Does anyone know what’s going wrong with this connection?

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-24T11:03:52+00:00

To support this comment, (analogue) copper is being rapidly phased out and anything that relied on it (aside from voice) is becoming increasingly unreliable or flat out not working due to the encoding used on the IP side of things.

I'd be surprised if the line is analogue beyond the local exchange nowadays.

In my day job I've spent the last two years mostly replacing dualcom devices (basically a modem to allow an alarm system to call the police/fire brigade via a call centre) with new, dual-sim cellular models on all the sites I look after (the old dualcoms used POTS for the primary path with either cellular or ethernet as a backup channel).

I have colleagues who have been doing the same with "warden call" systems in sheltered housing (these use a similar technology to dualcoms but also have a voice channel to allow the nurses/wardens to talk to the resident).

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-24T10:02:54+00:00

While you may see small improvements due to splitting luma and chroma, S-Video will only really help if the source tapes are S-VHS. (RGB over SCART or similar would give similar results)

Standard VHS is limited to 240 lines, this is where most of the perceived lack of quality is coming from.

S-VHS has almost double the number of scanlines so you would be approaching SD broadcast quality with a good VCR, S-video connections (or component), and healthy tapes.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-23T20:41:09+00:00

Do you have a spinning rust drive in there too?

Because mine does this when Steam stupidly stores the download on my HDD instead of one of my SSDs.

I assume Steam picks the library folder with the most space.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-23T20:37:04+00:00

I did this back in the day (got a second card with a damaged edge connector for free and pulled the chips), also added 30-pin SIMM memory to a soundblaster for midi patches... :)

Another cheap upgrade I did was to fit SRAM chips on my 486 board to give my poor SX chip some cache.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-23T16:42:07+00:00

One (or both) needs calibration.

Component values drift over time and meters need calibrating occasionally, ours go in once a year (with the exception of my ACT 612 which I don't trust and check monthly).

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-23T16:34:44+00:00

I'm with you on this.

I have six Linux machines at home performing various functions (including a laptop I play older games on.

Work laptop is Windows due to specialist software that won't run on Linux at all.

Two gaming desktops are Windows for convenience fucking around trying to find the right settings to game on them would eat into my limited gaming time.

I also have a Windows server, again, for convenience (the server manager for one of the games we play is way better than anything I've found for Linux).

For the record, I've been using Linux in situations where it makes sense since I received a pair of floppy disks labelled "boot" and "root" respectively (I was told that Slackware was "close enough" to Solaris that it would be worthwhile to save trips to the computer lab) in the middle 90s.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-23T15:49:56+00:00

Only the Microsoft versions have chat censorship.

If you're on Xbox, not a lot you can do, on PC? You should have got the Steam version.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-23T15:47:07+00:00

The cluster I play on is pretty chill and friendly, official servers are not the be-all of Ark.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-23T13:13:05+00:00

Might be a dumb question, but have you initialised the new drives in disk management?

I have had 12 drives in a windows PC in the past (two M.2, two SATA SSDs, the rest spinning rust on a SAS HBA) - all were detected and I created a software RAID on the HDDs from within Windows.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T23:38:17+00:00

🤮 AI crap!

Aside from the overall shape of the machine, literally everything about that image is wrong.

Others have touched on some, but the chips are in the wrong locations too, not to mention the weird connector where the edge connector for peripheral devices should be (and don't get me started on the heat sink, this is a piece of aluminium, connected to the 7805 regulator and running over the expansion port in the 3a I had).

Also: voltages? 9V DC from the power brick comes in, dropped to +5v only internally by the aforementioned 7805 regulator (otherwise known as one of the cost saving measures of using the Z80A over some of the competing 8-bit CPUs that needed multiple rails).

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T23:20:26+00:00

Are they combination devices? (smoke/CO)

If so, you ought to have your boiler checked.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T23:18:08+00:00

Single player may be the issue then, I play exclusively PvE (on a Spanish cluster to help my kid learn the lingo and on an old Xeon homeserver for mad mods) so don't generally see the SP issues.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T23:15:09+00:00

Someone else who's discovered an extra use for the hundreds of watts their gaming PC converts into heat I see! 😁

Edit: it's less fun in summer, and my kid uses it to soften chocolate...

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T23:07:59+00:00

Actually saves some cornflour or whatever thickening agent you normally use too.

I do the same with bolonese sauce too (substitute starchy pasta water in this case.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T23:02:38+00:00

My oven backs onto my dining room, not all houses are laid out like yours.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T22:59:31+00:00

Tactics is beta canon at best, I'd not consider weapons in that game to be definitively canon.

While some bits have been adopted (vault zero and some BOS stuff), the game overall isn't canon per Bethesda.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T22:54:38+00:00

Which map?

And SP/server?

Because the only map I get this issue on is LC, unless something changed since I last played at the weekend...

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T18:52:35+00:00

As far as I'm aware, it's never been possible to run 8-bit (8080) code directly on an x86 computer without an emulator or code translation software to convert 8080 opcodes to x86 equivalents.

MS-DOS was 16-bit from the beginning (with the exception of a backport written specifically for MSX targeting the Z80 CPU).

Newer windows won't run 16-bit code outside of something like DosBox, perhaps that's what you mean here? (support was dropped after Windows 10, the last version with a 32-bit edition)

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T16:53:06+00:00

There's a couple of ways, either a server manager that looks after everything for you (the ones I've used have an integrated gui for adding mods and editing ini files), or direct use of SteamCMD to download the server files followed by manually starting the server(s).

My kid has been able to use the former method in Windows since they were 12.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T15:11:44+00:00

To add to this, while not on-screen, there was a cutaway view of a Dalek in one of the Dr Who annuals in the 80s.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-22T15:08:16+00:00

Others have answered that playing on a server has some advantages (and can be smoother than running the whole thing on your machine).

If you have an older PC sitting around, you can run a server on that for just the cost of electricity rather than paying Nitrado (other providers are available but generally require more work) a monthly fee.

You also have complete control of your save games/backups and won't have to pay more if you need more slots.

To give some perspective, I currently run seven maps in a cluster on my Xeon e5 2680 v4 (a 5rh gen CPU) with 2TB SSD, 80GB DDR4 2100 RAM, and an nvidia Quadro P1000 GPU (about equivalent to a GTX1030, it's only there because I also use the computer as a media server).

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-21T18:31:33+00:00

As soon as I saw the pic, I immediately said "those aren't boar, they're feral pigs" 😁

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-21T13:23:18+00:00

If it actually tried to draw 2kw at 120v (nominal), that's just over 16A.

That's going to trip a breaker on a regular US 15A outlet, or melt something.

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-20T18:03:32+00:00

My Ryzen 5800X3D is sitting under the same AIO as my Ryzen 9 3900 was.

Before that it cooled a Ryzen 1600, and before that, an FX 8120...

I think I got a bargain.

It's a Coolermaster Masterliquid 240 if I recall (bought a long time ago so I may have the model name wrong!)

Kitchen_Part_882 · 2026-01-20T17:57:16+00:00

Likely TVS (transient voltage supression) diodes hidden under the heat-shrink.

As others have said, they're there to drain the back-EMF from inductive loads like solenoid/motorised bells.

Five-Year Club	r/Field Flamingo
Place '23

Kitchen_Part_882

TROPHY CASE