The Christmas 2021 Thread ;-)

[IRF]

There's a joke in there about having not seen so many Willies on one screen at the same time since... [feel free to add a punchline]

Anyway, Merry Christmas everybody!

[MtM]

Thanks to Norman and Spider for their efforts! Good to see IRF back briefly for Christmas! Remember, JSW & MM are for life, not

just for Christmas 😉

 

I have a threadripper Norman, 12 core / 24 threads, in truth, you are right, I have little need at all for all that cpu grunt, but

when I built it last year it was with the idea that it might be the last pc I ever really need to build. I enjoy building pcs

and tinkering with them, but the truth is that my previous build, from 2014, is still going strong, an overclocked 4970k cpu, 16gb

ram, m.2 drive etc., decent gtx card in it, there is nothing it can't do, will be 8 years old shortly but hard to see when it

won't still be working. It is possibly one of the reasons why M$ have made W11, simply to force people to upgrade to run

w11, but it is easily worked around. So they enforce obsolescence on w10 too in 4 years time. Ubuntu is an excellent version

of Linux and completely free and maintained and updates itself really. Sorry, a bit off topic here ... 🙂

 

 

Edited December 23, 2021 by MtM

[Norman Sword]

The ADDENDUM ON MY LAST POST  
 

If you're in trouble he will save the day.

He's brave and he's fearless, come what may.

Without him the mission would go astray.

He's Willy ,Willy  Willeeeeeeee!

 

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks for your Miner Willy X-mas cards, Andy and Norman Sword - they're great stuff! 👍

And thanks for starting this thread, MtM! 🙂 Your message to Ian (IRF) reminds me of two of my favourite quotations that I put on "The phenomenon of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy games" page on JSW Central:

"People in the Eighties did not just buy 'home' computers. They fell in love with them. And first loves tend to stick with you for the rest of your life." - Vaggelis Kapartzianis

"JSW isn't just a game - it's a relationship! One that stays with you from the very first game." - Adam Britton

Hopefully, we will see more of a 'JSW-committed Ian' next year 😉.

As for what I asked Father Christmas for Christmas - or rather, for 2022: it is more spare time (at home OR at work 😁) that I could dedicate to MM/JSW. That's pretty much all I need at the moment.

Happy Holidays / Christmas to everyone on the forum! And then a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2022!

[Norman Sword]

Now featuring a guest appearance by Maria.

Thankfully the day is nearly upon us..... Then I can forget about this, for a whole year 

card2.tap

[Spider]

Seasonal Greetings everyone

Apparently (around my area) risk of a bit of snow tomorrow, which will be interesting if it does happen. Seems rare 'on the day'

The other 'card files' are excellent. 😄

Talking of Red Dwarf, I once had the full DVD set and one of the bonus items it contained was their 'full' musical they only showed a part of in one episode. I can't recall offhand which one it was now, sorry. But it was a good 5 odd minutes of 'song and dance' compared to about half a minute or so in the episode. Must of taken ages to do that.

Regarding PC's , well I still have my Mesh tower (brought new about 10 or 12 years go now) a Athlon Phenom x6 , its still quite a pleasant machine all in all. Sadly the mainboard limits it to 8GB ram iirc, which it had in when new. Not terribly cheap then.

My main machine is an 'ex office' HP XW6600 workstation , its very old (came with XP64!) but with a pair of 4 core Xeon's and 32GB ram, the highest spec it came in at an eye watering cost new, its still very much up to the job indeed. It was a fraction of its new price when I brought it about 5 years ago. The only downside really aside from not being terribly quiet and needing EEC (server spec) RAM, its not terribly power efficient.

I'm not up on modern PC's , my sort of knowledge stops at the last of the Pentium 4's before they all went CoreDuo and then onto the i3,i5,i7 stuff.

 

Mentioning briefly CRT monitors @MtM , A few friends have had the CBM CM8833 (I think it was) without major issues. It does sometimes command a price premium which is a bit unjust. However the Acorn Archimedes monitors aside from being beige work very well, I've had two different ones in the past and they are fine. They also benefit from having audio (mono) in and as well as a (wired a bit odd) DIN RGB input have an RGB scart socket too, note there's no composite in signal in these though, its RGB or bust! Biggest issue with them is the annoying power switch that is a push on/off latch and it tends to fail "off" resulting in it being bypassed. Oh that and the small stand to raise it up can collapse on your hands (hurts as its heavy) , otherwise they are dead good. 🙂

[MtM]

I used to have a couple of cm8833's, an original and a mk ii I think, ran an original psx on one when they first came out in 95/6. My goodness, and to think

that connecting via scart was considered so good then. I had used them previously on my Amigas. They were good monitors the 8833's, it isn't that long since I threw an original box out of the loft for one on the tip, all the packaging etc. for it in there too. I would rather that than have someone scalp someone else on eBay for it what

is a cardboard box.

 

I have seen people run Speccies on cub monitors and they looked great. No bright mode though I think, they couldn't display it. I had a microvitec for my last Amiga before I sold up that would sync down to pal but then do vga + too, quite a decent monitor that, quite a rounded screen, cost me about 300 quid back then I think. Either way, I am beyond paying silly money on eBay for any old tech I have owned previously, so the old Dell 4:3 vga spesh will do! It's lcd but very cheap.

 

Think I remember the Archimedes monitors, but were they not rebadged Phillips?

[Spider]

@MtM Cub's are OK , avoid the metal cased ones if you can. They don't have a 'bright' signal input so yes you're right its plain 'no bright'

Archimedes units: Yes I think you're right they are rebadged Phillips units. Thinking again their power lead is just a very short IEC socket, so you'd need a lead or rewire. Neither of mine gave any real issues although when at one moment they were side by side you could just about tell one was slight better focused. 🙂

[Spider]

One more from me, no .tap only a .gif of it:

[MtM]

I got the second hand Dell monitor 4:3 ratio as a Christmas present, but there seems to be a timing issue, as a line or lines are out of sync etc. The monitor is running

at 640 x 480 vga via a vga to vga cable to my ZX Next, and the osd of the monitor says that it is 640 x 480 at 50hz, perfect,  but tried two  different vga cables

but no joy. I will take a picture so you can see what I mean. I realise that no one may have a Next on here, but just thought I would share.

 

There are options in the monitor's osd for 'phase' and 'pixel clock' but having altered them both form the max 100 to the min 0 they do

not remove the line issue. Odd. Any ideas from anyone greatly appreciated! Standby for picture ...