don't worry vetz, it's common stuff... people only remember what they had and automatically assume it was the //best// ... but in most cases it was only the best because they hadn't anything to compare with. I mean if the Live! made sounds it should be the best right? 🤣 unless you are on some retro-related forum you will hear all sorts of crap 🤣

I remember I fell into the Live! hype back then... I immensely enjoyed EAX but I was devastated to find it actually sounded worse than the Yamaha WaveForce192XG I upgraded from. The sound quality difference was huge even in mp3s of the era...

I did once and I was taunted as if it were my main machine. 🤣

vetz wrote:

Do you guys share your knowledge about retro hardware on forums where people talk more about modern general hardware?

How do you deal with people who just think you are talking out of your ass and don't believe a single fact you say? Mostly because it crashes with their 10-20 year old memory of the subject which is heavily dented?

One subject is how the majority in general forums believe the Soundblaster Live! PCI card was the best of the best (since everyone had one back in 1999-2000 I guess?) and Aureal sucked ass. If I try to say otherwise then I get hammered down.

I see it on Youtube when some 20 year old kid who thinks he knows everything posts an ignorant comment under a video about 386 or 486 systems. The comments usually range from insulting the owner of the system for still using something that old to mouthing off about how much he THINKS he knows about old computers but is filled with numerous errors and then when someone points them out the next post he makes is filled with swears and insults.

I see it on Youtube when some 20 year old kid who thinks he knows everything posts an ignorant comment under a video about 386 or 486 systems.

And most likely it's similarly ignorant 20 year old (or, perhaps more realistically, 15 year old) kids posting their stupidity on the tech forums. "Enthusiast" type boards seem to attract the worst of them, where they fancy themselves 1337 overclockers just because they read the instructions and changed a couple BIOS settings. I'd imagine a lot of the people shitting on Aureal cards, for instance, haven't ever even seen an Aureal card before.

Shit like that is exactly why I don't bother visiting most tech forums anymore... I can almost feel my brain cells committing seppuku just reading through the fucktarded posts in most of those places (and not just the ones about retro hardware). It's just not worth the time to wade through the crap to find the rare knowledgeable insights.

Seeing a signature image of some sort of car next to high-end intel-powered geforce-powered system specs should be a drinking game.

Even in communities based on old "famous" FPS games isn't safe from the pretentious and dumb. This is a nice example of one such situation in which some young "big fan" (Dirge) misunderstood a technical term and even makes a "carmack is a sell out!!" post.

Notably that same person used to go to a forum that specialized in betas and all of his posts were bugging for betas of fps games for stocking up on his crappy 'history of fps' freewebs site. He was banned there too.

He also used multiple accounts on youtube and demanded that I share Q3A betas - which I don't have and which were never leaked, all because I posted a January 1999-dated Pentium III launch video that was publicly released then. among those comments were these ignorant 'beta is better' comments.

yeah i'd say beta-obsessing kids are just a similar annoying group as those. They take away the element of curiosity discovery of developmental insights in the hobby for a misleading greedy "because betas are better" placebo effect one for ego hoarding and eBragging (which is probably natural selection working as they've just soiled their reputation. see WhywasIBanned for hilarious bans over kids wondering why their hacked xboxes were banned for playing games that weren't officially released yet).

That case sounds like it's way ahead of simple "ignorant kid" territory, possibly deep into "serious personality disorder" zone.

I'm highly amused by this thread.

I am, compared to the immense majority of the users in this forum, an utter ignorant of retro hardware. Yet, even considering that back then I was a teen, I used to install and configure a lot of DOS, Windows 95, 98, 98SE... and so on machines. I had, of course, the dreaded experiences of not being paid a dime, but on the other hand that wasn't always the case so I managed to buy some (usually second hand) hardware and have more cash than the majority of my friends. Do not misunderstood my "ignorannce": I have fond memories of the late times of DOS games, of the 3D accelerator cards craze, of how dreadful was Windows ME... and I treasure many moments of amazement and wonder at new technologies, or the sense of accomplishment being succesful in setting up a certain configuration, "making things work". I think that's the reason many of us are here talking about such things. Until very recently I had some truly false notions of a lot of stuff. I, too, thought that the Live! series was the way to go in gaming even though I maintained my SB16 ISA card installed well into the PIII era. Or that, for that case, I was (and I still um) a complete n00b about MIDI synthesizers and all the difference they make.

Yet if the matter of old (PC) hardware ever arises on the forums I usually participate the most, then I'm looked at with even some kind of reverence. "Do you remember the release of Doom?" "Yep" "The FIRST Doom?" and things like that. And even when new hardware still entices me (I'm the owner of, for example, an ASUS Xonar Essence STX card and a last-generation-as-of-now nVidia card for example) I deeply envy some of you who have a lot of old hardware I could only see in magazines and the (rare) times I could connect to the Internet. Last Easter, for example, I had a delightful weekend running different games with diverse graphics card: from trying to run Half-Life on software rendering for enjoying my OEM copy of Terminal Velocity with S3 acceleration.

The best (worst?) part about retro threads on non-retro sites is having a little shit reminisce about its system when it was 10, and it's now 14!

Post something and be rewarded with a flurry of ghetto-wanna-be-language. Post your old system or parts and get a mountain of shit from some little turd who doesn't understand that this is one of your retro systems and that your main rig (or even your back-ups) will eat his little LED infested plastic junk for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sad.

I don't even bother with other sites anymore even for new hardware as I find I can get better answers from the community here. I've posted asking about Core 2, AMD Ph2 and FX and new cases amongst others, and gotten better insights here from people who actually own and know how to use the stuff, rather than someone who is all "theory" only.

leileilol wrote:

yeah i'd say beta-obsessing kids are just a similar annoying group as those. They take away the element of curiosity discovery of developmental insights in the hobby for a misleading greedy "because betas are better" placebo effect

Ain't that right. Also happens with unreleased games. Upload just one video of it on youtube and you're sure to get a few comments like these:

"Please share Download link!"
"I cried when I watched this, this game would have been so amazing"
"This is so much better than final, I want to play the beta"

As if beta is just one specific build.

As for Aureal, I really wanted to like the Vortex 2 and I somewhat do. If it weren't for that DB header I would have sold it years ago.
Personally, I could never get A3D to work properly outside of the demos included with the drivers (possibly a faulty card?) and I'm not really sold on the SB Pro emulation, the FM synth emulation is awful and the sound effects on the SB Pro part are muffled. On top of that the drivers can prove problematic.
That's not to say the Live! is a fantastic card or anything, I hate a lot of things about it, but it still is my PCI card of choice for 1999-2000 rigs.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

I see it on Youtube when some 20 year old kid who thinks he knows everything posts an ignorant comment under a video about 386 or 486 systems.

And most likely it's similarly ignorant 20 year old (or, perhaps more realistically, 15 year old) kids posting their stupidity on the tech forums. "Enthusiast" type boards seem to attract the worst of them, where they fancy themselves 1337 overclockers just because they read the instructions and changed a couple BIOS settings. I'd imagine a lot of the people shitting on Aureal cards, for instance, haven't ever even seen an Aureal card before.

Shit like that is exactly why I don't bother visiting most tech forums anymore... I can almost feel my brain cells committing seppuku just reading through the fucktarded posts in most of those places (and not just the ones about retro hardware). It's just not worth the time to wade through the crap to find the rare knowledgeable insights.

When I was hired at Creative Labs, they had just acquired Aureal, and one of my duties was to take their systems, remove their sound cards, and any video cards that weren't branded by us, and replace them with our hardware, then image the hard drives.

It wasn't easy to get permission to use an unused piece of hardware, either even though they were just gonna throw it out. Makes me sad, now because I had to toss some Voodoo2 sli setups, an original Obsidian 3D and who knows what else. It was old stuff at the time, but if I just had it in my hands, now. RAWR!

Logistics wrote:

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

I see it on Youtube when some 20 year old kid who thinks he knows everything posts an ignorant comment under a video about 386 or 486 systems.

And most likely it's similarly ignorant 20 year old (or, perhaps more realistically, 15 year old) kids posting their stupidity on the tech forums. "Enthusiast" type boards seem to attract the worst of them, where they fancy themselves 1337 overclockers just because they read the instructions and changed a couple BIOS settings. I'd imagine a lot of the people shitting on Aureal cards, for instance, haven't ever even seen an Aureal card before.

Shit like that is exactly why I don't bother visiting most tech forums anymore... I can almost feel my brain cells committing seppuku just reading through the fucktarded posts in most of those places (and not just the ones about retro hardware). It's just not worth the time to wade through the crap to find the rare knowledgeable insights.

When I was hired at Creative Labs, they had just acquired Aureal, and one of my duties was to take their systems, remove their sound cards, and any video cards that weren't branded by us, and replace them with our hardware, then image the hard drives.

It wasn't easy to get permission to use an unused piece of hardware, either even though they were just gonna throw it out. Makes me sad, now because I had to toss some Voodoo2 sli setups, an original Obsidian 3D and who knows what else. It was old stuff at the time, but if I just had it in my hands, now. RAWR!

Wow, you worked at Creative Labs. Would be grateful if sometime you share something of your experiences there 😉

I've never actually used an SB Live. I kept using ISA Sound Blasters until switching to onboard audio. But my memory of the SB Live time period was constantly reading about problems people were having with them. It seemed to me there was a lot of negativity about them, but I guess I wasn't getting the big picture.

I think the worst computer forum I've seen is probably Tom's Hardware. Anandtech might be just as bad. I'm not a member of those but their threads frequently come up in web searches. It seems that 80% of their threads are bogged down in flame wars. Most of the threads that end politely are the ones where somebody posted ignorant advice, and nobody argued against it. Very few have both a satisfying resolution and courtesy at the same time. I think their problem is that they're too big. When a forum grows too large it starts to go downhill in my opinion.
Discussing old hardware on most modern PC forums is pretty futile I think. Everyone just wants you to buy new stuff, even when it isn't needed. One way they rationalize it is to assume that old hardware is a power hog, despite measurable facts to the contrary. I think the real reason is that they don't know anything about the older hardware, so their first instinct is to push it out of the discussion. A site like VOGONS has a more broad perspective.

I've been impressed with the maturity of people on VOGONS. I've been on other forums where you're walking on eggshells trying to state an opinion without somebody finding a way to be offended. On VOGONS there's been times I posted things I worried would be controversial, but people here don't take personal insult from the fact that they disagree and are refreshingly intelligent and diplomatic about it. I guess that's a result of the demographics that visit the site. I'm sure age is a factor but I don't think it's the only one - there's nutty forum users out there of all ages. For whatever reason, the subject here seems to attract people with a more well-adjusted, less paranoid personality.

shamino wrote:

I've been impressed with the maturity of people on VOGONS. I've been on other forums where you're walking on eggshells trying to state an opinion without somebody finding a way to be offended. On VOGONS there's been times I posted things I worried would be controversial, but people here don't take personal insult from the fact that they disagree and are refreshingly intelligent and diplomatic about it. I guess that's a result of the demographics that visit the site. I'm sure age is a factor but I don't think it's the only one - there's nutty forum users out there of all ages. For whatever reason, the subject here seems to attract people with a more well-adjusted, less paranoid personality.

I was going to say that I feel it's highly due to most of us being old farts or old souls. 😀

I've posted some of my builds on a couple of other Australian forums and the reception was generally favourable. I did get one or two threadshitters but I just ignore them and they go away 😀
They were general tech forums that had been around a long time, not just gaming forums, which may point to a generally older member base that appreciates or remembers the older technology. Gaming-centric forums seem to attract a younger member base that doesn't care for old tech - or if they do, they just obsess over Zelda/Mario in a misguided attempt to appear cool. (I feel sorry for those kids who missed out on all the cool DOS and Win9x games of the 90's).
I won a $100 Logitech mouse from one forum for post of the month as well 😀

shamino wrote:

I've never actually used an SB Live. I kept using ISA Sound Blasters until switching to onboard audio. But my memory of the SB L […]
Show full quote

I've never actually used an SB Live. I kept using ISA Sound Blasters until switching to onboard audio. But my memory of the SB Live time period was constantly reading about problems people were having with them. It seemed to me there was a lot of negativity about them, but I guess I wasn't getting the big picture.

I think the worst computer forum I've seen is probably Tom's Hardware. Anandtech might be just as bad. I'm not a member of those but their threads frequently come up in web searches. It seems that 80% of their threads are bogged down in flame wars. Most of the threads that end politely are the ones where somebody posted ignorant advice, and nobody argued against it. Very few have both a satisfying resolution and courtesy at the same time. I think their problem is that they're too big. When a forum grows too large it starts to go downhill in my opinion.
Discussing old hardware on most modern PC forums is pretty futile I think. Everyone just wants you to buy new stuff, even when it isn't needed. One way they rationalize it is to assume that old hardware is a power hog, despite measurable facts to the contrary. I think the real reason is that they don't know anything about the older hardware, so their first instinct is to push it out of the discussion. A site like VOGONS has a more broad perspective.

I've been impressed with the maturity of people on VOGONS. I've been on other forums where you're walking on eggshells trying to state an opinion without somebody finding a way to be offended. On VOGONS there's been times I posted things I worried would be controversial, but people here don't take personal insult from the fact that they disagree and are refreshingly intelligent and diplomatic about it. I guess that's a result of the demographics that visit the site. I'm sure age is a factor but I don't think it's the only one - there's nutty forum users out there of all ages. For whatever reason, the subject here seems to attract people with a more well-adjusted, less paranoid personality.

Techpowerup is a better review site than Tom's or Anand's.

Techpowerup rocks and it's a review directory as well. On top of that, awesome downloads and excellent old stuff archived there too.

Although I'd like to talk about retro gear on other sites it seems like everyone is in this big rush to have the newest and the best (e-peen!?). Sadly new hardware hardly excites me like did in the 90's. I cannot say its just my age that causes it either.

I didn't try a Aureal card till a couple of years ago. I was disappointed about drivers and game issues I seemed to always be running into with the 2 I own. I eventually did settle on the SB Live! PCI. It just works (most of the time). I also buy into the PCI being less of a resource hog than ISA. The less things stealing cpu cycles the better 😉 Audigy drivers are not very good with windows 98se or else that would be stuck in my Taulatin rig.

Gotta wonder why didn't anyone/team carry the torch on driver development after Creative killed Aureal. 3Dfx Development didn't stop just because they got shutdown.

I recently made the mistake of asking in the EQEmu forums if anyone plays EQ on the emulated servers using vintage hardware and you should have seen the sheer ignorance and rank stupidity on display. It was like every troll with an internet connection suddenly showed up all at once. Not a single person had a kind word to say about running the game on vintage hardware and most were flat out dicks about it.

sliderider wrote:

I see it on Youtube when some 20 year old kid who thinks he knows everything posts an ignorant comment under a video about 386 or 486 systems. The comments usually range from insulting the owner of the system for still using something that old to mouthing off about how much he THINKS he knows about old computers but is filled with numerous errors and then when someone points them out the next post he makes is filled with swears and insults.

Something like this? Heck, we are talking P3 here!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwU1tQD-Was