Post by bitshiftgames in General Discussion

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Ho ho, a modem and a 486. Ladies and gentlemen, we've finally found someone older than me here! But not by much, I DID use some of those, they were just out of date by the time I was old enough to be building/owning any. I THINK the old acer multimedia systems (that I always thought were black, but I guess were dark green??) that had Jazz Jackrabbit pre-installed were 486s, but I could be misremembering.

And fair enough, different things for different people. Third will definitely be more along the lines of the length of 2. Probably a bit larger once all the extras are added in.

Khevor64 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

I fear I may be a fair bit older yet. I started programming in BASIC on an old Commodore 64, moved up to an 8088 with GW-BASIC (not counting the Unisys Icons at school), before I got my own computer some years after that - a nice 286 (Q-BASIC) (which also caught fire, interestingly enough: the plastic on the speaker wires starting smoking one day for no reason I could fathom). To really date myself, my high school still had old PET computers in a storage closet (they weren't actively used anymore but they were there and still functional).

And I will be keeping an eye open for Third tidbits you decide to let slip.

(Edit: Apparently I'm a sucker for punishment but to add to the above, when I was still a kid, I played Centipede with my neighbour on their Commodore VIC20.)

bitshiftgames64 days ago(+1)

Oh nice! Yeah, definitely have me beat, very much a 90s kid here. I started out tinkering with GW and Q BASIC, but at that point it was on old 286 and 386 IBM compatibles. Enjoy the old stuff though. There's a lot of really good youtube channels right now digging into that early 80s pc tech, and I've really enjoyed taking a look at what they cover, in large part because I didn't have exposure to it naturally. It's a whole treasure trove of machines and companies and histories I had no idea about before (Commodore and Atari especially are just wild). Also, they ported/wrote a version of centipede for the vic20?? Did it run at anything resembling a proper speed?

Funnily enough, the first PC I was allowed to tinker with on my own was also a (then ancient) 286 in the early 90s (the family had a more modern one), and it also...well it didn't catch fire, but it definitely released the magic smoke. Worst and most unique smell I've ever had a computer give off. No exhaustive youtube videos back then to tell me about the dangers of ancient caps or the need to clean dust out of things.

Khevor64 days ago(+1)

Oh wow... um... this was over 40 years ago so I don't really remember how Centipede ran. I just remember it was on a cartridge that plugged into the... back? of the unit. Around the same time, another neighbour of mine had an old console plugged into their t.v. Now to see if I can remember what it was called... No I don't remember. I just remember that the gamepads had a round joystick and a keypad of buttons. Each game came with a plastic template that you slipped into the gamepad that showed you what buttons did what for that game.

I passed the half-century mark a couple years ago and it is mind boggling to know that I was around and playing with computers and game consoles before the internet existed (in its public form). People still had BBS's set up that you could contact and play games or whatever on. I was part of the whole private website/blogging craze that dominated the internet in the mid 90s (before corporations figured out that it was an absolute goldmine). I remember the Grey Day movement. It was an attempt by artists that made webpage assets (such as graphical buttons, background tiling images etc... even entire sets) to stop bandwidth theft (direct linking to their artwork on their webpage so that when a page was called, it would load images from the artist's site ramping up the amount of bandwidth used and they were charged for it by hosts and/or ISPs). Those early days were quite something. I learned HTML (and CSS when it came out) followed by PHP server side scripting as time went on.

But I digress.. by a lot. LOL. I don't program anymore (I stopped programming in BASIC after Visual Basic was released by MS as the Visual Studio package they charged a mint for. Now you can get the entire thing for free). The last thing I programmed was a personal spellbook for my AD&D (2nd ed) character a few years ago in C#.

LOL, yes cleaning and dusting. Mice were the most annoying as grime would get into the wheels and you'd have to pop out the ball and clean them. Computer maintenance was basically trial and error most of the time. Speaking of, the first time my friend got an Intel... Pentium? chip... I think it was the Pentium. Anyway, you used to be able to pop in a processor and fire up the computer without worrying too much about the fan. You still needed one, of course, but it wasn't urgent... until the Pentium. LOL. My friend ordered all the parts but the fan was shipped separately for some reason so it hadn't arrived yet. We figured it should be alright to set it up at least, so we did. Figured we'd turn it on just to make sure everything was working, then shut it down and wait for the fan. The chip fried pretty much instantly. When he sent the chip and MB back to get replacements, the guy wanted to know if the computer was hit by lightning based on the damage to the chip. LOL To this day we don't really know what happened exactly whether it was a faulty chip, a power surge (most likely) or a sudden overheating (since the chip did get damned hot in a hurry). Not funny at the time but it is now.

bitshiftgames63 days ago(+1)

Ha, fair enough, I have trouble remembering stuff from a few years ago sometimes.

Ohhh yeah, I remember all the consternation over hotlinking. And just the whole era where many webpages, especially personal ones were literally hosted out of someone's ordinary, personal desktop box and would go down whenever that box was off for whatever reason. The times when "a website" was just html and some (small) images, or later a bit of css sprinkled on too. Now everything is a horrifying spew of javascript, literal programs running in the browser instead of marked up text like it was supposed to be.

I'm in no way a "serious" programmer (RPGMaker is lego bricks, though you can shove in bits of javascript here and there when the default system fails), but I do muck around from time to time. Had some fun putting together a few site scrapers in python a while back (not to steal content, just grabbing a bunch of text and links and info and re arranging it so it was easier to skim through). Fun to mess around here and there.

Oh god, yeah pentiums ran HOT. Especially once we hit the brief period of the slot CPUs, those things were a nightmare. Kind of interesting to think about, because we've kind of come full circle. I watched a vid a while back of someone DESTROYING the airflow in a modern case, worse and worse with each iteration until there were no case fans at all and the thing was covered in blankets and it....still ran fine. Given, thermal throttling is a thing now, and also given this was a few years ago, before the most recent batch of GPUs, which from what I've heard may have sent us right back to the Pentium days :P. But for a while at least, unless you were on the absolute cutting edge, PCs just...didn't care much about cooling.

But good talking! One of the bright spots of all this nonsense has been getting to know some of the fans of the games a bit better, and it's been fun meeting people.

itch.io

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