 million to work with,[5] out of the $80 million originally allocated"
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Aug 8, 2016 03:19
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I remember when video stores used to charge you a fee if you didn't rewind a tape when you returned it, too. I also remember when our video store used to check out the game instruction manuals as separate items from the game itself, but forget to check them back in. Tat was fun being told I needed to come up with $20 for a missing manual because they didn't ring it up when it came back in.
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Aug 11, 2016 06:52
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Something we noticed for a long time was that on VHS tapes that seemed to be made in the very early-to-mid 80s there was a very odd thing where kids' tapes of cartoons and what not had extra stuff on them. If you let the tape keep playing after the credits and wait a few minutes, we'd see all this strange and unadvertised (and possibly unintended) extra material that had nothing to do with the actual we'd watched. Parts of other cartoons, mostly. It became sort of common for us to just fast-forward for a while past the end of the credits of the main feature, and you'd get it, eventually. I don't know if it was a situation of them reusing tapes in bulk of unsold product (so once the main new feature was done recording, old material still on the tape past a certain window would still be there) or if somehow if the master tapes they made their dupes from were being reused in a similar way and no one knew that they'd had stuff after the main program. There was a situation about 20 years ago where a tape of generic and public domain cartoons had something happen where after the main cartoon was over, the rest of the tape had porn on it. I think it was something about how they thought the company that was releasing it was just recording over old tape stock and relabeling/boxing them and selling them at discount stores as dirt-cheap cartoon collections and thought they'd been fully recorded over.
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Aug 12, 2016 01:41
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The thing I sort of miss about DVD was when it first came out, there was the idea that every movie was going to have several language soundtracks and captions for you to choose from. I don't think I ever saw that happen consistently on anything. Sure, the English, French, Spanish and subtitles, but over at wiki I get the following info: -DVDs can contain more than one channel of audio to go together with the video content, supporting a maximum of eight simultaneous audio tracks per video. This is most commonly used for different audio formats – DTS 5.1, AC-3 2.0 etc. – as well as for commentary and audio tracks in different languages. -DVD Video may also include up to 32 subtitle or subpicture tracks. Subtitles are usually intended as a visual help for the deaf and hearing impaired and for translating dialogs. I don't think I saw anything that had close to that on there, but it does seem like the older the DVD, the more they had.
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Aug 15, 2016 19:53
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Lowen SoDium posted:Does anyone remember Vivo? It was a very early streaming video player. Mostly used for porn in the 90's. Blocky, low res, buffering porn... I've mentioned this before in some thread, but I used it almost entirely for a pre-Youtube site from the late 90s called InterneTV that had a bunch of movie trailers and music videos on it. I actually thought that compared to Realplayer it looked better at the time. I still remember how Google Video used to be a thing prior to them taking up Youtube. Stuff that people uploaded a lot of times gave you the option of just, "Do you want to download this video to playback on a PSP, iPod, etc." and you could do that easily.
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Aug 24, 2016 20:41
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I miss the days of massive rebates if you wanted to role the dice. There'd be times where I could swing into a Circuit City, Office Max, etc. and end up after rebates getting some really good deals. The moment that Office Max started their, "We're getting rid of rebates" plan, it feels like the sales and deals got so much lesser over the years.
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Aug 30, 2016 23:16
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About 10 years ago we saw sort of a boom in places that had a bunch of consoles and PCs, comfy chairs, and would let people play games by the hour on those systems. It was probably at its height when Rock Band/Band hero were big as you'd have a big 55" TV, and audience and a lot of room and no one cared how loud the music got. This was after the more or less death of arcades, though. Even they vanished before the WiiU, PS4 and XBone launches, if I recall.
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Sep 12, 2016 20:00
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I was in a Radio Shack recently and saw something that brought a small amount of joy into my otherwise sad life... They had Tandy-branded computer accessories on the shelf, again. You hear that, everyone! TANDY'S BACK! edit: I know it's likely all the same rebadged stuff as anything else, but seeing the old Tandy logo on a box just made me nostalgic. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 07:39 on Sep 16, 2016 |
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Sep 16, 2016 07:35
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For a while in the 80s/early 90s, I thought Radio Shack batteries were considered as good/better than most of the big Alkaline brands of the time. I still probably have some of those classic gold and black AA laying in a drawer or eating away a tape player somewhere.
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Sep 16, 2016 19:31
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Casimir Radon posted:Without the annoyance of having to bundle it with anything else. Original content is the only thing Netflix streaming has going for it, the movie selection is pretty garbage. I've mentioned before, but the golden age of streaming video seems to be done and gone. I don't know if it will ever come back, either. Then over the last few years, it feels like the streaming arena has been fractured and diluted too much. I don't know how much of this is the case or not, but about 6-7 years ago it felt as if everyone who held the rights to movies just figured having Netflix streaming their stuff as a good deal. Then they saw how popular it was becoming and realized they needed more money for their content from Netflix or that they could run their own paid streaming service. The sort of sad thing is that despite all the complaints about Crackle, I can turn it on and there seems to be a lot more recognizable films on it at first glance than Netflix/Amazon despite having just a fraction of the content. I do have to say, though, I get antenna for most my TV and there's a lot of content on there if you have an interest in older TV and movies. One station is even showing reruns of MST3K, and another plays old Johnny Carson Tonight Show episodes.
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Sep 18, 2016 13:08
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I almost bought one a while back and I'm not sure how many or what companies still make them, but quite a few years ago I saw a home stereo system with a 'rip to USB" option for your CDs. I guess you'd just put in your CD and and USB drive and convert it to an MP3 copy. I know it'd take more time in the long run than just doing it on my computer where it would automatically sync titles and artists, but I sort of wanted something just like that for quickly to have on USB for my car, 360, etc.
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Feb 4, 2017 13:16
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Negrostrike posted:Heh, I always got my shareware from those CD-ROM magazines. I still have some of them, featuring incredible image collections of some 20 bmp files with no more than 400 pixels wide or tall, sound effects, midi files and so on. One of the strangest bits of shareware/freeware I ever found on a disc like that was a Microsoft GIF Animator that at the time was pretty easy to use and basic, but I had good results with the few times I used it. Then I lost the disk and lost the program due to an reformat and it turned out it was no longer available on the MS site when I went looking for it. A rumor from around the time was that MS actually removed the download for a period of time due to some GIF legal stuff going on at the time. I guess that's a thing, too: Wasn't Compuserve trying to sue for control over the GIF format for a while in the late 90s/early 00s? I seem to recall that some version of Windows or some program I had actually didn't have GIF support one way or another (like maybe it WOULD open a GIF but it wouldn't save as one.)
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Jun 13, 2017 09:45
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This Apple talk reminds me that I watched some of an Amiga documentary on Hulu a while back (Viva Amiga, maybe) and I think someone from Amiga was talking about how they had a marketing team pushing them to get their computers into higher-end computer stores, trying to treat them more like Apple computers that were hot at the time and some of the Amiga people trying and failing to get them to push the thing to places like toy stores.
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Jul 22, 2017 07:28
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I assumed HD-DVD stood a better chance at surviving than BD due to the number of titles released on hybrid discs. You could start an HD film library while you still had a DVD player and once you upgraded you wouldn't have to buy all new movies, you just flipped the disc over. The format war would be in its favor because people debating systems would be leaning towards the format favoring what they already had.Monkey Fracas posted:How is Family Video still seemingly expanding? Granted they're only around Lake Michigan but I think they're hanging on. Years ago I think I read about how/why Family Video seemed to survive compared to other chains and I think it came down to a combination of strategies. One was they bought the buildings they set up in rather than rented. This turned out to be a thing that hit chains like Blockbuster where they were renting their space and when the video market took a downturn, it also happened as real estate prices went up and rental contracts were starting to expire. But from what I was told, Family Video would buy their property and then build to include extra rental spaces in the strip for other businesses like pizza or sandwich shops so the business sort of fed one another. People coming for something to rent would go over and grab a pizza. People going to buy a pizza will stop and see if there's a movie. Etc. I think they even have their own non-Little Caesar's pizza chain, too. They might be unintentionally doing better thanks to the change in streaming content over the last few years. When you now have to sub to about 3-4 different services to find movies you want to watch and when a streaming rental is $3 or more for even an old movie, stopping at a Family Video for a 2/$1 for 5 nights comes across as not so bad given their selection compared to Redbox units. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 19:12 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 19:08
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