Rich's Random Retro Reviews

I picked up the PC in the picture below for £20 from Facebook Marketplace. No idea what the specs were, but on the back was a label that said it had a 4.3GB hard drive in. As much as I love the noises old PCs make, spinning hard drives are SLOW and loud.  I like to replace the drives with an SSDs or at least some kind of flash alternative. As long as you're not running a *NIX or NT based OS, then compact flash cards are a great and cheap option. Anything with a more advanced virtual memory management system usually degrades flash storage solutions really quickly. It's best to try and find a proper SSD if you plan on running one of those on your vintage computer.  So I plug in an IDE to compact flash adapter, put the CD-ROM on the secondary IDE channel and turn the machine on. I'm greeted by a 192MB of RAM, Pentium II 266MHz PC. Not bad for £20 - and the case is in excellent condition.  I need to install an operating system on the computer now, but I can't find my Win...

So I've been playing today ANNNND here are my results and something I've learned that I really should have thought about.  In one of my previous posts, I said I had found an unpowered VGA splitter to be good enough for me. Well I take it back. Below is a screenshot (unedited) from OBS earlier using a VGA splitter and the new BlackMagic Design HDMI capture.  As you can see - the image is extremely dark and if you click on it, you'll see that there is lots of noise in the image. For some reason, it has never crossed my mind as to why the image appears so dark. It's because I'm splitting the signal in half. DUH! Of course it's going to be dark. I also think the VGA splitter cable is responsible for the noise that's been added to the image. When plugged directly into the graphics card, the capture is noise free. Here's what it should look like.  This is much better. (Ignore the colour depth change. The first screenshot was at 256 colours, this one is at 24 b...

Our first PC was a DEC Station 917 - which I've mentioned in a previous post and it came with plenty of software to keep the younger me entertained. Remember - the Internet wasn't really a thing at this point...Anyway last night I thought it might be fun to find a wallpaper that I used to have. It was of a parrot and that's all I could remember. I had no idea where I got it from other than we had a very limited selection of software back in the day - so it had to have been from one of those.  One of the CDs was a CD Sampler that had demos of Microsoft Home software and hardware products. I used to browse this CD a lot - wishing I we had the cool looking Microsoft Home Mouse or the Natural Keyboard.  Turns out, someone archived it and put it on archive.org - so I downloaded it and created a Windows 98 VM to explore. I fired it up and was immediately transported back to 1995.  The Microsoft Home Mouse is awful. Ergonomically it's terrible but I loved the look of i...

I thought I'd do a follow up to my original Capturing VGA post as I didn't really mention the software that I used. Initially the solution I used had the same hardware with the exception of the actual USB capture device. This was an AVerMedia GL310 (LGP Lite) which was great, with a couple of exceptions. It would only to 30fps 1080p but would do 60fps at 720p. I wanted 1080p60. The software was a REAL let down. It was Windows only and called RECentral. It wasn't very user friendly and as such I wasn't overly keen on it.  I think  it worked with OBS but I didn't use it with that and I just found it a bit clunky.  The second device I used was the Elgato HD60 - which turns out is old and the software doesn't work on Apple Silicon. But I managed to get it installed and working on the Windows 10 PC that we have as a Plex media server, once I had found it. It turns out I should have bought the newer S version and the older software is buried deeply on the Elgato webs...

To coin a phrase invented by my good friend Wolf, and the one that I've mentioned before - my current brain itch is for speakers. The reason for this has to do with my blue and white G3. The issue is there is only one speaker on the front of the machine and it's mono. It's fine for the Mac chime or for system alert beeps but for anything more it's a bit lame.  Cue my scouring eBay for something appropriate. I do have some JBL Duet speakers that sort of matches the aesthetic of vintage Macs and PCs but they really stand out next to a funky coloured Mac. I did find a video or a picture of some translucent blue speakers but I couldn't find them for sale and I now can't remember the name or brand of them. Anyway back to the eBay search. I did a search for vintage computer speakers and not much came up. I then did a search for vintage multimedia speakers and these bad boys popped up.  Wolf and I are terrible influences on each other. I sent him the link and he said I...

A few years back I decided that I wanted to do some VGA capture from my old vintage computers so I could show it off in my YouTube videos. This lead me down a dark hole to try and get a working solution. I'd seen a couple of cheap VGA capture devices on eBay so bought a few to try. None of them were successful. I tried several different ways of doing it and I was pulling my hair out until  I stumbled upon a video by a fellow retro computer enthusiast called Victor Bart . He has done a fantastic video on the way he does it.  Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel I figured I'd give his solution a go. The only thing I changed was the capture card - mine is USB, not PCI-E. The secret sauce is the VGA scaler. Many older machines and games in DOS output at strange resolutions and switch between them frequently. Most of which these newer cheap VGA capture devices don't support these old resolutions. For example: the Windows 98 start up screen displays at something like 720x400....

Another one of my saved searches on eBay is for BeOS related things. Unfortunately these days  this search seems to pull back Bang and Olufsen stuff - which I definitely cannot afford but every now and again, something properly BeOS pops up.  This little beauty came up for auction and was listed at £4.99. Within the last 30 seconds, it still had no bids, so I put one in for £4.99 and waited. I wasn't too bothered if someone else bid on it but I thought it would look cool in my CD wallet, next to other obscure software CDs. Turns out I won the auction so I paid and a few days later this turned up.  Now I did have a 7300/200 that was another buy from eBay a while ago - which in theory this would have run on, but I had to have a cull of machines in early 2022. I was up to about 11 Macs at that point and I was getting moaned at as they were everywhere - in the garage, under the bed and anywhere else I could store them. So this will have to sit th...