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Win16fan

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Posts posted by Win16fan

  1. Posted

    Wow, sorry I haven't replied to this topic in months. Since posting this thread, I ended up getting an NTSC Amiga 500. Maybe one day I'll get an ST, but in the end the Amiga appealed to me more. I got a lot of NTSC and PAL games with the system (along with a PAL boot disk), a couple I liked, some I didn't. When it comes to PAL games, I found that some work and others don't. I bought a NEC 1970NX monitor for the PAL games that won't work. Now I'm just waiting for the VGA adapter to come in from Poland. I'm hoping this solution works, if not I'm not gonna worry because worrying about PAL compatibility made this whole purchasing decision much more difficult than it should have been. If it comes to it I'll just use a video capture device with my modern laptop, making my laptop the "monitor" for my Amiga.

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    I think you made a great choice of laptop, much better than the one I made, lol. I bought a Powerbook G3 Main Street, which has a passive matrix screen, which is terrible. I have it hooked up to a VGA monitor, but the hard drive takes a long while to boot, so I use another old Mac instead most of the time. I quite like classic Mac OS. I have an iBook G3 as my main OS 9 Mac that I use for creative writing and a little gaming, mostly Wolfenstein 3D and Sci-fi pinball.

     

    Have fun with your Mac. :)

    • Like 1

  3. Posted

    Hello,

     

    So I recently purchased a NTSC C64c from my local game shop and a 1541 Floppy drive from ebay. The drive works, but there is a problem, it only responds to being called "9" instead of "8." I have tried various commands from both the internet and the 1541 manual and I cannot get this drive back to 8. I have not opened up the drive to see if there were any mods to it and there is no device id switch on the back like some of the modded drives have. The seller had a picture of the drive responding to the command: Load "Game 3",8,1, so why does this drive not respond to 8 on my C64c? I don't know what model of 64 he had. The guy was also selling other 1541s so maybe he accidentally gave me one of his modded ones.

     

    What I'm asking is if I need to mod this drive to get it back to 8 or could there be something wrong with my C64c? I have no soldering experience in case anyone asks.

     

    Thanks in advance.

  5. Posted

    Wow, didn't expect so many replies. Thanks guys.

     

    I don't have any historical ties to either machine, so either would be an new experience for me, which is something I am looking for. I am largely a console gamer, but I do play some PC games and have experience with MS-DOS and classic MAC OS. I love 16-bit graphics, so these systems like the ST and Amiga appeal to me.

     

    I want to play more than Fire & Ice, it's just the starting off point for hopefully more games. I've played the Master System port and I really like it, but I've heard the ST/Amiga versions are the definitive versions.

     

    I've done a lot of comparing and contrasting and watching reviews and reading forum threads on these systems, but the one question that I couldn't find a clear answer to was how to play import games.

     

    So far it seems like the ST might be better since there are software tricks to get games to run, whereas only the Amiga 1200 offers software tricks (I read that the 500, which is the Amiga I like the look of the most, requires hardware mods to be able to switch between PAL and NTSC.) I could be wrong though. It also seems that it all depends on the game.

     

    I considered getting a PAL Amiga and using an American PSU with it, but there seems to be no one on ebay currently that sells American Amiga PSUs separately. If I had a PAL ST, I would need a power transformer to use it in the USA, since the power supply is internal.

  6. Posted

    Hello,

     

    So I was thinking about getting an Amiga or ST and I'm trying to decide which one to get. I live in the US and there's a game I want to play that was released for both systems called "Fire & Ice", but it only came out in Europe. Comparing the Amiga and ST, which one is the most import friendly and which model would be the best to get, so I can play PAL games like "Fire & Ice" in the states?

     

    Thanks in advance.

  7. Posted

    Awesome to see someone interested in Windows 98. I love that OS, much nostalgia. Sorry if someone already brought this up, but be aware that some games require 3D graphics cards. So if you can, find out the graphics card of the PC you want to buy. You could always replace the graphics card if it's only a 2D one.

    • Like 1

  10. Posted

    Here's an update in case anyone is interested:

     

    I've maxed out the RAM to 512 MB. Unfortunately, I bent the heat shield in the process. There are two parts to it, a small metal square covering only the processor and a large metal rectangle that covers both the small square and the rest of the internal components (except for the hard drive). The small part is attached to the larger part and has its own screw that holds down both it and the larger heat shield to the computer. This screw was either stripped when I got it or was starting to strip and I made it worse. Both screws (1 for the large part and 1 for the small) have to be removed in order to remove both parts of the heat shield properly. I had to take the heat shield off twice. The first time it came off and came back on nicely, but I didn't put the RAM in correctly so I needed to get back in the computer. I got the screw off for the large metal shield just fine, but the one for the small shield was stripped, so I had to use force to remove the large heat shield, which worked but I bent the heat shield in the process. The small shield remained attached and screwed in. I reseated the RAM and put the large heat shield back on, but because it was bent it wasn't even when I put it back (I tried to bend it back the best I could before re-inserting it). The keyboard sticks up a little on its left side because of this.

     

    The computer works fine though. I ended up doing a clean install of OS 9.2, which means I lost all the old apps, but oh well I can always get them from Amazon. I did an upgrade install of OS 9 before this and it ran sluggishly, but the clean install runs much more quickly. I hooked up the computer to the VGA input on a TV and it looked much better than the laptop's own display.

  12. Posted

    Well folks, I got the laptop yesterday and have been using it for 2 days. It works quite well and came with a floppy drive after all. The MAC can read my PC formatted floppies as well as the MAC formatted ones from my PB 100. The CD-ROM drive worked great too and the laptop has some cool design software that I love like Photoshop and Illustrator. There's only 2 complaints I have about it:

     

    1: The mouse. It's a one-button touchpad and trying to draw things in Illustrator with it is kind of a pain. I remember having similar frustration when I used my Toshiba's in-built touchpad mouse with Photoshop Elements 11. I use a USB desktop-style mouse with it now and drawing is a lot easier. I think I'll need to get a desktop adb mouse for my PB G3, preferably one with 2 buttons.

     

    2: The display. Due to the old LCD it uses, the cursor leaves a trail on the screen and games have quite a bit of motion blur. It's not too bad for productivity software, but it's annoying in some games. There's a VGA out on this laptop, so I guess I'll have to get a VGA cable and converter box in addition to my adb desktop mouse.

     

    Overall, it's a nice machine and I like classic MAC OS 8.1, but it's not perfect.

  13. Posted

    I'm totally showing my age (23) with this one, but here we go...

     

    HP Pavilion 4445

    64 MB Ram

    ATi Rage video card with 4 MB of memory

    333 Mhz Celeron Processor

    Windows 98 First Edition

    CD-Rom

    3.5'' 1.44 MB Floppy

     

    It was the "family computer" back in 1999, but then my mom upgraded to an HP with Windows XP on it in 2005 and gave me the old HP as a hand me down.

    • Like 2

  14. Posted

    Thanks all for your replies. I've done a lot of research between 68k vs PPC and decided to side with PPC and ended up buying a Powerbook G3 on ebay. Finding old Apple stuff locally is pretty rare in my area (the PB 100 is the second time in my life that I've seen an old Apple computer for sale locally. I bought it at a flea market that's only open in the summer. That same flea market had a Mac Classic for sale in '08/'09.). I decided on the PB G3 because while it is kind of "modern" it still has the old rainbow Apple logo under the screen, which makes it feel more vintage than the iMac or iBook. I don't think it has a floppy drive, but one could be added. I'll post in this topic again when I actually get to play with this thing.

  18. Posted

    Hello,

     

    I've always been interested in old Mac computers ever since I saw some at my school back in the late '90s/early '00s. I bought a Powerbook 100 some time ago, but didn't have good luck with it, but I want to try again with another Mac. I'm excluding the black and white models because I think the color display Macs have more software and I think I'll stick to the laptop lines for now. Basically, I'll use it for messing around: gaming, creative software along the lines of photoshop, that sort of thing. I don't have any specific software or specs in mind, except for color display and ability to use both floppy and CD (doesn't have to be at the same time, floppy/cd can be separate units). For OS, I'm thinking OS 7-9 since X seems too modern for what I'm picturing and 6 and older is black and white era. Is it a good idea to buy a '90s Mac or should I look elsewhere for my old computer fix? The only old computers I've owned have been PCs.

     

    Thanks in advance.

  20. Posted

    Hello,

     

    For years I've always wanted to own an old Apple computer and last month I finally bought one for $25 at the local flea market complete with batteries (which were dead), power supply (tip was cracked), manual, carrying case, floppy drive and floppies (1 OS, 1 system tools, 1 Microsoft Excel). The computer is in nice cosmetic condition, but it has a couple of problems:

     

    1) It doesn't recognize the hard drive

     

    2) It makes this weird buzzing sound on start up before the boot up music starts.

     

    I opened it up and didn't see anything wrong on the motherboard (no busted caps, all cables were connected). I didn't open up the monitor. Anyway, the computer doesn't boot to the OS anymore. It did boot to it from the included OS disk, but now it won't even do that. It just gives me an image of a monitor with a question mark. Oh well, I've been dealing with used hardware for years and know that sometimes you buy something that ends up not working. Nothing new to me. At least I got to experience old Mac OS 6 and I quite liked it. The trackball mouse was different, but I liked that too. It came with a sticker sheet that had unused stickers featuring the old, and in my opinion better, Apple logo, so I guess it's not all bad. Still, I wished the Powerbook actually worked. It's now the oldest computer I own.

     

    Thanks for taking the time to read this.

  21. Posted

    Hello all,

     

    I recently joined the forum, though I've been browsing for awhile, and was curious to know if anyone else likes this vintage OS? I've been interested in old tech ever since I was a kid. I got into old console gaming first back in the early '00s, then in the mid-'00s I got an interest in old computers too. I discovered Win 3.1 while looking for old computer operating systems and liked what I saw in the screenshots I could find. I've used it on both real hardware and virtualization and the experience was similar, though I never ran the OS on an early '90s PC (oldest PC I had was from 1999). My first OS was Win 98, so 3.1 was completely different to me, which is what I liked about it. I like using the Program Manager interface and I've never installed any of those "make win 3.1 look like 95" programs, since, in my opinion, if I wanted 95, I would install 95. My biggest complaint with 3.1 is finding games. It seems like PC game developers focused more on DOS back in the day and once 95 came out they all shifted to that OS. I try to buy 3.1 software when I can find it, my most recent pickup being Microsoft Works 3.0. I know it's office software, but it's better than nothing.

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