Retro PC Thread

Send me a link to your local craigslist page, i'll see if I can find you something if you want. I can also check eBay

Now your missing the point. A 100 year old engine may still burn gas but how it was designed and operated was completely different then modern engines. Ever fire up a two cylinder full sized farm tractor by grabbing the flywheel with your bare hands? Rest assured its a very different experience then just turning a key.
Same goes for tube/transistor computers with punch card interfaces when compared to modern PCs. Clearly both can calculate 1+1=2. How a user goes about getting the result is very different however.

These things aren't far enough back in the past to matter. They are no different then modern PCs besides being slower. Every example you mention could occur on a modern PC one way or another.

waco.craigslist.org

I should take a better pic.

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Very nice collection if it is yours

waco.craigslist.org/sys/d/dell-optiplex-745-with-monitor/6586821612.html
This is a good one given that it's one of the few Retro PC's. Very nice Core 2 Duo and made for XP. Would be a fun tinker project. Win XP is nice addition too

Wait no it's a Pentium D, even more exciting to study and work with. Very capable CPU even for todays standards

Thanks!
I have some more old machines, mostly x86 stuff from the Pentium era onwards. But I also have Suns, including an Ultra Enterprise 250 which still runs 24/7 as my homeserver.

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I actually have an opportunity to get a 450 for 80 or so dollars. That said I am hoping to talk them down to 50.

This

I missed out about ten years ago when the company I was working for moved to a new depot and threw out all their IT shit.

I remember they had several tiny desktops that ran either Redhat or Mandrake that they just chucked in the bin. They would make perfect HTPCs or mini servers but I haven't been able to find out what make they were. I didn't have the same interest back then as I do now and would have loved to grab a few.

Any ideas on what computers they would been OP?

Obviously no idea what he's talking about. Why do you even post?

On the theme of old computers, what do you guys think about LGR? I saw a couple of threads about him in the past and people seem to not like him.

is a powermac g4 retro?
where do i obtain the os? can i install it from usb or do i have to burn optical media?
does it still count if i just put debian on it?

Personally I occasionally watch his videos if there's something interesting, actually more like the thrifts videos as it's nice to see what's laying around in thrift stores, he also does good research, but it's too shallow for my liking, would like more detail, also not very interested in watching him play Duke Nukem 3D on yet another random DOS machine for the 30th time in a row.
People don't like him because they think he seems like the "hipster meme" kind of guy, a lot of people in these threads are actually like that, so they automatically hate anyone similar.

>is a powermac g4 retro?
Not really the question here, where else would you ask about a PowerMac G4 anyways if not here?

>where do i obtain the os?
Google, torrents. What OS are you interested in putting on it?

>can i install it from usb or do i have to burn optical media?
Some G4's indeed support booting from USB, you have to do it manually in the OpenFirmware prompt. If you have the option to burn a DVD, that's probably easier.

>does it still count if i just put debian on it?
Why not?

>They are no different then modern PCs
My Amigas beg to differ.

> hey, I recognize that floppy drive

how's the kitty cat, fampie?

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Picture too big for my tiny VGA resolution.
Post a picture for ants next time.

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She's enjoying the summer/spring sun outside right now.
So how does 95 run on that thing?

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He is fine, but I mainly watch his non-gaming related stuff. Talking about hardware, or the occasional rare tech tales episode I enjoy watching them.

Some people consider G5's to be borderline retro while I think that is not remotely the case, but yeah some people have considered it "retro" enough.

For me, if it has modern inputs and can get online without any configuration needed then its by all means not retro. Its almost hard imagining the fact that XP and P4 is almost reaching 20 years but I cannot see them being retro in the slightest.

>Some people consider G5's to be borderline retro
The G5 is obscure by todays standards, that's why it's not being mind here, anything obscure and a little old has been always okay to post here.

OfferUp has had some promising returns

Pic related only cost me $40 and it fucking works.

I would post my NeXT but I have done that to death already. This is my new hotness, aside from the Sun Ultra10 I got recently and a future purchase that I am fucking hyped about.

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>These things aren't far enough back in the past to matter.
Nobody will be at your funeral, because you aren't dead long enough to matter.

He's alright, anons will hate on just about anybody. I like the thrifts and oddware stuff, the gaming stuff i don't care about. Of the retro PC youtubers i enjoy the 8-bit guy the best because he really gets down to the more interesting and educational low-level stuff.

I recently got some old P1 PC's and i have to say, *hardware aesthetics* aside, a big part of the fun is not knowing what you're going to find on the hard disk. So far i found an installation of Super Bubble Blob and random pictures from Happy Tree Friends. Looking at the last time most of the files were accessed it appears that the machine was used until around 2005 which is quite a long time for a Pentium 1.

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Most of my daily use computers are G4s, I wouldn't really consider them retro. Maybe the Yikes! And the Sawtooths. I have an MDD that plays 1080p video just fine, and that's my main desktop.
Or maybe they are retro and I just can't wrap my head around the fact that they're almost 20 years old.
But the G5s are definitely not retro.

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>tfw cleaned out my retro PC today

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>tfw shat my pants in high school once

I feel exactly like you, I just like to watch him tinker with old tech an the thrifts

PowerMac G4s have been around since 1999 when they first came out.

As for software. You can get any Mac OS (upto X.5), office software, games, etc from macintoshgarden.org/.
There is also a guy that still makes a modern version of FireFox for the G3/G4/G5 system running Mac OS X.4 or X.5. floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

For systems running Mac OS 8.6-9.2.2 and Mac OS 10.1.5-10.3.9 there is Classilla, but I don't know when it was last updated. floodgap.com/software/classilla/

i have that exact same case on my p2 350mhz

An AT Slot 1 motherboard? Disgusting

what a slow thread

i wanted to reactivate my powerbook G4 (1,67mhz, 2gb ram) for light shitposting and irc but it's slow as hell and get's pretty hot. i have no idea why since i don't even use anything released past 2010 and it runs leopard. should i make a clean install or downgrade to tiger?

Supermicro made an AT dual slot 1 motherboard, P6DGH. It was a full-size monster thing that had four extra PCI slots above the keyboard connector, in addition to the normal eight AT slots.

Do a clean install. That thing should fly with Leopard and TenFourFox. I'd also recommend upgrading to an SSD. You'll notice it, believe me.
I just upgraded my GbE with a 933MHz CPU from a QS, and man this thing flies, even clocked at 700MHz (haven't set the correct multiplier yet)

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thx for the input! any recommendations for a ssd to slap inside it? or, any ssds to avoid?

> Retro PC

The single and ONLY reason this is a thing is because of planned obsolescence by Microsoft. X64 can run X86 commands just fine. The fact is, if Microsoft didn't prevent us from installing Windows 95-2000 on modern hardware, we'd be running old games just fine.

One caveat: The ancient games with timing-based issues have their own kinks to work out. But everything after that is just Microsoft screwing us.

>That thing should fly with Leopard
Not with a 1,67MHz CPU

it actually did when it came out. that's why i'm wondering why it's so slow since then. i know, it IS slow compared to more modern computers, but still, it's even stuttering with mundane tasks.

Microsoft does not prevent this.
You can easily install DOS (or 95 or 2000, etc) on a modern PC with an EFI motherboard.

The problem is 3rd party drivers, like ISA sound cards or for latter games (if we are talking games) graphics cards to actually make use of that machine, totally unrelated to Microsoft.

No idea why you're accusing Microsoft, if anything it's Wintel in general, heavily on the Intel part.

Giguhurtz user not Memehurtz

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>implying i read my own typos
it was a long day being a wagecuck, you got me there.

>The single and ONLY reason this is a thing is because of planned obsolescence by Microsoft.
How is this related to Macintoshes, Amigas, PC-98, SGI workstations, so on?
>Microsoft didn't prevent us from installing Windows 95-2000 on modern hardware
Go on as we have 30 years of legacy on modern X86_64 boards and CPUs, you can do it

I don't really have a clue about SSDs for OS X. I use an m.2 (via m.2 > mSATA > IDE adapters) SSD in my iBook, but that's because I use a modern version of Debian and it supports TRIM and all that. I think there are IDE to mSATA adapters with garbage collection onboard, one of those should be good for OS X.
I use a dual 1.33GHz MDD as my main machine and it renders sites as fast as a core duo running at the same speed. A 1.67 CPU should be only a tad slower. Oh, just got the joke. Oh well.
I'd repaste it too, the thermal paste on it must be dry as a dead dingo's donger.

Where do I get one of these?

I'm only 20something, but something about the *really* old 8-bit microcomputers, the Commodores and Amigas and Spectrums, really attracts me. I've never even owned one - I'm not so flush with cash that I can really justify plonking a couple hundred bucks on eBay for an artifact that I have zero practical use for - but that kind of retrocomputing totally fascinates me.

The 6502 processor had just 3000-odd transistors. It was simple enough that its schematic can be - and was - drawn out by hand on paper; Hell, you can actually build a working replica yourself with discrete components. It's actually possible for a human being to look at code and actually *know*, with confidence, what the processor will actually do with it on the level of amps and volts. There were, and are, people who fully understand the thing from the silicon to the system level. The C64 was likewise *comprehensible*; no operating system beyond BASIC getting between you and the hardware. The machine could be fully understood, in a way that modern computers can't. Programming wasn't mysterious in the same way I found it as a kid trying to learn for the first time how to make my own games, there was no layer of files and folders and APIs and GUIs to distract you from what a computer even was: you were greeted by the BASIC prompt as soon as you pressed the power button, and fiddling with the assembly was as easy as PEEK and POKE.

It was a simpler machine, a less capable machine, a less useful machine. But it was a machine that a human could actually fit in their head. There is no human being on Earth that really, fully comprehends what their computer is actually doing at any moment in time. Even if you zoom in so close you're looking at the raw hexadecimal of a compiled executable, even if you pretend those millions of lines of OS isn't there, the chip itself is so complex that the execution model implied by the x86 language has very little to do with what your actual silicon is doing.

>I'd repaste it too, the thermal paste on it must be dry as a dead dingo's donger.
suspected that already, well, long weekend coming up so i might open it up for some cleaning.

Windows 95 doesn't work on modern hardware because the chipsets have changed a _lot_ in 20+ years and it can't run on them at all.

i have a p4 dimension in my garage with xp on it for some reason.

As long as the EFI supports LegacyBIOS (most do) it will run fine with generic ACPI chipset drivers.

>and it supports TRIM
Wait, you say PATA IDE? How the crap does it support TRIM? You need at least SATA with AHCI to do TRIM.

>I think there are IDE to mSATA adapters with garbage collection onboard, one of those should be good for OS X.
There are SSDs that do that automatically, searching for pages related to PPC Macs in modern day and age will show some info about what people recommend for that exact reason.

Quake is a meme game though.

>old 8-bit microcomputers, the Commodores and Amigas
>Amiga
>8-bit
>Amiga
>8
>bit

>It was a simpler machine, a less capable machine, a less useful machine. But it was a machine that a human could actually fit in their head.
This is indeed something.

You actually don't need a real cassette recorder, you can just hook it up to your PC's audio in/out jacks and save stuff as WAV files.

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That's something someone would say who wasn't hyped as fuck (because they still shat their pants or wheren't born) when they got their hands on the shareware version in '97.

I actually never really liked programming until I started learning BASIC on an old Amstrad my uncle gave me because "I like computers". Now I'm learning Z80 assembly...

Like, I didn't even really understand what a computer *was* until I got overconfident in my own skill after beating TIS-100 and tried to design my own CPU. Like, I'd known that it was "all just binary" and that somehow it was just a bunch of logic gates doing math really really fast down there, but I'd never truly understood exactly what that *meant*. Truly realizing how much of what I'd thought of when I thought "computer" and "programming" - files, folders, multitasking, variables, functions, data types - was just ... not there, down at the metal.

All you really need is to take in numbers in the form of different combinations of on-off on a bus, and based on that, switch the circuit into different configurations that determine what it does with the next number. All the files and folders and GUIs and programs collapse to a single line from 0x00000000 to 0xHowever much RAM you have, all the zillion different processes you have open collapse to a single stream (well, depending on how many cores you have) of numbers scattered across that line that are executed one-by-one, telling you where to move on to find the next number to munch.

It was the same kind of change in perspective in what computing *means* that I felt when I went through SICP and really *grasped* Lisp, just ... in exactly the opposite direction.

And since then I've always had this fascination with computing machines that are still electrical circuits, that are still *tools*, and not magical artifacts so vast in scope that mere mortal minds cannot hope to understand more than a tiny fraction of their complexity.

>good old hardware
keyboards
monitors
>bad old hardware
mice
computers

i'll gladly use CRTs and old keyboard for as long as they still exist

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Shit, you're right, this whole time I thought Amiga was a different company than Commodore that existed at the same time.

I have been shamed. I will commit sudoku immediately.

You can send TRIM commands just fine through a PATA PHY. The IDE to SATA adapter is just changing the physical signalling, the OS can send any command it wants to the SSD as long as in supports it.
Damn this LaCie ElectronBlue II looks fucking awesome.

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TRS-80s are design-wise halfway between an Apple II and a PET. There's just monochrome block graphics and to generate sound, you have to connect the cassette cable to a stereo and output sound to the cassette port.

Amiga was a company bought by Commodore because they had financial issues.
The point was that the Amiga was a 32-bit computer, not 8-bit.

It's 16-bit (well, the classic models). There were the later 32-bit models that about 5 people in Germany used.

48k RAM composed of tri-voltage 16kx1 DRAMs that get hot and will self-destruct if not powered on properly (correct voltage sequence and all that).

I believe you could probably replace them with a single SRAM chip but you'd need some extra logic to demux the data and address lines and not connect the RAS/CAS which SRAM doesn't use. Would cut way down on heat and power consumption plus you could use a newly-manufactured SRAM chip instead of 35 year old chips.

And an HxC?

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No, every 68000 machine is a 32-bit core with a 16-bit external bus. Including the very first Amiga.
Atari ST even stands for that, ST = Sixteen/Thirtytwo.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000
>The Motorola 68000 ("'sixty-eight-thousand'"; also called the m68k or Motorola 68k, "sixty-eight-kay") is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor, which implements a 32-bit instruction set, with 32-bit registers and 32-bit internal data bus, but with a 16-bit main ALU and a 16-bit external data bus
The address bus is even 24-bit, not just 16-bit.

Only exception is the Genesis, as its categorized as a 16-bit console.

You really aren't the only one. In fact, pretty much any beta metrosexual bugman hipster numale millennial sòybóy cuck is into that, and that demographic is pretty big.

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DESU, same. Like, the thing that made me interested in programming as a kid was that I wanted to make my own games ... but none of the programming courses or tutorials I could find online ever explained how to actually put pictures on screen or make stuff move, beyond a few simple APIs that were very clearly not intended for making games. It took me literally years before I found out how to make programs that actually did anything beyond interact with the command line. Everything was so abstracted from everything else I did on my computer. It frustrated kid-me.

But when everything is so, so basic (pardon the pun) that you can interact with the graphics hardware at the level of "Hey, these numbers in this part of memory control this part of the screen", you can start making shitty graphics *immediately* and use more complicated programs to make better graphics. It's much, much less *efficient*, because all those modern APIs exist for a reason, so that if you know what you're doing you don't have to write so much code from scratch - but as much as the superior modern approach gains in efficiency, usability, portability, stability, performance, and actual quality, it loses in accessibility and, frankly, *fun*.

Even now that I actually know how to make programs that aren't just command-line toys, if I wanna make stuff happen on screen I gotta pick a library someone else wrote and search through its documentation for how to do stuff and then whatever I wanna do I have to figure out how to piece it together from those high-level tools with the right arguments.

>saw a box of Fuji camera film in a store the other day
Wait, camera film still exists?

That's the thing, nobody considered Atari STs or Amigas as 16-bit machines.
The chipsets themselves use 24-bit too because of DMA.

Either way, I'm embarrassed.

HxCs are great because they let you cheat and define things like a 1MB floppy image and other stuff that wouldn't have been possible with real floppies (or at least not reliably anyway).

>HxCs are great because they let you cheat and define things like a 1MB floppy image
if we are talking IBM PC, does this not get defined in the BIOS? Many 8 bits also

I remember someone telling me that back in the early 80s, Radio Shack's Computer Center would upgrade the RAM in your machine for $600, until you realized you could just buy the chips in the store and install them yourself for 10% of the money.

Yeah. Partially due to hipsters, partially because there's a huge glut of high-quality film cameras that can be found *really* cheap because professionals have moved to digital and gotten rid of their old equipment, so you can buy pretty damn good photochemical cameras second-hand for way, way less than a new digital camera of sufficient quality to replace it.

On a PC with DOS, you'd just use the DRVPARM command to set it up. On 8-bits, you'd have to rewrite part of the OS software. For example, the standard floppy format on the TRS-80 was 180k single sided with 40 tracks and 256 byte sectors.

Note that if you set an HxC to use a 1MB image, it will still work with an unmodified OS, but you'll only be able to access 180k of data or roughly 18% of the disk image.

>There were the later 32-bit models that about 5 people in Germany used.
They are all 32bit, later models where fully 32bit, sure 3000 and 4000 didn't sell as well but 1200 and CD32 sold pretty well and all Amigas have expansions to do full 32/24bit instead of just 32/16/24bit

>Big deal, the Z80 is also internally 16-bit but it's still considered an 8-bit CPU because it has an 8-bit data bus and 16-bit address bus.
Big deal the IBM PC XT is a 16-bit computer but with a 16-bit CPU and 8-bit data bus or are you going to say it's a 8-bit computer?

Guy on VCFED said he used to have an IBM XT that he installed a quad density 5.25" drive in to get 720k of storage. Of course the downside of doing that was having disks that nobody else's PC could read.

A 1.2MB 5.25" drive can read them.

Totally with you. It's simple, but the first time I used BASIC to draw shapes, with the location, colour, and size all having a mathematical basis I was really impressed with myself for drawing a Mickey Mouse logo just by telling it to draw shapes at particular places on the screen. It's very easy to see how people of all ages (the guy who made Lords of Midnight never even owned a computer until he was 30, and was an English teacher before then) were so excited about these microcomputers.

eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/powerbook Pick your PowerBook model. They sell 60GB, 120GB, etc. They are just SATA SSDs and come with the adapter to use it in your PowerBook.

Someone did an SRAM mod on a C64 but mostly as an experiment and it was a headache to do because the C64's architecture is pretty complicated; for one thing the VIC-II performs RAM refresh and it also controls the system bus. The TRS-80 and Apple II are much simpler and the CPU itself controls the bus.

Forgot to add with the SSD reply , find a tear down guide and clean the system out.

Out of pure curiosity, what's the largest SRAM chip available?

Samsung makes a 32MB SRAM, but it's gonna cost you. I believe that's about the practical limit of an SRAM due to the die size.

TRS-80s aren't exactly user-friendly in the sense that if there's no OS disk present on power up, it will just sit there with a blank screen until you press Ctrl-Reset to go into BASIC.

I've seen the things listed on Ebay where the seller claimed it was broken likely because he didn't know about the power on behavior of the things.