old computer

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > old computer

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

The Puppet Master posted:

remember back when getting online required the sound of a robot orgasm to loudly reverberate your house?

furiously smashing mute for late night clandestine porn sessions

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 16:11

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 22:15

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

atomicthumbs posted:

here's my PDP-11/73

Wikipedia says it best: "Introduced in 1983, this system used the Jaws-11 chip set and the Q-Bus, with a clock speed of 15.2 MHz."

basically, this was a miniaturized PDP-11 used in various sytems that would be well-served by a PDP-11 but that didn't need a serial connection to a Big Ol PDP-11. once microchips started being a thing (LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION), DEC discovered that you can take a thing that takes up dozens or hundreds of circuit boards and thousands of components and put it on one or two chip dies.

If you had a VT-103 terminal, you could build an entire computer like this inside it.

the computer, as a whole, is the Q-Bus card cage, which is just a dumb backplane with a power supply connector and a bunch of cards in it. It's a cheaper and smaller revision of the earlier Unibus, created by multiplexing the address and data lines.

The CPU card (a KDJ11A, the thing that makes it a PDP-11) is in the front. The two dies are a "data path chip" and a "control chip" and I have no idea why they're separate or how they work. It's 16-bit, just like all the other PDP-11s, and its clock speed is pretty high for the time.

This particular computer was inside a Kevex electron microscope controller. Besides the CPU card, it's also equipped with a 1.1 kiloword RAM card (which goes over the same Q-bus connection as everything else so it's pretty slow), a GTSC 304 4-port serial card (equivalent to DEC's DLV11-J), a Data Translation EP050 data acquisition card, a Kevex electron microscope controller card, and a GTSC 360/361 SCSI controller card.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work yet. I need to find or build a power supply for it and connect it to a terminal, and to the Quantum ProDrive that came with it. Someday, it will boot, but for now it just sits there looking kinda neat.

it used an r12000, which is the same family as the playstation cpu, the r3000. that amused me and upon further research i found out the r3000 debuted in 1988 :eyepop:

it wasn't cheap enough for a james machine until six years later i guess

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 17:11

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

the playstation was under development for like a decade. if it had come out on time it would have been a very expensive console.

the remarkable thing about the psx is that it's really a very ordinary architecture. it looks a lot like an early 1990s unix workstation under the covers. no weird coprocessors, no funny memory, just a RISC cpu and a bus and some memory and some devices hanging off the bus

Well the psx was supposed to be very easy to develop for, so that makes sense

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 20:24

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Sham bam bamina! posted:

it's amazing that being all of two years ahead of its time was enough to kill that thing

700 dollars with little but some edutainment software for a library L M A O

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 20:25

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Sham bam bamina! posted:

the 3do had some good games, like need for speed, crash n burn, road rash,

yeah just not at launch or for several months after

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 21:08

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

the 3d0 had great conversions of samurai shodown and sf2 turbo

shame they didnt lead with them

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 22:31

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

i wonder if a 3d0 blaster could be made to work in win 10

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 22:32

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

atomicthumbs posted:

did you quote the wrong post here

no? why do you ask

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 22:56

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Citizen Tayne posted:

PDP 11/73 didn't use an R12000, PDP-11 was a 16 bit CISC architecture.

oh. maybe? or i accidentally looked up the wrong computer. idk

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 23:13

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Doc Block posted:

I have an SGI Octane in storage. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to find the pics I took of it back in 2003. Here's the whole setup, including SGI-branded Sony Trinitron monitor

The beige box on the right is an external SCSI CD-ROM drive, since the Octane had no room for an internal one.

It's got a 64-bit MIPS R12000 CPU @300mhz w/640MB RAM

Not pictured: the support I had to add to the underside of the desk to stop it from sagging under the weight of a 19" CRT and an 80 lbs SGI workstation.

edit: this particular Octane only has the SE graphics, meaning the (2nd generation?) entry-level 3D graphics hardware with no texture memory.

oh ya its this one :o:

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 23:14

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

error1 posted:

Well it did have a bunch of coprocessors to make it not suck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_technical_specifications

The main bits that made the PSX a success was the geometry translation coprocessor and the design they used for the GPU where the focus seems to have been speed rather than precision. The thing didn't even do floating point if i remember. Early psx games had geometry holes, texture warping and other glitches all over their graphics but they were actually capable of rendering at 60fps. As time went on the developers got better at hiding the flaws in the 3d math processors by breaking up polygons into smaller chunks and so on.

Meanwhile the N64 had lots of bells and whistles in the gpu like perspective correct texture mapping, texture filtering, mipmapping, z-buffering etc that completely gimped performance. Holy crap the N64 CPU ran at 90mhz compared to the PSX 33mhz and Zelda still couldn't achieve 30fps. It ran at 17fps on PAL systems

yeah the focus at the time was getting textured 3d into a reasonable price for a home console and the psx did that, flawed as it may have been

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 16:22

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

i had like 900 dollars to my name in feb 1996 and i spent most of it on video games instead of, say, a car. which would have allowed me to be independent and socially functioning....but gently caress that, video games

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 16:24

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Sham bam bamina! posted:

the n64's texture memory was a joke so you tended to get either blown-up blurry turds or sharper textures in conspicuously small sets

then they put out the ram pack and n64 games finally had decent textures, years after launch

the n64 also launched almost 2 years after the psx

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 16:24

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Barnyard Protein posted:

i had a car then, no one wanted to hang out, almost never used it. everyone was inside playing video games. so, you made the correct choice.

ha, i knew it :chord:

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 16:32

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Smythe posted:

crash bandicoot: mario killer. LOL

its a bad game

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 16:19

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

like, the blog is cool and its obvious they poured themselves into the game which makes me feel bad that i found it so boring

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 18:03

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Silver Alicorn posted:

has everyone read racing the beam

yes and i need to reread, it rules

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 02:42

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Doc Block posted:

The voltage regulator in my Jaguar literally popped, LOL

saving you from yourself

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 04:38

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

the

version is a 300 -> 75 ohm balun

ive always wondered why rf is so bad. after all the signal delivered over an antenna can be really good, so i guess it's just cheap nasty noise filled modulators in the console/computer?

# ¿ Feb 22, 2016 04:16

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Jonny 290 posted:

all the modulators and demodulators and IF stages and detectors add electronic noise, which is barely visible when looking at motion video stuff like bsd said, but when crisp graphics are trying to go through the noise of the components adds up and you get the blurry edges and spots and such

basically, run some abstract poetry through google translate and back, then run a technical reference manual through it and back, see which one gets worse

atari 2600 graphics = poetry

i can dig it

# ¿ Feb 22, 2016 04:31

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 22:15

Panty Saluter: Jan 17, 2004; Making learning fun!

Digital cable boxes should have used clearqam output on rf so olds wouldnt be confused by a new connector

But ~*~MY DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT~*~

# ¿ Feb 22, 2016 16:44

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > old computer