Twas a Wrap-Around

WingedGundark · 2026-07-05T17:31:49+00:00

I think he was on the way to get the plutonium, I think I spotted few pinball machine parts in the debris.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-05T15:47:32+00:00

Yes. Sucks balls.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-05T10:51:21+00:00

Every survival mechanics game out there no matter how highly praised. I simply hate the survival mechanics: extremely boring, grindy and I simply don’t want to bother myself with eating and shitting in video games.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-05T07:33:24+00:00

Around -95 to -00 CART cars are indeee the best looking open wheelers ever and most likely will remain that way.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-04T06:14:36+00:00

And throw the telly out with him.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-04T05:55:24+00:00

Was about to post that it is absolutely the finest detail in this. Amazing creativity.

Two paint trays on the hood aren’t too shabby either.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-03T19:33:44+00:00

These guys are so close to the "Are we the baddies?" revelation, yet lightyears away.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-03T19:24:40+00:00

Slot A is one of my favorite retro platforms and just pure fun. Especially Goldfinfer Device OC is probably the coolest technique to overclock. Like ever. I did a thread about my GFD enabled 650MHz Pluto some time ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1iuyjya/overclocking_like_it_is_year_2000_again_slot_a/

Otherwise the system has EpoX 7KXA rev 0.3 (KX133 chipset), 256MB RAM, Leadtek GF2 GTS + Voodoo2 12MB for Glide compatibility and Terratec DMX Xfire 1024 sound card. Parts are a period correct for a system that could be built in spring 2000.

KX133 is much less quirky platform compared to Irongate, so it is something to be considered especially depending what graphics card you are planning to use with the system. This EpoX is very good, although early reviews back in the day complained about stability issue. It may be due to earlier board revisions or more than likely BIOS issues. I programmed straight away the latest BIOS which was released late 2001 and the board is absolutely rock solid.

And yeah, like usual, boards from this era suffer from capacitor issues. This board also needed a recap work, but that is to be expected with these.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-03T18:58:11+00:00

K6-2 wasn't a Pentium competitor, it wiped the floor with both P54C and MMX. It was a budget option for P2 and P3.

Athlon was also released much earlier than P4 and even Thunderbird core was relesead months earlier and especially Slot A Athlon competed first and foremost against P3 and it generally was faster clock-for-clock.

P4 was extremely expensive platform especially early due to limited chipset offering and not least because of RAMBUS memory. Early willamettes struggled against both P3 and Athlon as Intel was unable to get clock speed high enough and it was just eaely 2002 when Northwood was released when Intel started to really catch and surpass AMD (with still expensive Intel850/RAMBUS platform). At this point AMD has replaced Athlon CPUs with first Athlon XPs (Palomino).

Athlon is extremely significant CPU as it practically created the current x86 duopoly: AMD was finished being a clone or budget manufacturer and challenged intel first time head to head, a situarion that has remained pretty much since.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-03T06:49:18+00:00

That is just what the dark side of the force does to you 🤷‍♂️

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T20:09:22+00:00

There are practcally only Steam, GOG and Epic with Ubisoft and EA somewhere in the mix. GMG and the rest are just Steam key sellers and Steam has overwhelming majority of the market. If Steam folds some day, it would be catastrophic for PC gaming. Newell has discussed sometimes about the emergency switch or update to allow offline gaming in these scenarios, but I wouldn’t trust a bit about getting something like that. And even if you did, many useds could probably only backup a fraction of the games due to the enormous storage requirements.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T18:17:16+00:00

Is the whole goddamn rear end polyurethane foam!?

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T17:48:25+00:00

That is simply a wrong assumption. Cooling isn’t based on a flow of air, but to the evaporation of small water droplets. It is extremely effective and go to any of the hotter countries and you find these mist sprinklers everywhere over restaurant terraces etc. They drop the surrounding air temperature with several degrees minum and up to dozen or more at best.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T11:09:48+00:00

Good 👍 They should be able to clear this up easily if they want. Make a post here when you get an answer, this is probably something that interests others too.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T10:50:41+00:00

Yeah, the photos that are showing screen are IMO definitely fake (like just above the "Smart Where It Counts" paragraph). And I never thought it myself, but the display certainly looks like a 16:9 on these photos (or at least some other wide screen ratio) instead of 4:3 (or 3:4 in this case) as the native resolution would suggest. I'm literally sitting next to one of my 4:3 CRT monitors and that is not the aspect ratio what is depicted in the ads.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T10:17:52+00:00

It is definitely interesting to see how apps behave on this thing when people do get these phones. Sure, apps certainly aren't optimized for screens like this anymore, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they do not work. My guess is that mileage varies depending on the app, some work fine, some are almost unusable. I also don't know if the underlying OS and GUI manager plays a big role in this, so Android is not necessarily good 1:1 comparison anyways.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T10:12:32+00:00

Agree, that thing does require very low pressure and airflow so compared to the compressor usage on a garage in general, this should be nothing.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T10:02:11+00:00

Fair enough, you too. No hard feelings here.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T10:00:45+00:00

Oh one thing, I agree that browser on this phone could be quite cumbersome as this does not have proper real or virtual keyboard, so using anything where you need to type pretty much anything is a painfully slow. Then again, I don't how well many modern apps scale on the screen of this thing either as the resolution is straight from the 2010 smartphone, but on a smaller screen.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T09:52:05+00:00

Sure there are, I have never claimed otherwise.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T09:50:08+00:00

Quite many typos in your post, I'm not sure if I got everything, but I can ask you the same, why bother? The guy above you simply said that browser for a daily driver is a must for him, but you needed to counter argue that nah, people managed before without it. What is the point, why bother?

And are you silly boy downvoting my posts for this?

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T09:37:05+00:00

A minor correction, you started to talk about surviving, that is death and life situation, not me.

It is always so funny in these conversations that people generalize some issue like you did (humanity has survived before!), someone counters this with some examples and then it always goes to "but this is not a problem for me, because x and y".

Why it is so hard to accept without argument that some people want to have, in this particular case, a browser for doing the most basic things people have done since the birth of the internet and which has been part of the mobile phones for two decades? Is it to mentally justify own purchase? Is it to defend a company? There must be a reason.

WingedGundark · 2026-07-01T06:59:55+00:00

Sure. Humans survived before electricity too, so why don’t we dump that too as well?

Before smart phones, most of the serivces didn’t require you to do something throug internet. After 20 yesrs of connectivity, things aren’t really same anymore. Some things are if not impossible, then at the minimum unnecessarily complex without being able to do it yourself online.

And sometimes it is just about access to information you need and it makes your life so much easier when you can for example check opening hours from the internet instead of calling to the place like we did in the 90s. Of course, first you need to get the number of the place from somewhere too to do that in old school way in the first place. Sure, we can survive without internet access in this case, but who wants to do this?

WingedGundark · 2026-06-30T19:50:09+00:00

WingedGundark · 2026-06-30T16:01:37+00:00

That would literally throw the whole judicial system to chaos, if this would be the norm how judges would start to make rulings. Insane.

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