1. Forum
  2. Main
  3. General

  • Fairly recent newbie here

    From Vicgchad07 to All on Thu Sep 21 20:20:33 2023
    Howdy, folks.

    So, I'd bought a WiRSA modem kit off of eBay about a month ago and used all my remaining solder in my workshop to piece it together.
    So far, the WiFi to serial connection does what it should with little to no issues (the firmware updates are hit-or-miss as far as downloading is concerned).

    Anyway, I'm 32 years old and an avid user of Windows versions prior to Windows 10. When I'm not fixing up arcade machines at the local Chuck E. Cheese's where I work, I tinker with older technology (and use it unironically afterward to cheese off my coworkers :P ).
    One example is right here: this IBM PC 300XL I'm restoring and using to connect to Synchronet.
    I did have to resort to a CompactFlash to IDE adapter as I made the grand mistake of buying a pre-owned hard disk rather than refurbished...and thus had nothing to access BBSes with for a good two weeks.

    My goal this year is to make identical retro builds for my mom, my sister, and my brother for their birthdays or Christmas.

    Anyway, gotta catch up on laundry before heading to bed for a grueling work day. Toodles. :D
  • From Scoop140 to Vicgchad07 on Thu Sep 21 21:31:53 2023
    Re: Fairly recent newbie here
    By: Vicgchad07 to All on Thu Sep 21 2023 08:20 pm

    Greetings!

    I also bought one of those WiRSa modems from eBay recently. It's pretty neat since it allows me to use my Wincor Nixdorf Beetle (running Windows 98) to sign on to the BBS. I probably don't have something configured right though. I'm running at 1200 baud and still get lots of strange characters when I type. Oh well. I'll get it worked out, hopefully.
  • From anthk@anthk0@synchro.net to Vicgchad07 on Mon Nov 13 01:16:45 2023
    On 2023-09-22, Vicgchad07 <vicgchad07@vert.synchro.net> wrote:

    Howdy, folks.

    So, I'd bought a WiRSA modem kit off of eBay about a month ago and used all my remaining solder in my workshop to piece it together.
    So far, the WiFi to serial connection does what it should with little to no issues (the firmware updates are hit-or-miss as far as downloading is concerned).

    Anyway, I'm 32 years old and an avid user of Windows versions prior to Windows 10. When I'm not fixing up arcade machines at the local Chuck E. Cheese's where I work, I tinker with older technology (and use it unironically afterward to cheese off my coworkers :P ).
    One example is right here: this IBM PC 300XL I'm restoring and using to connect to Synchronet.
    I did have to resort to a CompactFlash to IDE adapter as I made the grand mistake of buying a pre-owned hard disk rather than refurbished...and thus had nothing to access BBSes with for a good two weeks.

    My goal this year is to make identical retro builds for my mom, my sister, and my brother for their birthdays or Christmas.

    Anyway, gotta catch up on laundry before heading to bed for a grueling work day. Toodles. :D

    36yo here. Not an ultimately BBS user, as I am posting thru the Usenet gateway to the Dove/FIDO networks, but as with Usenet, you can always find interesting technical conversations out there. I don't use Win9x any more since a few decades, but you can fetch retrozilla from here:

    http://piteusz.ovh/files/windows/9x-nt/

    and visit lots of modern sites among Gopher holes (I suggest you gopher://magical.fish, gopher://floodgap.org and gopher://mozz.us
    as starting points).

    People call me retro or outdated, but I can fetch news and resources
    with 1/50 of the bandwidth. And, even better, RSS's, Usenet posts and
    BBS' threads can be stored offline and be read anywhere.

    On arcades, once I've got MAME since early OO's I didn't spend money
    or resouces on that as most games ran fine on a simple Athlon XP.
    Nowadays MAME requieres a Core Duo to properly emulate the games,
    but there's always AdvanceMAME/AdvanceMESS.