Iv’e been in Japan the last 10 days, but upon my return to Hong Kong this little 9kg box was eagerly awaiting me!
I know that ‘unboxing’ donation videos are quite popular, but I thought I’d do the blog equivalent. I don’t want to ‘out’ the sender, although I did email them back a big THANKS, although I didn’t get a reply. Maybe it’s an email thing but I wanted to tell them THANKS again!
To start is a bunch of loose CD’s including old SDK’s, and the infamous Windows 2000 RC1 set including Dec Alpha builds of workstation & server. Also in there is Beta 3 of Windows 98! Cool!
In the box was also Back Office 45, Visual C++ 6.0, a sealed copy of Windows 2000 Server, Visual Studio 2005 Standard and Expression Studio 2.
I’ve always loved this, it’s NT 4.0 and all the good bits of 1997, like Exchange 5.5 & IIS 4.0! Also in there is a copy of Outlook 2000, so this is a much later build/packaging of Back Office 4.5 . I’ve always wondered how many if any Back Office purchasers ever used SNA Server. I’ve seen it something exclusively used in real enterprises that have site licenses anyways.
Visual C 6.0 is the last x86 compiler that was ‘pure’ before the .NET invasion. Although you can with a bit of work get 2003 and onward to build for strict Win32, but who wants to work? This is getting increasingly hard to find, and getting far more expensive. But it’s great to have this in retail in the box again! (I used to have this and Visual Studio 97/6.0).
It almost feels wrong to break the seal on this, although I’ll probably do an active directory deployment eventually now that I have machines running in the USA, Hong Kong, and Japan.
I’m super thankful for all of this, and if anyone else wants to send me their ‘old / obsolete junk’ drop me a line!
You can find this over on gog. I remember the original that I had on the commodore 64, it was super tough (well for a kid), although I do remember chasing mutant rabbits through some farm, along with all the text being in a book, because the disks were simply too small back then.
But it was the inspiration for the later Fallout. Nice to see how it’s managed to get out from under the control of a dead & collapsed studio.
And sure enough the are the latest versions of the game files to be found according to doom.fandom.com. Great! So to further the abuse I tried them under my mutilated DooM.
Ultimate Doom seems to work just fine on it’s own I tested it briefly warping to a few levels but yeah it just works! Doom2 however bombs out that the resource TITLEPIC is missing from the wad. How disappointing!
Naturally I just took the easy way out, and basically checked for the resource, and load another if it’s missing.
@@ -477,7 +477,11 @@
else
pagetic = 170;
gamestate = GS_DEMOSCREEN;
- pagename = "TITLEPIC";
+ /* the Doom 3 BFG EDITION version of Doom 2 is lacking the titlepic */
+ if(W_CheckNumForName("TITLEPIC")>0)
+ pagename = "TITLEPIC";
+ else
+ pagename = "DMENUPIC";
if ( gamemode == commercial )
S_StartMusic(mus_dm2ttl);
else
Another interesting thing is that DooM 3 BFG also includes the gravis ultrasound bank data, so you could load them up into some other emulator and enjoy that gravis experience. I don’t know if it’s licensed or what, but it’s a nice touch.
Back when OpenGL accelerated hardware became a thing at the consumer level (and even non OpenGL, like the Rendition Verite v1000E !) games like Quake suddenly took on an entirely new life, with the amazing ‘realism’ that OpenGL could bring. And what an amazing change it was from the software renderer.
I had bought the Diamond Fire GL 1000, and it honestly kinda sucked. It did the OpenGL demo’s okayish under Windows NT, but Quake, not so much. But it was a sign of things to some, as I could run the 3D pipes screensaver without running the CPU at 100% But the Fire was meant more so for ‘adult’ or productive things, not for playing a game.
So here we go again, yet another major vendor that has been around since the 1970’s decides that all their prior content needs to be purged ‘because reasons’.
Kind of sad that a few people in an old church can preserve the internet, but a megacorp like Intel cannot even be assed to keep their downloads available.
I’m sure the virtus/spyware/scamware/ransomware people are just salivating at this, as now they can easily add these named & tagged downloads to their lists, as more and more people run into intel branded gear, and attempt to recycle it’s use.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Due to a popular demand I have added an option of generating full page height screenshot and allowing client browser to do the scrolling.
https://youtu.be/lDqrPxkOFlI
This makes the browsing experience much smoother, you have resources for it. Beware, a full page screenshot can be several MB in size encoded as gif/png and much more as a decoded raw bitmap on the client. I managed to crash Mosaic and OmniWeb a few times. Fortunately typical Wikipedia page is under 1 MB so for most part is should be fine. To activate just put 0 in page Height.
I have drafted a pre-release on github for testing. Please let me know any feedback. I’m also thinking whether enable this by default, or not.
But at the same time there is great value in old computer hardware.
In my opinion around 2006-2007 we basically hit peak computing. The biggest restrictions I see on older machines is memory sizes, and disk speeds. And for the most part these can be taken care of with ease, although many chipsets and formfactors of the time seem to have these incredibly tiny 8Gb/16Gb/32Gb limitations that just really are annoying in the distant future of 2019 when you may want to run a few things at once.
Yes, ‘Mouse’ computer is a thing
So I bought this used i640GA6-BDO, an i7 machine oem’d by mouse computer. Yes the name of the business is the same name as the 2nd most popular peripheral of all time. From the blurb:
From the “NEXTGEAR series” with high cooling and excellent maintainability, Intel® Core™ i7-4790K processor, dual channel 16GB memory, 1TB hard disk (7200rpm), DVD super multidrive, NVIDIA ® GeForce® GTX™ .970, 80PLUS® BRONZE certified700W power supply, pre-installed Windows 8.1 Update i640GA6-BDO” is 149,800 yen.
I paid just over 20,000 yen for this machine. So losing some 120,000 yen, or about 80% of it’s value over 5 years is certainly not a good investment proposition. It seemed like a good bargain.
Finding the corporate website was NOT easy, but thankfully they own mouse-jp.co.jp so one of those wild guesses turned out being right. They seem highly influenced by the ‘idol group’ thing that is popular and japan, and they have an extensive YouTube channel over at MouseComputer2010. And an extensive ad gallery.
(the original video was taken down and made private… ? https://www.youtube.com/embed/mPd-vUSsAAo very strange)
They even have the making of videos. I could find so much about the advertising and various talent, but the machines… that was much more difficult than I could imagine.
The build quality however left a bit to be desired, when I turned it on and jumped into the BIOS the first thing that I noticed was that it ran HOT.
75c in under a minute!
So yeah 75c in under a minute is not a good thing. The water pump was making a weird noise as the bearings were clearly shot, and it’s just not circulating anywhere near fast enough.
Although I didn’t take a picture I was able to find one online, that shows that despite the bottom of the case has a big slot for the PSU fan, but the fan was pointing up into the case, not venting to the bottom.
I guess that the original owner got rid of the machine as it was overheating, and/or thermal throttling. I ended up going back out looking for a new cooling solution, and I was torn between a cheap fan thing for $10 or another all-in-one liquid cooler for $50. I decided to go with the all-in-one, as this machine was originally liquid cooled anyways.
I’m not sure why everything needs a cartoon..
The machine also had no storage, so I also picked up a M.2 drive, and a spinning rust disk. I have to say that even for this ancient machine, it’s great it had a M.2 slot, and WOW I thought SSD was fast, but this positively blows it away!
While I was out I see this former holy grail of GPU’s a Nvidia GTX 980 for Â¥12,000. Now granted the machine I picked up has a GTX 970, a nice touch as I wasn’t expecting anything, but I can always use another DVI capable card back at home, so I’m probably taking that along with the i5 back to my HK office.
Now the real killer is that the card is a ASUS GTX, and looking around online it’s the STRIX-GTX980-DC2OC-4GD5 model.
I look around and find it on Amazon, and if the ad thing is to be believed the new price on this thing was ¥70,900! Looking around on that part number also shows kakaku.com with a list price of ¥73,480!
So granted the card is 5 years old now, but wow what a drop in price! It’s one more stop away from the junk piles that the other 9xx’s currently are (I’ve seen boxes of Zotac 750’s and up).
Naturally of course, like the i7, this card also had issues the moment I put it into my PC. The screen was flashing with garbage, and it’d eventually lead to a system freeze after a few minutes. What a pain, bad memory I suppose. And like the PC, I took the card apart, cleaned up the old thermal compound, and added some new generic stuff, put it together, and left it running The Outer Worlds at ultra high settings just fine. Who knows, maybe it’ll break later on, I don’t know, but I now have a ‘high end 5 year old’ gaming system for about the same or slightly more than a PS4. And I could be wrong but i’d like to think an i7/980 would crush a PS4. Although I could be wrong.
Naturally running cinebench 14, basically shows that the 970 & the 980 perform so close to each-other it makes no real difference. Although the fan setup on the 980 is far more aggressive, and it runs much more quieter. So that’s a nice bonus.
And if userbenchmark.com can be trusted, the performance difference from the 980 to the 1080, isn’t all that bad. It’s unreal that now even with 2nd generation RTX 2080’s out there, the 1080 is still an expensive GPU.
So, sometimes it may be worth looking at the junk piles. Although at the same time if you have nothing, the new/lowend stuff like the 1030’s/1050’s really aren’t so bad either. But for some reason I always seem to like yesterdays powerhouse.
So while I was out yesterday, I came across some outdoor fire sale on Blu-Ray discs. Normally they are expensive, at an outstanding ¥2,381 which is just crazy. But for some reason they were only ¥1,000 each. Since I have no entertainment out in Japan, I fell into the nostalgia trap, and picked up a bunch of old favorites.
All I needed was a Blu-Ray drive, which I picked up for Â¥2,700 and finally needed some software to play it. While VLC does a great job with DVD’s that doesn’t mean anything, does it?
Well starting with version 3, the framework for Blu-Ray playback is in place! But you’ll need some additional files in place, which after a lot of hunting I found on vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name. There you can find both the keys database and AACS dynamic library.
The keys database is copied to the C:\ProgramData\aacs\ directory, and the DLL just is placed into the program directory.
And surprisingly it works well! Granted I’m using an i7-4790k, which I picked up as junk for around Â¥20,000. Although I was initially excited as it had 16GB of RAM, a m.2 slot (I got a 512GB new drive for Â¥5,900), it’s a nice box compared to the old i5 thing. And rocking a GTX 970, it was nearly top of the line for 7 years ago, but we pretty much hit peak computing, so this thing is fine. I thought it was a bargain as it also includes a liquid cooler, but it appears the main circulator is seizing or something as it is kind of noisy.
What was kind of interesting was that there was so many Blade Runner Blu-Ray discs to be had. I picked up a few, and one I’d never seen before the Archival version. Although maybe it’s a Japanese only release? I’m not sure, but to be honest I never really look at physical releases as it’s yet another thing to eventually lose. Despite having lost everything, I still have my iTunes library.
Maybe I was just a strange kid, maybe it’s just an artifact of growing up in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), where Citytv would put the film on immediately after Auld Lang Syne would finish. A great way to start the new year. (Incidentally in a weird way many stores in Japan will play Auld Lang Syne when they are closing)
2019 seemed such a long far off date, and yet here we are.
Since I’m tagged as a game site, back in the late 90’s there was even a Blade Runner game! You can find it over on archive.org, patched and ‘fixed’ for modern systems (I had to run the bladexp on my Fujitsu machine running Windows 10), although considering the PII 233 I had back then, and this thing clocking in at 2.9Ghz the game play is very pokey. At the time it was an amazing game, with so much CGI, interwoven animations, and all the voice acting. Set in scenes reminisce of the film, it starts down a very familiar path, then goes off the rails during the predictable plot twist, but opens up enough paths to lead to a few moral choices and thusly different outcomes.
I dare say in 1997 that it really was ground breaking technology to give the look, feel and aesthetic of Blade Runner, and they even got the rights to use hints of the Vangelis score here & there, leaning on the old and trying to go in a new direction.
But compared to modern pacing it may be awfully slow, totally on rails, and one of those point & click, and find the hidden thing in the scene, along with click the person 100x to get different answers. While not as dire as ‘I have no mouth,and I must scream’ where you are hoping for the least worst ending, Blade Runner does have that optimistic style ending that was pushed onto the film’s original ambiguous ending where Deckard holds the unicorn and hears Gaf’s message implying that even if Rachel isn’t retired, that she doesn’t have very long to live. Just as he very well might not have long to live.
The game is almost maditory for real fanatics of scifi fans of the 1980’s, but odds are if you are, you’d have played this game back when it released.
As for the kids of today… I imagine that Blade Runner would be pretty much like 2001. Slow, confusing and messy. As Harrison Ford put it, it’s a detective who doesn’t detect. Just as both films feature legendary Directors who establish amazing worlds, and atmospheres they deliberately remove the humanity from the humans, and entrust it to the machines, the real torch barres of the future. Sometimes I wonder if Riddly Scott grasped the human angle of the final confrontation, and why there was so many misfirings with Prometheus and Covenant…. But that disappointment is for another time.
One thing that really established the aesthetic of Cyberpunk was Sir Run Run Shaw’s involvement in producing the film, as the Hong Kong Ladie’s Market, Shum Shai Po, and Mong Kong give that impression for the November 2019 that isn’t quite reality. Just as that ancient novel Neuromancer, established forever the vibe of Chiba having the sky that felt like a TV set to a dead channel (I’m currently across the bay in Tokyo, and it’s a nice blue.. How future prophetic), where that feeling of old tube televisions displaying the noise of the electromagnetic storm of the stars & the solar wind, would give us the old gray snow. Now forever replaced with the clear blue skies.
Despite the Orwellian nature of the wonderful internet, the brave new world feeling of the ‘licensed’ clinics of Shenzhen in many ways the future is brighter today, than it would have been in the 1980’s version of today.
