timixretroplays

timixretroplays, 7 months ago to VintageOSes

Have you ever tried emulating #Windows98 on a #Ryzen system and had it crash spectacularly? Just within the last year or so, someone's written a patch for 95/98/98SE to fix it!

There's a floppy image you can boot your VM from, which will patch and fix your Win9x install even if it's partially installed and you hit the Explorer crash, so it doesn't even matter hugely where/when in the installation process you apply it. https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x/releases/

Boosts for visibility welcome!

#retrocomputing

timixretroplays, 4 months ago to opensource

Interested in a completely #opensource #FOSS portable media player? Go check out the #Tangara, designed and made right here in Australia: https://cooltech.zone/tangara/

They've just launched their funding campaign for it on Crowd Supply, and have immediately blown past their goal, so it seems certain they'll be able to make them. But being totally open source software and hardware, you can also just go make your own!

timixretroplays, 1 month ago to 3DPrinting

I'm proud to announce the first public release of #Thrixels, my system for #3DPrinting pixel art! After several months of work, I think it's finally ready to inflict on other people - please give it a go if you're interested, and let me know how you get on with it.

https://www.printables.com/model/843125-thrixels-a-system-for-3d-printed-pixel-art

Boosts, suggestions, and any other feedback would be highly appreciated!

@3dprinting @3dprinting

timixretroplays, 5 months ago to 3DPrinting

Can I interested you in some bevelled egg this holiday season?

Download the STLs here: https://www.printables.com/model/681120-bevelled-egg

#3dprinting

timixretroplays, 3 months ago to retrogaming

So, uh, I collect old game controllers - mostly gamepads, but a few joysticks, mice, and weirder things here and there. You can see some of them in the photo below. This collection - and attempting to appropriately document and meaningfully share it - is why I joined Mastodon in the first place. For those of you who follow me for #retrogaming and #retrocomputing stuff but have been cursed by endless 3D printing posts - sorry, the good stuff's coming, I promise. 1/🧵

timixretroplays, 3 months ago to random

What fresh hell is this? Why would I ever want to log into my home router using Facebook?

It gets worse - I tapped on "Others" expecting to see a typical username / password prompt, but the only option in there is to... log in with WeChat.

timixretroplays, 2 months ago to 3DPrinting

Introducing the second iteration of my #fakerbeams project. I wasn't happy with the results of emulating aluminium extrusion as-is, so this is an entirely new construction system designed from the ground up for #3Dprinting, heat-set inserts, and metric everything. Finished structures get M3-bolted together for strength, but prototyping is done with bits of 4mm doweling for speed - it took just minutes to pull apart the little cube and rebuild it into the bigger box!

@3dprinting @3dprinting

A photo of a small section of the parts, disassembled, to show how they slot together.
A photo of a large (roughly 20 by 20 by 30cm frame) built from 3D printed parts.

timixretroplays, 7 months ago to Playstation

This is the Logitech Cordless Action Controller, a wireless pad for the #PlayStation 2, and it hides a puzzle I need your help to solve.

For every forum thread calling this the best controller ever, there's another complaining it doesn't connect to its receiver. I think either the controllers or receivers are failing over time.

Do you/did you have one? Does it sync, does it not? What are its model/part numbers? Send photos!

Boosts appreciated, help me solve this!

#retrogaming #retrocomputing

A photo of the back of the controller and of the receiver. Controller: Model number: G-X2D11 Part number: 863239-0000 Receiver: Model number: C-x2B31 Part number: 863240-0000

timixretroplays, 7 months ago to random

Today's acquisition: this ridiculous Star Wars-flavoured mouse, PS/2 and serial compatible. This was one of the cheapest serial mice on eBay that didn't look like it was once a puppy's chew toy, and is (hopefully) going to help me build a general-purpose USB to serial adapter, so... may the baud be with you?

A photo of the mouse out of its box, showing the PS/2 plug with a serial adapter attached.

timixretroplays, 5 months ago to animals

Abby says hi. #Caturday #CatsOfMastodon

timixretroplays, 4 months ago to keyboard

Looking for #keyboard / #mechanicalkeyboard recommendations. I want a low profile TKL for the office - brown tactile or scissor, not picky beyond low noise. My Keychron K1 (pictured) is feeling a bit too tall for comfort this year. I love my G915 TKL at home but they're very expensive, so buying another is a last resort. Currently considering a 3Dconnexion Keyboard Pro, I love their mice and the horizontal home-end layout. I don't have time right now to design my own. Boosts appreciated!

timixretroplays, 7 months ago to random

Introducing #SimpleBreakouts - can you handle through-hole soldering, and want a simple breakout board for a PS/2 keyboard connector or whatever, but haven't ever yet dipped your toes into PCB design? I'm starting a public repository of all the little breakouts I've had made for my own projects, in the hope that they may save some time in your world as well.

I'll add more as I go, or by request even, but for now, here's the start of this project: https://github.com/timixretroplays/simple-breakouts

Another view of the boards, showing text indicating what each of the pins are/do.

timixretroplays, 7 months ago to retrogaming

And here's why I've spent the last week futzing around with Windows 98 and old laptops. This is the Gravis Stinger, a gamepad that occupies the same unforgiving temporal space as 1996's Fire Fight - it's a 9-pin serial gamepad, not USB or gameport; its software was written for Windows 9x, and the assumptions that were made to make it work were trashed in Win2K, so it was very short-lived. My goal here is to understand its protocol, and build a USB adapter for it.
#retrogaming #retrocomputing

timixretroplays, 1 month ago to Cat

Siamese llama. Will you just look at this ridiculous creature.

#Cat #SiameseCat #CatsOfMastodon #Caturday

timixretroplays, 1 month ago to random

So this guy built his own gamepad from the guts of both an Xbox controller and a trackball mouse in order to improve his FPS game. This is an amazing project and I wish there was more than 29 minutes of him talking about it, because the design is utterly brilliant - I love the detail of accessing the trackball from front and back, I bet that results in having phenomenal mouse control. The pad itself looks like something Gravis would have made if they were still around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug06dhahqg0

timixretroplays, 30 days ago to 3DPrinting

#CGAPrints update: Release Candidate 1? I took some time today to test-print a couple of colours that arrived this week, and they seem pretty close. This is the first time I've compared a full batch against colours on a real screen - what do you think?

All 16 colours are different brands and types of PLA, so given access to the complete palette, basically every printer should be capable of making some form or other of CGA pixel art.

#3DPrinting @3dprinting @3dprinting #retrocomputing

timixretroplays, 4 months ago to animals

Those cheeks are 100% floof, there isn't any actual cat in them. #CatsOfMastodon #Caturday

timixretroplays, 5 months ago to design

It could have said 'cool'. It could have said 'COOL'. For this specific word, this display is absolutely capable of either, in a unique confluence of design, language and function.

Instead, someone asked "What if someone misreads a lower-case 'L' as a numeral one? We have to differentiate it so lower-case text isn't ambiguous!" and so the text-to-LED-segment library used by this tumbledryer, built by a company with nine decades of business under its belt, says 'cooL'.

#design #typography

timixretroplays, 1 month ago to random

Have you missed an alarm on your iPhone lately? It's not you, it's an actual bug in the software that means the alarm just doesn't work sometimes: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/apple-confirms-bug-that-is-keeping-some-iphone-alarms-from-sounding/

The reddit thread I saw was full of people saying they'd missed work, interviews, all kinds of stuff. You'd absolutely assume you were at fault, and not the thousand dollar smart device failing to do something a $10 bedside clock can do, right? What a mess.

timixretroplays, 16 days ago to random

Fun language/free market convergence thing: A "right angle" is where two lines intersect at a 90 degree angle, and you can buy "right angle cables", where the plug at one end is rotated to point at a 90 degree angle away from the cable.

But what if you want a cable to go the other way? Well, in that case, you want to search for a "left angle" cable, and it'll point in the opposite direction to a typical "right angle" cable.

There also exist "up angle" and "down angle" adapters, like these.

timixretroplays, 23 days ago to retrogaming

This is probably the only Gravis UltraSound-related thing I'll sensibly collect. This is the Gravis MIDI and Joystick Adapter, and I'm super thrilled to have picked one up for a reasonable price in this condition. At some point I'll carefully pull things out for a closer look, including scanning the paperwork, but in the meantime - did you ever have/use one of these? What'd you use it for/with? Let me know!

#retrogaming #retrocomputing

A photo of the back of the adapter package, showing some of the instructions.

timixretroplays, 5 months ago to 3DPrinting

Ask your doctor today if Bowl O' Plastic is right for you! The next step in my #Thrixels madness is seamlessly joining multiple panels together to support larger mosaics. Here's a test with no extra clearance - not only is there a gap, it's exacerbated by the tiles pushing the thin substrate walls outwards, so those will have to be cut away in the next attempt.

That metal pin is from the #GravisGamePad project - I will need to find a different "dowel" material.

#3DPrinting @3dprinting

A photo of the mosaic split in half, with a metal pin showing how the two halves are fixed together.
A close-up photo of the inner edges of the mosaic, showing the plastic texture.
A close-up of the underside of the assembled mosaic, showing a clear gap between the two halves.

timixretroplays, 6 months ago to random

I managed to collect something truly special this week - this is the #Stadia Launch Team controller! A limited number of these were made as gifts to the launch team in 2019, and a fraction of those have appeared for sale in the intervening years.

These are nonfunctional - they lack several components that would make them work as regular Stadia pads - and while a couple of people have refitted theirs with the hardware from a founders' edition controller, I am choosing not to do that to mine.