Is retro computing a meme or does it have a useful purpose?

>But the business and other high end machines of that time were fantastic.
I'm pretty sure that if you spend your 10-years worth of income on one computer today, that one will last as well.
>Older software runs better with fewer system resources and was of a higher quality in general.
Again, older software was sold for as much as your high-end consumer PC costs now.

Literally more expensive things last longer and are generally of higher quality. Nothing is stopping you from starting software company making software only in Assembly, Tell me how well your 1000-times more expensive software sells.

this is an often overlooked fact. thanks

it's comfy

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It's fun :3

Games compatibility, specially in the '00s era. Most games from last decade won't run on anything other than actual hardware and software from those days. Regular software you can virtualize in most cases, and games from the '90s and such will also run fine on a VM, but holy shit is it a nightmware to get gayms of the '00s running today, even on "old" OSs like Windose 7. You gotta go WinXP + hardware from circa 2005 or else they *will* shit the bed.

>2k18
>not using an analog computational machine as daily driver

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Give me an example. Because that's bullshit my friend.

>retro computing

Hello and welcome to the team, user. We are so happy to have you here as a junior java developer. Your first task will be writing an export layer for the salary calculation jobs that run on the mainframe. They are written in COBOL and BASIC, but don't be afraid - we still have all the manuals from the 1979 when they were first coded. Also Thomas and Allen will gladly help you in those 2 months left before their retirement.

GTA III, VC and San Andreas won't run unless you spend an hour looking for tweaks for instance. GTA IV also shits the bed on Win10.
C&C Generals and RA3 also give me shit, usually because of ayyMD """""""""stable""""""""" drivers. I'm forced to install beta drivers to get it going again.

>All of that bullshit is junior level pay
Sounds right.

> GTA IV also shits the bed on Win10.
Patched.

It's a hobby. Hobbies by definition need no "useful purpose" justification.

For some weird reason it's comfy as fuck: there is something about old computers that made them feel more "human", also you were much closer to the real thing back then (consider for instance MS-DOS, which included DEBUG).

Daily reminder that old computers had a soul.

Literally three seconds on Google. The terrible ones are usually early Windows games, where developers usually just said fuck it and referenced all libraries statically. So usually the 94-98 gap.

Those are some nice line drawings.

Yeah, all of those run fine with tweaks on modern hardware.
It's pre-2000 Win32 games and DOS games you need specific hardware for.

What you need hardware for is OPL, glide, etc, things you can't emulate perfectly and those are not "'00s era"

>C&C Generals and RA3 also give me shit, usually because of ayyMD """""""""stable""""""""" drivers. I'm forced to install beta drivers to get it going again.
use a DX to OpenGL or Vulkan translation layer, both games work fine for me like that with a RX 480 and up to date drivers

If it helps. in some way, to keep working machines out of landfill then at least that's something.

As long as you have infinite space to store it you're okay.

>use a DX to OpenGL or Vulkan translation layer
that's.. interesting. How do you do that?

he said nasa, not nsa.

I don't get the more human feeling. To me, I get the opposite. in the 80s especially because of price computers were treated like objects of reverence. Now people give them to 5-year-olds. There was a level of knowledge needed to use them that isn't required today. This is good and bad but added to the overall mystique. The main thing though is that they felt futuristic in a way that modern computers don't really seem to capture probably because of their ubiquity.

>what are soundcards

It's not so bad. Of course compared to todays computers are are many things they simply couldn't do because of the lack in computing power. However it was still a general puropse Computer not a glorified Typewriter.

Since they got used in many areas, there have been diverse programms for it too. Some of use even have got quite an archive of those. It worked then, it will work today too.

Lastly, development is still possible and thus they can be used in projects you'd deem them useful. Heck, even though I have no Idea how to write "USB Drivers" for todays computer, I could swiftly get some Input/Output for serial or parallel ports with a few lines in BASIC. That could be used to turn on/off a few LEDs but it's not limited to that. Having real world influence from your computer is a powerful thing no matter how "retro" it is, since this drives the modern world.

Of course today you can get cheap little things like the arduino that already can do more with less electrical power consumption. Still "retro" computer have been loved by their owners in the past till today for a reason and I do not mean nostalgia.

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Mafia 1 nuff said

fun things are fun

> not using a computer than runs on steam

It's for people who have an emotional attachment to tools ie. autists

its a meme, youtube recommended me a lot of videos about all this.
every channel or youtuber start with
>>showing old machine
>>praising old machine
>>showing old games, app
>>praise old media format like floppy
>>finding alternative for old media format and using sd
>>video trying to custom the machine to make it better
>>video about repairing old machine
>>video about complaing about old machine

>>stop making videos about old machine

Played through it on Windows 10. Same with Vietcong. You are just making shit up.

I remember using an old PC for college that could barely run Windows XP, and had Window Maker for Vim and Groff and that was basically all it did (because it was really all it could do). I have never been more productive than I was than at that time.

It's a hobby just like model trains.

if you wanna collect and are a hobbyist and maybe even a bit of an enthusiast, you can do well by keeping these old machines around and maintain them. I have two older OEM machines: an IBM Netvista with a Duron 700, 768mb SDRAM, 32mb Geforce MX200, a Soundblaster Live! and a 40gb HDD running Win98; a Compaq Presario P4 2.53ghz, onboard sound, Geforce FX 5200 128mb GPU, and an 80gb HDD running XP. I look at them like old consoles, and treat them as such - they play the period appropriate games, with anything DX 9.0c that requires a Geforce 7XXX or higher being played on my current machine, as by then, most shit will play on a modern Win10 machine. Only issue i have atm is finding a driver for the ethernet card in my IBM, but its not a deal breaker.

It's a meme. Often times they will fail without notice. I have an Amiga 500 that failed out of nowhere, just smoke out of nowhere. No clear evidence of failure. Caps test out fine, none of the chips get hot...just works intermittently now.

If you wana play old games, emulation is just fine.

>emulation
>just fine
Pick one.

more to a smoking computer's failure than just caps. there could have been a failure of a transformer etc. Ive watched vids where dudes have taken an old 8bit computer from the outside elements and got them working without much work. look up Adrian Black on jewtube, dude had a Commodore 64 C FULL of debris from what looks like a flood or similar and with just a lil bit of work the fucker powered on with no issue. Emulation is 'fine' for some who will settle for the option, but if you wanna go pure and go original, that's 'fine' as well. eye of the beholder, really.

110% meme

for the most part, Emulation of 8-bit and 16 bit systems are well off.

It's only partially a meme.

You have your retro-enthusiasts who are 50+ years of age and can recall when the general computer market was open season and understand the ins and outs of their 30+ year old systems. To them it is not a meme but a physical, static look-and-feel of what once was.

The "meme" of vintage computing came when vaporware grained traction. Vaporware indirectly made Amigas, Macintoshes and Windows 98 a symbol of "nostalgia" for a time that some of it's listeners may not even remember (or have been alive for).

Emulation is a moving target of increasing complexity that is causing headaches for true retro collectors.

Several proprietary systems that have been abandoned by their parent company do not have true preservation efforts. Off the top of my head this includes..

NeXTSTEP (Poor emulator support)
PowerPC-based Classic MacOS (No emulators exist)
A/UX (Developer abandoned emulator)

This is also not taking into account embedded/tailored operating systems like those for phones, PDAs and consoles.

The communities surrounding these devices have done a tremendous amount in preserving them but only so much can be done without assistance from the developers/original authors.

way more usable than "modern" browsers with their ambiguous monochrome icons and hide-everything-behind-hamburger-menus design

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>PowerPC-based Classic MacOS
Sheepshaver works fine

>When your breaker boys don't work fast enough so your analytical machine is slow
Support me in my time of need

The people buying and selling mid-90s Packard Bells and pretending they're good or desirable are Larping 100%. There was nothing good about those machines.

It's not larping if you collect parts and put together, what would have been, a pretty decent NT4 workstation, and then use it to run and work on old projects.

I think people into computers have this mental illness that makes them think others must justify their choices about computers. I never hear people people into making furniture or knitting having to justify their hobby to some autist. Never once have I heard "lol just buy a sweater", but I hear "lol just buy a RPI and a HDMI monitor" all the time when I talk or read about 90s computers and CRT monitors. If these people really cared about being productive, they wouldn't be on some random bulletin-board/irc-channel asking others to justify "wasting time" on a hobby.

It just boggles my mind that this is a meme now.

In the late 90s, I got tons of this shit for free. People were begging you to take it off them. And it was about 18 years newer, so you didn't have any problems with the hardware physically dying on you.

No it was the oposite, it was machine built to serve you. Now current system is like a women, pretending to be your friend and pretending doing shit for you while cucking you out of your privacy to her daddy.

It's a meme, unless you are in to /vr/ stuff

PPC classic Mac OS works in Qemu:
en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Mac_OS_9. OS X works too

I hear the gov't uses a lot of extreme legacy software that need to be maintained and pay good money for it too

>falling for the steam machine meme
/v/tards at their finest

>And it was about 18 years newer, so you didn't have any problems with the hardware physically dying on you
>clearly knows nothing about how C64s had close to a 50% out of the box failure rate in their first year on the market

It's a collection hobbie
Like stamp collection

youtube.com/watch?v=Vh8geD12KFE

We have better replacements for vintage hardware components today, including SD devices. Most common consumer-level hardware is well understood and documented. You may run into problems with obscure stuff nobody used.

I'm planning on switching to a late 80s computer as a daily driver. All I have to do is port my self written OS to 16 bit, and build a network card. 2MB of RAM is enough for anybody, really.

>Is retro computing a meme or does it have a useful purpose?
It's a hobby.

>does it have a useful purpose?

Yes, you can learn about how computers used to be, you can also learn more about how computers actually work, you can interface with them very easy, for example you can easily use the outputs of the parallel port to drive electronic circuits (again for learning purposes). They are great to learn assembly language programming on. You learn how to repair electronics, and you learn a lot of history.

The manual for Model II BASIC is online. I was perusing through it the other day to see how it differed from the TRS-80 BASIC on the Model 1 and 3, and it occurred to me that nobody's ever made an emulator for the Model II.

The things are relatively easy to repair, at least 80s stuff with large components and poke through soldering. By the 90s, everything used surface mount. It's kind of unfortunate because 90s and up electronics are mostly unrepairable without advanced tools.

>and hide-everything-behind-hamburger-menus design
I'm all for vintage computers, and the windows 95/98 interface, but modern browser interfaces are far better, they maximize screen realestate to web content. That philosophy would have gone a long way back when people were stuck on 640x480 resolution.

The main problem is with certain custom ASICs, especially Commodore ones because they have a known high mortality rate.

Yep, *sips*
Takes me back to 1995 and I played Red Alert online as an 8 year old. Really takes me back. Also I don't care how good the ported games are, nothing like the good old CD-ROM vanilla version *sips*

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>1000x more expensive software
What are you talking about? A suite of pro software today costs thousands in recurring licensing fees per unit. It was not vastly cheaper in the 90s but at least then you got the version you wanted and had use of it indefinitely without recurring service agreements and costs.

Way too many zoomers just look at inflation adjusted dollars and think 90s computing was hideously expensive. Fact is, the only real diffirence was the hardware improving so rapidly such that people or companies with big budgets could upgrade often and majorly if they wanted.

If you think retro machines weren't often a bit dodgy brand new.

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for the most part I hate that nostalgia seems to have infected so many facets of culture today e.g. film, music, video games, etc. but to be honest i think i wouldn't mind having an old win98 shitbox running all the good pc gaymz from that period

It's hard to find Model II stuff in general. Most books about the TRS-80s are for the Model I/III.

Total meme. Well, that's unless you are in a field that still uses legacy tech.

archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Volume_II_1980_David_Ahl/page/n9

The infamous 101 BASIC Spaghetti Code Games, TRS-80 edition. Try and convert some of these for Commodore BASIC or your retro machine of choice. Fun.

my dad's entire department at the local university uses 486s still

It's fun.

Yes some old games can't run on newer systems because of clock speed, single core etc
believe it or not but some really old games don't run really well on alot of newer Operating systems

*sip*
for me, it was all about the aftermath expansion. Nothing like pwning noobs on westood.

>C64C
I bet he wouldn't have had that kind of luck with a breadbin.

Not everyone can appreciate the beauty of retro tech.

Everything you see here fits on a 40 MB drive. What you learn about old computers, is how so much could be accomplished with so little. We have done a terrible job making efficient use of our modern computers. Our modern computers would be many times faster if we sill had a philosophy to conserve resources and build efficient software.

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I think the popularity of a lot of retro machines was regional to an extent. My dad said everyone he knew had a C64 or Atari and he didn't know any Apple II owners. Yet if you ask people in California, they'll go "What? Everyone here had Apple IIs."

Uggh, did people have such low standards in the 80s to think these "games" were actually fun?

Not always. Many Windows 9x games are still runnable, sometimes with a patch.

The fun was programming them yourself. At least that's what some of the most successful people in modern tech were doing back then.

Uh...you didn't have to deal with a million autistic automatic updates back then.

ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Packard-Bell-Multi-Media-PC-Desktop-Model-PB414A-i486-SX-19MB-RAM-NO-OS/152906919085?hash=item2399f66cad:g:E3sAAOSwZA1ag2kT:sc:FedExHomeDelivery!19530!US!-1

Errghhh...

some of the cases were kinda neat but the designs often didn't follow any kind of standards. this one used a riser card for all the expansion slots.

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>SGI
Guy on Youtube with a SGI Origin reality engine. Does shit no one else can do now.
Find it, watch it.!

Maniac Mansion v1
New systems can't handle the clunky graphics effectively, maxing out the cpu.

did you even put in an offer poor baby?

Buy a classic, old car.
Nobody asks for speed or mileage. - It's all for the feels.

Same thing.

to me, its only use was retro gayming. but honestly with dosBox, Good Old Games, and Steam re-releases of classic titles, i dont see the point to retro PCs at all. not to mention, virtual machines if you just want to dick around in Win98SE

>gaming

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It's not about the end goal. Saying "just emulate" is like telling a mountain climber "You should have just used a helicopter to get to the top". That's a silly statement. Retro computing is a nice hobby to mess about with the hardware, collect parts, try them out. Learn or reminisce about it.

Maniac Mansion is a real mode 16-bit DOS game. You couldn't even run that without an emulator on anything made in the 21st century.