- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
Remember when a computer didn't have internet and it was still something that could entertain you for hours?
anyone here into retro computing
- Thread starter WhitePaperKat
- Start date
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2018
Yeah, I programmed my own networking interface for basic message communication between mates using C. Very similar in operation to NetCat but way more primitive. Probably one of the reasons I work in software development
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2018
I’ve been posting from a Compaq Presario from 1995 since I opened this account, does that rate?
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
I always imagined that the current generation that grew up as natives in the connected tech-world would know more about it. They're all fucking morons, they're intensely dependent on social media and devices but know less about them than people twice their age that don't actually give a shit but understands that if they want to get out on Instagram and things aren't working they can at least try to pull cables and mess with settings to see if it solves things, just like in the 90's when things didn't work.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
Today, the command line is mostly a meme for people who like to LARP as "power users". There are very few practical applications left that still land in the sweet spot for CLI - not completely automated to the point of zero interactivity, but also not requiring much in the way of visualization, selection, review of data, or iteration. Even fewer of these applications are for end users.
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2018
You clearly use Windows and have never actually done any programming whatsoever. If you want to run any code you pretty much have to use the CLI.
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2020
Last year, this YouTuber actually observed and located an old warehouse that sells, or used to sell, old computers from almost 20+ years ago.
And this coincidentally was made a month ago on where you can find retro computers. I might actually watch this one tomorrow. It seems pretty interesting.
You somehow managed to describe the early 2010’s young millennial before Generation Z came along and hijacked the MacIntosh computer for nostalgic, vaporwave purposes.
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2020
Thanks to those pesky Zoomers, I have a bitch of a time when trying to do a search on anything related to my Mac Plus.
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- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
I used to have a 13" android eink tablet. Some eink screens are super quick (for eink) and can also switch into a "1-bit" (strict black/white) mode to be even faster, on top of that comes partial refresh. You wouldn't be able to play doom on such a screen in a way that's fun but you can kinda do mouse-cursor driven GUIs and slower games like adventures for example. Text-only console (if you can live with the lag) works pretty well, even more so if you switch to bitmap fonts to be able to use that fast mode without any visual deterioration. There are ghosting issues if you run the screen like that though, they're not distracting though, it's like seeing the writing of a different page through the paper if that makes sense. I liked the screen and it's absolutely amazing on the eyes, but I didn't like the shitty, ancient and exploitable kernel, chinkware-infested Android on top of it (leave it to the chinese to make an $800 device feel like a supermarket noname special-deal-of-the-week tablet) and ended up getting rid of it fairly quickly. Waveshare sells an 10,3" HDMI-connectable e-ink screen that explicitly has no OS and needs no special drivers and does everything via an FPGA and that might be interesting but at 450 bucks it's kinda expensive for what it is. Also like many eink screens it runs at an absolutely bonkers resolution (1872x1404) which you won't be able to squeeze out of most old computers. Would be interesting to look at it in emulation though. At least with WinUAE and it's uae gfx card driver it should work pretty well for standard workbench.
I remember the times when people had to hunt down obscenely expensive and rare industrial IDE/SCSI adapter solutions when the SCSI drives started to disappear. (Funnily, the IDE drives have disappeared now too) For a while I also used to hook up modern USCSI drives to these old computers as SCSI is a backwards compatible protocol (actually didn't work with every drive so what the specs required and what the manufacturers did where two different things like so very often) but these drives were intended for servers and insanely loud, (15k RPM) hot and power hungry. Nowadays I wouldn't bother with any of that anymore. All these modern SCSI solutions really are a godsend. I still have a few computers/controllers that require winchester drives and I doubt there's any ready-made solution for that.
I'd run a virus scanner over the final result. I picked up some ancient viruses in unexpected places before.
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2017
I don't own any retro hardware buy I enjoy 6502 programming for the NES and C64.
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2017
Already accounted for. I had an old iBook in my closet. It's not having a good day, or at this rate, probably month.
Stuffit is having an aneurysm over that folder but it did get past the hours of beachballing to give me a progress bar. That's the entire contents of the info-mac and umich FTPs (archives within archives!) plus about 40GB of unsorted crap from internet archive's software category being filtered through 256MB of ram on a 800mhz G3.
E: If anyone happens to know if there's a linux tool that can properly uncompress .sit/.hqx with the resource forks intact onto a HFS volume please let me know so I can spare this computer's life.
E2 : Aww yeah, Norton actually found something. Makes me really nostalgic for the times when it was actually a useful tool.
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fuckidunno
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 24, 2019
sadly, in the mid-later part of the 90s GUI really effected the blind - not just in general use, but phone tech support was a job a number of blind guys I knew would do.
that employment opportunity ended
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2020
the 8bit guy looks like a soft shell turtle
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
Later Boards from around that vintage usually also fit into ATX cases if style isn't a concern. Many of them even have ATX power supply connectors, it was around the time ATX showed up after all. You can also buy ATX shields where only the hole for the AT keyboard connector is cut out. Or just buy blank shields and cut the hole yourself if you can.
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2014
I'm still waiting for new keycaps for my Amiga 1200.
I should probably use it again at some point.
I should probably use it again at some point.
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2020
When is he going to make a video about his fat goth e-girl addiction?
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
I'm kinda thinking about biting on one of the Checkmate A1500 Plus cases to give one of my A1200s a practical home now that they're back in stock, especially because I don't really care a lot for the original keyboard case and it doesn't work well with expansions. I plan to outfit it with a Blizzard 1230 IV and Delfina soundcard if, Allah willing, I can get the latter one to stably run. I was also fantasizing about some tiny inbuilt ARM connected via serial or somesuch I could reach via ARexx scripting for specific functions. I never was a big fan of the AGA Amigas (in fact, brought my A1200 back to the store to buy an 486) because quite frankly back in the day they kinda sucked and were too little, too late but nowadays 256 colors are an attractive proposition. I also do have older Amigas with graphics cards but in my experience the graphics cards (to reach 256 colors) just don't work well with like, 90% of applications as they all bypass the OS to directly bitbang registers. 200 bucks though. Ouch.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
Does anyone actually have a good plan how to display old DOS era resolutions on modern screens in ways that don't suck? I have a few 5:4 displays here but none of them (even the very new, 3 year old one) has the capability to scale to aspect so they all stretch the picture. Widescreen monitors usually understand 720x400 and 640x400 (320x200 embedded) as 19:10 widescreen resolution which I guess is actually technically correct but wasn't the intention when displayed on 4:3 CRTs. Also any 1920x1600 monitor I could find does biliniar scaling which lead to blurriness which becomes even more noticeable on such relatively big screens. (too big for the old DOS stuff anyways, IMHO) The few that offer 1:1 resolution display usually make the actual picture end up in a tiny area because of course these screens are so high res.
The only visually satisfying solution I could find is to feed the analog VGA signal into an OSSC and then feed that via hdmi into a framemeister which can be set to not scale and "squish" the image into a 4:3 aspect and "embed" it into a signal which is at the appropriate resolution of the monitor. This also has the advantage that you can set the framemeister to drop frames to bring the signal down from the usual 70 to 60 Hz which more monitors work with. It has the framemeister-inbuilt problems though, namely poor reds (hardware bug AFAIK) and ringing on some resolutions, also long black-outs when the resolution changes which some software just does willy nilly sometimes to just display one screen. Generally does look great though, an "old game" 640x400 non-moving picture from my old Cirrus-Logic using 286 is visually basically indistinguishable from dosbox on the same screen.
Amigas work perfectly with the OSSC and with a bit of fiddling you can get a pixel-perfect display on a 1280x1024 monitor. Nobody has a better solution for old DOS machines than what I came up with? That chain of devices feels kinda crazy..
The only visually satisfying solution I could find is to feed the analog VGA signal into an OSSC and then feed that via hdmi into a framemeister which can be set to not scale and "squish" the image into a 4:3 aspect and "embed" it into a signal which is at the appropriate resolution of the monitor. This also has the advantage that you can set the framemeister to drop frames to bring the signal down from the usual 70 to 60 Hz which more monitors work with. It has the framemeister-inbuilt problems though, namely poor reds (hardware bug AFAIK) and ringing on some resolutions, also long black-outs when the resolution changes which some software just does willy nilly sometimes to just display one screen. Generally does look great though, an "old game" 640x400 non-moving picture from my old Cirrus-Logic using 286 is visually basically indistinguishable from dosbox on the same screen.
Amigas work perfectly with the OSSC and with a bit of fiddling you can get a pixel-perfect display on a 1280x1024 monitor. Nobody has a better solution for old DOS machines than what I came up with? That chain of devices feels kinda crazy..
totallyrandomusername
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2021
My focus is mainly laptops from the DOS 5-6 / Windows 3.1 era. I have a few that need to be recapped, and then I'm going to try and perform an upgrade on one of them. In theory on paper, it should work, or it might fuck everything up. We'll see.