Ugly Computers - This Week In Retro 169

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🛠 Check out PCBWay at pcbway.com/ for all your PCB needs! You can find the Commodore PC10 III PCB Reproduction board we mention in the show here www.pcbway.com/project/sharep... 🛠
Dominik Diamond said the Amiga A1000 is ugly. Do you agree? Which is the ugliest of retro computers? We also chat about MS-DOS becoming open sourced and how the release has gone a bit wrong, and the effort Microsoft went to in getting DOS games running in Windows 95.
All this and other retro computing topics in brief along with your answers to last show's Community Question Of The Week.
00:00 - Show Opening
08:21 - Come On In The DOS Are Open
Story Link: cloudblogs.microsoft.com/open...
17:21 - Wing Dings Commander
Story Link: www.theregister.com/2024/04/1...
33:17 - Dave's Housekeeping
Game Boy at 35: www.theguardian.com/games/202...
Additional Game Boy article: www.theguardian.com/games/202...
American Visits British Computer Museums: • An American Visits Bri...
Google Demolishes Atari: www.timeextension.com/news/20...
Infrogrames To Return: www.gamedeveloper.com/busines...
Short Pong Film: • PONG | Gaming Short Fi...
9th INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER CLUB: • It's the 9th INTERNATI...
Stop Killing Games: www.stopkillinggames.com/
44:43 - The Amiga is Ugly. Yuck!
Story Link: www.theguardian.com/games/202...
52:23 - Community Question of the Week
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This Week in Retro is a weekly roundup of the hottest stories from the world of retro gaming and computing, voted on by you, the listener! Hosted by Neil from RMC and Dave. Edited by Duncan Styles.
Episode Credits
"6128plus_es.jpg" by Kangaroo MusiQue, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
"Apple IIc with monitor" by Bilby is licensed under CC BY 3.0. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/....

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15 июл 2024

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Комментарии : 90

@aaldrich1982 2 месяца назад

My favourite command line is when Patrick Stewart says, "Make it so"

@williamfalconer4289 2 месяца назад

This channel is becoming one of my go to Saturday watches. Better than Saturday kitchen.

@duncanstyles133 2 месяца назад

We could start an 80s inspired cooking segment and call it Retro Recipes…….

@MarcKloos 2 месяца назад

Together with Tech Moan

@bazza5699 2 месяца назад

*waits for someone to talk about chips*

@kosmosyche 2 месяца назад

Dude, Atari ST looked so good, such a cool design for it's time. I never had one, just when I saw it in magazines I always took time to appreciate the looks.

@cjh0751 2 месяца назад

Housekeeping with Dave music always reminds me of Steptoe and Sons music 😂

@burnrubber7547 2 месяца назад

Both the amiga and the atari st are classic 80s designs, they are timeless and ooze personality inside and out. Especially the amiga. Look at the character on the main board. Names for the chips, b52 rock lobster etc. Desktop pc's back in those times were easily forgetful, whereas the amiga and St stick in your mind to this day. I love them.

@005AGIMA 2 месяца назад

Ah cleaning the connections inside a Quickshot 2 Joystick while listening to Dave defend the Amiga. What a time to be alive :D Also LOL Duncan for leaving Neil hanging re the loading sound. Had me in stiches.

@duncanstyles133 2 месяца назад

I might have just forgotten to add that..

@Paul-yh8km 2 месяца назад

I remember going for an interview for a software engineering job in the 1980s for a company that was developing a PC video card which decoded and rendered the video in hardware. Cuting edge stuff. The video on screen was the size of a postage stamp.

@mrt.7146 2 месяца назад

LOOOL "Hollowed out the corpse and wore it as a mask!" 😂😂 I wonder when we'll see Noel, from Noel's Retro Lab. Those 3 lads could geek out for ages over Amstrads 🤩

@jitmancanth6698 2 месяца назад

My stomach turned once Amstrad got their hands on Sinclair's Spectrum and started giving them decent keyboards and integrated data storage. Objectively an improvement, but to me, no Spectrum should look like a shortened Amstrad CPC.

@JH-pe3ro 2 месяца назад

Two things I remember about the transition to Windows: 1. "Plug 'n Play" was introduced, and USB. We had previously used a GUS MAX, and when my dad got a new machine, it had a GUS PNP. Never got that thing working in DOS mode. There was a whole generation of hardware like the "winmodems" that shipped a Windows driver and you had no idea if the driver was the thing causing blue screen crashes, whereas the stuff made for DOS took some work to configure, but usually was more reliable. 2. There were so many demo CDs, you barely had to buy games when you could just buy magazines with CD bundles and play the demos. I experienced Wing Commander 3 through a demo CD.

@nickwallette6201 2 месяца назад

Rose-tinted glasses, there, I think. DOS drivers were unattended minors, hopped up on sugar and caffeine, and given the keys to dad's sports car. Yeah, 9x drivers could be a little rough, but in DOS, it wasn't even all that out of the ordinary to reboot after exiting one application and before starting the next, just because there was a fair chance something had been messed with, and your chances of success increased considerably if you started with a fresh boot. That's assuming you were able to exit the first application successfully, vs. just having to give it the three-finger salute, or hitting Reset. The more hardware you had installed, and the more demanding the application, the more likely your only way to get back to DOS was to reboot back into it. Fancy memory managers and VLB only amplified that likelihood. At least in Win9x, you might get through a whole day.

@atomnetton 2 месяца назад

Dave has the best T shirts.

@adriansinclair5062 2 месяца назад

Great to see Dave's new purchases. Love the big boxes especially nowadays. There are no ugly retro computers. Each had its own unique design features and helped cement their look in our minds for decades.

@MQsto 2 месяца назад

"Digital Mindfulness" sounds like a Infograms game.

@EvanBThompson 2 месяца назад

In case you find it interesting how people watch the show; for me it's at the gym running on the tread mill. You're helping me keep fit. Thank you

@Paul-yh8km 2 месяца назад

The games on Windows 3.1 were graphic adventure games like Déjà vu, Shadowgate and things like chess etc. They were often also available on Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, specifically designed to use multiple windows. Developers were trying to exploit windows as part of the game interface. You could drag items in your inventory to other windows to interact with the game instead of typing in commands.

@iftheshuafits4268 2 месяца назад

"Some good back and forth in that film."...you got a chuckle with that one. Great show as usual!

@bazza5699 2 месяца назад

might sound a bit triggering, but i much prefer the look of the atari stfm to the amiga 500.

@airjuri 2 месяца назад

I had boot menu in my 486 machine. There was couple of selections for MS-DOS memory configurations and windows.

@kosmosyche 2 месяца назад

Same. Though at first I just copied over the needed autoexec.bat and config.sys by hand and rebooted. Worked just as well.

@Robin-ie3ns 2 месяца назад

I use the Div MMC to discover new games etc but always load my top 10 go to games from tape - love it!! ❤

@TheUAoB 2 месяца назад

WindowsMe was still architecturally a DOS extender, even though DOS was hidden, it was still there.

@nickwallette6201 2 месяца назад

That whole "9x was just a DOS Shell" thing is not actually true. The Raymond Chen blog, and various other authoritative sources, have all said that 9x ran as much as it could in full 32-bit mode. SOME things had to drop back to real mode, mainly when there was a supporting device driver loaded from CONFIG SYS. However, even in some of THOSE cases, like with CD-ROM drivers, Windows could hook the calls and handle them with its own 32-bit driver stack. This fallback approach ensured a ridiculous (but, at the time, still necessary) degree of compatibility with legacy 8086 baggage, while only imposing the performance penalty when it absolutely had to.

@TheUAoB 2 месяца назад

@@nickwallette6201 That argument doesn't really hold any water. DPMS DOS applications were considered DOS software. By the same standard (!NT) Windows was still DOS software.

@nickwallette6201 2 месяца назад

@@TheUAoB You’re getting dangerously close to an existential argument of what actually makes something a DOS or Windows application. The line seems pretty clear to me - if it links to Windows and doesn’t run without Windows, then regardless if it’s a 16-bit 3.x application or a 64-bit Windows 11 application, it’s absolutely not a DOS application. If you want to really stare into the abyss, it’s not a Windows application OR a DOS application. It’s just x86, or x64 code. The OS is “merely the launcher.” But, IMO, that’s a tired and dead-end philosophical rabbit hole. Win9x used DOS as a boot loader. Then, as Raymond Chen put it, the Windows kernel lobotomizes DOS and takes over the machine. How is that different from Linux booted by grub, or NT booted by ntldr, or BeOS booted by the Be Boot Manager, or DOS booted by the BIOS? Everything starts somewhere, all the way back to the CPU calling a known address in ROM when it comes out of reset. Is Ubuntu an EFI program?

@TheUAoB 2 месяца назад

@@nickwallette6201 No Ubuntu isn't an EFI program, but Linux can be! I actually load my kernel using EFI Stub as an EFI program!

@cefrodrigues 2 месяца назад

It is mentioned several times how Windows stood, or was hampered by, the shaky foundations of MS-DOS, but actually... 🤓 Windows booted from MS-DOS but, starting with Windows/386, it was an operating system in its own right. It replaced DOS services completely, and DOS applications started from Windows ran in an "emulated" or "virtualized" environment supported by the "virtual 8086 mode" of the 386 and later.

@marcusmayfield9499 2 месяца назад

Super Mario Land was on the Game Boy. Super Mario World was on the SNES.

@aaldrich1982 2 месяца назад

Mario World can be spotted regularly through this, below Faxanadu and to the right of Starwing.

@DavidBrant 2 месяца назад

Really loved 80 (mode 2) character mode on the Amstrad CPC. Crisp and bold yellow on royal blue. 😙 👌🏼

@RandallHayter 2 месяца назад

The return of the “Jingle Bell Rock” housekeeping song!

@RetroTinkerer 2 месяца назад

Hello everyone, I believe the WC3 that required a Hardware MPEG2 decoder was a re-release on DVD with high quality video scenes. If I'm not mistaken, you can get that version on GOG. I have the one released on CD, shame I was an early adopter of all that stuff, you end up having to purchase the same stuff more that a single time. 😂 EDIT: My bad WC III on GOG don't mention enhanced video at all, that is a thing on the WC IV release. Now I wonder if anyone, have replaced the lower quality video on the WC III for PC with the slightly improved ones from the PSX release. I doubt the GOG release include these flies as the full game download offline installer weight 1.7Gb while the PSX videos by themselves is around 1.6GB, someone must check it out. 😜

@nickwallette6201 2 месяца назад

I got a copy of that MPEG-2 enhanced version of WC IV with my Creative Labs PC-DVD Encore kit. The kit came with a Panasonic 2X DVD-ROM and an MPEG-2 hardware decoder card, and versions of WC IV and Claw that used the MPEG decoder card for the cut-scenes, while the normal (CD) versions of them used highly compressed video played back in software. I want to say it also came with a copy of Goldeneye on DVD (video, not game.) Although I'm questioning whether my particular kit came with the latter, because I don't have it anymore ... that I know of. (But I do still have the card, and the two games. I ran the DVD drive until the wheels came off, and replaced it with a Plextor DVD-ROM / CD-RW combo, which I also used until it gave up the ghost.) The WC IV disc was double-sided. It just had a thin label around the hub, like some DVD video releases that used to put widescreen on one side and fullscreen on the other. My image of it is 3.9GB + 3.6GB. WC3 came on 4 discs, each around 640MB. I'm sure some of that is replicated to be available regardless which disc you have inserted, though.

@retrosim4197 2 месяца назад

In terms of industrial design, the Atari Mega STE was the best looking machine that Atari ever made. It was also the first to ditch the internal metal shielding and instead has a special paint coating on the inside for RF shielding. It made it really easy to access the internals and add hard disks etc... Unfortunately, it came way too late to gain any traction. I think I bought mine in 1991 but the platform was virtually dead by then.

@CRG 2 месяца назад

I've never played a text adventure, maybe I should do something about that. Another enjoyable show. As a die hard Amiga fan I don't think any of them are ugly but I will concede that the ST when compared to the A500 is certainly in the better looking case. The 2000 is a maybe a bit of a boat anchor but its a product of its time, designed for function over form and that alone gives it its charm.

@POVwithRC 2 месяца назад

Gosh, that PC-20. Someone needs to bottle that grey and sell it 🖤

@Markr7855 2 месяца назад

Sony HB-F1XD is a good looking thing 😊

@jst6502 2 месяца назад

“Go team Amiga!” - What have you done with the real Dave?

@catriona_drummond 2 месяца назад

It's probably something superficial like "Oh but the Atari was grey and the Amiga was beige like shaping underwear, how uncool, while the Spectrum was sexy black."

@justice4g 2 месяца назад

despite owning one, the Amiga 2000 was ugly to me, at least compared to the 1000 and 3000

@Simon-ml4lu 2 месяца назад

70's Computer terminals look ugly now but I'm still fond of the design some how..

@mogwaay 2 месяца назад

+1 for the use of the word "Shugily", great bit of Scottish dialect that needs to be used more :)

@Markr7855 2 месяца назад

The Amiga though is a good looking machine.

@MrKanjidude 2 месяца назад

Civilization II used the Windows 3 interface, if I remember correctly. Or was it Windows 95? It's been so long...

@ninehundredollarydoos 2 месяца назад

Amiga 1000 ugly? Not really sure about that , I'd say its a pretty decent looking system , now the TRS 80 looks a bit tacky with silver thing going on so that might count as ugly. Btw on an unrelated note have you guys considered covering the recent Sound Canvas emulators EMUSC and NUKED SC55? They're both pretty far into development and I'm surprised not many places have covered them so might make for a good story on TWIR.

@nickwallette6201 2 месяца назад

I've never thought sleek design was really Commodore's strong suit. Everything they made was always a little bit fugly.

@stugreenhouse6680 2 месяца назад

Ugly wise... Amstrad Mega PC The Amstrad PCW16 was pushed hard in catalogues back in the late 90s. My Mums friend had one that I was always intrigued by. Turns out it was a glorified address book. Gutted. Think it was only black and white screen too.

@waynekeenansvideos 2 месяца назад

I remember a 486DX couldn't play MPEG3 files without stuttering.

@esseferio 2 месяца назад

I loved my Amiga 2000, and I found it beautiful at that time :) I really dig the image background of the thumbnail! What is it?

@robwebster7406 2 месяца назад

Yes windows 95 plus cd had Buddy Holly by the Weezer on it, not my style of music, but liked it. Maybe because it was on the disc 🤔

@nickwallette6201 2 месяца назад

Not Plus!, just the regular Windows 95 installation disc itself. Or at least the retail version. Not totally sure if OEM versions did. I think they may have come on an "extras" disc that was optional.

@robwebster7406 2 месяца назад

Was on my 95 plus extra cd, found it on there when I was looking on it.

@solidstate0 2 месяца назад

Version 2.11, 3.30 and 5.0 were popular and stable. Version 4.01 was meant to be a disaster for some reason I don't recall

@user-ub1dz8js7s 2 месяца назад

Dude either the first 8-bit Oric or the Mattel Aquarius are hideous

@ScandalUK 2 месяца назад

Interesting to see what the DOS source can do for the AO486 MiSTer core

@terrylaze6247 2 месяца назад

Probably nothing because fpga is recreating the hardware and not trying to find a way to run software on hardware it wasn't meant to be run on, which is what emulation and things like dosbox do.

@nickwallette6201 2 месяца назад

@@terrylaze6247 Welllll... there's some potential there. Not all chipsets are super well documented, and the BIOS itself often had some dark corners in it as well. Since DOS was part bare-metal and part BIOS interface, there is likely something to be learned there. At the time, there wasn't another software vendor in existence whose success was so intricately linked to the fortunes of hardware and firmware manufacturers, so if _anybody_ knew what was going on, it was Microsoft.

@Savagetechie 2 месяца назад

The PVA glue method is the absolute best way to clean records.

@espressomatic 2 месяца назад

Also makes a great addition to vodka martini when shaken with an olive and mint - try one

@TheUAoB 2 месяца назад

DOS sources aren't going to help FreeDOS/DosBox/DOSEmu. They're already more advanced (and compatible) than any MS DOS version. The controversy around previous DOS source drops was the license didn’t allow anybody who'd seen the code be involved in any other DOS project. At least they've used an Open Source license this time so that's not an issue.

@Joliie 2 месяца назад

What is in the box, Dave??

@onurdundar42 2 месяца назад

Where do the retro system icons in the thumbnail come from? They look neat.

@duncanstyles133 2 месяца назад

Co-pilot. Or whatever the Microsoft chat thing is called.

@ArthLud 22 дня назад

Surely there was Civ2 for Win3.1

@duncanwoodward6831 2 месяца назад

"The Amiga is Ugly" .............. HOW VERY DARE YOU 😂 and to say the ST isn't a looker is also just plain wrong - all that slanting looked amazing Nah, I don't think there's any machines I could say are ugly at all, they all have their charms. OOOOOH, and to say the Amstrad CPC Plus is ugly is also wrong, but I understand the reasons for saying it, it's not as iconic as the CPC 464. But, as much as I love the Amiga, I wasn't keen on the A600 / A1200 from a design point of view, it definitely cheapened up the looks, but still looked pretty good. Like what Neil is saying, the Amiga was no underdog, it was so popular. As for the the comments about the Pong film, I picked up on Neil's comments, "there's some back and forth in that film" ............ I found it funny, even if nobody else did. A lot of the comments about Amiga/ST looking ugly, I suspect a lot of this dates back to Computer vs Console wars, especially from the console side. As for the community question about the "how do you decelerate" .............. I use physical media for games (like the guy who loads stuff from tape) but also for music, I listen to music on vinyl record, cassette, CD or even Mini Disc. As for the most uncool computer? .......... hmmmm, maybe the Mattel Aquarius?

@waynekeenansvideos 2 месяца назад

Was it Macromedia Shockwave?

@JohnVance 2 месяца назад

ACAB - all computers are beautiful

@Joliie 2 месяца назад

12:00 Guess version 3 is currently lost, from the link it says Ray Ozzie found the files for 4.0 and asked MS if they could be released. So best guess is, they didn't have those files anymore and could only release them, because Ray found his copy of them. So goes to show, check all you floppies before you scrap them.

@nickwallette6201 2 месяца назад

Oh, I'm sure IBM still has it all. ;-) Probably in a room that nobody has been allowed into since 1993.

@MotownBatman 2 месяца назад

m$ couldn't Release Multi-Tasking MsDos 4 due to IBM Strong holding them and making turning it into OS/2, while just ReNaming MsDos 3.3 into MsDos 4.0

@levmonster5156 2 месяца назад

I think Infogrames also purchased Ocean software before it purchased Atari. Ocean would be a better brand to revive than Infogrames.

@neozeed8139 2 месяца назад

sigh the source to ms-dos 4 fully compiles. I wish people did just a little research into this. I'd blogged/twittered/youtubed even how to bulid it, and even showed it booting on real hardware, but also that I've spent the 70 minutes to compile it from my ps/2. very dissapoint.

@billramsay7351 2 месяца назад

Dominic Diamond continuing to prove he's a complete prat.

@BenRattigan 2 месяца назад

*health warning, don’t lick 30 year old MS-DOS packaging 😂

@belstar1128 2 месяца назад

The Amiga had that grey look that every computer had for a very long time. It doesn't really matter but people may not expect the awesomeness inside. it seems like a lot of people don't remember the Amiga they only remember c64 dos and apple everything else is obscure to non retro gamers. Even those that were alive back then. and a lot of Amiga games that are on console too are either bad on Amiga or good on Amiga but bad on console. so it seems like a bad platform to those who never used it.

@picturesalbum4532 2 месяца назад

I looked the look of the Coco3 but the Multipack addon was seriously UGLY !!

@TerribleFire 2 месяца назад

Amigaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

@markwrightrf 2 месяца назад

Yay it's Saturday and TISWAS is on the air.. the acronym being Today Is Saturday, Wow Amstrad Sucks....

@The_Temple 2 месяца назад

The Soviets built the ugliest computers

@bazodee2 2 месяца назад

Apple II is bone ugly and so is Atari 400/800.

@Wiscotac 2 месяца назад

Wrong place, wrong time, wrong reference. However, IMO, the most uncool computers are all the modern embedded computers in all new so-called "Smart" TVs. These devices, hidden under chic looking screens and plastic, are designed to encourage, advertise, and promote various streaming platforms. The gateway controller talking to this embedded computer is literally the remote control that comes with the Smart TV units. The goal is to promote streaming consumer subscriptions through the same-old same-old advertising tropes, on steroids. And these embedded computers are used to steer if not make it close to impossible for the so-called owners of the Smart TVs to use freely. In other words, it's not yours. One example is to simply supply a newly designed remote with gimmicks like allowing audio inputs to have more functionality than any onscreen menu system that a Smart TV computer is easily able to produce. Do you wonder why a modern Smart tv remote doesn't even have a button dedicated to input selections? Hint: the new TV design concept doesn't want owner input, rather they prefer users/owners that are funneled to streaming services of any kind imaginable, usually the word *"Free"* is peppered into all these continuous online pitches. Also no upgrading efforts for OTA channel access has been improved, no, the big tech streaming companies are working endlessly to get TV users to not only have limited access to digital channels OTA (antennas), now there is a big tech effort (various huge ISPs) and the legacy broadcast industry, or whats left of it, to get you to pay for it. Yeah, I think the era 1,000 cable channels is kind of dead, put a fork in it, we should not have to resurrect their profits. End Rant.