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TPA5

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Posts posted by TPA5

  1. Posted

     

    The same as always, IT data backup and recovery. Nowadays it's almost all data backup. While I still have access to the lab and influence the technology roadmap, all my efforts are focused on prevention. Successful Backup/Restore makes one a tech hero every single day. Customers lose nothing but a little time.

     

    The screws were regular $5.00-a-pack, but I glued the stones in the center where the screwdriver would normally go. I thought to myself WTF, how will I get the screws out later? Needlenose locking pliers! Later on I made use of the stones in tooling. They were industrial to begin with.

     

    The name of the simulation is Orbiter Space Flight Simulator. It's been around since the Pentium II days. It has a great community following. And is highly technical. If your looking for shoot-em-up style stuff, this is about as far from that as you can get. It's all pretty nice and good and all, but getting long in the tooth.

    http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

    http://orbithangar.com/

    http://alteaaerospace.com/

    http://www.orbiter-forum.com/

    http://orbiter.dansteph.com/forum/index.php?page=download

     

    Something more modern looking is this:

    http://en.spaceengine.org/

    ..but its still in early development.

     

    Then there's the fun Kerbal Space Program.

    https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/

     

    That Space Engine one looks sweet, and the Orbiter Space Flight Simulator looks cool too, thanks for the links!

  3. Posted

    If people want to pay money for an acrylic box and gold-sticker from someone, hey more power to them. If they then want to go and charge $399 dollars for a common game, they can go crazy. It's part of participating in a free-market. If someone wants to pay $399 for a common game in an acrylic box, they can do it. Ultimately, it's not my money nor my concern. I mean hey, I buy whole wheat bread. Maybe you buy white bread, or even rye bread. Point is, as long as you're satisfied with the bread you make a sandwich with, does it really matter what bread other people get?

     

     

    (I should really wait to make analogies until after I eat lunch)

    • Like 3

  5. Posted

    In fairness mate, while they make their points in a really a-hole way, they do have some points. Waiting until the art was at least fully implemented in the first level would help a lot, because right now first impressions are really rough in terms of art direction. When people see mostly placeholder art, they'll have a hard time seeing past that since most folks will judge based on the first few seconds of what they see visually, not the core game-play. I think the idea is awesome, but the visuals at least for a 30 second preview video need to be spot-on, or people won't be interested.

     

    Just my humble 2-cents.

  6. Posted · Edited by TPA5

     

    $700 for the ECC rambus memory

    $665 for the CPU

    $1,700 for the monitor

    $299 for the sound card

    $499 for the graphics card

    $299 x 2 for the HDD

    $199 motherboard

    $50 for cable dressing

    $200 power supply x 2

    $500 case

    $475 custom fan

    $3,000 diamond screw heads in select areas

    $100 industrial power cord

    $600 custom keyboard

    $120 gaming mouse

    $90 cd-rom drive

    $45 floppy drive

    $350 silver plated cd-rom tray

    $280 paint, enameling, clearcoating, and finishing

    And for good measure throw in another $250 for cables, wiring, fittings, hardware, screws, other fans..

     

    Guys don't ever bother building a premium PC. They end up as little more than sugar-coated garbage. I eventually scrapped and threw all this out except for the monitor and the diamonds in the screw heads.

     

    The bitch ran hot, weighed just under 31-kilos, consumed prodigious amounts of power, was outdated before it was completed. I do not miss it.

     

     

    Holy shit, 3k for some screws? I didn't even think that was possible, what kind of job did you have to afford that!

     

    In fairness, you have to admit that cost-sheet is more than a little extravagant. I built a rig about 3-1/2 years ago, spent about 500 on it, and my brother now uses it and still runs current games with no problems. So you can build a solid rig for meager bucks these days.

     

    By the way, what's the name of that space simulator you're running in those pictures?

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    I'm not 100% sure if this belongs in the Classic Computing section, as it is not a classic computer strictly speaking, but it does recreate the classic computer experience. If I have categorized this wrongly, my apologies.

     

    To the good stuff!

     

    This is one of the neater looking things I've wanted to get my hands on lately: https://www.tindie.com/products/Propellerpowered/propellerpowered-pocket-mini-computer/

     

    2014-06-25T21:07:17.734Z-PMC-PEB2014_2.j

     

    It's a little computer that looks to recreate a classic computer with hardware specs like 32k of RAM and a full BASIC interpreter, with some modern amenities such as a Wii game port connection for a classic controller and VGA out so you can use easier-on-the-eyes LCD monitors. It''s only 45$ and even comes as a solder-yourself kit, so I for one definitely am looking forward to getting my hands on one. I've known about these guys for a couple years now, but after they stopped development on the old version and went through a lengthy re-design and re-release process. I'm definitely wanting to put one together for myself and get back to writing some BASIC games and programs.

     

    What do you guys think? Cool toy or not worth it?

  8. Posted

    Bravo! Let's see some pictures of the finished unit as seen in the video! I love arcade machines, this is such a cool idea for a project I'm almost tempted to steal it and add it to my ever-growing wishlist of cool stuff. Looks really clean in the video, well done and congrats at staying under the budget.

  9. Posted

    My dad had a ZX-81, and I'll be honest perhaps it's just nostalgia but I like the machine. Sure, it was hellacious to type on that keyboard, and yeah it wasn't the fastest and was soon eclipsed by other systems, but I liked it. Sadly, it vanished somewhere along the line and all he could find from it was some literature he had and that was it. If I ever got the chance t own a ZX-81 for a reasonable price again, I'd be all over it.

  10. Posted

    Neat piece of history on this machine! It's interesting the lengths they went to in order to ensure the design of the unit was cohesive, and avoid looking like they simply slapped any old TV together with the machine. I love these kinds of stories, it really shows the ingenuity these companies had when it came to building and marketing their computers!

  12. Posted

    I thought 80486's were futuristic and totally bad ass because they could load text files in under a second whereas my Apple //e would take many seconds.

     

    Now! I think as software gets more and more stupid-bloated-up the intelligent among us will appreciate the simplicity of 486 and earlier machines. I can't see myself going beyond the 486 and Win 3.11 much when it comes to classic PC paraphernalia. Though I do have a beaten-up Pentium III I dick around with. But it seems to me that starting with win95 there's always had to be some kind of tweaking that would undo itself or morph into or affect another setting. Uhm yeh..

     

    I really hate the amount of updating today's shit needs. Constant updating and changes to the OS is not in agreement with healthy mechanical hard disks. It upsets the natural order of things and causes loads of fragmentation and slowdowns. And blahh blahh.

     

    Make no mistake, I run a tight ship on one of my XP machines. It was last installed on June of 2007. 34 processes, all accounted for. Manual updates. No spyware, no adware, no system-draining scanners or anything. Tight $MFT and NTFS structures order. Everything. All that good stuff. Complete documentation for all applications. Complete install discs, or complete install.exe files. I could rebuild this bitch from a blank disk and be fully functional without the internet whatsoever! Of course it's imaged and backed up appropriately too.

     

    Well.. I look forward to seeing what everyone else is doing. And when I have time I'll spiff up my 486 machine and do a photo op-ed. One neat thing is I collected a lot of marketing material related to the specific machine and its peripherals. Spec sheets and flyers and tech briefs, that sort thing. And of course I have all the documentation too. It is a 80486 DX2/50 with 16MB ram, 200MB HDD, 15"CRT, Cirrus Logic 5422 1MB 16-bit ISA video card, 5.25" & 3.5" floppy drives, Serial+Parallel+IDE Multi-I/O card, 2nd parallel port, Micronics motherboard w/256k socketed SRAM cache, SoundBlaster 16 with wavetable daughtercard and ASP chip upgrade, 1x (150KB/sec) CD-ROM, Practical Peripherals 14.4 modem, all ISA slottage, 124 key programmable keyboard, ball-based mouse.. and so on and so forth.

     

    I would have been so disappointed if you didn't post in this thread, Keatah :-D

     

     

     

    I love vintage computers, and one of the big reasons is I feel there was less waste and laziness with vintage machines. With so little to work with in terms of hardware specs, programmers and engineers had to be meticulous, careful, and creative with everything they did. It was elegant in a sense, the tricks they used to push the hardware to its absolute limit. Today, with so much in terms of hardware resources and software packages, any hack can slop together something and fire it out onto the internet, assuming that everyone will have 16gigs of RAM and a quad-core CPU. Sure, I like modern games and I have a decent rig that I love to use for editing pictures, doing graphic design, and playing some games, but it's just not the same as firing up a classic machine and appreciating the effort that went into it. One of the things that bothers me most is I'm not quite old enough to have lived through that era, but I most certainly wish I could have experienced it first-hand.

    • Like 4

  14. Posted

    Thank god I've not seen one yet. A classic shouldn't be touched, bastardized, mutilated, or anything like that.

     

    What if the CRT in the machine is beyond repair, do you let the machine rot away while trying in vain to try and replace the CRT, or do you install new tech that allows the classic machine to live again?

     

     

     

    Back on topic, I've personally never seen it done. How would you convert the signal to digital to work with a modern LCD screen? Would it even display correctly? I certainly wouldn't want to try it on a working machine, but if it was a machine with a dead CRT it could be worth tinkering with.

    • Like 1

  16. Posted

    A patent is a patent, and this is hardly the first time Nintendo has infringed on another company's patents.

     

    When I was a kid I loved Nintendo's systems and their games, then when I got older I started learning about Nintendo the company and while I still love Nintendo games, Nintendo does do some shady stuff business wise from time to time.

     

    I for one am glad Philips is suing Nintendo, it's not like Nintendo doesn't have the money to pay licensing fees for the technology they put in their systems, they're just being shady again like back in the 80s and 90s when they maintained a stranglehold over the US market with their prohibitive licensing agreements and pressuring stores not to carry competitor's products.

     

    Everybody has done shady business stuff. To participate in shady business dealings is to participate in business itself.

     

    Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Commodore, they've all pulled moves that are less than savory. It's just a part of doing business, and companies get sued all the time.

  20. Posted

    I personally thought it was a little bland for my tastes, didn't really interest my inner vintage nerd, and I found the characters to be relatively unlikable. It felt like the characters were arrogant business guy who leads the team, punk female chick who doesn't give a damn about what the man says cause she's way to cool for that, and that rascally bearded engineer who does the grunt engineering work. Blah.

    • Like 1

  25. Posted

    Hey guys,

     

    I'm looking for an inexpensive laptop or netbook so I can browse the net and maybe play a few old games while laying in bed with the wife. She has a Macbook so I'm just looking for something I can use so I don't have to keep browsing on my phone. Doesn't have to be new or fancy, just curious if someone has something affordable they're looking to ditch. I live in Canada, so if it's terribly heavy shipping from the US will be not great.

     

     

    Thanks!

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