sf78 wrote on 2021-02-09, 11:48:

That's what I mean. You have FB, Tube, Whatsapp/Signal, news etc. that use check out all the time for no good reason draining your battery. I'd rather take a smaller phone with bigger battery than these mini tablets we have now. Apple mentioned releasing a small form factor phone this year and I really hope Android manufacturers will do the same. 5.5" would be the max size I'm comfortable with, so basically giving an option buying the same size that was the norm 5-10 years ago.

Feature phones are still sold today and they are dirt cheap. I have a Nokia 130 Dual (2017) as a secondary phone.
There are also apps for smart phones that let you limit your usage.

You can use Screen Time on iOS to limit your time. But honestly the best thing to do is to remove social media apps. I have whatsapp and instagram on my phone but I rarely get something from it, I just check CSS/HTML related posts on Instagram. You don’t need notifications of social media 24/7.

At the end of the day I only have about 20/40% left depending of my usage. And charge it when I go to sleep (usually around midnight). Now working remotely, I almost do not check my phone.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-02-09, 03:17:

The furture doesn't exist.. It's always NOW. Still waiting for my Jetsons style hover car to turn up.

The collapse of the future into the present is future shock. The Jetsons are hauntological retrofuturism.

On topic, I feel closer to the 90s knowing the pretender to the Pentium name was overthrown and the lineage of the Pentium Pro/Pentium II/Pentium III was restored. I can sleep at night after using a LGA775 board for a 9x build.

"hauntological "? My that is one big word I need to look up on...

"Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology) is a neologism introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. The concept refers to the return or persistence of elements from the past, as in the manner of a ghost."

After I build them i quickly loose interest in them, ive got 15 built, fully configured and everything installed but I havn't used one in the last year

candle_86 wrote on 2021-02-12, 05:48:

After I build them i quickly loose interest in them, ive got 15 built, fully configured and everything installed but I havn't used one in the last year

I think Iunderstand you . I love tweaking, testing and upgrading my setup . Playing games is fun too, sometimes. However, I think that I am at my happiest when something does not work as planned or breaks and I need to fix it or work around it .

darry wrote on 2021-02-12, 05:56:

candle_86 wrote on 2021-02-12, 05:48:

After I build them i quickly loose interest in them, ive got 15 built, fully configured and everything installed but I havn't used one in the last year

I think Iunderstand you . I love tweaking, testing and upgrading my setup . Playing games is fun too, sometimes. However, I think that I am at my happiest when something does not work as planned or breaks and I need to fix it or work around it .

Excatly, my Radeon 9700 Pro was dead oh 4 months ago when I turned on my XP 2800 system i like to boot them up once a month before turning them off, dunno why I just do, but I noticed the 9700 Pro wasn't displaying, took it out and tested it in 2 other computers and same issues no display. So I bought a 9800 Pro for cheap on ebay, installed it, ran 3dmark, then turned off the computer, ive turned it one 3 times since then, and then off a day later, still havn't played a single game on it.

these are fully working, on 3 KVM Switches and ready to go on my desk, but none are used, and 3 are on the floor same working condition.

1 AMD 5x86 133 - 32mb FPM - S3 Trio64 PCI - 8gb HDD - DOS 6.22/Windows 3.1
2 Intel Pentium 60 - Batman's Revenge - 32mb FPM - S3 Trio64+ - 8gb HDD - Windows 95
3 Intel Pentium MMX 233 - ASUS TX Board - 64mb SD-Ram - Riva 128 PCI - 10gb HDD - Windows 98FE
4 AMD K6-3+ 550 - Epox MVP3C2 - 128mb PC 100 - Voodoo 3 2000 - 20gb HDD - Windows 98SE
5 AMD Athlon 700 - FIC SD11 - 256mb PC100 - Riva TNT2 - 20gb HDD - Windows 98SE
6 Pentium III 933 - ASUS CUSL2 - 512mb PC133 - Geforce256 - 40gb HDD - Windows ME
7 Athlon 1133 - HP Board - 512mb PC2100 - Geforce 2 GTS - 60gb HDD - Windows ME
8 Pentium 4 1.7 - Intel 850 Board - 1gb PC800 RDRAM - Geforce 4 Ti 4600 - Windows 2000
9 Athlon XP 2800 - SOYO KT600 Dragon - 1gb PC3200 - Radeon 9800 Pro - Windows XP
10 Pentium 4 3.4C - MSI 865PE - 2gb DDR 500 - Radeon X850 XT PE - Windows XP
11 Athlon 64 3200 - FIC K8T800 - 2gb DDR 400 - Geforce 7800GS - Windows XP
12 Athlon 64 3700 - ASUS A8N-SLI - 4gb DDR 400 - Geforce 7900GTX SLI - Windows XP
13 Athlon 64 X2 6000 - ASUS A8N-E SLI - 4gb DDR2 1066 - Geforce 8800GTS 512 - Windows XP
14 Phenom II X4 955 - ASUS M4A77T/USB3 - 8gb DDR3 1600 - Geforce GTX 570 - Windows Vista
15 Athlon XP-M 1800 - HP Laptop - Radeon 7500-M - Windows XP Home

I built two systems. One is a P3, the other is a Pentium 1. Both with 3DFX. One with an SB16 in it and Windows 95.
Once complete (don't get me wrong, it took a lot of tweaking over the years), I don't tweak them anymore.
Now I enjoy them and play games on them. For example, Doom Zero on Windows 98SE with AWE64 midi and LZDOOM.

Considering the lot of people who only tweak a lot of systems, the lines above sound like a retro confession, I guess. 😁

I'm at my parents place for the first time since September; my retro rig (SS7 K6-II Win98SE) is here, and I have absolutely no desire to tinker with it or even turn it on at all.

candle_86 wrote on 2021-02-12, 05:48:

After I build them i quickly loose interest in them, ive got 15 built, fully configured and everything installed but I havn't used one in the last year

I can relate to this. I was sold a fully decked out 486 system a few years ago and I never even used it because without having built it myself, I had no emotional connection to it. I ended up selling it on to someone else.

Even the stuff I build myself doesn't get touched as often as it should...

I can't believe people recommend Audigys for Win 98 builds. Having just fought with one over the last 2 days, the experience has been awful. Firstly the driver installation process is slow, and the bundled software is bloated with crapware, not all of which you can de-select (I'm looking at you annoying splash screen). What is with the unstoppable silent upgrade of DirectX? And of course every time you close the installation launcher, it leaves a little turd on your desktop should you choose not to register. Next, getting it working with some semblance of DOS support, which why wouldn't you given many games up to 1997 were still DOS under the hood, is an absolute nightmare if you don't have an ISA motherboard + sound card. Either spend hours fighting to get it working along side another PCI sound card with DOS support, or deal with its own horrible DOS drivers and glitchy SB 16 emulation. I'm sure its a fine choice for XP, and probably fine with 98 if you have an ISA slot + card to cover DOS support, but holy hell I would stay away if you're building a PCI only Win 98 rig.

Sorry that was more of a retro rant than a confession...just had to get it out. Better EAX is absolutely not worth the hassle I just went through. Please tell me the Vortex 2 experience is better.

draetheus wrote on 2021-02-14, 02:52:

I can't believe people recommend Audigys for Win 98 builds. Having just fought with one over the last 2 days, the experience has been awful. Firstly the driver installation process is slow, and the bundled software is bloated with crapware, not all of which you can de-select (I'm looking at you annoying splash screen). What is with the unstoppable silent upgrade of DirectX? And of course every time you close the installation launcher, it leaves a little turd on your desktop should you choose not to register. Next, getting it working with some semblance of DOS support, which why wouldn't you given many games up to 1997 were still DOS under the hood, is an absolute nightmare if you don't have an ISA motherboard + sound card. Either spend hours fighting to get it working along side another PCI sound card with DOS support, or deal with its own horrible DOS drivers and glitchy SB 16 emulation. I'm sure its a fine choice for XP, and probably fine with 98 if you have an ISA slot + card to cover DOS support, but holy hell I would stay away if you're building a PCI only Win 98 rig.

Sorry that was more of a retro rant than a confession...just had to get it out. Better EAX is absolutely not worth the hassle I just went through. Please tell me the Vortex 2 experience is better.

Audigy2ZS and a Vortex2 are both essential sound cards for late-98 builds. That's exactly what I run, and an AWE64Gold alongside the ZS. Don't recall any issues with the ZS - in fact it was the guests card I found that worked with this Via chipset after SBLive and Audigy1 failures.

I've got a new one - for years I've lamented only having 8GB CF cards, after my few small capacity HDDs failed and I didn't want to spend more money on a drive that could also fail any time. 8GB isn't very much space on a fast Windows 98 system!

But then years later (today) I remembered I can limit the capacity of a much bigger, newer IDE HDD to 32ishGB. So I'm building a fast Windows 98 PC to celebrate.

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2021-02-16, 17:55:

I've got a new one - for years I've lamented only having 8GB CF cards, after my few small capacity HDDs failed and I didn't want to spend more money on a drive that could also fail any time. 8GB isn't very much space on a fast Windows 98 system!

But then years later (today) I remembered I can limit the capacity of a much bigger, newer IDE HDD to 32ishGB. So I'm building a fast Windows 98 PC to celebrate.

Glad that it works for you . Unfortunately, hard drives are pretty much consumables, so even that is a stop-gap solution, IMHO . I try to base my storage solutions, even for retro applications, on hardware that has a chance of being available in the long-term .

There are ways to get much bigger drives working reliably in Windows 98 SE, as long as your disk controller is LBA48 capable . See Re: Formating and partitioning disk for MSDOS 6.22

kolderman wrote on 2021-02-14, 03:06:

draetheus wrote on 2021-02-14, 02:52:

I can't believe people recommend Audigys for Win 98 builds. Having just fought with one over the last 2 days, the experience has been awful. Firstly the driver installation process is slow, and the bundled software is bloated with crapware, not all of which you can de-select (I'm looking at you annoying splash screen). What is with the unstoppable silent upgrade of DirectX? And of course every time you close the installation launcher, it leaves a little turd on your desktop should you choose not to register. Next, getting it working with some semblance of DOS support, which why wouldn't you given many games up to 1997 were still DOS under the hood, is an absolute nightmare if you don't have an ISA motherboard + sound card. Either spend hours fighting to get it working along side another PCI sound card with DOS support, or deal with its own horrible DOS drivers and glitchy SB 16 emulation. I'm sure its a fine choice for XP, and probably fine with 98 if you have an ISA slot + card to cover DOS support, but holy hell I would stay away if you're building a PCI only Win 98 rig.

Sorry that was more of a retro rant than a confession...just had to get it out. Better EAX is absolutely not worth the hassle I just went through. Please tell me the Vortex 2 experience is better.

Audigy2ZS and a Vortex2 are both essential sound cards for late-98 builds. That's exactly what I run, and an AWE64Gold alongside the ZS. Don't recall any issues with the ZS - in fact it was the guests card I found that worked with this Via chipset after SBLive and Audigy1 failures.

Except for wanting to play a few late 90's games that won't work properly in modern Windows on modern hardware such as Nightmare Ned I want nothing to do with Windows 9x/ME or any hardware from that time period ever again. Windows 10 so far has always installed drivers automatically without any trouble whatsoever and I don't think I have had any crash yet and next to none as far as crap/bloatware goes. Reading your story I get flashbacks of a half a dozen 3.5" disks and installing a ton of shitware just to get a stupid Sound Blaster 16 card to work in Windows 3.11. It turned out I didn't need half of the stuff the installers tried to shove down my throat. I also found out almost all DOS games worked without any of that crap at all. Oh, and having Windows 3.11 freeze at random when switching from fullscreen to windowed and back because for some reason my S3 Trio video card drivers didn't work properly was loads of fun. Although that could be related to a bad RAM chip which made installing Windows 95 impossible until that bad chip was finally discovered. After that ram chip had been replaced I could run Windows 9x and even Windows 2000 on that particular machine although just barely.

Nightmare Ned works fine on Windows 10 with dgVoodoo2.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2021-02-17, 09:47:

Nightmare Ned works fine on Windows 10 with dgVoodoo2.

You must have 32 bit Windows 10, right? I forgot to mention I use 64 bit. The game has 16 bit installers for its components while it is a 32 bit game. I found a replacement installer for the game, but then got stuck unable to get DirectX to be installed. Sigh.

I was talking about 64 bit Windows.
I used a VM in order to replicate what its installer does in a new 32 bit installation wizard built with InnoSetup.
You don't need to install DirectX, everything needed is already installed. DirectX is a Windows component since Windows 98.

Here is part of a post I made while back on this forum:

When I started this thread I was trying to get the game to work in a Virtual Machine because for some reason that is beyond me a 16-bit installer was supplied for a 32-bit game. Any way, I found a way to install Nightmare Ned on 64-bit Windows. This page https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10988 refers to a 32-bit Setup program that can replace the Setup.exe that comes with the game. It can be downloaded from here: http://toastytech.com/files/Is3Engine.zip - just copy it to the folder containing Setup.exe and run that instead. The game installs now. Unfortunately I still can't play it because some files called dino2d.dll and dmix.dll can't be found by the game. Does anyone have any idea what these files are? As far as I can tell it has to do with the ancient version of DirectX required by this game.

There is a Redist folder containing DxInstal.exe among the setup files which appears to exit immediately without doing anything once started.

Questions:
1. Exactly what kind of VM did you use?
2. What is InnoSetup?
3. Did you use a VM to install the game only, or is the game running in a VM too?