prokyonid

It’s the Lilac color scheme that really makes it - we had that on my family’s first PC and classic Win UIs don’t look quite right to me without it.

He wasn’t imprisoned for 30+ years. He got 7 years and was out after 5. He was, in his own words, ‘locked up in [his mind]’ for 30+ years.

Warzone 2100. 3D RTS from the late 90s that was open-sourced after the studio went belly-up. Fantastic game, runs on even ancient hardware.

Edit to add: Forgot to mention it is still receiving updates!

Genuinely I’d trust random FOSS stranger on the internet before I’d trust Google, Samsung, Apple, etc. It’d be a lot of work to be the sole maintainer of a LineageOS distro that only functions on one specific phone just to try to steal the data of the maybe 12 people who are going to install it.

I think, especially as you get towards “newer” vintage systems, the logical conclusion is the same one he reached - if you want a compact portable and you’re okay spending a couple hundred dollars, you’re probably going to be better off buying something from the time period than anything new that may be sold at that price point.

Just a couple years ago, I could have pointed you in the direction of some really good recyclers that could get you enough parts to build a fun 486 or Socket 5/7-style machine, if you weren’t too picky about what you got. Unfortunately now the supply has either dried up or the recyclers think their extreme budget clone parts are solid gold. The only time I find parts now is when I stumble across them at thrift stores or estate sales.

Someone on the SDF Mastodon got bent out of shape because I suggested a computer with those specs might be considered ‘retro’, haha.

Right now, the only retro machines I have accessible are my Tandy 1000TX and my C64, but my actual preferred machine for most things retrocomputing is one that I built out of a bunch of my spare parts:

Biostar M6TLC Slot 1 Motherboard PGA 370 Slotket 500MHz Mendocino Celeron PGA370 CPU 128MB of 168 pin SDRAM Sparkle SP5200 RIVA TNT2 Vanta AGP Soundblaster 16 CT2940 ISA 3Com Etherlink III ISA 1.44MB FDD, DVD-ROM, 20GB HDD Running MSDOS 7.1 (stripped from Windows 98SE)

The only picture I have of it was taken in the dark with a Mavica, so I won’t bother posting it, haha.