Something Random

[DrunkenBastard]

I upgraded to a 27" 1440p monitor and my first impression is that everything's so small! I can't be getting old person eyes yet... I can still read it, but it's definitely going to take some getting used to. I will definitely have to wear my glasses at all times now.

You may need to turn on Windows dpi scaling which may help in certain situations.

 

[DrunkenBastard]

Watched a documentary on Amazon Prime called "The Man Who Saved The World". I had no idea the world came so close to total nuclear annihilation but for the actions of one man. Highly recommend a watch.

 

[sedrosken]

You may need to turn on Windows dpi scaling which may help in certain situations.

DPI scaling doesn't work 100% of the time, and everything's designed for 96dpi, usually, and inconsistencies in UI always bother me more than they should. It's already an exercise in frustration to use Windows as it is, with some aspects of the UI dating back to Windows/NT 3.x, some from 95/NT4, and so on and so forth.

 

[sedrosken]

Watched a documentary on Amazon Prime called "The Man Who Saved The World". I had no idea the world came so close to total nuclear annihilation but for the actions of one man. Highly recommend a watch.

I didn't look it up but I'm pretty sure you're referring to one Stanislav Petrov, correct? The one who (correctly) assumed that if the US were to authorize a nuclear launch against the USSR, it wouldn't have just been five missiles and called the computer malfunction that said there were that many headed there out as such?

Or, I suppose it could have been another Russian, this time in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that fluke third officer (usually they only had two) Vasili Arkhipov aboard that B-59 who refused to let the crew fire nuclear torpedoes in response to being told to surface via practice depth charges.

 

[DrunkenBastard]

Yes, the one about Stanislav Petrov.

 

[sedrosken]

Hmm. This gets more and more interesting the deeper I get.

So the PlayStation I ended up getting and modchipping works well enough -- I have to replace the laser mech, right now all it will boot into is my burnt copy of the 240p test suite -- and I have to figure out a better solution for burning stuff at slow speeds so it can more easily read the disks. Apparently the PS1 is very notorious for having finicky-at-best CD drives.

The Trinitron is a complex beast. Provided I can find the jungle chip, I should in theory be able to tie 75 ohm resistors to each of the signal lines for the OSD to get ports for RGB on the back, which is a nice little project -- I'm not comfortable enough with a dremel to even start with trying to panel-mount a real-deal SCART connector, but I'm comfortable enough soldering now that I could put together a little breakout cable for SCART to get phono plugs for each of the signal lines and stereo sound, and I have a set of those stepping drill bits so it wouldn't be a big deal to make holes for phono plugs. I'd be happy enough with S-Video if I could get the geometry dialed in right. I can *almost* get it perfect but the image is ever-so-slightly rotated, and the service menu lacks a PROT option so I'm guessing I'll have to manually get in the cabinet and mess with the yoke to fix that. Even more frustrating, despite my writing my new settings, it just refuses to actually save the settings I set in the service menu -- I almost wonder if it's got a battery that powers some kind of SRAM chip that holds those values, and the battery has long since died or something.

 

[DrunkenBastard]

Try flipping the Playstation upside down. Common disk read problem workaround with PS1.

 

[sedrosken]

Another PIII build is underway. I've managed to accumulate some desirable retro hardware again -- first a Voodoo3 3000 AGP, then an Aureal Vortex 2, and now I've managed to land myself a microATX i815 board out of some IBM NetVista. Figuring out the pinout on that thing's front panel is going to be fun, but once I manage that, I should have a pretty decent platform for a late-90s Glide/A3D machine. Not going all out -- since it's just a Voodoo3 there's no point in going any faster than a PIII-1000EB, 512MB of RAM (the chipset's cap and also the reasonable limit for 9x, though with a patch you can use more) and a 120GB SSD on a SATA to IDE converter.

9x has no concept of TRIM and through IDE it wouldn't work anyway -- even on what seems like native SATA on my i865 board XP can't use any tools to force TRIM on its SSD, either, because it's locked through the BIOS to IDE emulation mode -- but I've chosen a modern enough drive that it shouldn't be a problem. The firmware should do a completely adequate job of garbage collection on its own, and even if the performance is degraded compared to what the drive's rated for, it should still have absolutely no problem saturating the UDMA-100 the i815's IDE controller is good for.

As for exactly what variety of Win9x I'll be going with, I've decided tentatively on Windows ME pending final system stability, trying my best to stick with all VxDs since ME's problems mostly boil down to issues with mixing VxDs and WDM drivers. This is 100% not a DOS rig, between the less-than-ideal sound situation (the Vortex2 has a DOS driver, but it's completely emulated and sounds awful) and just having a dedicated machine anyway in the 486, I'm not bothering with anything non-Win32. It's a bit of a change of scenery from the copy of 98lite my 486 runs. As for whether I'll run the 98lite shell swap tool on ME, I'm leaning toward not, because the version of Shell32.DLL it copies over freaks out some later software that's supposed to be able to run, and having to hex-edit stuff to change references from Shell32.DLL to Shell32.W98 is a pain. It wouldn't be worth the miniscule speed boost it's good for on such an already fast machine for the task at hand, and really would just be for aesthetics -- which, to be fair, I do prefer the 95 explorer to the IE "enhanced" one, but it's not worth the trouble.

Why 9x in the first place? Well, it's era-appropriate, but also because the Vortex2 sound card it's going to use has very lackluster drivers for NT5. On 9x you get full hardware acceleration for 3D APIs like EAX and A3D, whereas on 2000/XP you just get stereo output. The Voodoo3 is in a similar spot -- sure you can get Glide support on 2000/XP, but it's through third-party drivers and in general they just kinda suck on NT. And there are some games that have weird issues on NT5 that don't happen on 9x.

 

[Chewy509]

@sedrosken Any interest in the older 8bit (6502 / Z80) or early 16bit x86 systems? If so I've found the following two YouTube channels of interest:

• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE5dIscvDxrb7CD5uiJJOiw/videos
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uT9cgJorJPWu7ITLGo9Ww/videos

The first one does a lot of videos on 8bit era machines, particularly repairs.

 

[sedrosken]

I actually already watch both of them! I have a great deal of interest in alternate platforms, I just kinda get ahold of them, get them set up and go "Okay, what now?" because unlike my PC excursions, I have no frame of reference for it and no attachment to it.

 

[fb]

This was new to me, Amazonas has released more CO2 than it absorbed in the last 10 years.

Since 2010, Amazon forest emitted more CO2 than it absorbed: study - France 24

Since 2010, Amazon forest emitted more CO2 than it absorbed: study

www.france24.com

 

[sedrosken]

Hmm. In 486 news I've managed to follow this guide to install what essentially amounts to a Windows 3.11 (not for Workgroups) virtual-machine under Windows 98SE. Of course, Control Panel GPF'ing on the special mouse driver and one of the pieces of software I actually wanted to mess with requiring 386 enhanced mode -- the VM can only run in standard mode since, hey, Win9x is already running in 386enh, and it doesn't like to share -- led to me putting together some scripts to swap configuration files around for DOS-specific ones and then providing a proper environment (correct PATH, WINPKT loaded for rudimentary and slow but crucially working networking) for loading Windows 3.11 directly in 386enh mode. I also had to patch WIN386.EXE and IO.SYS to accomplish this, but in the end I had a working setup that... was completely useless, but fun. I call it useless because the amount of software I've even seen that will work under 3.x but not 9x can be counted on one hand, and due to the lack of 32-bit file/disk access, it's also much slower than 9x when it's actually doing stuff. It being more unstable is also a given.

I went through and updated some of the decisions I'd made when originally putting it together, such as remounting the battery pack with command strips this time instead of velcro with perished adhesive. I also disconnected and disabled the game port on my super IO card, since (I didn't know this when I originally put it all together) most MIDI cables that hook to the game port have a passthrough for a joystick/gamepad, since MIDI just uses some otherwise unused pins on the port. Now I don't have to potentially deal with those conflicting, since they were at the same address.

Of course I managed to completely screw something up -- I caught the IDE ribbon cable in some metal and sheared it to the point that it does not work anymore. And of course I had no suitable spares, since the way I had it set up was with a very long cable as it had to go to some awkward spots. I tried to cobble together something with an already-used but salvaged connector off of another cable, and a rather long but uninterrupted cable, crimping it with just a bog standard pair of channel locks. It seemed to work at first, but it's behaving rather strangely -- IO is fine for the most part under DOS, but Windows loads extremely slowly and calculating the free space also takes an order of magnitude longer. This is enough for me to just bite the bullet and grab some fresh cables off ebay, and an extension lead to go where it needs to go that needed the extra length. But I have to wait for those!

Speaking of stuff I had to wait for, the PS1 has a fresh laser mech now and it boots everything I throw at it without issue. Now I finally have a reason to go through with that RGB mod that I'd been putting off, now that I have all the parts.

 

[fb]

3.1 was kind of nice.I remember installing it on a Pentium 120 MHz with 24 MB RAM on a really small partition on the very edge of a HDD, it was really, flying but I had no use for it at the time.

And, it also had a really good file manager.

 

[sedrosken]

Holy shit.

 

[LunarMist]

Does that person really exist as an individual he or she? Maybe it is a pen name of a group of people or a hoax.

 

[LunarMist]

3.1 was kind of nice.I remember installing it on a Pentium 120 MHz with 24 MB RAM on a really small partition on the very edge of a HDD, it was really, flying but I had no use for it at the time.

And, it also had a really good file manager.

I used it originally on a 386SX at an office and later on a 486DX. I did not rate a Pentium until Windows 95 was out.

 

[Mercutio]

Does that person really exist as an individual he or she? Maybe it is a pen name of a group of people or a hoax.

That person did exist and apparently a big deal in that community.

Gender-related matters are can be weird and difficult, but in practice the important thing is to treat people in the matter they wish; a great deal of what we think of as "gender" is really wrapped up in social or cultural expectations. Unless you're a health care provider or sleeping with them, it shouldn't really matter anyway. Anti-trans issues specifically are a wedge for dividing us politically, but in practice they just serve to harm individuals trying to find their way in life and to get out the vote for regressives who can't tolerate change and know they've already lost on most other sexuality related matters.

If we don't go full on Gilead, I expect the Zoomers to come out the other side with perhaps a slightly broader set of pronouns than what we use today and a much more accepting view of who can do what with whom. That seems to be the direction they're going, at least.

 

[Mercutio]

A podcast I genuinely enjoy, Behind the Bastards, recently did a two part episode on Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates the philanthropist might be a worse person than Bill Gates the tech billionaire.

The host, Robert Evans (the journalist, not the movie producer) used to cover Silicon Valley tech. These days he spends most of his time in conflict zones like Syria, Ukraine and Portland. I like his work a lot, but I was genuinely surprised by how much work the Gates Foundation does to fuck up the world in the name of capitalism. It's worth a listen if you have 3 hours and would rather not listen to fireworks all damned day.

 

[jtr1962]

Gender-related matters are can be weird and difficult, but in practice the important thing is to treat people in the matter they wish; a great deal of what we think of as "gender" is really wrapped up in social or cultural expectations. Unless you're a health care provider or sleeping with them, it shouldn't really matter anyway. Anti-trans issues specifically are a wedge for dividing us politically, but in practice they just serve to harm individuals trying to find their way in life and to get out the vote for regressives who can't tolerate change and know they've already lost on most other sexuality related matters.

The big issue for me isn't what a person identifies as. It's the massive amount of confusion, and the constantly changing number of genders, which are the problem. I think NY state now recognizes something like 32 different genders. To try to remember who is what, and refer to them by whatever pronoun is currently in vogue for their gender, is bound to lead to mistakes which then offend these people due to simple ignorance. Case in point, the first few times I came across articles about people who identify as binary I'm scratching my head trying to find the other person or persons the article is referring to. A couple of times I even told the editor to learn proper grammar, as in "they"=more that one person, "he"/"she"=one person. Of course, the end result was a big fight, but not once did the person I was arguing with mention "binary" as the reason for using"they". It was assumed that I should know that. I was only once I came across an article using "they", then saying who identifies as binary, that I learned the lexicon. I still think it's confusing. There already is a perfectly good pronoun to refer to something without gender, namely "it". Now I would have thought it strange reading an article stating "it" did this, and "it" did that, but at least there would be no ambiguity as to how many people the article is referring about.

Now what about the other 29 genders besides male, female, and binary that NY recognizes? It's a practical problem keeping all this stuff straight. I'm starting to get to point that we should just refer to the singular as "it", and the plural as "them", all the time, regardless of gender identify so as to avoid offense.

 

[jtr1962]

Actually, it's 31 one genders NY recognizes, not 32.

 

[Mercutio]

Actually, it's 31 one genders NY recognizes, not 32.

The standard behavior is to ask someone their pronouns. Most people don't encounter THAT many non-binary (NB) or Trans or Agender or Two-spirited folks, and USUALLY it's a pretty minor adjustment. There are some people who go out of their way to misgender people, which is generally going to be seen as a dick move because almost everyone who isn't one of the default options encounters that constantly no matter what. If you're making an effort, it's probably going to be OK. Militant snowflakes exist, as do people who want some odd pronoun like "zhir" but it's my experience that they're in an extreme minority. The real question is whether or not you're willing to give someone the respect to recognize how they wish to be seen.

My best friend is currently dating someone who is actively transitioning and I had a hard time with it not just because it took a good long while for her (formerly very feminine) partner to look like a male, but because my friend still thinks of herself as gay even though she's currently living with a short, muscular guy with a pretty serious beard. I can either do semantic loops and overthink all of it or accept the labels the two of them use.

I suspect you might be using the term binary in place of non-binary though.

 

[Mercutio]

Remote Workers still aren't moving to the midwest.
My favorite bit of the article: 700,000 people moved away from the Bay Area but only 19,000 of them left for the American midwest. Ouch.

 

[fb]

Regarding genders, do they hve to have 31 different toilets at workspaces?
In Sweden we have han (he), hon (she) och hen (gender neutral) but I think it's OK if someone want to use other terms. And I don't know, I don't generally think about anyone in gender terms, more in terms of what they accomplish and/or if they are nice people.

Here's a cheat sheet in swedish pronouns if someone wants more information:

 

[Mercutio]

Regarding genders, do they hve to have 31 different toilets at workspaces?

I've worked in places with unisex bathrooms a few times.
I think the theory is more "Do you want to use a bathroom that has urinals or do you want to have a bathroom that is all stalls." And I've seen women use a men's room many, many times.

I can only think of two times that I've seen an adult stranger's private parts in a bathroom. One time because a guy had a seizure while he was taking a leak and one time because a disabled person needed extra help somewhere that there wasn't a handicapped stall. Privacy doesn't seem like it's much of an issue, at least in the USA.

Certain people like to argue that trans or nonbinary people are going to use women's bathrooms to leer or assault women and so far as I know that is not a thing that happens, but there are dozens and dozens of cases of cisgendered (gender identity conforming to birth assignation) men assaulting women in bathrooms regardless of what the sign says on the door. It's almost like it's a completely made-up issue that's just designed to get a subset of people riled up.

 

[Newtun]

I just watched The Third Man again after many years. To me, it's still brilliant in noir-and-white.

​

 

[Mercutio]

Black Widow is basically a James Bond movie. The action choreography is top notch, and if the plot is closer to a lesser Bond thriller than Winter Soldier, at least the new leads are every bit as memorable as the titular character.

There's more "male gaze" in the camera work than I would've expected. The female costuming is almost exclusively skin tight body suits, but there are an awful lot of lingering low angle shots. This movie, more than Captain Marvel, would've benefited from a girl power theme, given the nature of the antagonist, but I do feel like Disney played it safe.

I also noticed that Black Widow has the most understated credit sequence of any Marvel movie. That makes me wonder about how it fell with budgetary priorities. On the other hand, the credits are blissfully short compared to Endgame.

The stinger will make more sense if you're keeping up with Disney+ shows.

 

[sedrosken]

Well. The M912 kinda just stopped POSTing one day. It had been having weird issues with sound before that -- it just plain didn't work. Ironically I had more luck with the buggy-as-hell YMF719 card -- it'd at least produce a little more than garbage. I thought it might be that the ISA clock was just too high, but no, at CPUCLK/4 it should have been well within spec (it's using the FSB as the source clock there, not the CPU itself as it implies) since IIRC ISA cards typically function at anywhere from 8 to 11MHz. No, dropping it to CPUCLK/5 for an even 8MHz didn't help. The new QDI super IO card is also a wash, since under Windows it recognizes the CD-ROM but crashes explorer trying to navigate to it, despite said drive/controller combo working fine under DOS. So, to fix all my myriad issues, I had to essentially completely revert to the original configuration, to my intense chagrin. But, having a fully working if somewhat quirky machine is better than not having a working machine at all.

Now just to get this other socket 370 board in to get my 98 build working properly. The IBM board just isn't working out -- I think the low-pin-count IO controller might be bungled since it complains regularly about the mouse port. I thought it might have been a problem with the design of my KVM switch -- I thought perhaps when other machines on the switch were powered on it fed power back into the PS/2 ports on unpowered machines and this confuses them, so I installed some diodes on the power lines for each of the mouse ports, but that didn't help. The machine is just kind of wildly unstable no matter what it's doing -- I know 9x wasn't a paragon of virtue, but I've seen it behave way better than it does here. It bluescreened at me just installing the sound drivers. The caps are suspect, I think. They seem to have all been replaced with high quality modern electrolytics which tells me that the original owner also had these problems with the board, recapped it, and when it didn't fix their issues they threw it on ebay for some other poor schmuck to deal with, and that schmuck was me.

 

[Mercutio]

You should be able to get a decent Win98 compatible Socket 423 or 478 board if you want to make a switch to something just a touch more modern.

 

[sedrosken]

Oh, my P4 machine is fully Win98 compatible itself. The 98 machine being a PIII is by design, the Voodoo3 is the main facet of the build and a 1GHz Coppermine PIII and 512MB of RAM is plenty for it -- it's to run late 90's Glide games using Aureal A3D sound, while the P4 is for running early-mid 2000's games on Windows XP that don't play well on modern PCs (take for instance the Sims 2 or the original Far Cry), or, of course, just sound better thanks to the EAX the P4 is capable of (a notable example being Diablo II -- it sounds like a completely different game on there). Plus, it's a nice reminder of that little Dell Dimension that sparked my interest all those years ago -- the 4100 I tinkered with in middle school had a PIII-866 and a GeForce2MX, and a much less interesting sound card, but still.

One bonus of more modern hardware running Win98 is USB2 support, but to be honest, this thing has a gigabit LAN card anyway, and a good one at that -- the Intel PRO/1000GT ought to be able to actually reach 1Gbps, locally anyway, or as close as the CPU will allow.

The GA-6IEM I got in the mail ought to do the trick. I've been putting it through its paces and it's doing remarkably well, even having some modest overclocking features that ought to be fun to mess with one day.

 

[Mercutio]

I just ran across someone running Groupwise in 2021. I have neither seen it nor thought about it since maybe 1998, but apparently it still exists as a thing people can buy and use.

That set me off Googling, and apparently IBM is RIGHT NOW going through massive pain as they transition to new email systems, leading me to discover that it is still using Notes, something that every IBM subcontractor has been pointing and laughing about since the mid-90s.

There's no point to this, which is why I'm posting here, but holy crap I thought Email service was a solved problem.

 

[Mercutio]

Today's Google Doodle, Champion Island, is pretty amusing.

 

[Mercutio]

I ran over my laptop bag this morning. Set it down behind my car while I adjusted the load of parts I was moving around. Forgot to pick it up.
Thinkpad did not survive. It actually doesn't LOOK damaged aside from the screen being busted, but it's not turning on any more, either.

Whoops.

 

[sedrosken]

Ouch! Hope the storage is safe so hopefully it's just as simple as slapping it in another machine to keep using your install and all how you had it.

I know Win9x was never the most stable codebase but I swear on my late grandfather's grave I had it working better than this at one point -- heck, it works better than it does on the PIII on the 486, even. I get it installed, get chipset drivers installed (I go for the earliest ones that support the 815E to minimize useless junk being installed) and then go from there. At some point after I get sound drivers installed and some benchmarks and maybe games installed, it just stops booting normally. I can't boot in anything but safe mode... I'm beginning to suspect the SSD I have in there but it tests fine in my main machine. On the other hand it could just not like being installed on it through a (known good, it's startech) SATA to IDE adapter.

This time it was Unreal Tournament -- I got it installed, the bonus packs installed and patched up to v436 and was looking forward to fragging some people online, since the server list is still active and it doesn't care what video mode you're running in to play with other people. It kinda hung up in the middle of the intro cinematic and then it just wouldn't boot normally again after that. I also suspected the power supply, but checking each rail with a multimeter tells me everything's fine -- all of them report voltages well within spec.

What adds insult to injury is that NT5 is perfectly rock-stable on here, if a bit pedestrian and slow -- 2K SP4 can run fine on a PIII with 512MB, but the Voodoo3 and Vortex2 are sub-optimal for it, being that 2000 can't run a lot of earlier Glide stuff as it's under DOS, and the Vortex2 isn't anything special under 2000 and up since the drivers only use it as a stereo output, and don't make any use of the acceleration it offers.

 

[Mercutio]

My drives are both fine, but Lenovo no longer offers a T-series notebook with support for two internal drives or a WQHD display, so I just replaced it with another T470p. I don't want a 4k screen because of the hit to battery life, and most Thinkpads only have a 3 cell battery anyway. I hadn't looked at them for a while, but the T-series has really fallen down in my estimation. The newer CPUs aren't THAT much better to justify the cost of a new one, and losing the second drive makes them a T-series in name only IMO.

I have a 7th generation X1 Carbon that's a little newer, but it's short some ports (notably Ethernet) and it's only a FHD screen, so I think of it more as a travel laptop than a work tool.

As far as your system goes, I'm guessing that the chipset drivers you have are buggy AF. You're running the SSD in IDE emulation mode I'm sure, and support for that should just be native to 98. Where did you get drivers for your Voodoo 3? Did you get them off a CD or something?

I found an AGP V5 5500 in a box of old parts. I kept it, but I have no idea whether it works or not but people are asking comical amounts of money for them on Ebay.

I'm also pretty sure that a Pi4 has enough horsepower for both CPU and GPU to meaningfully emulate Windows 98 at Pentium 3-type speeds. I've at least had it running on dosbox, but never bothered with any gaming on one.

 

[LunarMist]

Is that a company computer or are you self-employed? Either your company's or your own business insurance should cover it.

Usually we send broken computers for secure destruction.

 

[Mercutio]

I buy my own laptop because the use is mixed enough between my salaried work and my side work that I don't want to make an issue of it. The person I work for will actually say yes to anything I ask for but that's not something I'd care to abuse.

 

[LunarMist]

I'm guessing that is a small company. Most people are not allowed to put anything confidential work related on a personal computer now as it is security risk.

 

[sedrosken]

As far as your system goes, I'm guessing that the chipset drivers you have are buggy AF. You're running the SSD in IDE emulation mode I'm sure, and support for that should just be native to 98. Where did you get drivers for your Voodoo 3? Did you get them off a CD or something?

Like I said, they're the earliest 9x drivers with explicit support for the 815E chipset that I could find, and Intel usually doesn't mess around, so I figured they'd be stable enough at least. May as well go a little newer just to be sure. The Voodoo drivers I used are the modified AmigaMerlin 2.9 series for Win9x. I at least like to believe I did my research, but I figure next go around I may as well try the latest reference drivers and see how far they get me instead.

I found an AGP V5 5500 in a box of old parts. I kept it, but I have no idea whether it works or not but people are asking comical amounts of money for them on Ebay.

If you have no attachment to it, I'd sell it off myself. Otherwise it's a neat display piece. I don't hold 3dfx in quite the same regard as most -- I respect their innovations of the time, and I recognize that generally the best way to experience Glide is on real hardware, not through an emulator, but if I hadn't gotten a good deal on this Voodoo3 I would have lived just fine without it. Honestly I wish I'd found the PCI version instead, I find that a much more interesting prospect. The AGP version has a pretty limited range of hardware it's useful for -- anything after a PIII-1000 is better served by a GeForce2 or better, arguably anything after a PIII-700 even.

I'm also pretty sure that a Pi4 has enough horsepower for both CPU and GPU to meaningfully emulate Windows 98 at Pentium 3-type speeds. I've at least had it running on dosbox, but never bothered with any gaming on one.

The dicey part is 3D acceleration and hardware 3D sound. Most of the games I play actually run fine on modern hardware as-is, or have been patched by GOG, but I like to experience them through the lens of the era on hardware that was meant to play them. nGlide is great, but not perfect, and I'm not actually sure of any meaningful emulation efforts that competently enable the use of Aureal A3D or Creative EAX outside of ALchemy, and that's typically locked to Creative hardware.

 

[Mercutio]

3dfx should have won. nVidia lost a huge lawsuit and responded by buying out 3dfx instead of paying up. I've always had a lot of antipathy over nVidia hardware because so, so, SO often I'd run across graphics cards that would die approximately 5 seconds after their cooling did, but at least that's something that's been corrected over the last ~15 years. I'm still not truly a fan.

I am kind of a big fan of the Pi4 as a hobby computer. Between things like running Pihole and all the crazy emulation they can do, they're a lot of fun for $60.

 

[sedrosken]

Oh yes, I completely agree. nVidia's philosophy has always been and always will be to monopolize the market in whatever way they can, it's why they're trying to buy ARM. On principle I try to avoid their stuff where I can, but with my P4 as an example, the era's alternatives are always broken in some fundamental way -- for that particular machine, refresh rate controls over an analog connection don't work on my Radeon X1950Pro, or I'd use that instead. It's a smaller card that also manages to be faster and at least on par with if not even more feature rich than my 6800U. For mid-late 90s stuff, I find that a Matrox card performs about the same and has much better image quality (not to mention more stable drivers) and 3dfx can do the neat Glide stuff. Nevermind the fact that for some reason no one likes to hoard Matrox stuff, while you can hardly find a TNT2 that isn't a damn M64. For modern hardware, it really boils down to CUDA being the industry standard for GPU compute as for why my next card will probably be green.

I've got an order in for a Pi4, but as far as emulating retro PCs goes, it's just not nearly there yet. It will be, especially with PCem being forked and 86box being a thing, I do plan to use it as a PiHole, and maybe the host for my IRC bouncer. I've not quite decided that particular bit yet -- I've been wanting to (and putting off) investing in a VPS for my own use (Apache2, some SQL, some game servers) for a while, and I think a bouncer would be better served running from one of those than a local deal. Right now I've got it on a free-tier AWS server, but I'm told that free-tier doesn't last forever, so really I'd better make a move soon.