I Only Meant to Stay a While
Feb. 5th, 2006 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolariThe Archaeological Dig that was Cleaning Jenn's Room.
Back in the day, 486 chips came soldered onto your motherboards. It was pretty much impossible to take off (unless you felt like unsoldering some 250 pins, then resoldering them). Intel and IBM though, got sneaky. They added what they called an "Overdrive" socket to their computers. So you COULD upgrade their computers...but only with a specialized chip provided by IBM and/or Intel. A really expensive chip. My 486/33 was a dinosaur by 1994, and a friend told me to upgrade it. When I told him all it had was an Intel Overdrive socket, he said "Well. We can't have any of that!"
A few weeks later in the mail came this monstrosity with the instruction "Plug this in your Overdrive Socket. If it starts to smoke, turn off your computer."
He had managed to find out what every pin on that overdrive socket did, and found out it was just a standard 486 socket, with a few of the pins moved around so a real 486 chip wouldn't work. He grabbed the AMD equivalent of a 486/100 and meticulously added layer upon layer of pinouts, channeling wires through and individually soldering about 20 or thirty pins on one layer, and another ten or so on a second layer.
And what the hell! It WORKED! I had a fully functioning 486/100, which lasted me from 1994 to 1997, and never smoked once. :)
All the DVDs FINALLY put in their place after being strewn around the room in piles for months. You'd thing those three turntables would fall, but they haven't.
And yes, they're all legal. I put them in jewel cases cause they dont' take up as much room.
I got this lovely PCJr in 1985, my very first real computer...unfortunately IBM had discontinued the line in late 1984 and the store they bought them from was clearing out their inventory by huckstering my parents into buying this. Mind you, in the beginning it was only the bottom most segment with 128k RAM. We got that printer (a thermax fax-paper printer!) a year later from another closeout company.
I credit all my Computer Saavy to this computer. It was so obsolete and limited and INCREDIBLY modular, that I learned how everything ran all together and how stuff worked inside.
In 1988 my mom mentioned she had bought another computer. YAY! SOMETHING REAL THIS TIME! Then she told me she got it for $1. It was ANOTHER PCjr. However, this one had two bays on it, and according to the guy she bought it from was shot. And it was. Very shot. I took it apart and reassembled it onto the old PCjr and it turned on (the other wouldn't even post). However it had a bad memory chip in it.
Back in these days, there were no memory sticks. Just chips. Stuck in slots. I ended up pulling EVERY memory chip out till the error stopped popping up. Then put all the chips back in, and bought a replacement chip from Altex in San Antonio (when they literally were a radio parts store that just happened to carry various chips). Popped that baby in and WHAM! Working PCjr with TWO drive. I got a copy of Windows 1 cheap for it. :)
WARNING TECHIE NOTES AHEAD: The neat thing about the PC jr is that it dynamically structured memory around, always using the top 300some KB for system usage. In today's 486/Pentium world, that's why you only have 640k of "Conventional Memory." The computer uses the first 640 to run programs, and the next 364 for Upper Memory. Well, the PC jr ALWAYS took the top for it's memory no matter how much was in there. Most computers, you're stuck with 640 conventional memory, even today. The PCJr could get 720. Ooooooohhhhhh....not that that's very impressive anymore, but back in the 80s, the more KB you got, the happier you were. TECHIE STUFF OVER!
I used that computer to 1992 when I got that 486/33. This still works, although parts have gone missing. And I swear that printer used to be the same color as the computer. :)
This pristine baby holds a whopping 360k. 720 if you turn it upside down. It's vintage 1980s. A coworker found a sealed brand new box of these in 2003 behind a bookcase, and gave everyone one. It still has that plasticy smell. :)
Doesn't work, needs to be opened and cleaned out because of that damned toaster tray it has.
All that's left of the mighty Dolari Gaming World. I used to have a LOT more games for these systems, but had to sell them all off over the years. And I havne't seen my Atari 2600 in a decade.
There's two Dreamcasts and a 3DO on the cabinet to the left of the Genesis. The black box to the right of the now yellowed SNES is a Sega Nomad, which got a LOT of use back in the mid 90s, when all you had for a portable was Game Boy. The Nomad is a Portable Genesis machine. Made for good times waiting at night for newspapers.
There's a story behind the Genesis. That's Dean's. You see, one day, while taking the garbage out, he spied a Sega Genesis in the dumpster, with games and controllers and power cords. So he fished it out, and it worked just fine...whoever threw it out, obviously threw it out simply because he got an XBox or something. I STILL have a 3DO. Don't throw those babies away if they have GOOD GAMES!
Ah, the memories. In the US, the Gameshark was very neat little cheating machine for the Playstation 1. But if you lived in the UK, this little thing was called a Pro Action Replay...and with a little PC add-on became this incredibly powerful Sony Playstation Debugger. You could divine your own codes, download the video memory to your PC, play with the memory registers, it was GREAT. But you couldn't get it from Interact, who licensed it for the US. Interact, in fact, would only get you new codes if you subscribed to their newsletter and you had to buy upgrade disks.
Thankfully, the parent company, Datel had no such qualms. They kept putting up new codes for free including codes from folks with the PC Comms Link add-on who made their own codes at home. After talkig with one of the Datel developers (the early days of the internet...you could TALK to people who were big wigs on their level just by writing to them), I managed to buy a PC Comms Link, downloaded the new BIOS for it, and now I had the worlds most powerful Gameshark. At least in the US (I found out later, only about 10 or 20 people ever bought a Comms Link in the US, while thousands had been sold in the UK).
I made a bajillion codes. You can still find them on the net out there if you look hard enough. Interact was not happy with me. :)
Laugh. Go on. Laugh. Really. Let me help:
A gift from my best friend Steph. It's actually kinda cool if you ask me. :D
That's a cordless screwdriver. Get your minds out of the gutter.
Here's why I replaced the DVD burner. This spattering pattern is what I've been getting a lot of lately when burning, on top of read errors on regular disks. At first I thought maybe it was some kinda schmutz on the disks but they're clean, and occasionally a burned DVD will get a completely straight line of no data right through the disk. The lens is prolly going out. Either way, a few months ago, I got my first spattered DVD, and now one in about 5 looks that bad.
* Name a CD you own that you think no one else on your friends list does: Julee Cruise - Floating into the Night
* Name a book you own that you think no one else on your friends list does:
Einstien's Universe by Nigel Calder
* Name a Movie/DVD/VHS that you think no one else on your friends list has: Dot and the Kangaroo. On DVD no less!
* Name a place that you have visited that you think no one else on your friends list has: Just One?! The Big Joshua Creek Waterfall. The old Edge Falls Water Resort. Fredericksburg and Northern Railroad Tunnel. Royer's in Round Rock. Should I go on?
* Name a tool/piece of technology that you think you use in a way no one else on your friends list does: See the "Overdrive CPU" article above.
Back in the day, 486 chips came soldered onto your motherboards. It was pretty much impossible to take off (unless you felt like unsoldering some 250 pins, then resoldering them). Intel and IBM though, got sneaky. They added what they called an "Overdrive" socket to their computers. So you COULD upgrade their computers...but only with a specialized chip provided by IBM and/or Intel. A really expensive chip. My 486/33 was a dinosaur by 1994, and a friend told me to upgrade it. When I told him all it had was an Intel Overdrive socket, he said "Well. We can't have any of that!"
A few weeks later in the mail came this monstrosity with the instruction "Plug this in your Overdrive Socket. If it starts to smoke, turn off your computer."
He had managed to find out what every pin on that overdrive socket did, and found out it was just a standard 486 socket, with a few of the pins moved around so a real 486 chip wouldn't work. He grabbed the AMD equivalent of a 486/100 and meticulously added layer upon layer of pinouts, channeling wires through and individually soldering about 20 or thirty pins on one layer, and another ten or so on a second layer.
And what the hell! It WORKED! I had a fully functioning 486/100, which lasted me from 1994 to 1997, and never smoked once. :)
All the DVDs FINALLY put in their place after being strewn around the room in piles for months. You'd thing those three turntables would fall, but they haven't.
And yes, they're all legal. I put them in jewel cases cause they dont' take up as much room.
I got this lovely PCJr in 1985, my very first real computer...unfortunately IBM had discontinued the line in late 1984 and the store they bought them from was clearing out their inventory by huckstering my parents into buying this. Mind you, in the beginning it was only the bottom most segment with 128k RAM. We got that printer (a thermax fax-paper printer!) a year later from another closeout company.
I credit all my Computer Saavy to this computer. It was so obsolete and limited and INCREDIBLY modular, that I learned how everything ran all together and how stuff worked inside.
In 1988 my mom mentioned she had bought another computer. YAY! SOMETHING REAL THIS TIME! Then she told me she got it for $1. It was ANOTHER PCjr. However, this one had two bays on it, and according to the guy she bought it from was shot. And it was. Very shot. I took it apart and reassembled it onto the old PCjr and it turned on (the other wouldn't even post). However it had a bad memory chip in it.
Back in these days, there were no memory sticks. Just chips. Stuck in slots. I ended up pulling EVERY memory chip out till the error stopped popping up. Then put all the chips back in, and bought a replacement chip from Altex in San Antonio (when they literally were a radio parts store that just happened to carry various chips). Popped that baby in and WHAM! Working PCjr with TWO drive. I got a copy of Windows 1 cheap for it. :)
WARNING TECHIE NOTES AHEAD: The neat thing about the PC jr is that it dynamically structured memory around, always using the top 300some KB for system usage. In today's 486/Pentium world, that's why you only have 640k of "Conventional Memory." The computer uses the first 640 to run programs, and the next 364 for Upper Memory. Well, the PC jr ALWAYS took the top for it's memory no matter how much was in there. Most computers, you're stuck with 640 conventional memory, even today. The PCJr could get 720. Ooooooohhhhhh....not that that's very impressive anymore, but back in the 80s, the more KB you got, the happier you were. TECHIE STUFF OVER!
I used that computer to 1992 when I got that 486/33. This still works, although parts have gone missing. And I swear that printer used to be the same color as the computer. :)
This pristine baby holds a whopping 360k. 720 if you turn it upside down. It's vintage 1980s. A coworker found a sealed brand new box of these in 2003 behind a bookcase, and gave everyone one. It still has that plasticy smell. :)
Doesn't work, needs to be opened and cleaned out because of that damned toaster tray it has.
All that's left of the mighty Dolari Gaming World. I used to have a LOT more games for these systems, but had to sell them all off over the years. And I havne't seen my Atari 2600 in a decade.
There's two Dreamcasts and a 3DO on the cabinet to the left of the Genesis. The black box to the right of the now yellowed SNES is a Sega Nomad, which got a LOT of use back in the mid 90s, when all you had for a portable was Game Boy. The Nomad is a Portable Genesis machine. Made for good times waiting at night for newspapers.
There's a story behind the Genesis. That's Dean's. You see, one day, while taking the garbage out, he spied a Sega Genesis in the dumpster, with games and controllers and power cords. So he fished it out, and it worked just fine...whoever threw it out, obviously threw it out simply because he got an XBox or something. I STILL have a 3DO. Don't throw those babies away if they have GOOD GAMES!
Ah, the memories. In the US, the Gameshark was very neat little cheating machine for the Playstation 1. But if you lived in the UK, this little thing was called a Pro Action Replay...and with a little PC add-on became this incredibly powerful Sony Playstation Debugger. You could divine your own codes, download the video memory to your PC, play with the memory registers, it was GREAT. But you couldn't get it from Interact, who licensed it for the US. Interact, in fact, would only get you new codes if you subscribed to their newsletter and you had to buy upgrade disks.
Thankfully, the parent company, Datel had no such qualms. They kept putting up new codes for free including codes from folks with the PC Comms Link add-on who made their own codes at home. After talkig with one of the Datel developers (the early days of the internet...you could TALK to people who were big wigs on their level just by writing to them), I managed to buy a PC Comms Link, downloaded the new BIOS for it, and now I had the worlds most powerful Gameshark. At least in the US (I found out later, only about 10 or 20 people ever bought a Comms Link in the US, while thousands had been sold in the UK).
I made a bajillion codes. You can still find them on the net out there if you look hard enough. Interact was not happy with me. :)
Laugh. Go on. Laugh. Really. Let me help:
A gift from my best friend Steph. It's actually kinda cool if you ask me. :D
That's a cordless screwdriver. Get your minds out of the gutter.
Here's why I replaced the DVD burner. This spattering pattern is what I've been getting a lot of lately when burning, on top of read errors on regular disks. At first I thought maybe it was some kinda schmutz on the disks but they're clean, and occasionally a burned DVD will get a completely straight line of no data right through the disk. The lens is prolly going out. Either way, a few months ago, I got my first spattered DVD, and now one in about 5 looks that bad.
* Name a CD you own that you think no one else on your friends list does: Julee Cruise - Floating into the Night
* Name a book you own that you think no one else on your friends list does:
Einstien's Universe by Nigel Calder
* Name a Movie/DVD/VHS that you think no one else on your friends list has: Dot and the Kangaroo. On DVD no less!
* Name a place that you have visited that you think no one else on your friends list has: Just One?! The Big Joshua Creek Waterfall. The old Edge Falls Water Resort. Fredericksburg and Northern Railroad Tunnel. Royer's in Round Rock. Should I go on?
* Name a tool/piece of technology that you think you use in a way no one else on your friends list does: See the "Overdrive CPU" article above.
