Duke23

I personally don't have a lot of patience for machines much older than a 386 but I can respect that. I think my first IBM compatible was a Packard Bell 386... Where I got my first taste for DOS and later Windows 3.1. Hard to believe that the ones I mentioned are 20 years old or close to it, so pretty retro by most definitions. I do have a Commodore 64 that was working last time I fiddled with it, put up at my dad's house.

@Zekes: Cool! Feel free to post more pics if you want, I love these older machines. With more info there's probably lots of things you can do with it. It's probably missing the drivers for the Ethernet or it could have been taken out by a power surge... I'd try a PCMCIA solution, either wired or wireless depending on whether you keep XP. If I remember correctly Windows 95 doesn't technically support wireless although there are hacky solutions for DOS, Win3.1, and Win95 for open connections or WEP, and 98SE does to an extent but I don't think it would support WPA -- been a while since I messed with these. You may need to find a hardware detection program to find generic drivers that will work when/if you downgrade, a lot of these non big name computers are impossible to find OEM support for. Check the system specs but I'd say any DOS games will work fine (with VDMSound under XP), check abandonware sites. Some of my favorite older games were Wolfenstein 3d, Doom of course, Duke Nukem, Whacky Wheels, Whiplash, Rise of the Triad, Descent, the Hugo series, the King's Quest series, and Commander Keen is worth mentioning although I just recently tried it. Some "newer" ones with slightly higher requirements to look for may be Terra Nova, Command & Conquer, Orion Burger, Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3d, and Zone Raiders for DOS (may require dos4gw or dos32a extenders under pure DOS), Gearheads and BadToys for Win3.x+, Midtown Madness, Monster Truck Madness, System Shock 2, Delta Force, and Jane's Fleet Commander for Win9x. I'd take a wild guess and say that computer is probably a Pentium II, so you could probably get away with playing tons of older games that just won't run on modern 64bit systems.

Nope I'm not talking DosBox here although that is a great tool. I'm talking real hardware... I have been interested in something for retro gaming, and got the idea to find some old laptops to mess around with. I picked them up on eBay for a decent price. The first one I've already received, taken apart, formatted, installed DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 and some games etc. The second is still in the mail and is slightly newer. The first is a Digital DECpc 425SE. It's got a blazing fast 25mhz 486SX, 8mb of RAM, and the original (as far as I can tell) WD 170mb hard drive. I've had to transfer everything to it via floppy disk so I don't have any big games on it, and the screen refresh is a little disappointing being passive matrix. It also has no onboard sound except the PC speaker. When I received this computer it had Windows 95 which was pretty sluggish, and is partly why I downgraded it. The computer is from 1994 and was used at the Digital corporation, it has a "Property of" sticker on the bottom with an employee name and badge number, and Windows 95 said "Digital Internal Use Only" before the login. Not to worry, this company is long gone along with 99% of information and parts for this computer so I'm crossing my fingers that nothing goes wrong. Because of the screen I've been avoiding the first person shooters but it seems to run fine. I grew up with computers from this era so it's pretty nostalgic and entertaining to me. A friend jokingly asked me if this computer would run KSP and I had a mental image of hitting the floor it button, going to sleep, waking up and hitting space, waiting two days and putting a roll of coins on the D key to start my gravity turn... I'm thinking of trying out the original Orbiter on it but that may be a little over my head. The other computer is a Dell Latitude XPi P133ST from 1997, with a larger active matrix SVGA screen and a mono speaker. It has the 133mhz Pentium 1 and 40mb of RAM (8mb onboard) and I believe it came with Windows 95 preinstalled, but it has no hard drive at the moment. I'd like to set that one up with a dual compact flash to IDE adapter to dual boot Windows 95 and Dos6.22/Win3.1. It has some cosmetic issues but I have epoxy and got it cheap so it's not a big deal and I can actually get (some) parts for this one online. Pics when it gets here... So if there's anyone else here with oldschool computers show them off!

Any chance anyone has had issues with being kicked / dropped off the server? I said before it was resolved by moving to a different VPS host, but that host was terrible and had lots of downtime which hurt the other things I'm trying to use it for besides DMP, so I'm back to the original one since I already a paid for a month and this one hasn't gone down once. I can connect fine for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, then I get the message on the client "Write failure. An established connection was aborted by the software in the host machine." And on the host I get "Disconnecting client X, endpoint X, Connection timed out. I can't for the life of me figure out what's causing it, both VPS boxes "should" have been configured identically (Server 2008 r2), and I'm literally using the same DMP server folder as I was on the other machine. Help? lol

How have I never seem that before? Must...try...lmao Redneck jokes aside, I'm remaining somewhat neutral on this one for now. Almost every update since I came along I've thought "wow, why did they do x, that's gonna break the game for me" but then I have to give it a fair chance and I haven't been disappointed yet. The trailers may be a bit much but I get what they're going for and I hope it's a step in the right direction. Models can always be tweaked. Heck, I'm sure a modder could make these look however anyone wants and maybe that's the point. (As in "look what we can do now", not necessarily "everyone needs to change this immediately")

*scratches head* Okay fine now I have to build a Kerbal General Lee. I swear I thought this thread was a modder having some fun, obviously I'm not in the loop as usual

That's a good idea, I had a lot of fun with a little rocket powered rover on the Mun before I got powered wheels. It could hop to another biome or two depending on the landing site, and then glide back along the surface using almost no fuel at about 50m/s, as long as you babysit it during jumps and don't hit anything too crazy.

It's definitely overkill. It was technically a Mun lander, based on an older cannibalized design etc... and it's designed with a failsafe in case something goes wrong. Ideally it would use the outer engines to land and take off from the Mun, then drop them and use the lower central engine for the entire return home. In the event that I miscalculate or something silly happens, it still has the tiny stage at the top to rely on. I used to have a lot of little "oops" moments like that so I just started building it into the ship to save time on rescue missions

I tend to give mine lame descriptive names like "Duna Contract Probe" or "Gilly Kethane Scanner". If it's a complicated mission (as in more than just run to x and do x) then I try to make that my "main" mission and not do any other complicated one at the same time. I use KAC also. Sometimes I just have to go through the last 10 or so entries of my tracking center to see what's already out there doing something so I don't launch doubles.

I usually just shove it under a weird purpose built lander and attach it with a docking port. For larger rovers though they tend to get their own dedicated drop system.

Where we're going we don't need -- hey, what the -- come back here! No, don't --

Sent the V3-XL "Gooseneck" on it's maiden trip to drop off a satellite in orbit of Kerbin, pick up a stranded Kerbal, refuel and run out to Minmus to deploy a second satellite and retrieve an older satellite. Possibly not all in that order... I may wait to refuel at my Minmus depot depending on what everything looks like after the Kerbin side of the mission. Maiden mission may be a stretch because it's really just the tried and true Valkyrie with extra cargo space and more fuel. These satellites are of my "new standard" variety... They have docking ports on them for easy retrieval. That way I won't have to bring KAS supplies into orbit for routine retrieval missions, saving weight and space and also because it's really a pain to use winches in zero-g. The craft itself is still transitional meaning it has docking ports AND winches in the bays for compatibility until all the old probes have been recovered. It also carries a small liquid fuel / oxidizer drop tank on this mission to give it an extra 800 DV or so (I think was the figure) which was supposed to help it get to Minmus for its refuel but it's questionable at this point. The extra cargo space is probably useless for anything except this exact mission because I didn't do anything to increase the payload capacity over the standard Valkyrie; but these probes are light and the extra fuel needed to be added without changing the basic design of the craft. As a side note, I really like the new look of the oversized tail fins / elevators I changed a while back. They suit the platform better than what I had on there before, and seem to give better control during slightly unbalanced situations.

I noticed that bug too. I panicked for a minute thinking I messed up something on the server...

This little guy does most of my Kerbal Rescue missions and small satellite deployments (up to about .7t) in LKO, recently brought out of the experimental designation and codenamed Raptor. It's so simple it's stupid, but it flies nicely and can make it out to ~150km orbit with a light payload and come back home. There's another version without docking capabilities that has a bit better range, but this one also gets used to bring KAS containers and other forgotten things up to interplanetary transfer ships already in orbit that I inevitably forget something on. I want to say it only costs me about 400 funds in fuel if I bring it back bone dry, but some of the posts above seem to say 1500 is the norm? Maybe I have a weird setting somewhere.

I really want to send a spaceplane to Laythe just because. I've never actually landed manned there, although I went to a few other moons around Jool. I was prepping for it in 23.5 and had two of my original Valkyrie planes strapped to a transfer ship... but then I took a break for a while when .24 came out and of course .25 broke my planes and I started a new save. So yeah, it's still on the books. In the very near future though, I'm prepping to send a Kethane mining rig and refueling station to Ike so I can send smaller, shorter range ships out to the Jool system. That's the plan at least. I already have the mining rig and station on one ship and a craft to bring the refined fuel up to the station on another ship, ready to go out at the next transfer window. I'm just taking my sweet time to actually warp ahead and do it. Keep getting distracted and putting it off.

Quick question provided I don't figure it out first -- I'm trying to run DMP server on a VPS right now (faster connection). It worked fine with the same setup and universe on my home computer but now it keeps kicking me off saying Write Failure and that the host aborted the connection. I have the firewall on the remote machine configured to accept connections through any executable in the DMP directory. The server keeps saying connection timed out... Maybe someone more experienced with DMP could point me in the right direction here? Edit: Nevermind, it seems to have just been that provider. I switched and now I'm getting even better speeds and no dropped connections. Weird.

I've been putting off trying this for a while but finally bit the bullet. This. Is. Awesome.

Well my situation looks better now. I still got a couple blue screens but... Simple fix, I guess I'm just lame sometimes. I cleaned and reseated the RAM and graphics card then proceeded to run prime95 on blend for a couple hours, burn in test with furmark, and memtest86+ for 10 passes (about 16 hours I think) and everything is fine. No more blue screens. Other than that I don't think I did anything major. And here I was thinking the worst. I just kept telling myself something must be failing because my rig is less than a year old so why would I have to reseat anything? I saw a few reviews for my RAM sticks that said they went bad pretty quick so I thought that was the issue but I think its all good now.

*mumbles, grumbles* I forget things. But I'll get to that. The other day I deployed an interplanetary capable Kethane scanner from a cargo bay (even though it almost got stuck), which I was kind of proud of. Just think of the launch costs I could save by adapting more payloads to cargo bays! Well, you guys probably already know that. But I've been pretty slow on actually *using* spaceplanes for anything other than playing around or dropping off / picking up small contract satellites in LKO. The small engine / tank will get it on an escape trajectory from Kerbin and the ion drive has enough juice to take it probably clear out to the Jool system if I wanted to. Actually that's not a bad idea. It was originally going to Gilly, and still might, but I'm putting that mission off for now as a whole. I just don't see any purpose in reaching my colonization efforts in that direction at this time, so I'm headed to Ike instead. But not with this probe, I just wanted to share that. I actually have a Kethane scanner already in orbit of Ike, it went out with my Duna colony missions and had plenty of DV left over. I figure if I put a self sustaining fuel depot at Ike I can take less extravagant ships for a detour on the way to Jool. I'm thinking long term cost of sending massive rockets out that far. Also, the bugs are *officially* worked out of this SSTO design and it flies beautifully now, no more crashy crashy. Not that any of this was cheap... Here is the Refueling Depot station and Kethane refinery, all this is empty except the descent engines on the refinery to save on the cost of getting it out there. Here's where I stopped thinking things through. I sent up a transfer stage (shown in bottom pic) to dock with this and push it out that direction because there was no way I was engineering all that into one payload AND getting it safely to orbit. They're almost guaranteed to be functional together because they were designed together, but sent up in two pieces. I'm also not completely sure what I was thinking when I made that hazardous looking docking assembly. Actually I do, I think that design is vestigial from when I wanted the refinery itself to fly back up to dock with the station, but decided that was silly and just slapped a decoupler in there to get rid of the reaction wheels and docking port once on the ground. There is now a separate ship that will arrive after this to transport the refined fuel (liquid fuel, oxidizer, monoprop, and xenon) from the surface to the orbital station. What I didn't think about was flex due to the idiotic way I made that docking assembly. As soon as I tried to turn the whole thing around, things got squirrely. So I sent up a refueling ship which was needed anyway since I burned a little more fuel than I planned while getting the transfer stage into orbit. I tried for a while to build an SSTO for this job, but I'm just not comfortable with more than doubling my highest mass spaceplane and getting it off the ground yet. The only reason the refueling ship was even manned was because I was going to send up a box of KAS struts and the pilot was to attach them to the weak points of the assembly, a dual purpose mission. BUT, I forgot to send the struts. So the refuel was fine but I still had the same problem... Enter the new and improved V3m-X, now with a small liquid fuel drop tank, a KAS box, and docking capabilities. By using the cheap drop tank to cruise up to around 18km on Kerbin while carrying more oxidizer than before (and running on airbreathing mode until 28km / 1700m/s), I am able to get into a stable ~150km orbit with an extra ~200DV, which is very useful on such a short range craft. (If I use the drop tank I have about 550 DV during final rendezvous approach). The drop tank is actually more of a throw tank, it sits on a decoupler in the cargo bay with 45 units of liquid fuel piped to the tank directly behind it, and when its empty we simply pop the cargo bay and fire off the decoupler and two separatrons. So without further ado here is the cluster **** I created... Refueling station, Kethane rig, interplanetary transfer stage, refueling ship, AND the spaceplane with a cargo bay full of struts. I will probably end up flipping either the cargo bay or the docking port on this plane, it's awkward to use the bay while docked. Now tomorrow... I will actually send this stuff on its way. I think. Judging by the number of missions I've started and not finished lately, I'm not holding my breath.

Mostly just keyboard and mouse. Sometimes I hook up a NES controller clone for long rover drives. I was working on an arduino setup but I got frustrated with it and quit lol

Memtest didn't turn up anything after running for a while, I checked out the graphics card while I was at it (stress test etc - nothing), one last chkdsk and sfc to be on the paranoid side also reported that everything is okay, and the event log isn't showing anything cringe worthy. Only problem I've had since that ordeal was bumping up against KSP's memory limit even though I'm not running any big mods... Which gave me enough reason to finally install Linux Mint on this machine, but that's another story. Darn newfangled technology... Lol. Guess we'll see how long this lasts. All else fails I did install Mint to a different disk and change the boot order, so if it goes south I have that going for me.

I tested a new SSTO design today. It's early experimental (design subject to change or be scrapped completely) and codenamed Lawndart... It's part of an effort to make a cheap abnormal looking and easily balanced payload delivery system for LKO. Then I had a derp moment and forgot to throttle back after swapping to closed cycle and blew the engines up... I wanted to land on the large island Northeast-ish of KSC but lawndarts don't turn too well at 40km. So I ended up setting it down in the ocean with minimal damage due to Aleny's good piloting skills. He was surprisingly cool about the whole ordeal. And just to see if I could do it, I built a rescue vehicle for poor Aleny that relied on a fully powered VTOL landing. It uses RAPIERs but carries no oxidizer, because those seem to have better throttle response for VTOL.

I was going to do that before I saw the errors in the event log but was holding off to see if anything happens again. Probably should though now that you mention it. Would errors caused by bad RAM show up in the SMART data like that though? It shows wear leveling at 4 as well and I'm not sure what is normal for that. Also neither of my regular hard drives had any problems at all when I checked them the other day, and one of them has most of my non critical programs installed. I did not check the SSD at the same time because I didn't want to bring down the whole system right then.

Bravo sir, bravo... lmao I think I've only been to Gilly once, back in .23.5. I was just screwing around with a design that never should have gone anywhere... The transfer stage wasn't pretty and we landed the final stage on Gilly. None of it was planned, I was kind of surprised the thing even got to orbit and I was like "screw it let's go to Eve" and then just went with it to see what would happen. Lembin hopped down to plant a flag and watched as the ship started dancing down the hill and slowly tilting over (but made it back inside before anything bad could happen).

I have an FX-4350 and for the most part it holds its own... To be honest though I really wish I had held out and built my system around a decent i5 instead. Hindsight is hell. So, I'm pretty sure my SSD is biting it. I'm past the blind panic stage and into the mourning period even though it's technically still working... It started with a bunch of bluescreens within anywhere from 5-30 minutes after booting. I was about to start ripping out hardware but I decided to fix the event log (it had an issue I discovered the other day but didn't figure out exactly how to fix it until earlier) and when I was able to check it, it spammed that Drive C was corrupt and unreadable. So I ran chkdsk which went to town and scrolled stuff by so fast I couldn't read most of it. Orphaned files, corrupted files, index errors, etc... SMART data says there were CRC errors and POR recoveries (not even sure what that is at the moment). I ran some SMART tests, it passed the short test but crashed pretty much everything at the end of the extended test. Rebooted and chkdsk ran again and fixed significantly fewer things. The system is up now and still not quite right but SFC says everything is fine. The event log is pretty quiet now and the system appears to be stable but a couple of my programs aren't working right. I'm... kind of scared to do anything right now. I have a backup of the SSD from a couple days ago so it's not like I'm going to lose everything even if it completely crashes, but I really don't want it to go out like this