The Belt Onion club
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And in case the embed doesn’t work…
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@boomzilla said in The Belt Onion club:
A comedian did a joke about that a couple of years ago:
Bruce Springsteen is supposed to be this big supporter of "the working people" so why is he doing a 3 hour long concert on a Tuesday night?
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@boomzilla Just wait till your kids start texting you botanic garden...
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@boomzilla that port looks pretty surprised.
Anyway, is it for phones? (The posts above suggest so)
Only ever had cables with that kind of plug go into the phone, the other side was a TAE connector.
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@Zerosquare Once upon a time, motherboards had no onboard hard drive ports. Or serial ports. Or printer ports (which were not serial ports).
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@PleegWat my first computer's motherboard basically just had a single master 'extension port' that was basically 'here's the main bus exposed electrically to the edge of the case of the machine, have fun'.
But that was because I grew up with a ZX Spectrum and they were built on the fucking cheap.
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@Arantor said in The Belt Onion club:
But that was because I grew up with a ZX Spectrum and they were built on the fucking cheap.
The hardware was very cheap. The manual was genius.
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@dkf said in The Belt Onion club:
@Arantor said in The Belt Onion club:
But that was because I grew up with a ZX Spectrum and they were built on the fucking cheap.
The hardware was very cheap. The manual was genius.
The manual for the ZX81 was amazing, too. Weighed more than the computer.
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@Watson I'm not quite old enough to have had one of those. By a couple of years...
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@boomzilla when you’re pretty damn sure the words in the picture are deliberately exaggerated for comic effect but there is that tiniest element of doubt because the effect is just accurate enough.
inb4 “his name was Rick Stank, you filthy heathens”
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Not sure whether to or
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@dcon I'm old enough to have seen when that was first posted.
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@PleegWat said in The Belt Onion club:
@Zerosquare Once upon a time, motherboards had no onboard hard drive ports. Or serial ports. Or printer ports (which were not serial ports).
But sound.
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@LaoC If you like square or sawtooth waves, and only changing frequency as often as you can spare CPU cycles for it.
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@PleegWat said in The Belt Onion club:
@LaoC If you like square or sawtooth waves, and only changing frequency as often as you can spare CPU cycles for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEqtmpIzYf0
OK, they only learned to do this 40 years later, but the usual MIDI shit played on Soundblasters wasn't much better than chiptunes at the time.
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@LaoC folks were doing (just about) recognisable speech on those things back in the day... this seems almost tame by comparison.
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@LaoC I'm pretty sure that's using most of its CPU and memory changing the frequency and/or amplitude thousands of times per second.
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@Arantor said in The Belt Onion club:
@LaoC folks were doing (just about) recognisable speech on those things back in the day... this seems almost tame by comparison.
Yeah, a tight loop manipulating the sound register could pump out something like 2-bit samples (they got it up to ~8bit later). Kinda innovative at the time but no black magic. This track is just using the square/sawtooth/triangle oscillators, modulator and filter though.
@PleegWat said in The Belt Onion club:
@LaoC I'm pretty sure that's using most of its CPU and memory changing the frequency and/or amplitude thousands of times per second.
I don't think so. This track by the same guy plays on 8 SIDs simultaneously. They used an FPGA SID implementation because getting your hands on 8 real 6581s is pretty hard these days but it's running on a cycle-exact C64 emulator so they could have run it on original hardware.
Samples, yes, they don't leave CPU time for much.
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@PleegWat said in The Belt Onion club:
Or printer ports (which were not serial ports)
Parallel ports were awesome! Arbitrarily controllable output pins available on any bog standard PC.
These days you have to buy something like a raspberry pi to get that.
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@Zerosquare said in The Belt Onion club:
Correct me if I'm wrong (my isn't nearly big enough), but didn't SoundBlaster came out in times were every PC was equipped with an internal speaker?
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Yes. But it qualified as "onboard sound" only in the "technically correct" sense. (Even if a few games managed to do impressive sounding stuff with it, far beyond what it was designed for.)
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@Zerosquare it's literally a sound output that's on the motherboard, but sure.
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@Gustav said in The Belt Onion club:
@Zerosquare it's literally a sound output that's on the motherboard, but sure.
I mean, you can define sound as a square wave generator rammed into a magnetic-driven speaker (like the 5150, wasn't even as modern as a piezo-electric thing), and you can pulse-modulate noise out of it into something that is recognisable as sound.
But I'm not sure I'd define it as sound and more as noise myself...
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@Arantor much like photorealistic 3D, what counts as sound and what's merely noise generator depends on technological level. I know some people who listen to music on AM radio. I strongly disagree they listen to music.
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I mean, the Manchester Mark I had sound (and could play recognisable tunes), but it predated motherboards.
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@Gustav said in The Belt Onion club:
I know some people who listen to music on AM radio.
There are still AM radio station that play music? I thought they were all talk.
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@Zerosquare said in The Belt Onion club:
There are still AM radio station
that play music?I thought they were all talk.FTFY.
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@Zerosquare said in The Belt Onion club:
I thought they were all talk.
No, that’s
schoolyard bulliespoliticians
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@izzion said in The Belt Onion club:
@Zerosquare said in The Belt Onion club:
I thought they were all talk.
No, that’s
schoolyard bulliespoliticiansI wish politicians were all talk. Their talk is bad enough, but sometimes they do stuff, and that's much worse.
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@Gustav said in The Belt Onion club:
@Zerosquare it's literally a sound output that's on the motherboard, but sure.
I initially played Arkanoid and Secret of Monkey Island on a PC without soundcard, and I agree with this sentiment.
As per:
@Zerosquare said in The Belt Onion club:
(Even if a few games managed to do impressive sounding stuff with it, far beyond what it was designed for.)
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@Zerosquare said in The Belt Onion club:
There are still AM radio station
Yes, not all of them had their radio towers stolen yet.
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@Zerosquare said in The Belt Onion club:
@Gustav said in The Belt Onion club:
I know some people who listen to music on AM radio.
There are still AM radio station that play music? I thought they were all talk.
There's a class of Chicago citizens who immigrated from Poland in the 70s and the time has stopped for them - more than a usual boomer. Their English is exactly the same as 40 years ago (below basic). Their job is exactly the same as 40 years ago - either a construction contractor or a factory worker (or for women, a cashier or a house cleaner), often still working their first job without ever getting a promotion. And the radio station they listen to is also the same as 40 years ago - 1030 AM and nothing else.
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
@Zerosquare said in The Belt Onion club:
There are still AM radio station
that play music?I thought they were all talk.FTFY.
Have to get the traffic reports from somewhere... Every 10 minutes on the 8s.
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@dcon said in The Belt Onion club:
@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
@Zerosquare said in The Belt Onion club:
There are still AM radio station
that play music?I thought they were all talk.FTFY.
Have to get the traffic reports from somewhere... Every 10 minutes on the 8s.
KCBS 740
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@dcon said in The Belt Onion club:
Have to get the traffic reports from somewhere...
Assuming there is traffic to report, If you listen to FM or DAB+ stations here, you’ll get traffic reports before or after each news bulletin, which are usually on the hour and/or half-hour.
the 8s.
That means “more than one digit eight” to me …
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
That means “more than one digit eight” to me …
"On the 8s":
hh:08, hh:18, hh:28, hh:38,hh:48, hh:58
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@Gustav said in The Belt Onion club:
@Zerosquare it's literally a sound output that's on the motherboard, but sure.
every CRT monitor had sound, too. It's just that for some it was was only the buzz of the mains and the whine of the flyback transformer.
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Not to mention this:
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@HardwareGeek said in The Belt Onion club:
"On the 8s":
hh:08, hh:18, hh:28, hh:38,hh:48, hh:58Ah, OK, now I get it. Never heard (read) it put like that before.