Graphic card advice?

[Death's Shadow]

Silly... you might want to check sites like ebay and newegg.com for video cards and upgrade chips .. some times you can find what you want there a lot cheaper than off the shelf. That is what I did to get this vid card. It took some time and loosing some auctions, but I got it wayyyy cheaper than off the shelf. It was well worth the wait. I'm now seeing things in the game that I didn't even know were there and I can make out players across map when before they were just vague pixels of movement. Haven't heard of the laser TV's yet ill have to check them out.. webcrawler here I come.

[Urumii-Previously ThePresident]

Tigerdirect.com is a good site too. Thats where I bought the parts for my computer (sssshhhh red!!!!) lol. And if you don't mind driving into st. paul for a day I know a good store there. their website is tranmicro.com. I go there all the time, and they are very cheap and will install your parts for free.


And red, when I said a couple years that was only out of memory of when I heard about it. And I just looked it up and nvidea's site says its 64mb, like I remembered. Oh well nothing to get all worked up about.

[Death's Shadow]

yea tiger.com is good

[RedRock]

thepresident said:

Tigerdirect.com is a good site too. Thats where I bought the parts for my computer (sssshhhh red!!!!) lol. ...

I bought Mac software on the cheap from Tigerdirect way back in the 80's.

Of course, that was before your time, Pres. We actually had to mail our orders in then, or call on the phone--no internet ordering.

[RedRock]

thepresident said:

And red, when I said a couple years that was only out of memory of when I heard about it. And I just looked it up and nvidea's site says its 64mb, like I remembered. Oh well nothing to get all worked up about.

As I said, Wikipedia is not necessarily authoritative, but it is a good starting point. The entry there for the geoforce 4 mx 420 said 64/128 on the memory. Nividia's site (I should have guessed it'd be nividia.com) says 64 max but also says "64MB 128-bit DDR Frame Buffer Memory" so maybe the wiki entry means 64 Mb of memory which is 128 bit type. Only the person who wrote it knows for sure. At any rate, multiple sources of data is good, good, good (hmmmm, sounds like 70 links to me).

And all I know otherwise is that when I bought my Mac, I could get the smaller screen model 17inch with 128 Mb VRAM or the 20incher with 256 Mb VRAM. I got the bigger one. That will be 2 yrs ago this Christmas. Easy options, easy choice, easy game play!

EDIT: Ooops, I was wrong--I checked, and I didn't get 256, I got only 128 Mb VRAM. I remember now, the bigger screen model had a faster processor and bigger hard disk, and there was the option of getting 256 on VRAM, but I would have had to order it from the factory, rather than pick it up off the shelf at the Apple Store, and I didn't want to wait. But my graphics do just fine with only 128, so I'm happy.

[a Silly Person]

I had a computer in the later part of the 80's, early 90's... OMG it was an Apple IIe ! ;D Dot Matrix printer... do you remember the noise that thing made? There was absolutely no printing allowed after 10p.m., or it would wake the neighbors.

Although I only used it for word processing and a few caveman style games, it was quite the experience to use, for a first-timer.

Thanks for the links DS, Prez and Red. I will use them.... right after I get more work lined up. ;D

[Urumii-Previously ThePresident]

OMG I remember having one of those printers. I think that compares to Dumb and Dumbers most annoying sound in the world Wait... I still have that thing lol. You had to plan out when you were printing something. "What cha doing next weekend?" "Oh I'm swamped, I gotta print up 3 pages for work." LOL

[RedRock]

sillyperson said:

I had a computer in the later part of the 80's, early 90's... OMG it was an Apple IIe ! ;D Dot Matrix printer... do you remember the noise that thing made? There was absolutely no printing allowed after 10p.m., or it would wake the neighbors.

Although I only used it for word processing and a few caveman style games, it was quite the experience to use, for a first-timer.

Thanks for the links DS, Prez and Red. I will use them.... right after I get more work lined up. ;D

The Apple IIe was a computer.
The Apple ImageWriter II is probably what you were thinking about.
I had two of them. They were excellent dot matrix printers and handled a wide variety of paper sizes and weights, and with nice micro-perf paper and best print settings, they gave a very professional look with near-laser quality output to my reports, invoices, and correspondence. Yes, they were slower than today's inkjet printers, but not that slow, even on best quality print, and they were loud, but I bought a plastic enclosing box that enveloped it and reduced it more to a heavy hum and vibration. This was during the greenbar era, after all, folks, where dot-matrix printers were the workhorses of the printing machines and laser printers were very very expensive. Pres, have you ever even seen greenbar paper?

[Death's Shadow]

didnt ya just love having to tear the tractor ribbons off the printed pages and then grrr when it ripped your document and you had to redo it.. aaa those were the days... I started out with a tandy 1000hx and a dot matrix printer.. aaa the good old days of no internet and having to boot the comp off a disk..

[Urumii-Previously ThePresident]

No I've never heard of greenbar paper. I was only... 10 maybe when I had that printer, so i wasn't really into computers yet.

[Lamron]

Greenbar! LOL That was a LONG time ago!

[a Silly Person]

Yep, you are correct, Red. The Apple IIe was a computer. I worded my post wrong again, doh.
I should have said that "I had the Apple IIe, that came with a dot-matrix printer."

It was about 2 years after I graduated from High School, that the schools finally purchased some computers, (most of which were Apples). My younger brother is 6 years behind me so he got the full basic DOS training. I never had the chance to use or learn about them until I finally got the guts to go out and buy one. Now even my Daughter's grade-school has computers for the the kids to use.

I have never heard of "Greenbar paper" however, but that doesn't mean that I didn't use it before, lol

(laughing) hey, any of you guys ever try to run that duplicate paper through your dottie?
I think that I may have invented some new cuss words on my first attempt. I was running out of all the ones that I knew.

[a Silly Person]

dreamingshadow said:

aaa the good old days of no internet and having to boot the comp off a disk..

I can't remember now but just how much memory was on those 5 1/2" floppies? Wasn't it something like .25 of a megabyte?

This is turning quite nostalgic.

"Please mommy, make it go away?"

[RedRock]

Check out the table in the wiki entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

There were 8 inchers before the 5 1/4 ones, too. Then the floppies went double-sided and double-density, such that for my Mac, my 3 1/2 inchers held either 400k or 800k or 1.2 Mb. There were even punch kits sold that let you make a hole in the 800 K ones so that the floppy drive would read and write to them as 1.2 Mb (manufacturers of the floppies weren't certifying that that would always work, unless you paid extra for the discs).

Wow, those were heady days, man, with the latest Mac, 4 Mb of RAM, one internal and one external 1.2 Mb floppy drive, a 20 Mb external hard disk, a 14 K external modem, a dot matrix printer, and a few black and white games. And in case you had any doubts, let me just state for the record, the Mac OS was better than MS-DOS, too!

As for Greenbar paper:
www.pdp8.net/images/greenbar.shtml

Do I need to explain "punch cards" and "slide rules" too?

[Death's Shadow]

slide rule? what is that? and why would I need one? lmao just kidding red though I have never used one I do know what they are...

my Tandy used 3.5" floppies. 720k to a disk 1 internal and one external. taught myself dos on that computer. No HD no modem. (who was there to talk to anyway) and thought I was livin' large when I upgraded the memory to 512k. And the chips came loose you had to manually install each chip in the slots provided on the motherboard. I could not afford the monitor at the time so hooked it up to a black and white TV with a RF switch. lol. I was only 15 at the time and saved for a year to get the computer.