11–20 of 44 posts
The Wii U walked so that the Switch could run. I'm glad to see renewed interest in it. Now if we only had a decent emulator. I know Cemu exists but the compatibility of most games I want to play with it is atrocious.
I used zip disks quite a bit (as an architect) and never heard the click of death. Before usb sticks, zip disk was the only way to move medium to large files, other than burn a cd.
It was a design issue.
> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a prem…
SCSI was that thing your dad's workstation had at work, and the rich kid had on his Mac. I remember finding some older Adaptec cards for an early Linux box and they were still worth some change, even 5+ years old.
It was cool and fascinating to me that only knew of the newly released USB, serial and parallel ports for external devices.
The Wii U walked so that the Switch could run. I'm glad to see renewed interest in it. Now if we only had a decent emulator. I know Cemu exists but the compatibility of most games I want to play with it is atrocious.
Have you tried Dolphin? From what I understand it's the best in class emulator on that front.
Dolphin is indeed fantastic for Wii/gamecube games though
> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a prem…
> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a prem…
And yet practically every Mac after 1986 had SCSI onboard. Why the PC industry didn't embrace it to avoid having to wait until USB is beyond me...
I'm a SCSI fan, but it took a few revs to get it righted.
> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a prem…
SCSI is a beautiful example of abstraction and standardization getting is Cool Stuff decades later. While there certainly are edge cases and it's not as 'tidy' as I'm making it out, it's really neat to me that a device like the BlueSCSI[0] can come along and bring a healthy dose of modernity to old platforms.
SCSI is at a sweet spot of general purpose capability and abstraction from the hardware (unlike, say, the Shugart floppy interface, or even ATAPI/IDE) that allows devices to be built to just plug-in and provide significant functionality to legacy platforms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet practically every Mac after 1986 had SCSI onboard. Why the PC industry didn't embrace it to avoid having to wait until USB is beyond me...
You may not have ever had to deal with SCSI termination errors before. Earlier system had to have the device numbers manually assigned, if they were wrong, all sorts of weird things could happen (of just nothing would work) I'm a SCSI fan, but it took a few revs to get it righted.
> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a prem…
I know there was a later revision parallel port ZIP drive that wasn't internally SCSI and that might have been lower cost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may not have ever had to deal with SCSI termination errors before. Earlier system had to have the device numbers manually assigned, if they were wrong, all sorts of weird things could happen (of just nothing would work) I'm a SCSI fan, but it took a few revs to get it righted.
SCSI was so much less tedious than dealing with IRQ / DMA / address hell on ISA cards, though. Once you understood it you could apply that knowledge across lots of platforms and devices. SCSI was much less arbitrary than dealing with random devices from manufacturers who each thought up their own way of setting configurable parameters (jumpers and DIP switches, option ROMs, tool you boot in DOS to frobnicate settings…
Aside from the time we lost a terminator for a few days, I never once felt like the scsi system couldn't work, it was just a matter of a really young me and my dad getting it sorted out. IRQ/DMA/ISA fuckery? There were multiple times I can remember getting a shiny new piece of hardware, that took months of begging my parents, and after getting things assembled thinking that "this configuration of devices" might not be possible to make work together.