Keatah Posted August 18, 2016 Share Posted August 18, 2016 What are some of the modern-day tools you use in your classic gaming/computing hobby? I'm not necessarily talking soldering irons or logic analyzers and scopes. But rather PC based tools like emulators, or file organizers, databases, file archivers & compressors, file viewers and things like that. My toolkit consists of: Windows File Explorer WinRAR Adobe Acrobat Foxit Reader (older non-bloated version) MS Office 2003 Notepad Wordpad Calculator A big box full of emulators Assorted PC <-> Classic Computer file transfer utilities and kits CFFA 3000 ADTPRO Ciderpress Disk Commander Assorted and platform specific graphic converters Platform specific compressors and decompressors Irfanview FreeFileSync EasyDuplicateFinder (older non-bloated version) CCleaner duplicate name finder Filename date/time changer D-FileMU file renamer Winmerge ISO Workship Winimage CDBurnerXP WinISO FastCopy ..and probably some others I'm not thinking of at the moment.. Lame topic? Maybe.. But the point is to discover and discus what tools on a modern PC make classic computing and archiving more fun and practical. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted August 18, 2016 Share Posted August 18, 2016 Right now I use ADT Pro, CiderPress and a Floppy Emu with my Apple IIGS, along with various web sites where I get disk images. I've had various emulators but the only one I really keep around permanently is MAME. In terms of PC-based stuff, I think that's actually about it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted August 18, 2016 Share Posted August 18, 2016 Some of the tools that I use with some regularity: Emacs (obviously) Adobe Photoshop various graphics converters (*) Audacity (to record/convert emulated sound for posting clips) Linux dd (to write disk images) etc plus some of the ones you list above. Actually I think "assorted utilities", "platform specific tools" and alike would be more interesting to list, as those are the tools that most users or aspiring developers would have the hardest time to hunt down and that is what FAQ's usually try to cover. The fact that we use WinRAR or 7Zip, Photoshop or Paint.net, MS Office, Notepad, Acrobat Reader, command shell etc shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, as these are programs that pretty much everybody use for various needs. Perhaps more interesting then for what we use them. I import full colour images in Photoshop, shrink them and reduce to a smaller palette and by hand fix pixels to get graphics that work on the platform of choice. For full screen images there are specialized programs that do the same even better, but for small chunks I like to have some control, although graphics isn't my game. I suppose a word processor mostly is used to write documentation, so nothing spectacular. Our pure text editors that others might just use to keep simple notes, usually are our programming tools where code is written. Some environments even allow syntax highlighting, attaching compilers to turn them into IDE's etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted August 18, 2016 Share Posted August 18, 2016 Notepad++tasmZ88dkCC65CyderpressApple II toolsM.E.S.S. and many other emulators Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elizabeth1701 Posted August 19, 2016 Share Posted August 19, 2016 For hardware: IBM model 25 Tandy 1000 T:L/2 486 DX 4 100 486 DX2 Server IBM p70 Apple IIC MAC LC II (Two) K6-2 a PIII Etc. ZIP Drives for easy file transfer from Newer Desktop, Plus a 3 1/2 Floppy Software: DOS 6.22/7/Win95/98/OS2/Apple OS WinImage I usually stick with DOS but I do have 98 on an Athlon with Geforce 6100 I think card you can get, Sound blaster for running games that were made for 95/98. DOS 7/95 on 486 because the FAT32 and the 80GB Hard drive I managed to stuff in it. Mostly just boot into DOS Mostly do most of the extraction on my Newer Desktop, write to a floppy or Zip. I have like 200 Floppies and 20 or so ZIP disk (People toss ZIP disk) I grab them and scandisk them, they usually test good after a format! A roll of tape to cover the little hole because a couple my computers only have 720k drives. A stack of IBM 5150, 5160 and 5170 I'm rebuilding Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 SDCC Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrMaddog Posted August 28, 2016 Share Posted August 28, 2016 I've often use a spreadsheet program like GNUmeric (Excel or LibreOffice also works) to make game lists. Being able to sort by catagory and export to a text file is very useful... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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