RetroFox

Been a rough month or so for the flea markets with snow lingering and more on the way. Few vendors today - saw this neat Sony Betacam set. Guy wanted $125 for it but negotiable. He also had sealed tapes. Didn’t get it but neat to see.

DOOM running on an industrial cake machine

New Video: Id Software's 1993 FPS DOOM has a long-standing tradition of being run on all sorts of weird and wonderful devices. But there's one device that's been sorely missing: a multi-million pound industrial cake machine. So I decided to rectify that once and for all...

youtu.be/BHSOVnahKjY

The funny part - it got me to basically leap out of bed to stop the alarm because there's a spoken line like "READY!..." then a few seconds later, huge explosion, so stopping it before that was...motivating. Hey, it worked :) Always on time for classes!

No FMF today because there's still 8" of snow on the ground and it's 6F with negative wind chill. Instead, I've been going through old CD-R backups. I used this CAC (College Alarm Clock) in college. Use to wake up to Terry Bogard annihilating the top of building, iykyk :D

It shows up in a number of my videos. Kind of made it the channel mascot. Fits with the name and all.

YouTube video by RetroFox What IS the iomega Fotoshow?

Posted a new video on the 'tube - please check it out. I'm taking a look at the weird and wonderful iomega Fotoshow. Neat and useful or relegated to the junkpile of history? You decide! :) youtu.be/RYZmzJKEz1c

Played around with latest PC over the weekend some more. Added another 8gb of RAM to bring it up to 16gb and ran 3D Mark 11 for the fun of it. That HD 6450 really struggled. I had a HD 7850 handy, so tried that for much better results.

Lots of books for this software and other bits - I think the key stickers for Final Cut are interesting. I probably wouldn't have used them either but I could imagine making the learning curve a little easier.

The PC wasn't the only pickup today at the flea - I also grabbed these three big boxes of Mac software (for a buddy) for $20. Adobe PS 7, Final Cut Pro 4, and DVD Studio Pro 2. Pretty neat (and heavy)...

Took some tinkering (and adding an ssd) but got the PC booting. Maybe nothing amazing, but it’s an AMD A8 5600 Series (4 core) 3.6 GHz CPU, 8 gb of RAM, an ASUS Radeon HD 6450 1gb all on an ASRock FM2A75 Pro 4 mainboard.

This is what I mean by tempting fate. Picked up a PC at the flea for $10 this morning - don’t know what it is yet, but hey - case is worth it for that price and it’ll be fun to tinker with. Still, too many big PCs lately :p …

And the newest pc is an Asus ROG Ryzen 5 3600X 6-core, 32gb DDR4 RAM, and a GTX 1660ti. Just slightly long in the tooth but new enough Win 11 will install on it. I have some plans for this one :) It's been fun to tinker with all of them, but so many projects at once.

The middle pc is a AMD FX 6300 6-core with a whopping 32 gb of DDR3 RAM and an Nvidia GTX 970 card. (all three were clearly someone's old gaming builds). Another NZXT case, complete this time - just dirty and the wire covers are pretty brittle.

Two of the computers were so caked inside and out with dust/filth - much cleaning was done prior to these photos and still need more. The oldest is a Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66 GHz w/ 4gb RAM and a Nvidia 650ti card. Side panel missing from the case, sadly.

Yeah, some of these vendors just pull prices out of their butts. I think it mostly comes from fear something is worth a lot and they don't want to have sold too cheap. They'll be lugged around for a week or so to various markets and eventually the price will come down. I have both, so no need either

The universe is fickle and has a sense of humor, thus it saw fit to punish my wayward thoughts. You want computers, here - have computers! So this week, I got these three machines for $50 total via an estate cleanout and friend hookup.

The i5 prebuilt has been a fun project and I have been also tinkering with the Vaio P4 from a while back (more on that later) - i.e., I've had some side projects going. But I made the mistake of tempting the universe by thinking I haven't picked up much from the flea lately...

Flea Market Friday time - it was so, so cold (21F/-6C) so once again there wasn't much turnout. Saw a couple SFF office/home pcs of the Celeron/C2D era. One vendor had this G4 and G5 tower, wanting $100 /each/ - yeah, no thanks :) Guess he'll have to lug them around longer first.

I did a thing with the MSI / i5 PC since it was cheap. Instead of the i5 4440, it now has a i7 4790 for a cost of about $20. Those extra 4 threads definitely helped in the benchmark. Still have a bit more planned for this machine :)

TimeSpy wouldn't run on the old PC but ran on the new box. For fun, I also had an AMD RX560 I hadn't tested so tried that, too. I have more plans for upgrades to this PC. But this is a solid start and upgrade. :)

Ran benchmarks (3D Mark 11) before starting to swap parts. The old bench PC is a AMDPhenom II/Gigabyte mobo combo that had a 1050ti. It's given many years of solid service as both a main PC and bench PC. o7 The i5 will be the new bench PC, swapping the 750ti and 1050ti.

Nothing like cleaning dust out of a case (It's NZXT brand, btw) and fans in below freezing weather. Put it all back together, added a Thermaltake 750W PSU and EVO SSD I had sitting around. It posts! I get video, BIOS reports the 16gb of RAM, just need to get an OS going next.

I also picked up this EVGA case with an MSI board, Intel i5-4440 3.1 GHz CPU, 2x DDR3 8 GB RAM sticks, and EVGA GTX 750ti for $15. The case is in really nice shape and I get to tinker with the board/cpu/video card.

That said, I did hit the flea market today and managed to find a few things. Picked up this SiS AGP card, a 256mb stick of PC2100U RAM, and -what I think- is an Apple/Mac serial to DB9 adapter for $3 total...

The weather has been a challenge lately for hitting the flea markets. This has been the scene for the last few weekends.

YouTube video by RetroFox Christmas Memories with the 'Twas the Night Before Christmas Animated Musical Disk

It's a little late but still in time for the holidays - Check out my latest YouTube video as I take a short trip down memory lane to talk about the 'Twas the Night Before Christmas Animated Musical Disk and my first computer. Hope you enjoy!

youtu.be/bf3mBKtGmzU

Sadly the screen is borked - bunch of vertical lines. Doesn’t affect the external output but still a shame. The CPU is a Pentium M (Centrino) 1.73 GHz, 1 Gig of RAM, a Radeon X300 64mb GPU, and a ton of I/O ports, DVD drive. Solid machine for retro gaming, screen aside.

Flea market weather has been rough lately - snow, rain, below freezing - haven't seen or found much. Today though, I did pick up this Dell Inspiron 9300 with faux woodgrain, adapter, bag, external drive, a couple nokia phones for $15 (it was all in the bag)!

Going through old school papers (yes, I still have my old school papers - shut up) and found this interesting little gem. Any 7th Guest fans out there? This activity sheet was from 1989, well predating the game or CD-ROMs in consumer PCs. Devs had the same activity sheet? :)

I'll have to play it more but the game reminds me a little of Deus Ex combined with a Mechwarrior game and dialogue in the "No One Lives Forever" vein. Has out of mech and in mech parts. Seems to run well on the Asus with the Voodoo3 added. :)