You were supposed to be studying for your computer class, but got distracted by The Sims on your iMac G4 instead!
The stupid modern branding on the Coke can and the Logitech F710 gave it away, but sick setup!
Knew I should’ve left that Coke can out, but that Logitech controller there is positively ancient. I’ve had it for probably 18 years now! Oh my… has that much time passed already?
(Also, there’s a little Minecraft icon in the iMac’s dock that I only noticed was there about an hour after I posted the picture)
I think I had that book! Taught me how (ish) a cpu works, although I never really understood it before watching Ben Eaters videos.
I actually started reading through it while I was waiting for the lava lamp to heat up. It’s a pretty good book! I can’t reference the name of the book at the moment because it’s just out of reach for now, but I found it at the thrift store a while back. I love these computery-type books, especially the ones that go into absolutely absurd detail about how things work. I think this one has a publication of 1998, so doesn’t quite fit the time period I was going for in this one, but it was the closest thing I had to relevant text book-like material for the story of this photo.
The PLOP bootloader floppy and TI calculator caught my eye. Nice set!
Can you believe that I still often use that PLOP floppy? Super handy - and so funny to see old machines boot from USB (if it works)! I also remember those old Texas Instruments calculators when I was in grade 1. That’s getting further and further away every day! I was obsessed with them as a small kid. They were brought into the class in these rather serious cases with slotted foam, so they felt like real James Bond gadgets to six-year old me! Naturally, when I saw one at the thrift store, I had to grab it even if I didn’t need it!
I believe it. I still miss the starfield background on PLOP.
Mac users having to deal with HP printers. Tale as old as time. Sad Apple doesn’t make printers anymore. I remember we had them in school, when I was in high school (mid-90s). They just worked. They all had cute names, you just go to print and choose one. It’s still pretty easy in Windows… until it’s not. Like how I know with Windows it’s possible for me, on a Windows laptop, to browse the drives connected to a Windows desktop… but it’s super confusing to set up. With a Mac, you just see the other Mac in Finder. Now, I think I had to enable it one time on each Mac sharing, and the first time, I had to put in the admin name and password of the sharing one on the receiving one… but now it just works. It’s slower than I like transmitting data over WiFi (they’re both M2 generation, so WiFi 6?) but it works pretty seamlessly. The drive with the newer content is a portable SSD, so better to eject it (ugh) and carry it over to the MacBook and copy directly from it, but I’m also lazy and willing to wait for WiFi.
I’m assuming that Discman is an MP3 model? I had one by Phillips. It was cool because it had a bigger buffer (antiskip) than regular CD players. You could shake the damn thing and it was hard to get it to skip. But playing MP3 CDs? It would never skip because it would just buffer the tracks a few in advance. These days, I rip all discs to low complexity M4A (AAC), they’re slightly bigger than MP3 320 at a little over half the bitrate (192k). I don’t think old MP3 players would play those files. I remember Winamp (which was recently ported to the Mac, I mean the OG Winamp) wouldn’t do it without a plugin.
And the Game Boy Advance SP was the best handheld, until the DS Lite, which was basically just a wider GBA SP that supported more games. I had flashcarts in both its ports. While the GBA games had to be loaded from the cart in the NDS slot, the cart in the NDS slot had something like a 16GB or 32GB microSD card in it, so it basically had all the games I needed. And the homebrew stuff was cool, too. But the GBA SP was a little more portable.
(Now I have a 512GB iPhone that solves both problems. The gaming, and the music. And a few others.)
I don’t know what it is about most printers now, but I swear they’re sentient and out to get us. ESPECIALLY HP printers. They have fewer issues with my Linux systems than my mom’s Windows laptop, since on the odd occasion the printer is advertising itself on the network, my Linux and modern Mac systems with CUPS (or whatever Apple uses now) are like “Oh, a printer! Wanna use that one?!”… but that’s not saying much. It isn’t particularly keen on broadcasting its presence on my network, and it can take a lot of coercing and cajoling with the printer itself before it begrudgingly says “FINE. I’ll do a print job for ya. Happy?!” (I swear that’s its attitude).
And that Discman is indeed an MP3 model! Specifically a Sony Atrac3Plus I found at the thrift store (common theme with many of these things). I had several various portable CD players when I was a kid, and I can’t remember them all but I can remember a translucent one with blue accents, and a bright candy-orange one (Wish I had that one, it was SUPER 2000s). Honestly, I’ve never tried this player before, but I’m going to do that now (it works!). I have a couple of album CDs from the time that should work well with it, saving me from burning another CD (and I am running dangerously low on those - I habitually burn Linux distributions to them and create restore CDs for old computers).
And the GameBoy Advance SP is one of my favourites for sure! Such a nostalgic form factor. It seem so gadget-like when I was a kid (another reason I think I was always a tech nerd). I remember my sister would come over and bring hers, and let me play with it. I got pretty far through Golden Sun, and I recall scenes from a few other games, just not their names. I’ve got an AGS-001 and a 101, but my 101 was shell-swapped because the original was in bad shape, and I didn’t bring it out because I’m not certain it fully fit the aesthetic I was going for. I never had one as a kid, but got to play with my sister’s GBA so it’s still nostalgic for me.
I know what you mean about the big phone storage. I ended up getting a 512GB iPhone too - more storage than I wanted, but that’s all that was available. Sure, it could emulate these games pretty easily (kinda yucky that most emulators on the App Store have in-app purchases, I won’t touch those), but there’s a certain charm with using the original hardware the way it was back in the day. I mean… I have been emulating PS2 games for a while because that’s convenient, but when I finally brought my Phillips CRT out, and attached my PS2 to it? Oh my!
The only emulators really worth using IMO don’t have IAPs or ads or any of that. Delta is Nintendo only (and GBA), you can skin the controllers, and it has Google Drive backup. Like I can uninstall the app and clear the space, re-download it, reconnect it to the cloud, and it’ll pull all my games and saves back down again. It’s awesome… but it’s Nintendo only. I suspect the developer of some kind of shenanigans, like there’s some reason it’s Nintendo only and not GameCube, but I wouldn’t know where to begin with the why. In any case, it works, and it works with external controllers — I like the 8bitdo SN30 Pro. I don’t think they make mine anymore. It’s a Super NES/Super Famicom controller. You used to get SNES/SFC lookalike controllers, but Nintendo sued and now it looks a bit less like one, but retains the shape. Bonus, it has a second set of triggers, and two analogue sticks. Playing Xbox games with it (it supports Xinput, Switch, and Bluetooth connections) feels illegal, but it works. Oh, and then of course there’s RetroArch. Supports almost everything (the iOS version is more limited than the computer one), but it’s not very user friendly.
I can remember the days when emulators on iPhones were out of reach for all but those who liked voiding their warranties to jailbreak the devices. It’s nice to see the iPhone open up a little bit more (though calling the iPhone “open” is taking mad liberties) even if it remains a curated walled garden. I could probably use my GameSir (love that name) controller case, or my 8BitDo SNES-like controller (that thing is so wonderful, but I need to prop my phone up with it), but I probably won’t emulate much on my phone. I don’t consider myself a hardware purist, but I do have a thing for using the original device over emulation when I’m feeling particularly nostalgic.
There is something to be said about using the original hardware. While I have no problem playing, say, a Zelda game to completion, a Mario game is another matter entirely. Even with a Switch with Switch Online membership, the latency that exists whether I’m using the attached controllers wirelessly, the Switch in handheld mode, or a third-party controller wired over USB, or wireless over Bluetooth, the latency is greater than it was on an actual NES. I just can’t control Mario as tightly as I could on original hardware. You could chalk it up to my age (let’s just say I played the NES when it was brand new), but there is a discernible latency that was not there with the original hardware, and even Nintendo themselves can’t get rid of it. And that’s if you pay them an annual fee.
