The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

[NeuralStunner]

After my area received pretty much an entire season's precipitation in about three days, the weather warmed up enough that the remaining snow started to melt and further snowfall turned to rain. The river is insanely high, entire areas are flooded, and it's still cold enough to make everything miserable.

It's especially cold in the house. My mom called the furnace repairman because the heat wasn't working, only for him to discover that the gas company turned off gas for the entire area due to the flooding and didn't bother notifying anyone beforehand.

"Public utilities" is a misleading term when you think about it.

[Captain J]

That's terrible and i'm sorry to hear. Snows turning into water or flood even usually don't go well in the winter. Instead it makes everything cold as hell. Maybe it's Scientifically makes sense... But to me, No. It isn't.

Anyway i hope that gas problem solved quickly.

[Nash]

Been having computer problems recently. Eventually had to send it away for repair. Got it back now and have just spent the last 3 days setting things back up how I like them. Not quite there yet though. Still need to get things set up for compiling again.

Welcome back! It's always good to hear from you. Have fun re-setting up your computer. :D

[Woolie Wool]

I've spent much of the past two weeks or so building and configuring and reconfiguring and re-reconfiguring this computer:


Specs:
Chenbro SR209 ATX/EATX server case
AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.1GHz
Abit KT7A motherboard w/ VIA KT133 chipset
1.5GB RAM (PC133 SDRAM?)
Corsair RM 750x 750W power supply
nVidia GeForce FX 5900 AGP video card
Yamaha OPL3-SAx ISA sound card, functioning as MPU-401
Creative Sound Blaster Live! PCI sound card
Netgear FA311 10/100Mbit PCI network card
Roland Sound Canvas SC-55mkII connected to OPL3-SAx midi out and SB Live! line in
TEAC FD-235 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive
TEAC FD-55GFR 1.2MB 5.25" floppy drive
Apple 678T0191 6X IDE DVD-ROM drive
Generic IDE compactFlash bracket with 16 GB removable card booting MS-DOS 6.0
80GB WD Caviar IDE hard drive booting Windows 98 SE and WIndows XP SP4

It's now fully set up in Windows XP and works perfectly in DOS except the line-in from the Sound Canvas isn't picked up so there is no MIDI unless I can get line-in working or buy an external mixer (if I do the latter, I'll also activate the Yamaha's AdLib emulation so I can have hardware OPL3). Windows 98 is not configured because I haven't bought the high memory hack and my hardware configuration is not final yet.


I've got a glorious Trinitron CRT to go with it. It will run most games made from the late 1980s up until around 2006.

[wildweasel]

Windows 98 is not configured because I haven't bought the high memory hack

You may be interested in this unofficial Windows 98 Service Pack that contains most of the known fixes.

(Disclaimer, since I know there are some of Those Kinds of People on this forum: Even with these fixes, I don't suggest Windows 98 as a daily driver, especially if you intend to connect it to the internet. This is mostly recommended for retro machines to make life a bit easier with them.)

[NeuralStunner]

I've spent much of the past two weeks or so building and configuring and reconfiguring and re-reconfiguring this computer:

That Beige Beast kicks ass.

I still have my old IBM around, and I'd like to run that again sometime. DOS games always ran great on it, other than the occasional old one that used the processor speed for timing. (Made battles in Gold Box really hard to follow.) Either that or I'll cave and set up a VM. It seems cheap though.


I'm currently drinking a juice box while looking at the Stellaris 2.0 patch. This remark stuck with me:

Over the last 30 days before release, QA reported about 400 bugs and the dev team fixed around 500 (which should give some perspective to people who think encountering a bug or two means there was no QA testing), but some things always slip through, and fixing bugs also has a tendency to introduce more bugs.

[Woolie Wool]

My complete revulsion towards modern gamer culture and branding and my appreciation for ThinkPads make me kind of sort of want an IBM since they're the most un-gamer brand of computer imaginable, but I don't want to deal with proprietary PSUs or in the case of PS/2 machines, the MCA bus.

An MCA PS/2 case-modded into a Baby AT or ATX computer would be fucking awesome though, especially if a more modern optical drive (slot-loader?) could be used with that fancy PS/2 Model 90 faceplate.

I don't suggest Windows 98 as a daily driver, especially if you intend to connect it to the internet.[/i]

I'd say it depends on what you want to do in the internet under Windows 98. I see no reason why you couldn't use it to download drivers, Doom wads, etc. from lightweight sites like Doomworld's idgames archive. It will be slow and cumbersome but less so than using CD-Rs or trying to network with Windows 7/8/10 machines. Firefox 8.0 runs under the official Windows 98 service pack (the high memory hack is apparently a separate thing you have to paypal a guy $21 for), and that's all you need for downloading stuff.

[leileilol]

Maybe you'll try a recent zdoom fork on it and be the second person ever to post in this forum. I've already given up my stand. The minimum supported OS/specs are anything that runs a modern enough linux now, no matter how worse those specs (i.e. Pi3) than that Tbird rig may be.

[Woolie Wool]

Why would I want to put Linux on this? Wouldn't ZDoom LE and/or ZDoom32 run fine in Windows XP or even Windows 98? If I did put Linux on it it would be an old version of Red Hat or something.

[Rachael]

Linux is a lot easier on resources than Windows will ever be, no matter how old that Windows is. That is, of course, depending on how minimal your setup is. Ubuntu will likely slow that thing to a crawl, but something like Slackware or Gentoo would do alright on it.

The advantage of Linux is, as long as the kernel still runs on it, you can install anything you want. So you are not stuck with a 20-year-old OS and can still browse the internet safely and securely on it.

[wildweasel]

Maybe I'm an outlier then, because my experience with trying to Linux my old hardware has been that I'd have better luck installing something like Win 7 Ultimate on it. My netbook, for example - Ubuntu, once upon a time, had a netbook-specific distribution, but I found that to be too sluggish to be useful, and many of the actually-useful programs I'd want on it either required video hardware that supported more OpenGL than the Intel Atom's integrated graphics could handle, or - more frequently - just didn't fit in 1024x600 pixels' worth of screen.

I did have a mostly usable setup on it running Crunchbang, after an unfortunate attempt at Peppermint Linux, but while I did finally manage to get the windowing environment to look/function decently on a tiny screen, I still had problems even launching some of the "staple" apps like LibreOffice or even Chromium, which would either just fail to start, or produce bizarre lag and graphical glitches (this was even the case on Peppermint). I finally got tired of the whole thing and just put Windows back on it. And while I admit it's slower to become usable after a cold boot, that level of machine is not what the Linux ecosystem will function to my standards on.

[Rachael]

A bare minimum Linux setup would do well on a netbook - and in fact, that is how Google sets up Chromebooks (aka "Chrome OS") - it's just a bare minimum Linux setup with only what you need to connect to the internet.

Ubuntu has a ton of bloat that makes it a terrible choice for anything but more modern systems less than 7 years old, so that's probably why it didn't work well for you. Not to mention the default Window manager since at least 14.04 (if not sooner) requires hardware acceleration in order to run decently.

Other Linux distros that focus on being minimal will run better on older or under-powered systems.

Puppy Linux is normally designed to be a "rescue CD" type of OS, but it is an example of a bare-minimum setup that works well. It's also incredibly small, and the interface is set up to be somewhat "Windows-like" so that you're not utterly confused on how to do basic OS stuff.

[wildweasel]

And that's where I thought Peppermint and Crunchbang would do better. Peppermint is designed as a "lightning fast, lightweight" distro, specifically citing Ubuntu Netbook and Chrome OS as its templates, and (back in 2013 at least) used LXDE as its window manager. In practice, while Peppermint/LXDE were quick to boot and lightweight on system resources, I was not able to customize LXDE's windows and panels as much as I would have liked (I wasn't able to reduce font or button sizes, and the panel kept crashing for some reason).

Crunchbang Waldorf (evidently the last ever release - it was brand new when I tested it) is another that was meant to be used on weaker machines, particularly for its use of Openbox instead of a more demanding desktop environment. I liked this setup, because changing how it looked and behaved was as easy as changing some values in a very well-commented .conf file and watching the results take effect immediately as they were saved. While I was able to get the windows customized Just So, with 8pt and 10pt fonts instead of most OS's 14pt and 16pt standards for larger displays, I still had some problems getting the staple apps to run. I mean, it was really useful for all the stuff I loved doing in the terminal, but I needed a daily-driver for college, a go-anywhere, do-anything lightweight utility machine, not just a terminal. And I'd had quite enough of having to download and setup ndiswrapper just to get WLAN support. I did eventually just buy a new laptop. =|

[Rachael]

Ah, that's a shame. And yeah, ndiswrapper is utter shit.

[drfrag]

Wouldn't ZDoom LE and/or ZDoom32 run fine in Windows XP or even Windows 98?

Sure, both run fine on 98. There's even a somewhat cut down version of LE for win95.
I've released a new ZDoom32 version and re-released the last ZDoom LE, there was a minor thing and i've added a few more patches. Didn't feel like updating the version number that soon.

Also tomorrow i'll lose my internet connection so i think it's over for now. Fiber is too expensive and no one wants to install ADSL on my building, pirates came and installed fiber. I could use my phone as access point (only 500 MB) or buy a battery for my laptop and go to a mall. Don't be fooled this is an extremely poor country and i'll need to be very lucky to find a very poorly paid job. Also you can be fined or go to jail for years for a bad joke on twitter.
Edit: but it's better that poor people (lots of us here) don't have internet and that way they cannot get information (media are controlled) and can't give their opinion.