free PC junk

[Sephiroth]

i have a friend with a ton of old PC's and today i get the best of the pickings. well i will take it all. there is alot of 486's and stuff of that type as well as newer parts. i dont need a new PC i just like playing aROUND WITH THEM

[Ralphis`]

Im trading a cd rewriter for a Rage 3d accelerated card, a gateway 2k motherboard that supports upto P3 700mhz and a $50 dollar case with a fan. heh. what a steal.

[kain]

i stole an altair from my school. believe it or not, that little shit ran the phone system. ( it was (upgraded) i guess someone went to radio shack and made as new main bored or somethink cus that thing did a good job with the phones. i could use a red box on the pay phones to get local calls. from the school's pay phones of course.

[bitstate]

sephiroth: i know the feeling :) last thursday me and my brother bought 7 toshiba 486 dx4 75mhz laptop's (in mint codition hehe) for about 90$ (for all of them that is).

wheee....

[Lüt]

I have so much shit here it's not funny. Well, maybe it is. I have about 15 computers in my basement and another 9 in my car. Some of them are the weirdest shit. One has some kind of supermodem to allow 8 modem connections to it. I guess it's some kind of server. Half of them I haven't ever plugged in. Plus I got a whole box of 24 processors and a few monitors and shit. And to top it all off, a pair of $9 speakers from my friend's discman for a sound setup :P

[kain]

the altair still kicks ass!!

[deadnail]

Hey Lüt, if you want to get better speakers there's an easy solution. I did this for a while. I got a double male plug shielded cord and used it to connect the output of my PC directly to the stereo input jack of my Magnavox boombox.

The cord was four bucks at the local rental store.

I got hellacious sound, it worked awesome for mods and stuff. It was a little hard to get good enough stereo for gaming, though, I will admit there's nothing like listening to the screams of Blood through a boombox. =)

Right now I have some Cambridge Soundworks thing with two speakers and a subwoofer (that I broke). They're okay, I only like 'em 'cuz I set them so far apart for good stereo separation.

Right now, though, I want to get a Live! that has that special plug so I can connect it directly into a DTS decoder. Then I just gotta get me four tower speakers and I'll be all set.

I saw some badassed speakers too, sixty bucks each. Four feet tall with the bottom foot being built in subwoofers. Luckily that Tool song Schism (sp?) was playing on 107.1 and I cranked the shit out of 'em at the store. Fuckin' nice man.

Four of those is $240, plus the $150 for a decent DTS decoder (that my monitor will probably sit on). Oh yeah, that would be nice.

I still remember the first time I played Duke3D with a subwoofer. I had it on max 'cuz I didn't know any better. The first explosions I heard in the game blew my eyeballs through the back of my head and they splattered against the wall. My fucking ashtray was jumping on my computer desk. Heheh.

While I'm thinking about it, I learned some things on http://www.r3mix.net about compressed audio. There's a good version of Lame (RazorLame) that by default has a joint stereo VBR setting for perfect CD quality. WMA and VQF (and any other MP4 formats) simply can't achive good CD quality since they use such harsh algorhythms... so the file size difference isn't all that extreme.

What's worse is the MONEY involved. Pay service streaming MP3s licenses are $2k a pop. WMA is even more costly.

That's when I heard about the Ogg Vorbis format. It's basically just another compressed audio format with one key difference, it's completely and 100% open source. Yeap, it's free to do freely whatever the hell you want with.

So I tested an album with a lot of the high-range that MP3 tends to destroy just to see how good it really is. I used RazorLame to encode Two then I encoded the same wavs with OggDrop at 128kbps. Hopping from song to song in the same heavily high-ranged sections of some songs between any format I couldn't hear a difference. Of course the oggs were about 20 megs smaller all told.

Try the beginning of 'Water's Leaking' (track 3) of the Two album if you don't believe me. Leave Me Alone starts out with a good MP3 test sound to it too. Just put all 3 versions in your playlist, crank 'em, and hop around.

The nice thing is that there's an offical Nullsoft Ogg Vorbis plugin to play them, so basically you don't have to do a damn thing out of your way to play them.

So the cute thing is that portable MP3 players will support Vorbis before they support MP3Pro, since with the latter they'll have to pay millions in advance in licensing fees. Plus, they are only better in imperfect bitrates (96 - 160), the higher bitrates with MP3Pro supposedly doesn't make much of a difference.

Oh, and how in the hell does this relate to Doom?

#1 Hitman: Codename 7 uses the ogg format. Maybe Doom 3 will too. They can fit another 33% more audio in the same space constraints and as long as games are distributed on CDs space is a concern.
#2 FMOD supports Vorbis files. ZDoom uses FMOD. Therefore, with the latest version of FMOD included ZDoom could use .ogg files instead of .mp3's, resulting in smaller wad files (or the same size/bitrate but with a better sounding result).

I mean, hell, MP3 is 13 years old for crying out loud. It's a fossil of a format and it's rediculous that it costs developers so damned much to use it.

Oh yeah, Napster will supposedly support it in the next update too.

I need to learn when to quit typing.

[kain]

nothing compares to being in your car and listeniong, or playing doom on the pc ( yes in the car, there is a way to do it( you can get a cheap 800*600 lcd screen for $90!!! and just use a power converter for the power) o yah it pays to have 2000 watts in your car!

[deadnail]

I know someone who sold a $3000 car audio system (with four 12s in it) for $500 'cuz the car was getting repo'd. The guy he sold it to hooked them all up to his computer, amp and everything. I haven't had a chance to hear it but I've heard car systems in things other than cars. It's not pretty but they do sound great!

[Sephiroth]

we should make a site, or a mailing list were we can trade, buy, sell and give away computer shit at cheap but reasonable prices and trades. hey my entire background is based on trade

[fodders]

Working low spec computers should be taken down to charity shops so people like Esco and Aurikan can get onto the internet

[Peter Heinemann]

Recently, I got the following on ebay for around $80:

PowerMac (PPC) 6100/66 (which I did upgrade with a 400 mHz G3 Processor card, have some of this cards)
internal CD-Rom
SCSI HD
72 MB ram
a second computer built into this mac !!! (a card plugged into a slot): a 486 DX2/66 with additional memory and a tiny soundblaster card
a very nice Eizo monitor
Apple extended Keybord II (maybe the best keyboard ever made - you could kill a horse with it)
Apple mouse (yes, the one button thing)
a HP deskwriter (deskjet) 660c
Handbooks, cables

all in "like new" condition, no scratches. $80!!!

Last year I begun to collect NeXT hardware when I found one of this machines thrown away on the local city dumb. I have a NeXT cube and a so called "Turbo Colour Workstation"

And I got a really "old school" computer on ebay: a Commodore 128D (which has the nickname "Blechdiesel")
Together with printer, green monitor, joystick and software for $20 (all handbooks and stuff included).

The 128D is in fact 3 computers in one housing:
c64 = 1Mhz
c128 = 2Mhz
CPM = 4Mhz

[Lüt]

Hey Lüt, if you want to get better speakers there's an easy solution. I did this for a while. I got a double male plug shielded cord and used it to connect the output of my PC directly to the stereo input jack of my Magnavox boombox.

The cord was four bucks at the local rental store.

I got hellacious sound, it worked awesome for mods and stuff. It was a little hard to get good enough stereo for gaming, though, I will admit there's nothing like listening to the screams of Blood through a boombox. =)

Jeezus! I read the first few paragraphs of that.

As a matter of fact, I did have a boombox hooked up to the computer for a while. It was nice because it had detachable speakers, and since it was only a tape deck, there was an RCA CD-IN plug, so I just ran line-out into that and used those speakers, with the main unit sitting on top of the monitor. I broke the main unit though, so now I haven't had anything to wire the speakers up to. I was gonna find an old cable to the first speaker set I had and splice it together, expect that these speakers had some kinda weird plugs with multiple wires that only fit the main unit, so at the moment they're useless.

I know someone who sold a $3000 car audio system (with four 12s in it) for $500 'cuz the car was getting repo'd. The guy he sold it to hooked them all up to his computer, amp and everything. I haven't had a chance to hear it but I've heard car systems in things other than cars. It's not pretty but they do sound great!

I have an old car stereo in one those boxes you put in the trunk for a car whose back seats fold down like my old one did. It's about 4.5 feet wide and has two 12" subs, so I could just set that beneath the monitor, raise the chair and make myself deaf in a matter of days :)

Of course the magnetism would probably suck my display down to the bottom half of the monitor, but hey, the sound's the most important part. I don't have an MP3 drive for nothing.

A thing I heard was that the power supplies were different for those car stereos than any outlets and power sources most people have in their home, so I'm not sure how I'd power them up. I haven't really looked.

some inane shit about mp3 compression being shit

I could send you a few sound samples of mine if you want to REALLY give the encoders a test. Usually I use MusicMatch Jukebox, because it's 128K encoding sounds better than most other programs' 192K. So I ran a few of my samples through it, and it's 256K sounded worse that the other programs' 96K. (I really fucked up these waves :P) Don't even ask how the 128K compression sounded.

I'm gonna try some of those other compressors you found on them. I've tried a bunch of different ones before and they all suck. I'd hate to not be able to put up MP3s of my finished products (this is for the record that's supposed to be worse than Danzig 5.)

Working low spec computers should be taken down to charity shops so people like Esco and Aurikan can get onto the internet

Hah! And why would you of all people want Aurikan back on the internet?

[deadnail]

Go here and read everything:
http://www.r3mix.net

1. Uninstall MusicMatch
2. Burn the sectors of the harddrive it was on
3. Install RazorLame
4. Do it the RIGHT way, fuck that Xing derivative bullshit

RazorLame's default setting gives you CD quality sound at the best possible file size. I got a 47 minute CD down to 65 megs with it.

Even better, you could give ogg a try. You have nothing to lose. The WinAMP plugin isn't even 100k for God's sake.

http://www.vorbis.com

[deathz0r]

I mean, hell, MP3 is 13 years old for crying out loud. It's a fossil of a format and it's rediculous that it costs developers so damned much to use it.

it's that old? i've had mp3s dating back to 1995, but i never thought it went back to 1988.

[Jon]

I want some kind of distributed system doom setup, with different processors managing different aspects of doom as it runs

[DeePsea]

A thing I heard was that the power supplies were different for those car stereos than any outlets and power sources most people have in their home, so I'm not sure how I'd power them up. I haven't really looked.

The power supply is the battery:)

Yes that's a problem for a home system since you need at least a 12v-30Amp power supply. Some of them require 200amps (12v) at peak moments. If you've ever seen those car amp bass "contests", they have like 8+ batteries in there! I think they run 1000 amps (I don't recall accurately).

Here's an easy and relatively cheap solution. Use a 12v car battery and connect it to a battery charger. For the times you use it, the battery will delivery the current required and then the rest of the time, the charger plays catchup.

[bitstate]

musicmatch uses the fraunhofer mp3 encoder thats the reason why it sounds that great :)

[Sephiroth]

what is wrong with MP3? it is a god damn good format for music, it sounds great and it can remain small. what would u prefer? wav files, and its large size, or some other shit the microsoft may try to push. MP3 is a good way to download music, i hate streaming audio or any of that other stuff out now. either it is too large or sounds terrible.

[Disorder]

i have a friend with a ton of old PC's and today... Blabla bla...

you have a lot of friends don't you?

[Lüt]

Here's an easy and relatively cheap solution. Use a 12v car battery and connect it to a battery charger. For the times you use it, the battery will delivery the current required and then the rest of the time, the charger plays catchup.

Aha, I'll have to try that then. I do have an extra car battery from when I thought the old one was dead and bought a new one. Turns out the starter was taking like 450v just for one turnover, so once that was replaced everything worked fine.

what is wrong with MP3?

It's just not CD-Quality, no matter what bitrate you use. It has trouble with certain frequencies, as evidenced by the sound FX I've used for some of my "music"; it totally destroys the sound, even at 320K. I will need another compression format if I'm ever going to distribute samples of that stuff.

[deadnail]

what is wrong with MP3?

You'll see.

it is a god damn good format for music, it sounds great and it can remain small.

MP3 audibly damages music at anything less than 256kbps. Using RazorLame is the best way to guarantee your music is in perfect condition. It's a shitty format for computer generated music, though.

what would u prefer?

A freeware format the does the job better. Ha, I must be crazy. Oh wait, Ogg Vorbis has smaller files and uses such different algorhythms for compression that the stuff that's squeezed out is usually inaudible to the human ear.

wav files, and its large size,

Use LPAC. You get 100% lossless compression and it takes the wavfiles down to half their size. Hardly a good transferable format but if you're a quality nut (like Lüt) this is probably the way to go.

or some other shit the microsoft may try to push.

WMA8 is a decent format but I have two issues with it. First and foremost, Microsoft has complete control on the software and hardware that uses it. Encoding and decoding. Unless they say it's okay you could pay out the ass for it. Second, although superior to MP3 in terms of compression it's still not the best format for archiving music.

MP3 is a good way to download music,

I never contended that. However, there's no such thing as a free MP3 encoder... just one that Fraunhofer's lawyers haven't dickwhipped yet.

i hate streaming audio or any of that other stuff out now. either it is too large or sounds terrible.

It's generally intended for high bandwidth users, then it sounds as good or better than Radio... assuming the site can handle the traffic.

As of right now, though, the Ogg Vorbis WinAMP plugin is at 1.0... so it might not ever have to change (except for optimizations in the code). The format is designed to be backwards and forwards compatible. However, the encoder is not at 1.0 yet... and you might get some weird errors in your songs. I've done quite a few songs and haven't had any trouble with it. It's also about as fast to encode and decode as MP3... and it hasn't had 4 years in the limelight for speed optimization either so the future for Ogg Vorbis is bright.

Some things you should know:
#1 MP3 ain't free, it's a strictly controlled format... just not as strictly as WMA, VQF or ACC.
#2 The makers of those portable MP3 players have to pay millions in royalties to Fraunhofer for a format that is thirteen years old.
#3 You know how much it costs for a business MP3 stream? $2k a pop. If you're running a huge internet subscription radio and trying to satisfy all your customers you simply can't afford to fuck up.
#4 To make a generally accepted CD quality sound takes 256kbps. Anything less is clearly inferior to the untrained ear.

To contest this:
#1 Ogg Vorbis is as free as free can be. You can go to their website right now and download all the sources and use it as you will. Some commercial games already utilize it (like Hitman). In fact, the FMOD sound engine uses Ogg too. ZDoom uses FMOD. Make your wads with MP3 soundtracks half as small or twice as clear.
#2 In fact, because of the costs, some portable MP3 players getting firmware updates will support Ogg before MP3Pro, simply because they don't have the $7.50 to pay Fraunhofer for each unit manufactured!
#3 Ogg is better in every way than MP3 for streaming. Higher quality sound at the same bitrate and with no fines or royalties to pay for using it. People don't even have to change software, WinAMP does it perfectly.
#4 Right now Ogg Vorbis can hit CD quality in half the size. When the 1.0 encoder hits they makers are hoping to hit CD quality at 96kbps.

Why? Because they're not competing with MP3. It's already a lame horse. They're competing with the MP4 formats, like VQF. Think about it. If MP3 costs this much how much will a better format cost?

What if there was a better format that was free?

There is not one single way that MP3 is superior to Ogg Vorbis, other than software. Ogg isn't even two years old, although the project is. It's still a puppy next to MP3 and it's whupping that old dog's ass.

I think of Fraunhofer the same way I think about Microsoft.

Fuck 'em.

Oh, and Fraunhofer is NOT the best encoder you can use. Remember Blade? Well, Fraunhofer kicked Blade in the balls with a huge lawsuit. Blade folded, but realized, it could still just release the source code instead. Lame picks up where Blade left off. Lame is faster at encoding and has a higher quality finished product. Lame is updated very often with new optimizations. It can fully use your P4 or Athlon Thunderbird.

EVEN IF you're still going to blindly follow MP3 at the very least don't use Fraunhofer. Download RazorLame from http://www.r3mix.net instead. Before Fraunhofer tries to sue them for a few million dollars.

Fucking Germans.