Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@gcunit Ah, I see. Game Boy was my life growing up. I often preferred it to consoles when I had to choose. I took it with me almost everywhere. My mom bought me a GBA SP almost exclusively because it had a rechargeable battery and she'd never have to buy me more AA batteries again. Lol

@Tyranexx Yeah, there's absolutely areas in the US with much worse internet than I have. Compared to my friend in Michigan, our internet here is awesome! He has extremely limited data and it's slow and it's his only option. On the other hand Compared to the service I enjoyed in Japan, this internet is pretty mediocre.

@Heavyarms55 My experience of Game Boy was pretty much limited to the rare school trip coach ride when a mate would bring there's along. But Tetris has never been able to hold my attention for more than 5 minutes, and that and Super Mario Land was pretty much the extent of what I saw of the Game Boy library. I was interested enough to lightly consider wanting one, but gadgets like that were kinda out of my parents' price range, and the battery situation certainly didn't help (irony being I now love AA battery devices because rechargeable AAs are finally decent and you can feel pretty confident that you'll always be able to find replacements - kinda wish all mobile devices were AA compatible).

yeah i dont have a charger so its AA for me

any one got burnout paridise remastered on there switch

@Heavyarms55 Out of curiosity, what's your average internet speed now vs. where you lived in Japan?

Apologies for the mini-rant on the one ISP by the way. It was a terrible experience overall. I wasn't surprised when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year. The only ones I feel sorry for are the employees as some of the people I interacted with were friendly and helpful.

me?

@gcunit On Game Boy I played countless hours of Pokemon, on GBA I branched out to Fire Emblem and Advance Wars. Those were the big ones for me. It was an era where I got a new game one a semester, if I had good grades. So I favored long replayable RPGs.

@Tyranexx I honestly don't have numbers to compare them. But I could download 10gb+ games in less than half the time it takes here.

And you don't need to apologize, not like I don't rant from time to time on here. Lol

@Heavyarms55 Lol Fair enough! Download results can be a good evaluator too.

Also, something that could be affecting your speed is if you're in a place where multiple people share the same router at the same time. Depending on what everyone is doing, the connection could be slowed significantly. Especially if there's a lot of streaming and downloading/uploading going on.

@Tyranexx I know. In all honesty I do know this internet isn't terrible. It's just that I had hilariously good internet before. So this is quite the noticeable difference.

@Heavyarms55 Technology has definitely come a long way from the dialup connection I remember using as a kid. I had to ask for permission to use the phone line to get on the internet. I can still distinctly hear the dialup tone. XD Pure nostalgia though. I never want to go back to that.

...Jeez, in writing that paragraph, I realized that I sound a lot like that dude who gushes about technology near the beginning of most Pokemon games. Now I feel old.

For anyone not familiar with the series, I'm talking about this guy:

@Tyranexx I have internet that comes into my house through a phone, is that still a dial up internet?

@Tyranexx Oh I grew up with the same. I used to type in my password then go take a dump and maybe, MAYBE I would be logged in. Remember the days of watching static pictures load? Not videos, pictures?

Heh, I remember dial-up, too, @Tyranexx .... Yep, I remember, @Heavyarms55! Being unable to use the internet because Mum was on the phone, too

@Ninfan No. A dial up connection was when your computer literally had to ring a phone number and do a "hand shake" by audibly "talking" to the computer on the other end. In the 80's you'd have put the handset onto a special modem but by the late 90's modems were built in and you'd just plug the phone line into the computer itself.

If you ever picked up a phone handset when the line was connected to the internet you'd hear lots of "computer noises" (bleeps, whirs and clicks). The actual dial up tone is recognisable and if you lived in the pre-broadband era you'll probably always remember the dial up tone to your own ISP.

I've never seen Bride of Frankenstin, so I was looking for it on youtube, just in case it was on there. Apparently, it's dangerous to go alone, and.... I found this SNL clip instead. And I'm going to keep watching different SNL Halloween clips

I miss Bill Hader on SNL. Jon Ham is good in this.

@Ninfan Definitely not. Wireless data, unless you've hit your limit and your service provider either slows down the data transfer speed or turns it off completely, is faster.

@Heavyarms55 Yes! One of the first sites I'd visit back then (and still habitually do visit) was Serebii, and I recall watching the images, starting with the site banner, slowly load. When we first got broadband (the same basic connection my parents still have, BTW), I was surprised (then) at how much faster it was. I could watch videos without having to wander off and watch them buffer! Pictures wouldn't load with the speed of molasses!

@BruceCM Hence why I had to ask permission! We only had one phone line. Getting another was more than my parents were willing to spend. Other than my mother for basic email checking and web browsing, I was the only one at the time who would use the computer on occasion. Our first machine was a Windows '95, then an XP that lasted almost a decade.

We had Windows 3 for the 1st tower, @Tyranexx .... Then, 95 & after that they went onto laptops, with XP

@BruceCM The '95 was my first experience with a computer. Though I've dealt with a couple of even older ones since. The elementary school I went to had an old Apple computer (No clue what version) that you could play edutainment games on. And I messed around with an emulated version of Windows 1.0 in a college class.

@Tyranexx We had a Windows 95 computer as well (it was an IBM Aptiva), I was around 5 when we first got it. That was the first computer I ever used. We had some games for it too (besides built-in stuff like Solitaire). I remember we had a floppy disk that had Namco arcade games like Pac-Man, Galaxian, and Dig Dug. (I'm sure there was a fourth title, but it's escaping me. lol)

I also used those old Apple computers wayyyyy back in my elementary school days (and of course, they also had edutainment games), and just like you I have no clue what model it was. (Pretty sure it wasn't a Macintosh.) I do remember a power switch that you could flick, it would turn on right away and immediately load whichever software's inside. So it wasn't one of those computers that would begin loading the GUI and desktop like on Windows and Mac. The only colors were black and green, too. That was the oldest computer I remember using, the second oldest being a computer that had Windows 3.11.

So, my boxes that I shipped from Japan to the US finally arrived. Thankfully without issue. So in the end, most everything made the trip without damage. A couple gunpla had some detail problems but mostly? Almost all of my CD cases now have cracks or are just missing chunks. Never realized how brittle those older jewel cases were. Thankfully all the CDs themselves seem fine.

@Tyranexx Oh yeah. I wish I had known about Serebii back then. I only learned of it around the DS era. But yeah, I imagine it was like that.

@BruceCM Yeah, my dad worked at Ford and was getting lots of overtime, so he paid for a second phone line just for AOL dialup. XD