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Post by starcruiser on Oct 25, 2018 10:38:50 GMT -7
Yer a good man, cowboy40! You also appear to be the most "computery" member of the forum. I have worked with computers for the past 30 some years....long before the days of plug and play.....i got started fixing computers back in high school in the 1980's. I missed those old machines to the point i am collecting them now! Most Techs coming out of the training programs don't even know what a DIPP switch is!!!! There's a reason why ITT Tech got shut down a year or two back... They were basically just using the Student Loan and Grant systems to make money and NOT actually doing even a marginal job of training students how to service computers. DeVry supposedly still does a decent job of it but... I've been working on or with computers since around 1980ish (Digital printer terminals, 150 baud audio coupler modems and a $7 million timeshare near NASA while in high school). I've definitely noticed a serious drop-off in competence across the board in the computer industry.
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Post by cowboy40 on Oct 25, 2018 11:37:23 GMT -7
I remember DIP switches. Kinda like re-pinning a connector to change the mode of a "black box"... but much easier. Check out the 8-bit guy. [ LINK] I enjoy his channel
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Post by krebizfan on Oct 25, 2018 12:46:46 GMT -7
8-bit guy is from the time frame of cheap albeit small ROMs making quick boots on minimal hardware easy. He probably would have a less favorable appraisal of the mid-70s computers where it was necessary to toggle a few front panel switches to start loading a more substantial boot strap from paper tape and then use what was loaded from paper tape to actually see the drives that would do the work. Let alone the amusing pure paper tape compiler where source code paper tape is inserted, an assembler paper tape is emitted, that paper tape is inserted and an executable paper tape is emitted, and finally the executable paper tape is inserted to see if the program can run. Multi-pass compilers predate C.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2018 14:16:02 GMT -7
Well... he said "Old" computers did it better... not "Ancient". It's not like any of us are going to hack a USB punchcard reader...
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Post by starcruiser on Oct 25, 2018 17:17:05 GMT -7
Ooooo... punchcard readers... yummy!
I do remember those, and reel-to-reel tapes, top-load disks (kinda look like a washing machine)... Nope, don't miss 'em...
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Post by JAFisher44 on Oct 25, 2018 18:35:11 GMT -7
Most Techs coming out of the training programs don't even know what a DIPP switch is!!!! Yeah, they don't teach about vacuum tubes either. Frankly there is no reason to teach your average tech about DIPP switches any more. Unless you specialize in antiquated technology you are not ever going to run into a piece of hardware where that has a DIPP switch on it. Hell, you're pretty unlikely to encounter a jumper. Sure, as an enthusiast you enjoy your computer necromancy, but it is fairly unrealistic to expect the average tech to be taught things that, frankly, they just don't need to know.
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Post by cowboy40 on Oct 26, 2018 3:14:51 GMT -7
Most Techs coming out of the training programs don't even know what a DIPP switch is!!!! Yeah, they don't teach about vacuum tubes either. Frankly there is no reason to teach your average tech about DIPP switches any more. Unless you specialize in antiquated technology you are not ever going to run into a piece of hardware where that has a DIPP switch on it. Hell, you're pretty unlikely to encounter a jumper. Sure, as an enthusiast you enjoy your computer necromancy, but it is fairly unrealistic to expect the average tech to be taught things that, frankly, they just don't need to know. The problem here is that retro computers have become a big hobby for many of us older computer guys. As for modern applications of DIPP switches, I have seen them on some single board computers, but again these are hobbyist kits that you build yourself....warm up the soldering iron...lol I do remember the front toggle machines. I never owned one, but my uncle had an Altair 8800 in his office at Kerr-Mcgee,in the 1970's. he let me play around with it, when Mom would go and see him.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 26, 2018 3:34:49 GMT -7
I do miss going "under the hood" on my computers. Even just installing a new board or some RAM is becoming less and less common for me. Tablets are nice, but you can't do much with them (physically). I got a used Thinkpad a while ago. About all I could do was swap the HD and load Linux Mint (it already had max RAM). It's a great machine, but other than upgrading to a SSD, I've reached the end of the physical upgrade road. All I can do now is actually use the thing.
Maybe I'll get that Raspberry Pi next time I hit the computer store. Could be a fun little project.
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Post by cowboy40 on Oct 26, 2018 3:44:49 GMT -7
I do miss going "under the hood" on my computers. Even just installing a new board or some RAM is becoming less and less common for me. Tablets are nice, but you can't do much with them (physically). I got a used Thinkpad a while ago. About all I could do was swap the HD and load Linux Mint (it already had max RAM). It's a great machine, but other than upgrading to a SSD, I've reached the end of the physical upgrade road. All I can do now is actually use the thing. Maybe I'll get that Raspberry Pi next time I hit the computer store. Could be a fun little project. Love single board computers like the Pi....i have set one up to act as an "arcade" game simulator in a wooden case i had built to house a monitor and the computer and controls.....Damn am i in a second child hood trying to relive the arcades and the IBM 5150 computer....Damn the 80's were fun. That's the reason i think i like this game. It reminds me so much of the times that I would play the rpg and the combat simulator back in high school and college. He did a decent job in turning a project into a great little program that we keep learning how to keep it working on modern systems. I do so enjoy all of the work FASA did in keeping us into Star Trek, back then this was our version of cannon Trek. I believe Paramount missed a great opportunity when they tossed out the FASA stuff.
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Post by starcruiser on Oct 26, 2018 8:19:53 GMT -7
Most Techs coming out of the training programs don't even know what a DIPP switch is!!!! Yeah, they don't teach about vacuum tubes either. Frankly there is no reason to teach your average tech about DIPP switches any more. Unless you specialize in antiquated technology you are not ever going to run into a piece of hardware where that has a DIPP switch on it. Hell, you're pretty unlikely to encounter a jumper. Sure, as an enthusiast you enjoy your computer necromancy, but it is fairly unrealistic to expect the average tech to be taught things that, frankly, they just don't need to know. Actually, not only are DIPP switches still around (along with Dip Sticks - both real and figurative - check out Washington DC!), jumpers are still very common. Mostly for things like "Clear NVRAM" or "Clear Password" etc...
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Post by cowboy40 on Oct 26, 2018 8:46:40 GMT -7
Yeah, they don't teach about vacuum tubes either. Frankly there is no reason to teach your average tech about DIPP switches any more. Unless you specialize in antiquated technology you are not ever going to run into a piece of hardware where that has a DIPP switch on it. Hell, you're pretty unlikely to encounter a jumper. Sure, as an enthusiast you enjoy your computer necromancy, but it is fairly unrealistic to expect the average tech to be taught things that, frankly, they just don't need to know. Actually, not only are DIPP switches still around (along with Dip Sticks - both real and figurative - check out Washington DC!), jumpers are still very common. Mostly for things like "Clear NVRAM" or "Clear Password" etc... You can still buy motherboards that have jumpers for hardware controlled over cloaking and so on. These boards tend to be more stable then you get with software based overclocking through BIOS and the like!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 26, 2018 10:55:03 GMT -7
That's the reason i think i like this game. It reminds me so much of the times that I would play the rpg and the combat simulator back in high school and college. He did a decent job in turning a project into a great little program that we keep learning how to keep it working on modern systems. I do so enjoy all of the work FASA did in keeping us into Star Trek, back then this was our version of cannon Trek. I believe Paramount missed a great opportunity when they tossed out the FASA stuff. Ditto. The game has a very 1980's feel to it. And a lot of the FASA-Trek was really nice. Paramount and CBS really should have kept the FASA stuff. So much better than what they are doing. I made a bunch of "wire-frame" counters for several of the FASA-Trek ships. Does anyone know how to import them into the ST:STCS PC game? Could give me something to do between D&D (BECMI) and Battletech (3025) sessions.
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Post by cowboy40 on Oct 26, 2018 11:04:06 GMT -7
That's the reason i think i like this game. It reminds me so much of the times that I would play the rpg and the combat simulator back in high school and college. He did a decent job in turning a project into a great little program that we keep learning how to keep it working on modern systems. I do so enjoy all of the work FASA did in keeping us into Star Trek, back then this was our version of cannon Trek. I believe Paramount missed a great opportunity when they tossed out the FASA stuff. Ditto. The game has a very 1980's feel to it. And a lot of the FASA-Trek was really nice. Paramount and CBS really should have kept the FASA stuff. So much better than what they are doing. I made a bunch of "wire-frame" counters for several of the FASA-Trek ships. Does anyone know how to import them into the ST:STCS PC game? Could give me something to do between D&D (BECMI) and Battletech (3025) sessions. If you have Adobe Photoshop, find the bmp;s in the ships folder...open them in Photoshop and paste your files over them....making sure to keep the same background shades....that should give you counters. I did it for a couple of ships and it works....takes time to line everything up right but it was worth the work....
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Post by Deleted on Oct 26, 2018 15:20:20 GMT -7
Thank-you, cowboy40. I may have to use GIMP... I'll give it a go over the weekend.
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Post by SITZKRIEG! on Oct 26, 2018 17:14:27 GMT -7
You might have to tweak the export settings for BMP files in GIMP to get it to work. I've been working on a few ships myself and tried using the GIMP created BMPs using the standard export settings and it gave me an error in game for the image files. I resaved them in MSPaint though and it worked just fine. My guess is that GIMP uses some newer BMP function that wasn't around in 2004 when the game was made and is causing an issue. Since the fix was easy, I didn't try to play around with the export settings so there may be an equally easy way of getting it to work there as well. If you do, let me know which ones to change.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 29, 2018 8:36:21 GMT -7
Didn't have time to try it this weekend. Busy with kids (they discovered D&D... I may have helped them find it ) I'm also not sure where I put the darn things. I'm sure it's on one of my Hard Drives or Thumb Drives somewhere. If MS Paint works... I'll just go with that.
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Post by starcruiser on Oct 29, 2018 15:16:15 GMT -7
Corrupting them with evil D&D?!?
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Post by SITZKRIEG! on Nov 2, 2018 20:02:03 GMT -7
I've been working on a couple of ships (my Archer and Sentinel writeups and my upcoming Attucks one) and possibly hit a snag. The ship and scenario files don't show up in the normal file explorer when I look for them but show up as successfully saved and usable through the in game menu and I'm not sure why. I had hidden files visible enabled standard in my file explorer so I don't think that's it. I've saved the ship, image, and scenario files as a zip file archive and included a readme.txt with instructions on where to put them. Can you folks try them out and see if they work on your computers if you cut and paste them into the appropriate folders? It won't work on mine as I still have the cloaked files somewhere on my system and I'd hate to have to tell players to enter in the full ship stats on each ship in order for it to work. Is anyone else having that issue?
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Post by cowboy40 on Nov 12, 2018 22:41:22 GMT -7
Thought I would just mention the four files that i had to register by hand in Windows 10
ARButton.ocx comdlg32.ocx mscomctl.ocx TransPicture.ocx
in the Command Prompt (admin) type the following
"REGSVR32 C:Windows/SysWOW64/example.ocx" don't use the quatation marks, and replace example with the name of the file to register. this is for 64 bit OS, but i believe the commands are something like this in a 32-bit system...
regsvr32 TransPicture.ocx
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Post by SITZKRIEG! on Nov 13, 2018 18:47:10 GMT -7
Thought I would just mention the four files that i had to register by hand in Windows 10 ARButton.ocx comdlg32.ocx mscomctl.ocx TransPicture.ocx in the Command Prompt (admin) type the following "REGSVR32 C:Windows/SysWOW64/example.ocx" don't use the quatation marks, and replace example with the name of the file to register. this is for 64 bit OS, but i believe the commands are something like this in a 32-bit system... regsvr32 TransPicture.ocx
I have 64 bit Windows 10 Home but the steps I described in my blog post didn't make me do more than register transpicture. Weird... I wonder why it was different. Maybe you have the professional version that requires more steps?
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Post by cowboy40 on Nov 13, 2018 21:08:39 GMT -7
Thought I would just mention the four files that i had to register by hand in Windows 10 ARButton.ocx comdlg32.ocx mscomctl.ocx TransPicture.ocx in the Command Prompt (admin) type the following "REGSVR32 C:Windows/SysWOW64/example.ocx" don't use the quatation marks, and replace example with the name of the file to register. this is for 64 bit OS, but i believe the commands are something like this in a 32-bit system... regsvr32 TransPicture.ocx I have 64 bit Windows 10 Home but the steps I described in my blog post didn't make me do more than register transpicture. Weird... I wonder why it was different. Maybe you have the professional version that requires more steps?
I have it installed on three Windows 10 machines. My main workstation machine has Win10 pro, my back up machine is an HP desktop and my HP laptop, are both Windows 10 Home and all three machines required me to register the above four files. My guess is that you had installed some software earlier, that put some of these files in your system and registered them, but on all three of my Windows 10 machines, which use the 64-bit OS...i had to do all four files i listed.....
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Post by Art on Oct 15, 2019 0:58:35 GMT -7
There are in fact nicer counters than the ones being used. They are replaceable. But I can't get this damn game to display properly on my monitor; the bottom is always cut off, or else the side if I twist it 90deg and flip the display under Control Panel. What resolution are you running your screen at?? You have to change your font size to normal or 100%
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Post by Gorn on May 29, 2023 17:49:38 GMT -7
Aaaaaahhhh thanx to SITZKREIG! it's finally working again. And at my resolution I don't have any problems. Only thing to do is get the phasers and torps to move faster than a snail's crawl...
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Post by Gorn on Jun 8, 2023 9:44:38 GMT -7
Dammit. Tried assigning it "High" and then "Realtime" priority; it's already assigned to ONE processor.
Didn't work. Wasn't there a workaround for the animation?
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