IO Sam

I love it! It's the late 90s all over again. titleart.dvy.io

Good times... 😂 But seriously though... At $0.30 per Megabyte for a 1GB Quantum Fireball 1080 in 1996, spending a quarter of your entire hard drive to install one game was not that funny. (kinda like installing Call of Duty on a 1TB SSD today 🤔)

After struggling w/ the Orpheus II on other builds, I finally managed to make it work on my PB Platinum (P233 MMX, 64MB EDO, Riva 128 + Voodoo 1) on DOS/W95. Had to remove all SCSI stuff to free IRQs, but the choice of SB Pro, GUS, OPL3 & smart MPU-401 MIDI for 90s games is literally a game changer!

Found the perfect protective case for CPUs: Nintendo Game Boy cartridge cases (with an ESD foam bed). I know I’m late to this “discovery”... but boy, is this an ingenious solution!

Surprising to go back to one of my first online orders back in the early 00s (and wild that Amazon still has this data)! Hard to believe I paid $461.97 for an IDE DVD+RW drive!!! Was used to death FWIW ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Such records can tell a lot about who you were at the time (what a choice of DVDs!😆)

Finally got a copy of Tachyon the Fringe. Not sure how I missed this game back in 2000, considering how much I loved space sims like #WingCommander, #XWing and #TieFighter... But here we are, 26 years later, correcting that mistake. Fantastic game voiced by the awesome Bruce Campbell. Such a treat!

This is a crazy awesome story. A former XCOM 2 dev bought a vintage computer off of Amazon, which happened to have a build of the cancelled Quake 4: The Awakening expansion. It's now been uploaded to GitHub! www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/ca...

Got this Leadtek WinFast A250 Ultra (GeForce 4 Ti 4600) two years ago, but only now got around to restore it to its former glory. Replaced all electrolytics with Panasonic FR caps, repasted with Artic Silver and thoroughly cleaned it. Should be in back in service (Win98SE) soon.

First time playing with a Slot A setup (I went from Slot 1 to Socket A back in the day). This is a 750 Mhz "Pluto" core (180 nm) Athlon CPU from 1999, with 128 Kb L1 and 512 Kb external L2 cache, on a Gigabyte GA-7VM Slot A motherboard with a VIA KX133 chipset and universal (1/2/4x) AGP slot.

What a bummer... The guy who single-handedly put synthwave on the map in the early 2010s. R.I.P. #Kavinsky Nighcall forever! www.france24.com/en/france/20...

Just found these old pictures of my 2014 incredibly busy "battlestation"... Head spins just to think about the amount of stuff I managed to put in a single corner desk 😂

Anyone waiting (forever) to get their hands on an Applesauce+, pre-orders for a new batch are open at shop.applesaucefdc.com But you might want to hurry: Diskblitz has only 150 units on this batch (they will fly off the shelf). @ronscompvids.bsky.social @mac84.bsky.social @actionretro.bsky.social

My Smurve80: a modern keyboard inspired by the IBM Model M SSK, designed by Play Keyboard & Swagkeys (sold by @novelkeys.com). It has both 2.4Ghz and Bluetooth. Mine came Cherry MX2A "Honey" (damped tactile switch with stronger tactility than "Brown"). Keycaps by Domikey ("Astronaut" cherry set).

Boy, do I have my work cut out for me! ("juicy" leaky caps... always fun!)

What a difference 2 years can make on Hard Drive prices! Ended up buying a simple USB dock from Sabrent this week (Prime Day), to bring some old 8TB (from 2021) and 3TB (from 2011!) HDs out of retirement, since $600 is a bit too much for a new >10TB HDD. Desperate measures for desperate times :P

Time for some Cyrix instead™ (on a freshly recapped MSI MS5169)

I am still trying to catch up to my early days of Space/Flight Sims... I guess I had to wait for almost 30 years of "inflation induced devaluation" for me to be able to afford these things! 😂

Capacitors, capacitors and more capacitors! New fresh batch from Mouser just arrived today for recapping two nice looking NOS purple motherboards: a 2003 ECS K7S5A Pro (Socket A) and a 2006 ECS P4M800PRO-M (LGA 775) So, @vswitchzero.com will have company on "recapping duty" this weekend!

May our childhood heroes never die! (Razor 1911... if you know, you know) www.youtube.com/watch?v=dybk...

Mail day was good! Catching up with some good old PC classics: - Halo: Combat Evolved - Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast - Delta Force: Land Warrior

I wonder how much the current world political climate might be a factor in this developers' plans to finish a game trilogy about a Jewish American WWII soldier, and his rag-tag band of diverse sidekicks, in their heroic fight against N@z! world domination...

Look what the cat dragged in! First time seeing a big box version of Expendable (1999)... Not even sure if this BB version was sold in the US (previous owner imported from the UK in 2002). The list of compatible graphics cards APIs is something to behold! I have never heard of half of these... 😂

Watching this today and couldn't help thinking: I miss the days when even corrupt leaders had shame (enough to try to cover up bad deeds), the legislative had teeth, and high ranking career federal government officials had courage. It was all fiction of course... youtu.be/sWwN-yDCjOM?...

Why on earth are #Radeon board partners (@asrock.bsky.social and #Sapphire for 2) putting this stupid Nvidia 16-pin power connector in their GPUs? I don't think it is unfair to say this "high-power on thin wires" design has been a massive failure. So why bring this abomination to AMD cards?? Why???

TIL: While watching a Computer Chronicles ep., where Cheifet & Kildall are interviewing the Tramiels (Jack & Leonard), I heard a bit I knew I had heard 100s of times before: "high resolution color graphics" — yes, the 1st sound bite in @thisweekinretro.bsky.social intro: youtu.be/KGvsIVlbngA?...

Ah I am so glad I got to talk with him. Stewart Cheifet was an inspiration in many ways.

To say this was a tough year in tech, economics and (geo)politics is an understatement. Unfortunately, 2025 still had 1 more gut punch reserved for us PC enthusiasts: the passing of Stewart Cheifet... Thank you @leolaporte.me for this unforgettable interview of this legend: youtu.be/WdtHS_X1ibg

Time to try the "other" PC gaming 3D spatial audio engine from the late-90's/early-00's: Sensaura These days is all about EAX & A3D/Vortex with retro enthusiasts, but I'm curious to see what a supposedly good software solution of the time could do (before Microsoft basically killed DirectSound3D).

Basically, my views on Bazzite (but much more eloquently laid out by a proper writer 👉 @ernie.tedium.co :) tedium.co/2024/12/12/b...

Ha! My perfect alibi for the family (as long as no one sees my stats on GOG + offline gaming on vintage PCs 😏)!!!

I took Nathan's ( @pixelpipes.bsky.social ) suggestion (to @actionretro.bsky.social ) of using this cheap PCI GeForce GT210 on old Pentium 4 systems without AGP/PCIe slots. This tiny card was the perfect solution for a D2700 Atom system! It literally runs rings around the Atom's GMA 3650 on XP...

While everyone is upset about Micron exiting the RAM business by closing Crucial, I'm still lamenting their 2001 decision to exit the PC business... Those Micron Millennias were some damn good machines! www.eetimes.com/micron-elect...

I guess listening/watching to 288 videos of @thisweekinretro.bsky.social (beginning from the very first episode) throughout this year is an accomplishment worth bragging about, no?

Got one of these obscure VIA C3 cpus (from 2004) to play around... This one runs at 1.2 GHz (socket 370) and was one of the latest with the "nehemiah" core. Now to find a motherboard that works with this... 😬

A Fan Control (getfancontrol.com) update (from V248 to V249) just bricked my entire Windows 11 install... Made my main SSD unbootable. Thank goodness I had JUST updated my backup via Acronis True Image an hour earlier, and was able to restore everything back! This saved me hours of frustration! 🙏

Exactly what sooo many of us have been feeling lately... I, for one, am going back to Linux after years away. I'm not replacing Windows on my desktop yet... But instead building a new "sidekick" PC (w/ older parts), to slowly migrate tasks from the main Windows rig (minimizing workflow disruptions).

The sound of late 90's nostalgia... "Welcome to Windows 98" 90's Trip-hop was the bee's knees!!! soundcloud.com/dmitrij-udal...

This 👇, plus another fact the writer forgot to mention (optical drives no longer being manufactured), is driving the prices of remaining Blu-Ray drives to new highs... www.tomshardware.com/software/win...

Huh?!? Another gem in @lgr-yt.bsky.social collection I guess... (youtu.be/CaNDeyYP98A)

Today was a good day! Finally got my hands on an elusive Nvidia FX5950 Ultra from 2003 (new old stock XFX branded)!! #nvidia #geforce #retropc #pcgaming

What a sad (and poetically appropriate) end for EA... They made a name for themselves buying and killing legendary game studios for decades (before Microsoft asked us all to hold its beer). Now, it is EA's time to die at the hands of unscrupulous vultures.

The original 3dfx Voodoo was fast, sure. But what was it REALLY capable of? Turns out, FAR more than most people knew! youtu.be/C4295RCp0GQ

Silly money... #retrotech #nostalgia

For all polyglot homies out there livid with YouTube's crappy auto-dubbing translations, that can't be turned off (and with a stupid AI voice no less), check out this Chrome/Firefox extension that blocks this annoying "feature" (at least on the desktop): youtube-no-translation.vercel.app

@asianometry.bsky.social has been one of my all time favorite YouTube documentarians. This particular video is, by far, the most comprehensive research about the capacitor plague I've seen to date. Impeccable work!

Nostalgia induced inflation never ceases to amaze me... If someone from the future told me in 2005 that a 50 bucks 5-1/4 inch drive bay PC audio peripheral would cost this much 20 years later, I think I'd laugh that time traveler out of the room! And yet, here we are...

Digging some old mags out of my family's attic. I guess I have some 90's tech reading to catch up to this weekend... . . . @pcworld.com.web.brid.gy

Hello world!