Show off your old and retro computer parts

[jre84]

we had the internet? internet has been around for a long time....heck I remember webcrawler being the old google. schools had the 1990s macs with interent...thats one advancement media..

 

media and gaming I suppose..youtube didn't exist no netflix ect like we still had alot of entertainment back in 1995 but now..wow have things changed...too much info not enough time.

 

gaming has progressed slowly, but internet speed!! i have internet 1000 and back in 1995 if someone told me about internet 1000 I would be thinking yeah ok maybe in 50 years, its advanced so fast heck now my cell phone does 300mbps

 

also I say gaming has progressed slowly because, back when it was all sprites they were really pushing 3d and when it came it advanced pretty fast..things started looking better and better by quite a bit..now crysis farcry from like more than a decade ago can still make new games run for it..I just played dirt 5 and thought wow this looks good, but when I compare it to a ten year old game its not really a huge jump just the small details..no huge jump..and to be honest games should look photo realistic by now, no excuse as to why they dont, ray tracing can allow perfect lighting and reflections and texture mapping has advanced enough as well as svogi ect they have all the tools....perhaps crysis 4?

[Corrupt_Liberty]

6 hours ago, jre84 said:

also I say gaming has progressed slowly because, back when it was all sprites they were really pushing 3d and when it came it advanced pretty fast..things started looking better and better by quite a bit..now crysis farcry from like more than a decade ago can still make new games run for it..I just played dirt 5 and thought wow this looks good, but when I compare it to a ten year old game its not really a huge jump just the small details..no huge jump..and to be honest games should look photo realistic by now, no excuse as to why they dont, ray tracing can allow perfect lighting and reflections and texture mapping has advanced enough as well as svogi ect they have all the tools....perhaps crysis 4?

Well you also have to remember we were mostly playing at 800x600 or 1024x768 in the early 00's. Now we're playing games at 4k. That's more than 10 times the number of pixels.  I think it's amazing we've improved polygon rendering as much as we have considering the sheer increase in pixel pushing. 

[resolve_beta]

I have a ddr(Something im not sure)300 mhz 256 mb of ram, nvidia quadro k600, and a unidentifiable cpu and it was a prebuilt help.

[da na]

59 minutes ago, resolve_beta said:

I have a ddr(Something im not sure)300 mhz 256 mb of ram, nvidia quadro k600, and a unidentifiable cpu and it was a prebuilt help.

There are many many prebuilts with that spec. 

Can we see pics at least? 

[atxcyclist]

8 hours ago, Corrupt_Liberty said:

Well you also have to remember we were mostly playing at 800x600 or 1024x768 in the early 00's. Now we're playing games at 4k. That's more than 10 times the number of pixels.  I think it's amazing we've improved polygon rendering as much as we have considering the sheer increase in pixel pushing. 

 

I remember those days, having a whole 16mb of VRAM to work with. It was a simpler time, but still a really good one.

[jre84]

polygon gaming has been around for more than 2 decades, so im afraid yes gaming hasn't progressed much

 

look at shenmue dreamcast from 1999 it has unreal graphics in some instances, it had some character models(faces) looking like crysis

 

-Shenmue 2 is right on the dot yu suzuki said in his notes about running at 1.5 million polygons at 30 fps.

 

-Crysis 1 is widely regarded as the first Poly Heavy game had about 24k Polys in the main character and team mates. But the reason it was so intensive was the world, with the total exceeding 3 Million Polys!

 

grabbed from google search, so yeah even from a polygon standpoint not much has changed

chai and shenhua faces in particular

 

 

chai below

 

 

sorry for vearing off topic but its retro tech and software info..still semi relevant

 

 

here crysis 1 korean soldier...graphics on face of chai look better and thats a 8 year gap..however crysis 3 faces and overall graphics look like a proper evolution, but not many games have that...ghost recon looks alot like crysis 1 for alot of assets

 

 

and back on topic, I had a macintosh II when I was a kid, but the sega master system was out years before...it was suprisingly robust did alot of things..

 

 

[SimplyChunk]

1 hour ago, jre84 said:

-Shenmue 2 is right on the dot yu suzuki said in his notes about running at 1.5 million polygons at 30 fps.

Interestingly..Did you know the poly count for 'Batman' in Arkham Knight was higher than the total poly count for the first Arkham game?

[SimplyChunk]

18 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

I remember those days, having a whole 16mb of VRAM to work with. It was a simpler time, but still a really good one.

Voodoo for life

[jre84]

8 year gap is all....we should be doubling every year...don't you see this....after a decade we should be able to see something big...its always small not trying to argue I know im old and a geezer and you guys won't see what I see but going from sprites to polygons was big....going from 1.5 mil polys to 3mil polys was not....this is all

 

 

and yes thats true but it was low poly to begin with...im talking top tier to top tier...whats the polygon count of the number 1 game vs 20 years ago..should double every time...ghost recon breakpoint vs GT1..we should have photo realism

[Corrupt_Liberty]

13 hours ago, jre84 said:

8 year gap is all....we should be doubling every year...don't you see this....after a decade we should be able to see something big...its always small not trying to argue I know im old and a geezer and you guys won't see what I see but going from sprites to polygons was big....going from 1.5 mil polys to 3mil polys was not....this is all

 

 

and yes thats true but it was low poly to begin with...im talking top tier to top tier...whats the polygon count of the number 1 game vs 20 years ago..should double every time...ghost recon breakpoint vs GT1..we should have photo realism

You clearly don't understand what goes into rendering a single frame of graphics in a video game.  When Quake released in 1996 it could render up to 200 polygons per frame. In 2006 Quake 4 was using 2,600 polygons for each character model. A year later Unreal Tournament 3 had over 12,000 polygons in just the gun model seen in the first person view. We can now render pretty much as many polygons as we want. Epic is claiming they can render billions of polygons with little difficulty. 

 

But all of that leaves out other advancements and what's really holding back graphics development.  Things like lighting, shaders, surface textures and physics.  And we're doing all of that in real time with ever increasing resolutions.  Yes, we can render realistic life-like frames. But doing so in real time is still a ways off.  The real trouble we're going to have in the near term is avoiding the uncanny valley.  I think a lot of production avoids life-like graphics simply to not have to deal with that.  Just watch Polar Express or Alita: Battle Angel. So close yet almost too disturbing to watch. 

 

I have no doubt that we'll get there eventually.  Just try to understand how daunting a task this really is. 

[oali24]

So I got this sony mz-n710 minidisc player/recorder from ebay for £40 and had it shipped here to Jordan. If you don't know anything about minidisc, its basically a cross between a cd player and an mp3 player, Sony developed them in the 90s wanted them to replace cassette walkmans, they weren't a failure but they definitely weren't as successful as sony hoped because by the time they had come down in price in the early 2000s ipods and other mp3 players were on the rise, it really is like an in between of CD players and mp3 players, you can add and remove individual songs as many times as you want without erasing the whole disc it basically acts like an mp3 player but with a magneto-optical disc (it uses magnets to record and a laser to read), since this is a later net md model you can even just upload music files to it from a computer over mini usb, it originally used a proprietary software but an open source web based software was developed and you can even use it on linux, I actually use it with some songs I downloaded on my laptop that I can just upload, they sound like any mp3 file, some of the things this has like shock protection actually were originally created for minidisc standard and later implemented in CD players.

 

[battlepants220]

My neighbors computer. Been in storage for 21 years. I get to play "will it boot?" Lol the goal is to access the hard drives. A simple goal. Let's see how it goes. 

[resolve_beta]

On 11/4/2021 at 4:37 PM, Mel0nMan said:

There are many many prebuilts with that spec. 

Can we see pics at least? 

alr i will when i have time

[CerealExperimentsLain]

Let me tell you, capture of 4:3 resolutions out of older machines is a pain.  The graphics drivers can freak out if it gets an EDID offering high resolutions, and many capture devices don't support higher resolution 4:3 options.  This is doing 1024x768 fine but blinks out on 1280x960 and 1600x1200, unless I set the input resolution to 1920x1080 but then it stretches the input out over that and that's undesirable.

[da na]

1 hour ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Let me tell you, capture of 4:3 resolutions out of older machines is a pain.  The graphics drivers can freak out if it gets an EDID offering high resolutions, and many capture devices don't support higher resolution 4:3 options.  This is doing 1024x768 fine but blinks out on 1280x960 and 1600x1200, unless I set the input resolution to 1920x1080 but then it stretches the input out over that and that's undesirable.

POV: Can’t capture GPU output so you gotta do it like a 2006 COD funny moment compilation 

[Bitter]

On 11/6/2021 at 1:16 PM, battlepants220 said:

My neighbors computer. Been in storage for 21 years. I get to play "will it boot?" Lol the goal is to access the hard drives. A simple goal. Let's see how it goes. 

If it won't there's plenty of USB to IDE/SATA interfaces that'll get the drive connected to a PC for reading data off it.

[battlepants220]

6 hours ago, Bitter said:

If it won't there's plenty of USB to IDE/SATA interfaces that'll get the drive connected to a PC for reading data off it.

My neighbors are awesome dude lol

[Bitter]

Hey, if it works for them it works for them I guess.

[da na]

29 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Hey, if it works for them it works for them I guess.

At this point might as well call XP "end of EOL" it's that unsupported. However, if it actually supported new applications I'd still connect my XP machines to the Internet.

[lostboy]

Got this for free off the Buy/Sell last month. P3 833,had WinME, and 100% of the Dell paperwork from Dec 2000. Runs like a hot damn. 

[afwasboi]

P1 of gems i found at the 30 yo computer shop i work at that never trows anything out:

 

-incredible 4D mouse with directional scrollweels (up/down and left/right)

-floppy DnD

-real digital agendas for the serious business man

-the first wireless mouse?

-a USB-C dongle box that is trying to cause max pollution

-the 4-way connector for when you just cant decide

-and ofc the classic remote stack

[afwasboi]

P2 of gems i found at the 30 yo computer shop i work at that never trows anything out:

 

-a steel cable for laptop security

-400 dpi mouse

-the good ol' webcam bags

-the prime of silent cooling engineering

-futuristic water cooling tech

- and to top it off... OVER 250 STICKS OF DDR1 RAM

[da na]

Just dropped $30 on a 6 inch B&W CRT and don't regret it. Here's the eBay picture

Tiny little portable TV, but what sets this apart from the 500 other similar ones you can find is this has video in, not just an antenna port. 

This will become a 3rd monitor on my desk. 

[Mitko_DSV]

@Mel0nManThis reminded me about mine 7" black and white CRT TV I've had since I was a kid. My grandparents bought it for me in about 2004 or maybe it was 2005, not sure. It's been barely used, total runtime is less than 10 hours I'd guess and it has a pretty sharp picture and it has video in on the back and I've used it, works like it should. And it can also run on either 220V or 12V.

Though it has an issue - the vertical isn't working properly, so the picture is basically 16:9 (not very good picture, but I hope you can get the idea). This problem appeared after the TV sat for years outside, I had completely forrgotten about it.

The problem is that it'll be hard to fix - it's impossible to find a schematic for 'PRESIDENT PREMIER MDX-KTV-516'. I have to replace components randomly and hope it starts working properly. Will try to fix it some day probably. I can make just enough space on my desk for it, so a second monitor is an interesting idea, hadn't though about that.

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, Mitko_DSV said:

The problem is that it'll be hard to fix - it's impossible to find a schematic for 'PRESIDENT PREMIER MDX-KTV-516'. I have to replace components randomly and hope it starts working properly. Will try to fix it some day probably. I can make just enough space on my desk for it, so a second monitor is an interesting idea, hadn't though about that.

Might just be a scratchy vertical size pot if you're lucky...

 

Only got color models, 3 of them (got 2 of the Sony combos, the 2nd has yet to be restored but the plastics are in pretty bad shape and the VCRs aren't working anyway so i might extract just the monitor and make a 3D printed case for it or something if I can find a way to provide it the right signals). 

The Roadstar one obviously has some geometry issues...