The Spam Thread!

[cpd2009]

It helps to troubleshoot every little thing. The TV card wasn't seated properly. Re-inserting the card fixed everything.

I also reinstalled Vista again as part of the process, and I won't bother doing updates this time around. No point, as Daffodil is an offline PC.

[cpd2009]

Here's a random Blast from the Past...


Crystal Pepsi might have been just an American product, but it left it's mark on popular culture. Introduced in 1992 and discontinued a few years later, Crystal Pepsi became an early Internet legend. For years people sent letters and emails to Pepsi execs, asking for Crystal Pepsi to return to shelves. And it did, in 2016 for a brief period. It has occasionally reintroduced the drink in short limited time windows since then. I tried it in 2016, and I enjoyed it a lot.  I never saw Crystal Pepsi in person back in 1992. I didn't get to drink soda that much when I was young, and when I did it was usually the store brand fruit flavored soda.

Anyway, the video above is a marketing and training video. It brings back a lot of memories, when 20 ounce soda was still packaged in glass and the two liters had separate colored plastic bottoms glued on to the main bottle. Those odd colored bottom pieces were gone by the late 90s.

[huckleberrypie]

Here's a random Blast from the Past...


Crystal Pepsi might have been just an American product, but it left it's mark on popular culture. Introduced in 1992 and discontinued a few years later, Crystal Pepsi became an early Internet legend. For years people sent letters and emails to Pepsi execs, asking for Crystal Pepsi to return to shelves. And it did, in 2016 for a brief period. It has occasionally reintroduced the drink in short limited time windows since then. I tried it in 2016, and I enjoyed it a lot.  I never saw Crystal Pepsi in person back in 1992. I didn't get to drink soda that much when I was young, and when I did it was usually the store brand fruit flavored soda.

Anyway, the video above is a marketing and training video. It brings back a lot of memories, when 20 ounce soda was still packaged in glass and the two liters had separate colored plastic bottoms glued on to the main bottle. Those odd colored bottom pieces were gone by the late 90s.

Whenever I think of Crystal Pepsi, I think of some crazy dudes drinking a vintage bottle of it as a dare.

[huckleberrypie]

There, just fixed the server from a recent backup. I hope all isn't lost, though I still have to do the same treatment with all of the other sites. :/

[cpd2009]

Since the forum is back up now, I will go ahead and post how well the 2020 13'' Macbook Pro has been doing for me. So far, so good. Over the Independence Day holiday, I was able to spend a lot of time using this laptop and measure just how well it meets my standards and needs. Safe to say, it does meet them nicely. The 16GB of RAM helps keep performance high when loading a lot of tabs in Safari or having many apps open at once. And more recently I've been testing out external connectivity.

The first device I tried was an external USB DAC known as an "ADS Tech" Instant Music device. I found one of these at a rummage sale a few months ago in near mint condition, and it has stereo audio inputs and optical audio input as well. The device can output to both formats too, but I haven't tested that part out. Recording radio broadcasts was simple. All you need is the device and software like Audacity or Sound Studio, but I prefer the latter. And today, that HDMI recording device came in the mail and I've been spending most of the evening putting that through it's paces. I will have a more detailed review in the coming days. On Windows, you use OBS or other suitable recording software, but on macOS, you use QuickTime. The HDMI dongle is listed as a USB video camera and audio device. Select those as the recording source in QuickTime, and you can save content from any HDMI source in MPEG-4 format with a .MOV extension.

As for heat, well, the MacBook can get a bit warm when under a load. This happens when recording content from the HDMI device or encoding an MP3 file which for some reason, Sound Studio used the LAME codec rather than the macOS one, and it's slow when encoding a lengthy file. Saving to M4A is much faster. Basic web browsing doesn't tend to heat up the Macbook as much as the other tasks, and for the most part, is very snappy and responsive. As for the touch bar, it's a Nintendo-esque gimmick more than anything. I only ever use it to adjust the volume.

Connectivity is okay, but Apple could have put in two additional USB-C ports on the right. Good example is using an external USB device like the HDMI dongle. I have a USB-C/Thunderbolt to standard USB adapter connected to one port, while the other is plugged into the AC adapter. Only way to connect a flash drive while using another device is to disconnect the power adapter to plug in the flash drive with my other USB-C adapter. The adapters themselves aren't a big deal... just the lack of ports. I think the 15'' MBPs do have four USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, but they still should have did the same with the 13'' models too.

One of the reasons Apple is moving to their own chips is heat. Apple is guilty of not providing adequate cooling solutions to their laptops in recent years, but Intel might share some blame too. Intel can't seem to meet Apple's demands in making a cooler more energy efficient CPU, and one of the touted benefits of the ARM transition is more performance while using less power and generating less heat. It's nearly identical reasoning to why Apple abandoned PowerPC in 2006. And to that end, I might have the very last in a series of 13'' MBPs with Intel. The latest rumor is that the first Mac to get the ARM chip will be a new 13'' MBP later this year.

[huckleberrypie]

Though of course one major issue with the x86-to-ARM transition is with existing AAA games being no longer supported and/or the barrier to entry with porting them to ARM Macs, and the costs associated with purchasing an ARM Mac for developing iOS applications.

[cpd2009]

Though of course one major issue with the x86-to-ARM transition is with existing AAA games being no longer supported and/or the barrier to entry with porting them to ARM Macs, and the costs associated with purchasing an ARM Mac for developing iOS applications.

During the WWDC keynote, they showed off one of the newer Tomb Raider games running on an ARM Mac via Rosetta 2 at 1080p in full visual quality. It's unknown whether or not that brief gameplay clip was fully authentic or not, but Apple's claims about Rosetta 2 being able to run the majority of Intel apps on ARM are very big. Once the new ARM Macs drop later this year we can see real world Rosetta performance and whether or not the keynote stream was BS.

https://old.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comme...rosetta_2/

They did state that virtualization apps like VMWare or Parallels won't run under Rosetta. New ARM versions will have to be developed.

[huckleberrypie]

Though of course one major issue with the x86-to-ARM transition is with existing AAA games being no longer supported and/or the barrier to entry with porting them to ARM Macs, and the costs associated with purchasing an ARM Mac for developing iOS applications.

During the WWDC keynote, they showed off one of the newer Tomb Raider games running on an ARM Mac via Rosetta 2 at 1080p in full visual quality. It's unknown whether or not that brief gameplay clip was fully authentic or not, but Apple's claims about Rosetta 2 being able to run the majority of Intel apps on ARM are very big. Once the new ARM Macs drop later this year we can see real world Rosetta performance and whether or not the keynote stream was BS.

https://old.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comme...rosetta_2/

They did state that virtualization apps like VMWare or Parallels won't run under Rosetta. New ARM versions will have to be developed.

Was it Rise or Shadow of the Tomb Raider? Assuming that Rosetta's dynarec is able to muddle through them x86 games with little fuss and that they won't be dropping said emulator at least for the next decade or so, well I guess it should be fine.

[cpd2009]

Though of course one major issue with the x86-to-ARM transition is with existing AAA games being no longer supported and/or the barrier to entry with porting them to ARM Macs, and the costs associated with purchasing an ARM Mac for developing iOS applications.

During the WWDC keynote, they showed off one of the newer Tomb Raider games running on an ARM Mac via Rosetta 2 at 1080p in full visual quality. It's unknown whether or not that brief gameplay clip was fully authentic or not, but Apple's claims about Rosetta 2 being able to run the majority of Intel apps on ARM are very big. Once the new ARM Macs drop later this year we can see real world Rosetta performance and whether or not the keynote stream was BS.

https://old.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comme...rosetta_2/

They did state that virtualization apps like VMWare or Parallels won't run under Rosetta. New ARM versions will have to be developed.

Was it Rise or Shadow of the Tomb Raider? Assuming that Rosetta's dynarec is able to muddle through them x86 games with little fuss and that they won't be dropping said emulator at least for the next decade or so, well I guess it should be fine.

It was Shadow of the Tomb Raider.  Again, it will be interesting to see how AAA games can run via Rosetta translation in a real world scenario. 

I never got to play any of the original Tomb Raider games, but if I did, I would go for the PS1 classics. Around 2004 or 2005 when I still had a Windows 98 PC, I recall attempting to run a CD-ROM version of Tomb Raider distributed by Softkey. I got it to launch but there was no sound and the graphics looked horrible. Never went beyond that initial start.

[cpd2009]

Oh... were you able to download those sample HDMI recordings I sent you via FB? I know your internet tends to suck at times, so I tried to keep the file sizes as small as possible. I do need to make a longer 1080p sample recording and compress it to a usable size.