The way back Machine
AgitatedRiot
Posts: 4,437
The way back Machine.
Going through my Software disk and came across a Poser 3.0 and Corel released version 5 of Bryce.
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I still have Infini-D, Poser 3 or 4 (the last MetaCreations one), Ray Dream Studio and "Bryce 3D" (probably Ver. 3) on my old Blue and White G3 Mac.
Starting that computer up is like time travel...
As cutting edge as that computer was brand new, it still dragged its butt on any Bryce scenes.
Every now and then I fire up that computer to print out something in metallic "ink" (actually a wax transfer material) on my old Alps printer... as it's the only computer that printer drivers still work on.
Ha ha, at first I thought this was a reference to Brewster Kahle! Especially since I checked an old web page a moment ago and although overall the crawls are at times limited and spotty in my case there were one or two deep links retained. Very cool.
But I do like hanging on to old software. See also https://www.oldsoftware.com/
I cut my teeth on the Bryce 5 demo back in 2002. That's how I became interested in (obsessed with) CG. I still use Mojoworld now and again.
I had a friend who had Bryce 3 I think it was but I opted to buy Vue 2 instead ;). Now I use neither. Looking hard at some of the landscape capabilities in Blender though ;). There is a paid plugin for Blender called True Terrain I've got my eye on.
I had a super early version of Poser that I think was pre-rendering. I just played with it like a toy, making different bodies and poses, kind of like playing with dolls in the computer. It was like a game to me, just for fun. I made a lot of super skinny stylized fashion model types with no hair, nude. I had no assets or maybe they didn’t even exist yet. I never saved anything and I’m not even sure if rendering was possible and I had no idea what rendering even was lol,
IIRC before discovering DAZ, I bought The Sims II or 4 or whatever the latest version was at the time, because it was the only thing I could find that sort of let you make, and look at... complex animated figures which I thought was a very interesting concept.
At the time I sort of knew about Poser but I thought it only made metallic silver (or "clay") generic figures that artists might use for reference. From there I went to DAZ and Sculptris and mobile modelling and anatomical reference apps in Android. Wow!
I was surprised (when I looked up the category this past summer, 2021) that the Sims franchise is still alive, sort of.
Most interesting things I've seen lately = a very high polygon mesh model of a hand-held dodecahedron on a German museum page (the Romans apparently used them for something but nobody seems to know what exactly), and also Dreamlight has an HD mesh of a Swedish church. I like chamfering on old walls and boards and other "sharp edges".
(Edit) Oh yeah - and negative printing. Useful for making two part, metal moulds of Genesis 8 that can be filled with soft clay on a sort of assembly line, Nick Park-("Wallace and Gromit", "Chicken Run") style?
I have also seen negative printing used to "flesh out" the shape of a tyrannosaur's brain from data inferred from a skull that was found already shattered into 40 or more pieces. So they didn't have to physically break a rare fossil to get the data that was fed into the 3-D printer. But yeah... additive manufacturing in general.
I have CBC video of the tyrannosaur skull item saved to saved to my hard drive. CBC = Canadian Broadcasting Corp., www cbc do C A.
Back on my Commodore Amiga, I had some programs that could generate three dimensional landscapes based on random or user-entered seeds. I could stare at my screen for hours while those mountains and rivers slowly sprung to life.
I still got floppies for win 3.1 Don't if they work, I don't have a floppy drive. LOL
Do they even make motherboards with FDD headers anymore?
Haven't a clue - but they do make USB external floppy drives; I had to pick one up a few years back for a project I was working on.
I liked "Little Computer People" which IIRC started on the C-64; this way vaguely like The Sims in some ways eg. there was house and figures that moved etc.
I was also a big fan of "Swinth" which was a colorized version of Synth Sample and included the theme to Magic Shadows. Yeah, I could stare at the acquarium screen savers for hours. There has historically been a real marine tank (maybe 200 gallons? Guesstimate.) open to the public near my place... I'd be hard pressed to say which was better - the screen saver or the real McCoy.
I bought a USB 3.5" floppy drive earlier this year. Seems ok but I did run into some apparent read/write compatibility problems fairly quickly. I hope I'm wrong but I have a box of virgin floppies lined up for further testing.
Heh heh - something from the vaults (Commodore 64-themed mousepad). Actually they wouldn't let me do this, citing whatever issues. )-: Odd, because I checked back and everybody and his brother was selling OTHER computer company "branded" stuff, and I didn't do this to make money. A joke really.
Anyway, kinda funny esp. when considering read/write errors as per the above.
Yeah, I have one of those USB floppydrives, too. My one gripe with those is that they're basically hard-coded to only be able to read PC-formatted floppy layouts. I.e. you can't get them to read or write to other, different-arrangment formats of 3.5" floppies. The Amiga platform, for instance, crammed more tracks onto both their DD and HD floppy formats. I've got bazillions of Amiga floppies, but can't read 'em anymore because I don't have compatible drives for them. 0o
Just found Duke Nukem 3d, Red Neck Rampage, Serious Sam The First Encounter, and a few other greats. Starting to find old Nintendo cartages.
That's one of the reasons I keep a couple of old XP machines around. Proper floppy drive support, and potential ability to tinker with the s/w, f/w, & formatting of them if necessary and worthwhile. Although, I have given up on my support for old IO-data "ZIP Drives". I used to have the 100MB and the 250MB models but gave them to a local repair shop a few years ago.
I've still got my USB floppy drive. It doesn't read the really old 800k disks, but it reads the newer, larger capacity ones. I don't know if I even have any floppy drives any more. But I might one or two among my art archive CDs.
I don't know what disk formats it's limited to. I'm on a Mac and never had any trouble accessing what I put into it, when that was still an issue.
The inaccessible format, from the days of removable storage devices seems to be the old ORB drives. They were a good product, but too late on the field to make much headway against ZIP drives. Although I would hate to try to access anything on an old Syquest cartridge either, by this time.
There's a Syquest drive looking at me from the top shelf, next to bunch of ancient display adapters and other miscellaneous add-on cards.