if anyone else has awful little computers that they can't help but love, this is a safe thread to post them
the gpd win 2 is a laptop that I'm currently trying to figure out how i should shove it more into my life.
It is very dumb.
the gpd win 2 is a laptop that I'm currently trying to figure out how i should shove it more into my life.
It is very dumb.
Poor little xbox with it's broken optical drive
EDIT: I've been had, keyputer is not a cute name for computer :(
My comment will now be ratio'd
my main internet machine for a while back in the early 00s was a Dreamcast.
What was it like? What kinds of stuff did you do with it most often?
It's hard to imagine an internet now without the ability to store or upload files of one form or another.
Mostly forums and I think webIRC. So period-appropriate social media I guess you could say. :D
The fun part was having to use a cheat code on a copy of Chu Chu Rocket to get the good browser. DreamPassport actually had cookie support IIRC, and could use the VMU for storing bookmarks and such. And of course I had the keyboard and mouse, without which it'd be useless.
The biggest pain was just being limited to effectively 640x480 resolution, in an era where 800x600 was becoming the standard. The browser could do some smart resize/reflow, but not much.
WebIRC worked on dreamcast???? That's sick. I love that.
Do you have details on the chu chu rocket thing? I absolutely want to try this some day.
I can't remember exactly. The main thing about Chu Chu Rocket is just at the time it had the most recent version of the Japanese Dream Passport browser you could get in English.
The American browser was useless garbage, but some games bundled the Japanese one on disc. The trick was, some of them were locked such that they'd only go to like, the game's website and hid other features and stuff. But Chu Chu was either unlocked by default or could be permanently unlocked so you could use it as a normal web browser.
I think I played the actual game like once, and sucked at it. I just wanted the DP
this is a good place to say that the backplane of a LBC should be a motherfuckerboard
https://i.pokyfriends.com/2023/02/halikan.jpg
At a thrift shop a few years back I found this lovely looking 386 laptop for $5 and grabbed it immediately, not even thinking about how the hell I was going to be able to power it until I got home. It's been a few years and I've never come across anything that would work with it whenever I've looked. The awful thing's power jack is identical to an S-Video cable.
I don't even know what I'd do with it if I could power it on.
Oh my god that's such a funky design. If you have pictures of the jack and the label (if it lists the voltages) I might have advice!
https://i.pokyfriends.com/2023/02/halikan-jack.jpg https://i.pokyfriends.com/2023/02/halikan-label.jpg
A page I bookmarked some time ago related to it is this blog post: https://awsh.org/chaplet-systems-halikan/ which has somebody just shoving jumpers into what appears to be the 486 model (it's the exact same shell without a doubt). It includes a photo of the actual power supply they found online which does list the voltages and even pin outs.
Oh! It looks like you only need the 15v to run it, 12 is only for charging, and the battery is dead anyway. It's not too hard to get 15v supplies, but it's even easier to get 16: virtually every Thinkpad power supply. It won't mind a one volt difference, so if you have one of those handy you could use it.
Sorry I feel like I'm missing something here. I get finding something with a workable voltage, but have no idea how to take a more modern supply and get it into this weird s-video-but-not port
Oh, I'm sorry, I may have been over-assuming. I have been hacking together power cords since I was nine and sort of forget that it's not a universal experience
If you obtain any cable with that connector (which is formally called mini-din 4 pin) and cut it in half, then strip the wires inside, and then do the same with a power supply of the right voltage, you can simply twist the bare wires from each cable together and presto, you have a supply suitable for verifying if the thing even works
You do need to figure out which of the four wires correspond to the pins you need however, and ensure that the pinout is correct, because if you get it backwards you will very often fry the whole device, so you need to have a multimeter and know how to use it.
also, a cable assembled like this has several safety concerns, not in the sense of electrocuting yourself (that can't happen at low voltage) but in terms of putting too much power through wires not intended for it, or the bare conductors shorting together, both of which can cause a fire, but usually not unless you leave it running for quite a while.
For a 2 minute power on test to just see if the machine functions at all, this sort of arrangement is the cheapest and simplest. if it actually works, and you decide you want to put a little more effort into making the machine usable, then there are options for building a long-term solution - ideally, you would buy a bare connector and solder the internal contacts to the wires on the donor power supply.
I wasn't sure if you have any electronics experience so I didn't know if I'd be talking down to you by explaining all this, apologies if so. If none of it's stuff you've done before though, then it might not be an ideal first project.
It's cool! But yeah, unfortunately not an area I've got any experience with. One of these days I gotta see if I can commission a local friend of a friend to assemble something like that. Thank you for the info!
My workstation that’s built on top of a dual-socket AMD Opteron server board from 2011. For some ungodly reason I spent $500 to turn it into a proper Linux workstation. The motherboard itself was salvaged from this custom 2U server made by a failed started called Nebula, which made this turnkey OpenStack…thing that was basically a 48 port switch and server crammed into one. I call it The Gremlin and it’s so slow but I love it.
Oh no that sounds like a total disaster. I used to daily a dual opteron I got out of the trash!
I have this bizarre little pico-ITX Celeron SBC I got in 2010 that we were going to build into a little portable computer in a metal lunchbox. We never got around to finishing it but the board itself is such a strange piece of work and isn't properly compatible with, like, anything, it's great. It's packed away with other jank like my partner's Coco2 in the basement, I should dig it back up and see if it still works...
Also I guess my Ship of Theseus desktop that is in some sense the same machine I had in 2001 probably counts...
I bought an Dell netbook that had 1GB of ram, a single core, and Vista. I upgraded it with a 60gb SSD, 2gb of ram, and Windows 7, and played XCOM on it for 10 hours on a flight to New York. It was bright pink and basically an onset of my gayness
posting my love for my ex-chromebook Lenovo X131e. it's slow and has a terrible screen but if you drop it, it just bounces.