keenmaster486 wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

You could always use a cheap Chinese mini wifi bridge instead; no drivers no headache.

This is what I do for my desktops (house not wired for Ethernet 😢 ) and for DOS/Win3.1/Win95 laptops... but for Windows 98SE I like a more integrated experience if possible. Plus those Chinese bridges are very flaky to configure.

I'd just use a regular router set to client bridge mode. Something decent from the 802.11n generation is more than sufficient in term of performance (if it supports 5GHz), available for less 2nd hand if you don't already have one knocking around somewhere, and far more reliable than bottom-scraping new stuff, particularly if it supports OpenWRT and you install that over whatever proprietary OS it had - usually just a skin over an outdated OpenWRT anyway.

dionb wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

You could always use a cheap Chinese mini wifi bridge instead; no drivers no headache.

This is what I do for my desktops (house not wired for Ethernet 😢 ) and for DOS/Win3.1/Win95 laptops... but for Windows 98SE I like a more integrated experience if possible. Plus those Chinese bridges are very flaky to configure.

I'd just use a regular router set to client bridge mode. Something decent from the 802.11n generation is more than sufficient in term of performance (if it supports 5GHz), available for less 2nd hand if you don't already have one knocking around somewhere, and far more reliable than bottom-scraping new stuff, particularly if it supports OpenWRT and you install that over whatever proprietary OS it had - usually just a skin over an outdated OpenWRT anyway.

Great idea. I have one such device (TP-Link WRT841n) that I have flashed to OpenWRT and I am using as a Wireless bridge/AP for the other half of the house. It has proven invaluable.

appiah4 wrote:

How good (bad?) is the 2600 version of Pacman?

It was considered awful and a rush job back in the day. I remember as a kid how disappointing the 2600 version was. The homebrew version decades later looks MUCH better.

https://youtu.be/uqdcayWamRc

Same with Donkey Kong.

https://youtu.be/3PPoAXcuNxE

I played Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Frogger, and many others, including Mario Bros. on the Atari 2600 a long time ago. I wonder if my grandpa still has the system, cables, and the games? I'm planning on building a game console room in either my backroom or my room to play games from the Atari 2600 to the Xbox Original, from CRTs to HDTVs.

I'm also going to build a prototype Genesis Model 1 A/V cable that'll have composite, mono and stereo (headphone jack) audio, RGB, and sync so I can use my DVDO Edge upscaler on my 43" UHD HDR TV (4:3 ratio locked).

The Atari 2600 is cool. I never owned one myself, so my first introduction to it was in the early 1990s via a clone system called the TV Boy which had 127 of the games built-in. So I played a lot of the 2600 classics, albeit with the wrong game names and often wrong colours. 🤣 I still have that TV Boy and fire it up from time to time, but I may get an actual 2600 one day to bulk out my collection.

On the photo you see Ms. Pac-Man (NTSC version), which is pretty decent. I also have Pac-Man, but that is indeed not very good. Ms Pac Man and Space Invaders are both NTSC versions and so display in weird colors on my PAL TV.

Donkey Kong is a bit lame because it only has two screens, but honestly: we had tons of fun playing it the other night. It is still very impressive how much fun you can get out of a machine with 128 bytes RAM.

I think in the long run I will need some form of flash cartridge and play some homebrew games and run some fancy demos.

liqmat wrote:

It was considered awful and a rush job back in the day. I remember as a kid how disappointing the 2600 version was. The homebrew […]
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appiah4 wrote:

How good (bad?) is the 2600 version of Pacman?

It was considered awful and a rush job back in the day. I remember as a kid how disappointing the 2600 version was. The homebrew version decades later looks MUCH better.

https://youtu.be/uqdcayWamRc

Same with Donkey Kong.

https://youtu.be/3PPoAXcuNxE

Wow, this is night and day. I definitely HAVE to get the homebrew version. Awesome!

Made this wallpaper for my phone as a joke. Ended up liking it and keeping it this way.

Enjoy!

My manager cleared out his P-III gaming PC a couple of years ago - He kept it around for playing a couple of Glide games on, but when he found that glide wrappers had got to the point where they can fully emulate the game he wants to play, he recycled most of it.

Today he gave me the video card in that system - I like my job sometimes 😁

The fans are worn out so I'll probably put a couple of 80mm fans over the board with zip ties,
I haven't seen one of these in person for 15 years - it's kind of funny to me that a lot of what spawned this interest was wanting to play Deus Ex and other glide games on the voodoo - of course then someone made modern renderers for the game so that's a moot point now

The other silly thing that's been giving me a lot of fun (srsly how many of my floppy drives are broken? both goteks don't work right??, the DVD drive just broke??) is this HP Intel 815 board which I bought specifically because a few months back, I found the ISA expansion card on ebay. This may be board #2, but this one works great!

Arranged a part of my Intel Pentium CPU collection into a picture frame to be displayed on my desk.

Was thinking about the most representative lineup as I had more choices, but ended up having a line of gold caps, ceramic tops and PPGA's

I went back to using my previous laptop, a 2003 NEC model with Pentium M. I've always been pretty fond of the design but started using a different one in 2013 because I needed battery life and there weren't any new replacements available (only rebuilt battery packs that weren't too impressive). However the CPU fan in the newer laptop has now died and I don't use battery power much lately so... time to reunite.

When your CPU idles at 1W there's no need for a silly fan to run all the time. At times the fan and HDD both spin down and it goes completely silent.

I can't juggle multiple web browsers on this system or it gets swap-happy, with 768MB of RAM. But it does quite well with a heavily tweaked Opera 12.18 with JS disabled. I just have to retrain myself not to move the mouse pointer to the top of the screen because Opera 11/12 have a bug that causes things to pop up when the pointer passes over and they will not go away as long as the pointer is still up top. I've found that I can still visit some video sites and fish the download link out of the page source (or youtube-dl) to be played in VLC instead of the browser. The ULV Pentium M can't decode h264 at 720p but it will do 540p.

Just mucking around with the Zenith 286 again. Had to gab some 30 pin simms from a 486 mobo I had in a drawer. All sweet now no more freezing or hanging up loading windows. Have Wold3D running to see if there are any hic ups. Quite pleased it's back to its reliable self. While I was hunting around I found my old socket 7 testing mobo. Haven't use it for years. Was out of a HP of some sort iirc. Very small form factor with pci and isa slots.

Hi, i bought two motherboards for testing the pentium 4 and core2 cpus i have. I'm actually not interestet in those cpus but i wanted to at least test them before selling or whatever.
Sadly the pentium 4 board has bulging caps, so i tried to remove them but i can't get the solder to melt. Even new solder won't connect to the old one.

Played around with John Romero's SIGIL WAD for Doom in the MBF source port on a Pentium 120 today. Didn't actually play through it since I'm waiting for my physical copies as I wish to play with the Buckethead soundtrack first, but I did take a few screenshots in different maps that I swapped around with idclev, using the -devparm arg enabled. Enjoy the tiny images converted from PCX.

I don't know about you guys, but the prospect of playing a WAD file made 25 years after the release of the original game, made by an original developer of the game, on era appropriate 20-25 year old hardware is quite exciting to me.

I'd have tested on a 486 if I had one ready to go.

Recapped the -5V, -12V and +12V on a 5150 I bought some time ago. It's working again 😀

Received a couple of cartridges today that I ordered for my NES - a "500 In 1" games cartridge from China & a "143 In 1" games cartridge titled "The 100 Best Videogames". Now I finally have a modest games collection to play on my actual NES and that's what I've been doing for most of the day. 🤣

The 500 In 1 has the most garbage on it as you'd imagine, whilst the 143 In 1 certainly seems to live up to it's name as it has most of the decent games.

Also today, I rounded off my current console cleanup operation by cleaning and setting up my Sega Dreamcast. That's all in good working order, though it's case has yellowed pretty badly over the years. Only have around 20 games for it at present and I've ordered both the VGA cable & RGB Scart cable for it as I previously only had the standard Composite cable.

Oh i forgot to mention what happend last weekend when i wanted to test a pentium 2 Motherboard.
Got no vga-signal, no post and my post-card didd'nt show a thing. Most strange was that it turned of after a few seconds. I changed everything i could change, including psu. I was really despaired.
I think that the last beer finally got my karma up as i thought what i did: I triggered the power by connecting the jumper pins.... and left the jumper on the pins...

Well the board and everytrhing works fine 😁

Decided I needed a plan for my re-wiring of my video, audio & midi setup.

Conclusion: we're going to need a bigger audio mixer 😜

Edit: or perhaps easier: a second mixer to connect to the speakers' second input, that I can feed both the 'X4' (Phenom 'support' PC for my retro stuff, and where I browse internet from while I'm messing around) and the three MIDI output devices into.

appiah4 wrote:

How good (bad?) is the 2600 version of Pacman?

As someone who actually had that version of the game when it was new, people wondered why it was so different from the arcade, but still played it to death anyway without further complaining. To continue the record, nobody thought that E.T. was a bad or overly difficult game, but a lot of people hated Raiders of the Lost Ark for being an arcane nightmare to play even with the manual.

x0zm_ wrote:

SIGIL

I'll try that out once I restore my 486, as its HDD is failing, and I'm waiting for a CF to PATA adapter to arrive.

Mister Xiado wrote:

As someone who actually had that version of the game when it was new, people wondered why it was so different from the arcade, but still played it to death anyway without further complaining.

Maybe in your hood, but in mine we all rioted. Luckily I had an Intellivision to calm everyone down.