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The Nostalgia Thread (aka...I remember that!)


Phillyman

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  • 2 weeks later...

My first MP3 player was a Creative Zen Nano Plus 1GB I paid approx. $50 (Fl. 100) for it.

I still use it for Christmas every year. I hook it up to the speakers.

 

I like the rectangular watch face of the Gear S better as well but since I got the Gear S2 for free I'm not complaining.

i just can't part with old devices/consoles along with their boxes. Have my launch day Genesis, Saturn and Dreamcast boxes up in my attic. 

 

Yeah, you can't beat free lol. Got my bro the S2 for xmas but after he saw my watch he said he'd rather have mine. Saved me $100 lol.

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i don't fully understand the love for VHS. don't get me wrong, i enjoyed the hell out of mine growing up, and i still have a VCR in a closet somewhere. Hell, i even like to browse old VHS collections at flea markets and stuff, but at this point i'd rather watch it on DVD or stream/download it. Way less hassle.

 

 

Can't speak for anyone else, but I will say that in the 80's and early 90's, there was nothing like going into a video rental store and browsing the horror section. Just looking at the boxes for those movies and reading the titles was enough to scare me as a little girl, and even then my brother and I would still take them down off the shelf, read the backs of the boxes to one another, and try and imagine what the movie was like (because no way on earth would Mom let us rent them, and even if she did, there was no way on earth either of us chickens would have sat through one). :)

 

Besides the box art, there were usually one or two screencaps from the film, so those, the box copy, and the title were all you had to go on to put the story together in your mind. I've no doubt my imagination came up with much better 'movies' than what was contained on 90% of those tapes. I'll go so far as to say that besides RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, nothing stimulated the imagination for me more than those oh-so-forbidden horror film boxes. That's why to this day I love watching horror flicks on VHS. That's the medium they were MADE for, baby. :)

 

*huggles*

Areala

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Horror film vhs observations...

 

*huggles*

Areala

Nailed it, absolutely, undoubtedly, nailed it.

 

Another quality, albeit a bit of an ironic one, about horror films on vhs? The quality of the transfer from whatever film it was shot on, to tape. Show me a good looking vhs. Even dvd was LEAPS ahead as far as picture quality. What I'm getting at is that often, you heard more of what was going on in a scene than you actually saw. That's also helpful to hide whatever flaws there were in the special effects, so a lot of that stuff looked real, for better or worse, depending on how solid a stomach you have for gore...

 

I think about the only modern film I've seen that does atmosphere as well as those old horror films on vhs did, is I Am Legend, the 2007 (?) version with Will Smith. At least the first half, anyway. For being so crisp and clear, that movie was freaky... then they showed the monsters and killed the suspense, grumble grumble.

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Horror is absolutely the one genre for which not being able to see every single pixel of every single scanline in every single scene was a feature, not a bug. Many of my favorite horror films from the 1980s and even the early 90s I refuse to watch on Blu-Ray. Not because I'm a cinema grognard or one of those "Betamax Uber Alles!" people, but movies like "Prince of Darkness" or "Friday the 13th, Part II" were not shot the way contemporary horror films are. The reliance on hiding the practical effects behind a layer of grain and murkiness was part of the filming process, and unless you have a George Lucas-style "restore the original print" workshop that can magically erase those flaws, you wind up with a film so crisp you can see too much. Once you've seen those flaws, they can't be unseen (it's like knowing how a magic trick is performed) and a little bit of the thrill is gone. :)

 

Blu-Ray is great for anything shot since, say, 2002-ish or anything shot earlier but given the Criterion treatment to preserve the intent of the filmmakers at the expense of being able to see all the wires. For anything older than that though, DVD is absolutely the better choice for archival purposes. :)

 

*huggles*
Areala

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Blu-Ray is great for anything shot since, say, 2002-ish or anything shot earlier but given the Criterion treatment to preserve the intent of the filmmakers at the expense of being able to see all the wires. For anything older than that though, DVD is absolutely the better choice for archival purposes. :)

 

*huggles*

Areala

 

35 mm films can be rescaned at a maximum resolution of 3840 x 2160.  It is technically and roughly the estimated amount of visuall bits of data that can be stored digitally and scale naturally. 

 

Rescanning film such as Lord of the Rings in 2160p would not work without re -creating the special effects which were added overtop the film by a 3d graphics arts program.

 

Three "old" films that I know of which have been re-scanned at 2160p are

Casablanca

Terminator

Total Recall

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  • 2 weeks later...

Cleaning out a closet I came across one of my old CD cases. So many demo discs from my PC Gamer sub back in the day. So weird to see demos that actually fit on a CD rom lol

 

For some reason I also thought of a couple top down shooters I downloaded I think back in 2000-2001 that were so cool for that time. They used the modern tech then for a 3D look to game play. They were Star Monkey and Ultra Assault. Re-installed them and brought back memories playing them about 15 years later.

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I haven't even owned a desktop PC for the past 8 years. :lol:

I can kinda understand, given my understanding of home sizes in Japan, a desktop PC takes up a decent amount of room...

 

My old 2004 Dell that i retired in 2011 had a floppy drive

I think that would have been toward the end of that era, I was working at an electronics supply at the time. Ahh, back when 250gb hard drives were about as big as you were gonna get, with 320gb drives being spoke of in hushed tones... :P

 

Built my PC with a friend way back in 2006. It's almost TEN already! It is showing its age a bit, but a new MB, memory, and video card would have this thing hopping I'm sure.

 

Or I might just do what I did then, and splurge a bit with the long term in mind.

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Every NES ROM in existence (thousands of them - NTSC, PAL, and JP) combined don't even fill half of a single CD-ROM.

I love how more prototypes are making their way into the hands of people who can preserve games. Some home-brew games are so good! You'll never have a complete set, because of these. I'm doing my best to get a CIB NTSC/U NES collection I think I just passed 60%, it's still a long way to go, but I see a faint light off in the distance. :)

I've been looking through my old Nintendo Power mags just after I got back home in March, I've noticed so many games that weren't released for the console that it was advertised to be on, or just nixed, completely. I've been wanting to get my hands on a reproduction copy of California Raisins: The Grape Escape, for some time now, but don't have the money. Man, Capcom made some great games back in their hay days. :)

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