Two Stop Bits | qingcharles's comments

qingcharles 631 days ago | parent | on: Apricot XEN : IBM PC AT compatible from yesteryear...
Apricot PCs were everywhere when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s. I would pick them up at bankruptcy auctions all the time for usually the opening bid of a quid. I had a whole bunch of them with different options. Would run a lot of DOS stuff, but nothing that needed exact ports or RAM locations as they weren't IBM-compat.
qingcharles 632 days ago | parent | on: Backing up a Pokemon Red save file with ACE and a...
This is the road to madness lol
qingcharles 632 days ago | parent | on: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Q&A - Under the Hood
And still our little secret remains:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/comment/cyet.../
qingcharles 646 days ago | parent | on: Slimming Down Windows 3.1/3.11
I used to run it on my 286 with half of it on a 3.5" floppy and the other half of the files on a disc in my 5.25" drive. I didn't have a HDD to run it from at first.
qingcharles 646 days ago | parent | on: The Authoritative Website for Timex/Sinclair Compu...
Damn, nice collection of zines/magazines!
qingcharles 651 days ago | parent | on: Dreamcast Architecture
These are always great and very informative.
I feel like the author sidelined the on-line capabilities, though. Not only did the Dreamcast have the modem, but it also had an ethernet adapter to connect to broadband. The keyboard was an essential item for playing games like Phantasy Star Online, which was an absolutely awesome MMORPG.
qingcharles 651 days ago | parent | on: DiskClick! Emulate Old Hard Drive Sounds
Can it emulate the sound of me screaming when the HDD fails and makes that clunking sound? :)
qingcharles 666 days ago | parent | on: The Case of the Top Secret iPod
This was great, thank you :)
In 1999/2000 I was working on one of the first legal music download/streaming services. Peter Gabriel was 50% owner. We had PG go to the labels one-by-one and persuade them to come onboard, which was a lot of work as no-one was doing legal online music at that point and all the technology was half-baked. He had an uphill struggle.
About a week after every meeting with PG we'd get a call from each label saying "You won't believe who just came through here? Apple! They're selling us on the same thing as you guys."
This was when the first iPod was secretly in development. And we know how this story ends :D
- bmonkey325 666 days ago
  What an interesting thing to have been apart of. For clarity for those that might not know is the PG is Paul Graham of Ycombinator fame. Right?
  - qingcharles 651 days ago
    No, Peter Gabriel, the musician of Genesis fame. Very nice guy.
qingcharles 666 days ago | parent | on: Thou shalt follow these Vintage Computing Commandm...
I just broke this commandment to my loss. I opened a laptop and the hinge snapped as it opened and the force of the spring drove it clean through the display glass.
qingcharles 669 days ago | parent | on: 1995 Programming on the Sega Saturn
So I was really into emulation and was working as a pro game dev just down the road from PsyQ in 1996. I went to visit them and they gave me a tour. They had all these super early prototypes of the Saturn, Megadrive, PS1.. every console you could think of, they had probably the first prototypes of every unit. I remember the "Pizza Box" 32X and a PS1 proto they called "The Refrigerator".
They gave me a Mega CD prototype, now lost sadly. They also said they had a warehouse with almost 200 SNES dev kits.. did I want them all for free? SURE! They called the warehouse only to find out they'd sent them all to the rubbish tip the day before :(
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