a new hobby of mine is finding old PCs and getting some linux distro running on them. I started doing this after getting into some youtube content where people refurbish 90s PCs to either get Linux or community rebuilds of old Windows OS’ going on them and seeing what modern or close to modern software they can run. THEN you get into a rabbit hole of finding VERY interesting projects of people still maintaining like ancient versions of firefox for example.
There’s a sort of cozy comfort to it. getting a mid to late 90s PC going again, booting it up, and hearing the Windows 95 startup sound just instantly sends me back to my childhood. And the thing is this tech surprisingly holds up after some 30 to 40 years much better than modern tech.
A fun new project I’m working on is hooking an old floppy drive up to a modern PC and using it to start games on steam. I saw a short video of that recently where a guy had all these floppy disks labeled with like Counter Strike 2 or Marvel Rivals which he would pop into a floppy drive hooked up to his PC and when the floppy was inserted it simply started the game. It’s nothing complicated at all. It’s just putting a very simple like bash script onto a floppy disk to simply tell it to start a specific game via steam when the disk is mounted. Why am I doing this? man I miss putting physical media into a PC to start a game. having one of those old floppy disk containers and flipping through them all to find a game to play.
a new hobby of mine is finding old PCs and getting some linux distro running on them. I started doing this after getting into some youtube content where people refurbish 90s PCs to either get Linux or community rebuilds of old Windows OS’ going on them and seeing what modern or close to modern software they can run. THEN you get into a rabbit hole of finding VERY interesting projects of people still maintaining like ancient versions of firefox for example.
There’s a sort of cozy comfort to it. getting a mid to late 90s PC going again, booting it up, and hearing the Windows 95 startup sound just instantly sends me back to my childhood. And the thing is this tech surprisingly holds up after some 30 to 40 years much better than modern tech.
A fun new project I’m working on is hooking an old floppy drive up to a modern PC and using it to start games on steam. I saw a short video of that recently where a guy had all these floppy disks labeled with like Counter Strike 2 or Marvel Rivals which he would pop into a floppy drive hooked up to his PC and when the floppy was inserted it simply started the game. It’s nothing complicated at all. It’s just putting a very simple like bash script onto a floppy disk to simply tell it to start a specific game via steam when the disk is mounted. Why am I doing this? man I miss putting physical media into a PC to start a game. having one of those old floppy disk containers and flipping through them all to find a game to play.