spacecadet
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Posts posted by spacecadet
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CFFA 3000 offers a large benefit over the EMU. For Floppy EMU, it can emulate the Smartport device, but you would need a disk controller card capable of that. These are expensive. Otherwise you are relegated to 140k images only.
CFFA can emulate SmartPort and Disk ][ at the same time.
This is a nice feature but really only worthwhile on a IIGS. The 8 bit Apple II's were all 5 1/4" (140K) floppy-based machines. There was some very late software released for 8 bit II's on 3.5" disk, but I don't know of too much, if anything, that wasn't also released on 5 1/4".
As for hard drives, this is also nice if you have a IIGS and want to run GS/OS. But now that we have floppy emulators at all, which basically give you the functionality a hard drive would have in those days, combined with the fact that the IIe and earlier were 5 1/4" based machines, there's not a lot of advantage to having hard drive support on an Apple IIe. Unless you have an 8 bit Apple II data file that's bigger than 140K (not all that likely), then saving it to a floppy image isn't much different than saving it to a hard drive image. And while I guess there may be a few extremely late apps that I'm not aware of that would "install" themselves to a hard drive, everything I've ever used for the 8 bit II's just ran off floppy.
The CFFA3000 is a great device, but its biggest advantages over the Floppy Emu are mainly going to be felt on the IIGS.
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I cannot get my PS4 controllers (including the move controllers) to charge anywhere except plugged directly into the PS4.
Get a charging stand for the PSVR. This is the one I have, though you can get it for less than this: https://www.amazon.com/Collective-Minds-Showcase-Rapid-Charge-Display/dp/B01LYGCK1M
It charges all my controllers, and acts as storage for both the controllers and headset. Makes everything a lot more tidy. One thing I like about it is that it has LED indicators for whether a controller's battery is charged or not.
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If I go back to when I started *gaming*, then there's a ton of stuff I'd do differently.
* No throwing away boxes - in fact no throwing away *anything*.
* I'd have bought up every game I could that was being closed out during the crash of 1983.
* I'd have kept my two original Intellivisions (I don't know what happened to them).
* I definitely, absolutely would not have traded in my Genesis and its games. They gave me $15 in store credit!
* I would have asked for a Saturn before a PlayStation.
* I would have bought a PSP when it was first released.
As far as collecting goes, which I started doing around 1998, I think it's mainly just that I probably wouldn't have sold almost anything. Most of the stuff I've owned as a collector, I bought because I really wanted it. So it never really made sense to me to get rid of it. I did it because I thought it was the normal thing to do if you don't use something much or you start running out of space and/or want money to buy something else. But I mean, I have an attic and a basement full of literal junk, like stuff that I don't even know what it is, or old textbooks from college, empty boxes (just plain brown ones), etc.... the point being there's *always* more space somewhere if you really want it. And selling something you really wanted to buy something else is just never a good idea in my experience. I've regretted it almost every time, and have bought back some of the stuff I've sold (always at a higher price).
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The current average for auctions and the current average for unsold buy it now listings is WAY different though. Most people, especialyl local retro game stores/dealers just use those ridiculous buy it now prices as their standard. That's why most of them go out of business pretty quickly.
That's why you look at "sold" listings, not running listings. It seems like a lot of people are getting off track here, or are missing the original point. The GIF Flojomojo linked to shows using "sold" listings of auctions specifically, and there's a reason for that. Those are prices people actually paid in competition with other buyers. The prices people actually pay = that item's current value. It doesn't matter if *you* (the royal "you", not you specifically) think it's inflated. Somebody else didn't, and that person bought it.
Even looking at sold BIN listings (vs. auctions) can be a little misleading because as often as people overprice BIN listings, they underprice them too. If somebody prices something at $100 and sells it, it's just as likely that thing would have sold for $150 or even $200. One way to judge that is by how quickly the item sold. If it sold within minutes, then it was probably drastically underpriced. Even selling something within a day or two of posting a BIN means it was probably a bit underpriced. There aren't a huge number of people looking for most older video game items, so it usually takes longer than that to sell anything that's priced appropriately.
Somebody else asked what you do if you see three drastically different prices for the same item in the sold listings. Well, assuming they're all auction listings, if there are really only three I'd probably look to see what the differences were in each listing. There's almost always something that obviously affects value. But if it's something with a *lot* of sold listings, I'd probably just average them. But just remember that that gives you an average price for an average listing; a particularly nice or particularly trashed example will have its value affected accordingly. Just because a heavy sixer Atari 2600 averages $150 in the sold listings doesn't mean you should expect to pay that price for one that's MIB. (You can always search for an item in approximately the same condition/completeness as one you're interested in.)
But the main point is that the true value of anything is the price someone's willing to pay. That's it. None of these things have any intrinsic value, it's all just what someone's willing to pay at a given time. And sellers can be suckers and buyers can be hustlers just as the reverse. I've seen buyers plenty of times tell a seller that something's only worth $20 when I've seen that thing sell for $100, and the seller goes along with it. That's not the buyer getting the "true value", that's the seller being suckered by a hustler. That's no more fair than when sellers try to jack up the price on something beyond what even the sold listings suggest.
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All the the reports from shortly after the ADAM was released were that the Printer was the culprit. I again state that I NEVER saw this issue with any and all Printers that I owned, used or tested. So I fall back on what I think was the main reason for so many returns early on.... USER ERROR.
I personally saw it happen at that time. It was not user error. Unless it's a case of "you're turning it on wrong". But that's a design flaw if so. No other computer I can think of - not successful ones, anyway - would erase your media if you didn't turn it on in the correct sequence.
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Where is the best place to get Rez for the PSVR?
If you want it physically, it's an iam8bit exclusive: https://store.iam8bit.com/products/rezinfinite-ps4physicalgame
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So...is the remote relevant with the Apple //e?
The remote lets you change between disk images without entering the menu. It's relevant if you use any programs that require either a side 1 and side 2, or a program disk and data disk, especially. Even on my IIGS, where I have access to the menu at all times, I find the remote very useful.
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I had FSII for the Apple II at that time and it ran basically the same. I dealt with it, but in no way was I *happy* with the slowdown. I would often seek out areas in the game where it would run more smoothly (it would bog down predictably in areas with literally two or more buildings, or a large airport). But the point is I definitely noticed the slowdown and did not just accept it. I would have upgraded to a faster CPU, faster machine or whatever I could have afforded to get rid of it.
And MSFS (which this was a port of) was already a well known computer game at the time, since 1982. That's what Atari's trying to trade off of here in the first place - they know people know what it is. But MSFS ran *much better* on the PC, and we all knew it. These commercials may actually be the first documented example of console inferiority to the PC.
Now, nobody's going to run out and buy a $3,000 PC instead of a $300 XEGS just to play MSFS. But the weird thing is that Atari tried to use this as a selling point. And in 1987! They're basically saying "look, you can play this several year-old game that runs a lot better on PC, along with some really old arcade games!" And that's just a really bizarre marketing message that I'm not surprised wasn't successful.
They should have picked a different pack-in, or just de-emphasized it in the commercials. But then, what could they have emphasized in the commercials, at that point? I dunno. It was 1987 and by then they were going up against 2 years' worth of NES stuff - and to me, those were the NES' best years, with SMB, Excitebike, Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda, plus a ton of other games (including a lot of more recent arcade ports than Missile Command). I don't think the best or only alternative was going up against 5 year old PC games, though, especially when the XEGS didn't even come out on the favorable side of that comparison, and especially when that same game was not even new to the XEGS (it was on the Atari 8 bits in 1984).
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To be honest, some of those ads above made me cringe a bit. Imagine watching those in 1987 or 88. One of them actually uses Missile Command as a selling point (and calls it a "joystick-based game"). This is an arcade game from 7 or 8 years earlier.
Almost all of them mention Flight Simulator II, another game that had been out for years already (since 1984). And it's running at literally like 1fps, even in the commercials. I know that's realistic for how the game actually ran at times, but I just don't get how this was meant to sell game consoles. I mean, pick another game as the pack-in or at least show a different area that runs a bit faster.
This would be like if MS suddenly announced a new game console in 2018 that's nothing but a stripped down Windows PC and then in the commercials showed it playing games like Half Life 2 and Elite Dangerous, and the latter only runs at 20fps. Who the heck would buy that over literally any other game console?? And why would you buy one over just getting yourself a cheap PC, or using one you probably already have?
People weren't dumb. And this system didn't exist in a vacuum.
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I have the FloppyEMU already for my Mac Classic. What will I gain with CFFA3000 over the floppy EMU?
Not that much, although I have a Floppy Emu also and still bought a CFFA3000. What you do get is more convenience, since you can select your images from a menu interface and not from a small LCD on an external device. But, it might not be as easy to do on a IIe - on a IIGS (which is what I'm using it with), you can easily access the menu at any time, even within games or apps, but I don't think that works on a IIe.
The CFFA3000 is also faster since it's not relying on the slower external port, but that may or may not be all that important to you. I never found the Floppy Emu all that slow.
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The memory card is the standard 1MB Apple II Memory Expansion Card. It's a nice find, though - in a IIe, that's almost definitely all that you'd ever need, maybe more than you'd ever need these days.
Get a CFFA3000 while you still can: https://shop.dreher.net/shop?olsPage=products%2Fcffa3000-remote
Watch for this thing to come back in stock, which it does periodically: http://www.a2heaven.com/webshop/index.php?rt=product/product&product_id=142
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Maybe I'm wrong, but this strikes me as a "many people are saying..." kind of thing.
I've seen that some new devices *have* HDMI and of course the reviews comment on that, but it'd be kind of negligent if they didn't. Also, it obviously makes things easier to use on a modern TV, which is probably what most buyers of those devices are going to have.
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There seems to be several explanations what the S in S-Video really stands for. Wikipedia says Separate, others say Super, yet others say Sony.
"S-Video" as a term definitely stands for "Super Video". It comes from S-VHS, which stands for "Super-Video Home System". And it refers specifically to the 4 pin mini-DIN connector developed in 1987 (the same year S-VHS was developed, which is what that connector was developed for).
Separate Y/C video has been around for a lot longer than the term "S-Video" or the 4 pin mini-DIN connector has been in use, obviously. But nobody called it "S-Video" before 1987, because that particular standard didn't exist yet. You can do an experiment yourself and search for the term "S-Video" in Google Groups, which includes most of the original Usenet from the 80's and before, using the "before:" date modifier. There's not a single mention of it before 1989. And all of the mentions in 1989 are either about S-VHS or the 4 pin mini-DIN connector.
Interestingly, there's a guy in one of those 1989 posts who defines a bunch of video terms, and one of them is S-Video:
S-video, S-connector, YC3.58, YC4.43. An interface which conveysluminance, and quadrature modulated chrominance, as two separate signals
on a specific 4-pin mini-DIN connector.
So he doesn't say specifically what the "S" stands for, but he does say it's specific to the connector introduced in 1987.
As someone who grew up knowing this (I sold electronics for a living just after high school), I was always really confused when I started seeing people use the term "S-Video" to refer to Y/C video generally, regardless of connector. If somebody told me a monitor had "S-Video", to me that meant it had the 4 pin mini-DIN connector. I still get tripped up by this sometimes but I've learned to ask people to clarify what they mean. It can mean the difference between buying an off the shelf cable or having to make one myself, sometimes using connectors that are borderline impossible to find.
I'm not sure what the most common term for Y/C video was before the S-Video standard came about... probably just Y/C video. I see people using the terms accurately in this thread, though, which is kind of refreshing (and not the norm these days, in my experience).
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I'm not sure they're the same company. There was an Acer Labs that made PC tech back then, but I think it's a different outfit.
Acer the computer company has always been Taiwanese.
Did your friend's computer have this logo?
Yeah, I meant when they started in the US. They were Taiwanese, but they entered the US market around 1987 or so, and as far as I know were mail order only for a while after. They were still a small company in those days, in both territories. I think they've only been around at all since the late 70's.
It was the same logo, and I remember my roommate always pronounced their name "Asser", which meant I did for a long time too...
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Acer started out in the US as a similar company to Gateway; I think they mainly were a mail order company, and I remember them not being bad at that time. Another old roommate went from an Atari ST to an Acer, and I used his PC a lot too. I remember it being a little more generic than the Gateway 2000 that my college roommate had (in that I don't remember much specific about it), but I do remember thinking they were one of the better brands at the time, and my roommate for some reason refused to even buy anything else.
So it probably makes some sense that they'd buy Gateway 2000 after Gateway fell on hard times. And the last time I heard anything about Gateway, their computers had really gone to crap. I just looked them up now and was surprised to see that they still have a web site! It looks like it was designed in like 2006, though, and even though they show their last computer lines, they don't seem to have any actual models listed. I was always a little sorry for what happened to Gateway; they were so good for a while. Even just the materials their early computers were made from were a step above everybody else. I remember my roommate even had one of those full keyboard membrane covers on his keyboard to protect it, because it was worth protecting. My keyboard, by contrast, was thrown in the garbage about a year after I got it.
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This was shortly after I got my first PC clone, which was a Packard Bell 486 similar to the one at the top of the CompUSA ad, but mine was a 486SX/25 when I got it. I'm not sure if I'd upgraded it by then or not, but I did pretty constantly upgrade it after I bought it so it may have been a DX/33 or a DX2/66 by 1994.
IIRC, my system was $1,499 with a monitor. It was in NO WAY worth that price. What a piece of crap.
But it could play Doom perfectly, so there's that. It was buttery smooth.
I do remember a roommate of mine in college in 1993 still had a 386, and he had just gotten it. So they were still around. I was actually kind of jealous of his computer because for one thing, his 386DX/50 or whatever it was was not really any slower than my 486SX/25. I'm sure you can find benchmarks these days that show that. And his was a Gateway 2000, which at that time made *awesome* computers. I remember thinking they were the best around; even better than a real IBM at that time. His computer just felt like a real computer, while my Packard Bell just felt like a toy.
I think the reason I went with the Packard Bell is that my dad was buying and I was worried he'd balk at anything more expensive; my PB was the cheapest computer in the store with a CD-ROM drive, and that was a new feature in 1993 that I knew I had to have.
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While I was researching the link you sent me, I found this:
Certainly worth checking out if you prefer the "over the ear" style.
It seems like a good idea but reading the reviews, I'll probably just stick with the originals. It seems like the design of these puts the drivers further away from your ears and rests the rubber "cups" against the side of your head. Just doesn't seem like it was executed all that well. I don't know why they didn't use a regular cushioned outer cup, instead of that rubber looking thing. Cost, I guess.
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Do you have a link to the headphones you bought? I wouldn't mind looking at something like that.
These: https://www.bionikgaming.com/products/mantis
They're not perfect, but they're a better overall solution than anything else I've found. They stay attached to the headset and you just kind of flip them up when you put the headset on, then flip them back down. I was worried they'd scratch my precious headset, but they haven't. The only real downside is that they're on-ear vs. over the ear, and they're not really being held on to your ear securely, so they can move around a bit and they also don't block out much external sound. (That's ok for me because I play in a quiet room.)
But they're better than the included earbuds that fall out all the time, and they're more usable than a full size set of over the ear of headphones, which are just bulky and unwieldy when combined with the PSVR headset.
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By the way, does it help getting a PS4 Pro for VR, instead of a slim? I still haven't got one but now there are enough games for it that I like.
I don't have a Pro and am still blown away by PSVR (yes, even now, after owning it since its launch). But I've seen people say the Pro upgrade is noticeable, if not crucial. So, it probably depends on whether you already have a system. Most people seem to say it's not worth upgrading to a Pro just for a better PSVR experience, but if you don't have either console yet, then you should get a Pro if you can afford it along with your PSVR.
It also depends on whether the games you want actually support the Pro. But I'm pretty sure most big PSVR games do nowadays, so you'll get improved visuals in some way. But it seems almost universal that it's not worth spending an extra $400 for if you have a PS4 Slim already. But it probably is worth spending an extra $100 for if you're coming in totally cold.
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I agree. Sometimes people either get a crazy deal, or they look at how things were 20 years ago and think that's the "true value" of something. But no, the true value is the average price something goes for today - that's it. Sure, those crazy deals get figured into that, and sometimes you can even find one of those yourself. But most of the time, you're going to pay something close to the current average - and that is the current value.
Things change, and the value of any collectible item goes up and down. There's no use denying the current reality.
That said, there's also no reason not to try to get a deal on something. But you have to be realistic, and know that that's what you're doing and that it might not happen.
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There are so many loose bits and bobs on eBay, the only way I will feel confident about getting the whole thing is going to be a boxed set. So, money. And it's so fussy and wire-happy. Can I just come over to your house and play the Star Wars mission? I'll bring beer.
Ha, sure, why not?
But yeah, I definitely would not try to put a system together myself. Just make sure whatever you do end up buying actually has all the things I mentioned. I can imagine some people pulling a headset out of a full bundle and just selling that, along with all the other parts separately. So make sure if you do buy one that it does come with the processor and cables.
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I haven't had any real motion sickness, and that includes playing while drunk!
Some people seem prone to it, others aren't. I think it's like other forms of motion sickness. I don't get motion sickness in any situation.
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I have a camera and I've seen two different versions of a stand-alone headset. The headset appears to need proprietary cables and maybe a little processing box.
Yes, it's a full system. If you see a headset without the box or cables, that's not going to do it for you. You need, at minimum:
1) Headset
2) PS Camera
3) Processor box
4) Processor box cable to headset (proprietary cable, not sure you can even buy it separately)
5) Processor box cable to PS4 (it's USB on one end but not sure about the other, probably proprietary)
6) Processor box power supply
7) Two high-speed HDMI cables
You also need the cable coming from the headset that plugs into the processor box cable dongle, but I think that might be permanently attached (I don't see an obvious way to detach it, but at least on version 1, the end is kind of hidden so I'm not sure).
If you have the camera, you still need the processor box and all the stuff that goes with it. ie. don't just buy a loose processor box either; you will never get the cables or power supply (unless someone broke a system up to sell parts at no doubt wildly inflated prices, because why else break up a set?)
I'd really recommend the Move controllers also, but they're not 100% necessary. And a set of headphones that provides 3D positioning. I tried to use regular headphones with mine but they didn't work very well; not only didn't I get positional sound, but more importantly the sound kept cutting out and random weird glitches would pop up in games. I think the system really expects and wants you to use 3D headphones made for PSVR. The bundles come with a set of crappy earbuds, but I ended up buying a $50 set of headphones that clips to the headset and has a cable just long enough to plug in to the port on the headset cable, which makes it look and work more like it should have to begin with.
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Most people who get it seem to have a similar reaction. You really have to try it to see how amazing it is. (I'm sure it's the same for PC-based systems; this is more a general modern-day VR thing, not specific to PSVR.)
There are a lot of great games for PSVR; you're not going to run out of stuff to do. Definitely a worthwhile purchase. I thought it was worth it even at $500 (what my wife paid for it at launch).
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Why the Name Trash-80?
in Classic Computing Discussion
Posted
When I see "TRSDOS" in that pic, I actually hear it in my head as "TrashDOS"