111–120 of 139 posts
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I kind of wish I had my 1990 beige box, even though it was a hunk of junk even for the time.
It was the worst of times. You needed at least 50 Mhz to play MP3-files. Only rich people could afford that. And couple of years later you wanted to play DIVX-files and you needed 300 Mhz.
Although this seems to be a 33MHz CPU, the 386DX40 was the first "decent" processor I had access to when growing up so was quite memorable for me. In my teenage years the PCs my brothers and I had access to were two 386DX40s each with 8MB of RAM and several hundred MBs of hard disk space (can't remember exactly, but pretty sure less than a GB). We really loved Blizzard's Warcraft II, which despite having a minimum re…
If you ever get the urge for playing it again the Warcraft 2 package on GoG even comes with the IPX patcher you need to play on modern windows. WC2 is still my favorite of the bunch and it's joy to have a game with old friends from time to time. I also play WC1 in dosbox from time to time. I still have many fond memories of playing WC2 with friends across town via modem to modem. We were lucky that our dads were gami…
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I wonder if I just got lucky in my youth trying to repair a mac classic II (at the time it was about 10 years old), or if the 9" CRT that must have not been turned on for years at that point didn't have enough of a charge? That machine eventually lived and functioned perfectly for quite a few more years (ended up just needing a new HDD) until finally dying.
A level of high voltage in CRTs is directly related to the size of tube and whether it's B/W (monochrome) or color (higher for color as you need to attract 3 electron beams instead of one.) In small monochrome CRTs (like 9"-10") cathode voltages would be in single digit kilovolts range, while for large color CRTs (19"+) would be in tens on kilovolts (like 25kV.) Bottom line is that in 9" CRT lower voltages are a bit…
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It was just a single pin on the timer chip connected to a buzzer so you could generate a square way at a certain frequency.
But you could do a bit more. Here’s a DOS golf game that did. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMPb1UlSRpY
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A little late but you could also have used the Crynwr plip packet driver to run IPX over the parallel cable avoiding the significant overhead of running Windows 95 on a 386 system.
Only about 25 years too late :D, but that would have been cool to know about. It does make me think though about how I might have discovered such a thing at that point in time. I don't think I even had internet at home then, I never used things like a BBS and later I was never big into forums either. So the only way I really learnt things was either through fiddling (which is how I found out about the parallel cable…
Here are some offline methods other people used to get such information:
1. magazines and "zines"
2. books
3. word-of-mouth (as you said)
4. clubs or meet-ups
Online methods that pre-date google:
1. newsgroups (usenet)
2. yahoo groups
3. bbses
4. forums
5. msdn
6. other search engines, even ones that used categories like yahoo were sometimes effective. It just took longer to search to find exactly what you wanted
7. manufacturer websites. for example if you need the pin settings for a WD MFM or RLL disk drive, go to the WD website and look it up.
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It wasn't as bad as people think. It just took a long more time to find.
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And, for us oldies the Weitek as well as the DSP32 board. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weitek and https://www.signalogic.com/images/Ariel_DSP32-PC.jpg
And if you're old and a bit odd, there were i486+i860[1] motherboards from (at least) Hauppauge, Microway & Olivetti. [1] https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc02...
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And instantly a lot smarter!
It's amazing how complacent we get. Two times every day I duck under an electric gate that's fed by a 10kV (might be higher) low-impedance charger. Been doing it this way for years. Then a few days ago, ducking under it as usual, I happened to be on a slightly higher part of the ground and my back touched it as I was wearing wet, muddy boots. And I was instantly reminded why the horses have learned to not get too clo…
Could one make a system on a chip 386?
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If you ever get the urge for playing it again the Warcraft 2 package on GoG even comes with the IPX patcher you need to play on modern windows. WC2 is still my favorite of the bunch and it's joy to have a game with old friends from time to time. I also play WC1 in dosbox from time to time. I still have many fond memories of playing WC2 with friends across town via modem to modem. We were lucky that our dads were gami…
Another way is to use Stratagus, it can import the WC2 assets from an original CD and play using that. We used to play on huge maps many years ago with several people playing over lan (It was called freecraft back then). I'm not even sure it's maintained anymore.