xcomcmdr wrote on 2021-12-30, 20:39:

I think the Atari ST soundchip was a failure. Even at the time. What an absolute shame.
Every tune I've ever heard coming out of it has made me regret having ears. Well, except some demoscene stuff.

Atari ST made up for it by having a MIDI port though..

dr_st wrote on 2021-12-30, 11:22:

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-12-30, 02:43:

It's almost as though they invented something precisely as annoying as USB-A ...before USB even existed! 😳

You think that's annoying? Try not mixing up the mouse and keyboard PS/2 ports, if they are not color-coded.

Once I remembered the trick of "mouse is nearer the middle" I can even plug it in correctly in the dark 😜

Meatball wrote on 2021-12-30, 20:26:

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-09-29, 12:28:

Confessions demanded ! 🤣

So I was going through some RAM, and I want a confession from whoever created/wanted/was a market for 128MB DDR DIMMs, explain yourself !

I confess! I also have 2 sticks of 128MB DDR (Nanya) PC2700 RAM for use in my Socket 423, 478, or 939 Windows ME builds.

My only defense is I generally don't go over 256MB of RAM for Windows 9x builds, and I want dual channel.

Tbf, I find this actually being somewhat more likable as you actually make an effort to make otherwise useless memory modules of some actually good actual use 😜

Tetrium wrote on 2022-01-01, 20:50:

Once I remembered the trick of "mouse is nearer the middle" I can even plug it in correctly in the dark 😜

Nah, everyone knows that the correct trick is "keyboard towards the case edge" 😁

You seldom have so good odds in life as 50%, I just jam it in there. 😁

konc wrote on 2022-01-02, 09:46:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-01-01, 20:50:

Once I remembered the trick of "mouse is nearer the middle" I can even plug it in correctly in the dark 😜

Nah, everyone knows that the correct trick is "keyboard towards the case edge" 😁

Keyboard and case would have also worked, but I thought of mouse and middle before that and kept that one as without the mnemonic I will just forget.

Every time I have a frustrating problem I'm always reminded of how I envy people who treat computers as pure appliances.

If it works it serves them for what they want and then turn it off, if it doesn't work it's the computer "being stupid" and just put it aside and go on with their day, as opposed of me "serving" the computer, going along with its quirks, configuring it as best as I know, eating up to hours and hours. It even sounds more ridiculous when it's retro stuff that is "obsolete" or "not current".

andre_6 wrote on 2022-01-21, 23:30:

Every time I have a frustrating problem I'm always reminded of how I envy people who treat computers as pure appliances.

If it works it serves them for what they want and then turn it off, if it doesn't work it's the computer "being stupid" and just put it aside and go on with their day, as opposed of me "serving" the computer, going along with its quirks, configuring it as best as I know, eating up to hours and hours. It even sounds more ridiculous when it's retro stuff that is "obsolete" or "not current".

Are you the type of person who gets so absorbed in their tinkering that you check the clock and its 9pm .. then you check the clock again and its 6am ?

I am...and Im damn proud of it 😁

I set alarms for 1 AM now because the 4 hours between 2 AM and 6 AM are usually undoing the screwup you did at 2 AM. 😉

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-22, 03:36:

I set alarms for 1 AM now because the 4 hours between 2 AM and 6 AM are usually undoing the screwup you did at 2 AM. 😉

IT professionals never make mistakes we fuck shit up exactly when we mean to !

I don't consider Windows pre-NT to be an operating system. I'll put up with 98SE to run some games, but even 'back in the day' I never considered it for real work. DOS -> OS/2 -> NT

lawyerpepper wrote on 2022-02-21, 04:16:

I don't consider Windows pre-NT to be an operating system. I'll put up with 98SE to run some games, but even 'back in the day' I never considered it for real work. DOS -> OS/2 -> NT

Word.

Excel.

I put way more hours on my CRTs with my modern boxes (i5-2400/i5-6600K) than I ever have with my older hardware, and that isn't looking to change as I look for a second 19" CRT and a good DisplayPort to VGA adapter that'll output 10bpc video from a Radeon RX 570 (and, in the future, a Pro W6600) at at least 240MHz. Haven't found one yet so far but I'm still looking. This isn't really for nostalgia per se, more just that I think CRTs look better than any of my flat panels, both in colors and refresh rate, and the closest contender I've seen yet is the 2021 MacBook Pro's Mini LED display. Shame about the notch and the lack of touch bar, but the ARM is still compelling -- I'm looking into the M2 13".

In my head, I tend to think of GPUs as matching with CPUs two years older. Voodoo feels like a Pentium Pro card, GeForce 2 feels like a Pentium II card, Rage 128 feels like a PowerPC 750 card, Radeon 8500 feels like an Athlon card, but both Voodoo3 and Matrox G400 escape this; I don't know why for the V3 besides just having it being a '99 card memorized, but for the G400 I think it's because of the massive performance scaling. I think it's because of these cards mainly being intended for people who already have completed systems and just want an upgrade, and so they're trying to be the best GPU for already existing CPUs, leading to people building out systems nowadays (and then as well) to go for them instead of cards from the year it was bought. I mean, how many people pair GF4Tis or FX 5x00s with Pentium IIIs? In any case, it leads to me seeing people talk about "period correct" builds that have GeForce 2 GTSes and Thunderbirds or Coppermines and it just feels like such an underpowered card to pair with such a stout CPU.

lawyerpepper wrote on 2022-02-21, 04:16:

I don't consider Windows pre-NT to be an operating system. I'll put up with 98SE to run some games, but even 'back in the day' I never considered it for real work. DOS -> OS/2 -> NT

I didn't used to, either, but then I thought about all the different subsystems, API, and even a kernel for Windows 3. I think that the 16-bit Windowses are kind of just a unique kind of OS that piggybacks off another for a few of its features, almost but not quite like a really primitive sort of virtualization.

Anyway, final confession for today: I have no real nostalgia for any of the systems I own besides a small handful I've personally owned for years -- the Dell OptiPlex GX1 I've had since I was 13, the Acer Aspire One I've had since I was like seven, and having been away from it for a few years I think I'm developing some for the i5-2400. I don't think nostalgia should be quite as all-encompassing of a factor as it is; I think "I'm interested in it" should be a good enough reason to justify wanting to use any piece of hardware, whether it be a PDP-11, a Sears Electronic Scholar, an Altair... Not to say it isn't a great thing to have, but I wish it wasn't so omnipresent that kids born in, like, 2006 or 7 call vaporwave "nostalgic" because it's old and different and they like it because of that.

Okay, final, final confession: I just hate vaporwave in general. It's dead now anyway, but I always thought it was cheap and felt like pandering to kids about something that looked nothing like what it's portrayed as -- albiet as someone that just barely slipped in the time frame to have daily driven Windows 2000 on hardware of the time, used Real Player/Real Arcade, and went on Geocities. I suppose I can't exactly talk.

I might make a lot of people mad with mine.

I actually don't like Compaq. It comes from running into a bunch of unstable ones in the late 1990s (mostly locking up, but also weird application crashes and disk corruption). From what little troubleshooting I did, it seemed like certain models had really poorly designed motherboards (which were proprietary, of course), but I made one mostly stable (the one I still have - it still locks up occasionally, but it isn't completely unusable). I remember my dad hating them even more than I did and completely writing off the brand due to their stability, and for some reason, it seems like we're the only two people who had those problems.

Also, I could never get decent performance out of socket 7 Cyrix or AMD CPUs outside of synthetic benchmarks (and a few specific applications on the K6 series), and I never got the chance to compare them with a Celeron (Mendocino) to see if that was just expected for the price. I keep running into desirable hardware that gets good benchmark scores and feels really slow and sluggish in the programs and games I wanted to run. It even happens with semi-modern stuff (like mobile Intel Sandy Bridge - I heard one other person briefly mention performance problems with those). Just like the Compaq thing above, I don't know why my experience is so different.

After all of that, the computer I've posted about the most is a socket 7 Compaq.

Is it Cyrix or AMD? And is that good or bad posting? Because I talk a significant amount of smack about both amd64 and my current cell phone, which would likely make them some of my more talked about topics.

To be honest, I'm ambivalent towards 99% of SIs/OEMs of the day. I suppose I dislike Compaq because they were the nail that made the IBM spec the standard of "PCs", rather than just one of many stopgap designs of the '80s that were evolved past.

I have two retro systems, a 386 and P5, and barely use them. One I've had for months that is mostly new hardware, but have done nothing except some quick hardware tests. I'm not much into games, I mostly want these systems to look at, talk about, and very occasionally mess with.

My wife doesn't even know the P5 exists. Not that she cares, but I feel silly buying this stuff despite a deep-rooted urge to do so.

This probably doesn't count as a retro confession but:

1) My only "retro" hardware is my Dell Latitude D600 with Windows ME. I rarely use it. I prefer using my Windows XP/Vista computers for more personal business. I use Linux or Windows 10 for work purposes because web browsing and newer software are mandatory.

2) I would rather purchase used hardware over anything new with Windows 10 or 11. Windows 10/11 literally ruins the power of the hardware.

I had my homework tasks done more efficiently on my Dell Precision M70 over my Dell Lenovo AIO A740...a Pentium M vs a mobile i7-3xxx (forget numbers). That's just plain sad. I could even multi-task better on the Pentium M with Windows XP and 2gb of ram. Windows 10 was always sluggish and crash-happy.

Heck, it literally had the same screen resolution and the laptop was still faster.

JiaoTongNan wrote on 2022-11-15, 00:36:

This probably doesn't count as a retro confession but: […]
Show full quote

This probably doesn't count as a retro confession but:

1) My only "retro" hardware is my Dell Latitude D600 with Windows ME. I rarely use it. I prefer using my Windows XP/Vista computers for more personal business. I use Linux or Windows 10 for work purposes because web browsing and newer software are mandatory.

2) I would rather purchase used hardware over anything new with Windows 10 or 11. Windows 10/11 literally ruins the power of the hardware.

I had my homework tasks done more efficiently on my Dell Precision M70 over my Dell Lenovo AIO A740...a Pentium M vs a mobile i7-3xxx (forget numbers). That's just plain sad. I could even multi-task better on the Pentium M with Windows XP and 2gb of ram. Windows 10 was always sluggish and crash-happy.

Heck, it literally had the same screen resolution and the laptop was still faster.

Ha ha, I have a D610 someone gave me because the power jack was broke off the board. Not sure what to do with it since I fixed it. It doesn't excite me much.

eesz34 wrote on 2022-11-15, 01:08:

JiaoTongNan wrote on 2022-11-15, 00:36:

This probably doesn't count as a retro confession but: […]
Show full quote

This probably doesn't count as a retro confession but:

1) My only "retro" hardware is my Dell Latitude D600 with Windows ME. I rarely use it. I prefer using my Windows XP/Vista computers for more personal business. I use Linux or Windows 10 for work purposes because web browsing and newer software are mandatory.

2) I would rather purchase used hardware over anything new with Windows 10 or 11. Windows 10/11 literally ruins the power of the hardware.

I had my homework tasks done more efficiently on my Dell Precision M70 over my Dell Lenovo AIO A740...a Pentium M vs a mobile i7-3xxx (forget numbers). That's just plain sad. I could even multi-task better on the Pentium M with Windows XP and 2gb of ram. Windows 10 was always sluggish and crash-happy.

Heck, it literally had the same screen resolution and the laptop was still faster.

Ha ha, I have a D610 someone gave me because the power jack was broke off the board. Not sure what to do with it since I fixed it. It doesn't excite me much.

Could use it as a guinea pig to try out various OSes and prototypes if that's your thing. It is mine. I have an Inspiron 2200 (Pentium M, 1.6GHz) that I mainly use for Haiku, ReactOS, and NT 3.51 with VBEMP NT, all juggled every couple months. Or at least, did until the power jack loosened up. Battery's dead, too.

I confess that I still haven't installed Win98SE on my K6 build that I put together 6 months ago. That changes tonight!