168 168 Never Quit

Greetings! And welcome to an LGR Thing returning to the mountain top, the MIDI Mountain that we put together, I don’t know, is it was like a year or two ago or something. Oh good grief, 2017 was four years ago. So anyway, I guess it’s been a while, but you know, I still use it every so often. Maybe not in its full form, but there’s a reason for that. And that’s because it’s a MIDI mountain! It’s just a stack of MIDI devices that aren’t really connected except via cables, and anytime that I would like to use it. I have to bring the whole setup out or parts of it out. And normally that’s what I ended up doing, if I’m honest.  I just bring one or two components out as needed, and then it’s not a MIDI mountain anymore, it’s just a regular old MIDI set setup for retro computers. And the thing with these devices here, most of them anyway, everything but the MT-32, is that they are all 1U half rack devices, which means that they fit horizontally. So that got me thinking, Why don’t I jus...

Greetings folks, and today on LGR I am proud to present the fabled AdLib Gold 1000 Stereo Sound Adapter. An IBM PC-compatible sound card which, after multiple delays, launched at a suggested price of $299 in the US sometime in late 1992. More or less, its release is a bit complicated but we’ll get to that. For now lemme just go ahead and say how much I’m freak in’ out with excitement recording this footage. Cuz dude, seeing an AdLib Gold in person, still in the box, unused? Among retro PC enthusiasts, that’s like finding a golden unicorn that craps diamonds, it’s just not a thing. Yet here it is, looking’ spiffy! And it’s all thanks to Trixter, aka Jim Leonard of The Old-school PC, Check out his YouTube channel if you’re into this kind of thing too, the man’s a fountain of knowledge and some of the items in his collection are literally one of a kind. Not the least of which being this pristine AdLib Gold 1000, a card that I’ve been wondering about ever since I was eight years old lookin...

Greetings, and welcome to LGR Odd ware, that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete, like this thing here, the Yamaha Disc system, or rather the drive that allowed it to happen in the early 2000s. And yeah it’s kind of just a CD-RW, but its whole gimmick was the fact that you could burn, or ink, tattoos directly onto your CD-R media, not the label side, the data side.  Let’s check it out. All right, so let’s take a closer look at the Yamaha CRW-F1, or more precisely the external SCSI version known as the F1SX. Yamaha made multiple models, external and internal, many of which cost less than this one, but they all had the Disclaser labeling system built in. Draw images on your discs. Mm. And this model cost a whopping $279.99 . Internal versions cost less, but on average they were all more expensive than the other CD-RW options when it released on July 15th, 2002. As if I really needed to say 2002, though. I mean, just take one look at that  sign in the name there and, yeah, 2002 indee...

Greetings, and welcome to LGR Odd ware, where were taking a look at hardware and software that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete. And this time around, it is this thing right here, the NEC PC-FXGA the DOS/V variant. A rather obscure version of an obscure expansion card for rather obscure console. It’s just obscurity all the way down. This one in particular is meant to take PC-FX console games and play them on your personal computer running MS-DOS through an ISA card amongst some other things. Hence the GA part of it. This is a fascinating device. Let’s jump right into it. Alrighty! So this lovely long beast right here is the NEC PC-FXGA . What is effectively an NEC PC-FX game console from 1994 on an ISA card, with GA standing for game accelerator. And this thing sold for 000 upon its Japan-only launch date in December of 1995, the equivalent of around $450 US at the time. So, not cheap by any means, especially seeing that it didn’t come with everything you needed to get the thing running...