Re: What did your home PC space/room look like in the mid 90s?

Posted on 2024-07-23, 21:42

by

by creepingnet

in Milliways

in Milliways

I grew up in a split family, and my sisters....the lucky brats they were, got to have their rich daddy BUY them a HOUSE for their college years in Auburn. I would go there on the weekends and they had not one but TWO computers.....an AMT 386 machine with VGA/DOS5, which my older sister in Vet …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2024-07-20, 07:15

by

by creepingnet

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Been installing games on the NanTan FMAK9200D - Wing Commander 3 and the 11th Hour. So yeah, more gigabytes of ISOs being run virtualized by a 486 with a insane sized HDD. THe install of OpenBSD did not work out, I managed to avoid the 63 sector offset but failed to mark the partition active...not …

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Re: What did your home PC space/room look like in the mid 90s?

Posted on 2024-07-20, 07:01

by

by creepingnet

in Milliways

in Milliways

I grew up in a split family, and my sisters....the lucky brats they were, got to have their rich daddy BUY them a HOUSE for their college years in Auburn. I would go there on the weekends and they had not one but TWO computers.....an AMT 386 machine with VGA/DOS5, which my older sister in Vet school …

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Re: Cleaning and Upgrading My First PC which I've had since 1994

Posted on 2024-07-20, 05:42

by

by creepingnet

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

DUDE, the IBM PC-330 100DX4 - T/C 6571-XXX - never let that one go. I had one in the early 2000's and it was a beast! I used to run Diablo over Battle.net on it in Windows 98 SE with almost zero lag on 56K Dial-up. I wish I still had it. Those punch pretty far above their weight class.

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Re: Design choices you will never forgive

Posted on 2024-07-18, 20:44

by

by creepingnet

in Milliways

in Milliways

I stuck retro on my original post...but since we're going modern.....I will only expound if replied because I have a lot to say on all of these....and a lot of gripes with modern tech due to poor implementation..... - Microsoft Windows Update - Microsoft Edge - Windows 11 - SaaS - Web 2.0/3.0 - Roku …

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Re: Fastest emulators period

Posted on 2024-07-18, 18:35

by

by creepingnet

in Console & Arcade Emulation

in Console & Arcade Emulation

The three fastest were SNES9x, ZSNES, and ESNES - with ESNES being the fastest. I distinctly remember ESNES being the slowest - their early soundless releases had no assembly! Later on that became NLKE and had very slow transparency emulation. Could have been a code optimization weirdness or …

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Re: Fastest emulators period

Posted on 2024-07-18, 05:39

by

by creepingnet

in Console & Arcade Emulation

in Console & Arcade Emulation

The fastest for me being a NES and Atari 2600 guy were NESTICLE and Paul Robeson's A26 (with Z26, based on A26's sourcecode, coming up near second). I still have em' running on my 486 to this day. Virtual GameBoy is another good one that's very zippy, I'm sure having Adlib for the sound on the …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2024-07-17, 16:53

by

by creepingnet

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Installing a more *modern* O/S on my 486 DX4-100 Desktop....lol....burned some CD's, tried some stuff....this is what I Found.... - Damn Small Linux - not enough RAM (64MB) - TinyCore Linux - not enough RAM (64MB) - NetBSD - too big for a regular CD (746MB vs. 600ish MB) - OpenBSD - Perfectumundo …

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Re: Design choices you will never forgive

Posted on 2024-07-17, 16:22

by

by creepingnet

in Milliways

in Milliways

Trident TGUI9400 PCI - that wretched card, what genius thought a default display rate of 75HZ in 640x480x256 colors in 1995 was a GOOD idea? That sounds quite pleasant actually. 60hz is a refresh rate I wanted to *avoid* for a desktop then. It wasn't for me. Back in 2001 I was running old 486 …

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Re: Design choices you will never forgive

Posted on 2024-07-17, 02:58

by

by creepingnet

in Milliways

in Milliways

Trident TGUI9400 PCI - that wretched card, what genius thought a default display rate of 75HZ in 640x480x256 colors in 1995 was a GOOD idea? C'mon, basic SVGA resolutions people - 640x480 @256 and 60Hz please. It made me think a perfectly good SVGA monitor was bad and caused a lot of "misinformation …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2024-07-17, 02:48

by

by creepingnet

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

- Damn Small Linux - not enough RAM (64MB) Damn. I can confirm that DSL 4.4.10 will run on a P133 with 80MB of RAM. So close. Yeah, I'm thinking it might also not be happy because I'm using a very ODD method of installing it on a 486 - booting from the CD-ROM (or DVD-RW drive in this case). It's …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2024-07-17, 01:38

by

by creepingnet

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Installing a more *modern* O/S on my 486 DX4-100 Desktop....lol....burned some CD's, tried some stuff....this is what I Found.... - Damn Small Linux - not enough RAM (64MB) - TinyCore Linux - not enough RAM (64MB) - NetBSD - too big for a regular CD (746MB vs. 600ish MB) - OpenBSD - Perfectumundo …

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Re: When PC became soulless for you?

Posted on 2024-07-15, 16:28

by

by creepingnet

in Milliways

in Milliways

Hm, not sure I would strictly link it to PC losing soul, but when Google Chrome took over the internet. When developers package something together with Electron and call it an app. That to me is the sign the soul is gone. Most people I know off the clock only use their phone anymore for everything. …

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Re: Vogons users, how do you deal with anxiety?

Posted on 2024-07-15, 16:01

by

by creepingnet

in Milliways

in Milliways

I'll revive this thread because it seems like everyone has anxiety. And such a thread is more than welcome, I think. Delete this if I'm wrong. How do you guys deal with stress nowadays? For me, guided meditation works. Also, video games, of course. Mostly distractions or something I can channel my …

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Re: Games of the 80s and ways of playing them today

Posted on 2024-07-15, 15:44

by

by creepingnet

in Milliways

in Milliways

I'm using real hardware most of the time these days with Emulation 10% of the time for things 1995ish and later. Even for YouTube it's about 95% hardware, mostly because I want to capture what running a REAL 8088-80486 machine was like right on down to the POST (with some convenience/speed built in …

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Re: List the CPUs you owned when they were new

Posted on 2024-07-15, 15:27

by

by creepingnet

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You know what, I've never owned a new CPU, ever. My first pc was a 10 year old Tandy 1000 SX in 1997. Then I got a 386 SX in 2001, upgraded that to a 486 DX33, then got a DX4100 IBM PC-330. I built Pentium III INTO A modded 386 Full AT chassis in 2003, ran that till 2008. Then in 2008 after being …

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Re: Online copies of games are not owned

Posted on 2024-04-15, 14:38

by

by creepingnet

in Milliways

in Milliways

This isn't just an issue with games, but also movies, and any other kind of media at this point. This is also why I don't trust others with "ownership" if the so-called "product" lives on THEIR servers of which I am refused the ability to manage the very existence of such data. I don't trust …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2024-04-11, 14:27

by

by creepingnet

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well...not today, it's been a few months, but ALL of my Retro Boxes are now technically "Wireless"... The Tandy and Compaq in the garage are both using the iMac's ethernet port as a router to the iMacs WiFi. Currently I just pass the ethernet between the two but I have a Cisco Catalyst Managed …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2024-02-26, 15:10

by

by creepingnet

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Got both my vintage PCs in the garage on the internet via internet sharing on my Late 2015 iMac 21.5". I put MacOS Monterey back on it and got it running well, so I turned this feature on, and lo and behold, now I can have all three vintage desktops up all year round.

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Re: Ultima VII on DOS PC - Speech Card Initialization Failed/Memory Issues

Posted on 2024-02-07, 23:12

by

by creepingnet

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Honestly, I'm surprised nobody has asked about the Unisound or what version of DOS he's using (FreeDOS, Ms-DOS, DR-DOS, etc...). Getting VII working on actual hardware is a royal PITA. It's all because of that VooDoo Memory manager which requires the computer be in "real mode" before it loads (hence …

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