Awesome! I look forward to hearing your adventures with it
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eBay bargains - what's your latest conquest?
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Congrats! I'd also have paid the extra $20 for the PSU and RAM - saves you having to then source them and I think the cost would've more than $20.
I've been using that driver with my Macs for over a decade! I love it, especially for sessions of Street Fighter II via MAME. Curiously though, it doesn't work on my Mac Mini G4 and I have to use a Thrustmaster gamepad instead. Perhaps something is different with the USB hardware on those machines...
Still regret selling mine earlier this year and buying an Xbox One controller. The buttons are so sticky, and I'm just used to the 360 one after all these years.
I agree on the pricing, basically everything I’ve been looking at would’ve easily been over $100 for the equivalent specs.
Thanks for telling me your experience, what happens with the mini? Is is it an official Microsoft brand controller? Is it just not detected at all?
The 360 controller is one of the best controller designs ever. Super cheap at the moment, you should pick another one up. Here’s the exact listing I used for the new old stock.
USB Wired Game Controller Gamepad for Microsoft XBOX 360 & PC WIN 7 8 10 | eBay
Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for USB Wired Game Controller Gamepad for Microsoft XBOX 360 & PC WIN 7 8 10 at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!
www.ebay.com
I've bought things and doubted myself and then other people around me were incredulous at my attitude and chided me for failing to recognise that the price was right. A classic case was when I bought a legal copy of Parallels for £2 GBP.
It's an official MS Xbox 360 controller and it works with everything else using the Tattiebogle driver: desktop or laptop, PPC and Intel with Tiger, Snow Leopard, Mavericks, El Capitan etc but it will not play ball on my Mini G4 - no matter whatever troubleshooting measures are attempted - including reinstalling Tiger from scratch and testing every single release that's compatible with PPC and Tiger. As I discussed here, the controller appears within System Report but there's no activity from the controller's green LED and it's not detected in the System Preferences pane utility.
Totally agree! I've never been a great fan of Microsoft's products (full disclosure, I own an Xbox 360) and I was initially apprehensive when I purchased the controller but the responsiveness of the analogue joystick immediately won me over and I was forced to concede that they or whoever they contracted to design the controller for them really outdid themselves.
I’ll have to look at the usb debugger thing and see what’s going on with the mini.I've bought things and doubted myself and then other people around me were incredulous at my attitude and chided me for failing to recognise that the price was right. A classic case was when I bought a legal copy of Parallels for £2 GBP.
It's an official MS Xbox 360 controller and it works with everything else using the Tattiebogle driver: desktop or laptop, PPC and Intel with Tiger, Snow Leopard, Mavericks, El Capitan etc but it will not play ball on my Mini G4 - no matter whatever troubleshooting measures are attempted - including reinstalling Tiger from scratch and testing every single release that's compatible with PPC and Tiger. As I discussed here, the controller appears within System Report but there's no activity from the controller's green LED and it's not detected in the System Preferences pane utility.
Totally agree! I've never been a great fan of Microsoft's products (full disclosure, I own an Xbox 360) and I was initially apprehensive when I purchased the controller but the responsiveness of the analogue joystick immediately won me over and I was forced to concede that they or whoever they contracted to design the controller for them really outdid themselves.
I’m in the same boat, the 360 is a really good console, it’s a shame there’s no software hacks for the latest dashboard. I might have to get another 360 and try soldering the RGH thing in the distant future when I have more money to spend on that type of thing.
Semi related to this forum, I found something neat about turning a retail G5 into one of those dev kits Microsoft had people use before the 360 hardware was ready here. It’s funny people at E3 were playing with G5 power macs, hidden so poorly they got exposed.
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Oh wow, thanks! 😮
This is very interesting, I'd written off the 360 in this respect because unlike my Wii, Wii-U and PS3 it didn't seem that there was much potential for modding and homebrewing.
Thanks for sharing this - I suppose it makes sense that it should be possible to convert a retail G5 for this purpose because the development machines were essentially a variation on the hardware. If I was proficient in coding, I'd be tempted to see if I could write something (relatively) simple like Pong or perhaps even Space Invaders! I had no idea that MS used the G5's as stand-in's. This information makes it even more annoying that the G5's are derided by many quarters as "useless" etc.
GTA 5 was made for G5 based consoles before being ported to Windows x86_64, how insane is that.
@alex_free @TheShortTimer Physically speaking, I am of the opinion that the shape of the GameCube controller is the greatest one ever. It almost melts into the contours of your hands, like butter.
Layout wise though, I am a fan of the DualShock 2 design. Nintendo clearly drew out the GameCube controller's button layout with 3D platforming in mind and little else - which was actually the case if you do some digging into the development cycle of Luigi's Mansion; the dev team had a major hand in deciding the controller's button and stick placement while working on the game.
Sony Computer Entertainment on the other hand, simply reused the already great design of the original DualShock (itself based off of the SNES controller) many times with little modification before rethinking it with the PS5, just because it was so versatile on its own.
Layout wise though, I am a fan of the DualShock 2 design. Nintendo clearly drew out the GameCube controller's button layout with 3D platforming in mind and little else - which was actually the case if you do some digging into the development cycle of Luigi's Mansion; the dev team had a major hand in deciding the controller's button and stick placement while working on the game.
Sony Computer Entertainment on the other hand, simply reused the already great design of the original DualShock (itself based off of the SNES controller) many times with little modification before rethinking it with the PS5, just because it was so versatile on its own.
It may not seem like much, but I did just pick one of these up, all to adapt a 30 year old keyboard, one that landed in my lap but seems utterly obsessed over in the retro mechanical keyboard community (Alps SKCM Blue switches, ANSI layout, N-key rollover) to usb.
Funny thing is, I found the keyboard in a friend's parents garage close to 20 years ago in a whole bunch of old, even for the early 2000's, computer equipment. Never mind the fact that you never know what you'll find if you go looking, sometimes you don't even know what you already have.
The only problem is that there's not a lot of "up" to go from when you have a Leading Edge DC-3014, apparently. Talk about 1st world problems.
And best of all, the adaptor came with a good nice and thick 6-foot usb cable.
Funny thing is, I found the keyboard in a friend's parents garage close to 20 years ago in a whole bunch of old, even for the early 2000's, computer equipment. Never mind the fact that you never know what you'll find if you go looking, sometimes you don't even know what you already have.
The only problem is that there's not a lot of "up" to go from when you have a Leading Edge DC-3014, apparently. Talk about 1st world problems.
And best of all, the adaptor came with a good nice and thick 6-foot usb cable.
Here's some of my latest acquisitions - none of them are related to PPC though so please bear with me.
So back in 2000, Casio said "Let's integrate a digital camera into a wristwatch" and the result of that was the WQV series. This WQV-1 takes 16-greyscale images at a whopping 120×120 resolution -that's 14,400 pixels- and uses an infrared port to beam images to a PC (using a provided serial cradle and software) or another WQV. It's got 1 MB of built-in memory good enough for holding 100 images. A perfect example of the "practically useless but undeniably cool" category of tech.
This cute thing is a 2-inch "video floppy" used by analog still video cameras that were a thing in the 1980s. There was also a 1989 laptop that used an incompatible variant of these for data storage, squeezing 793 KB onto them. It's a bit sad that they didn't see more widespread adoption IMHO since they're a lot smaller than 3.5" floppies.
This behemoth is from 1996 - Sony's first truly portable digital camera, the DKC-ID1. I love that it pretty much looks like an analog 35mm camera, complete with camcorder-style batteries and AC adaptor. It has a seemingly uncommon 768×576 resolution (442,368 pixels); until you realise that this happens to be similar to the PAL TV resolution (702×576 or 720×576).
The LCD shows the number of pictures recorded or left and important settings. The viewfinder is electronic i.e. a tiny colour LCD and also allows to "play" (view) the recorded images.
Yep, this thing's got a 12× optical zoom.
Unsurprisingly, it uses full-size PCMCIA ATA Flash cards - the microSD card is shown for size comparison. I also got a 10 MB SanDisk card (which probably cost a small fortune back then) in addition to this one.
So how do you get pictures off this monster? You could remove the flash card and put it into a laptop's PCMCIA slot or use a card reader. Or just connect the camera to the computer via... USB? LOL. Serial? ROFLMAO. Parallel? Stop, I'm dying from laughter.
SCSI or bust! The DIP switches are for setting the ID, termination etc. - and, curiously, for entering the "Set Date and Time" mode.
So back in 2000, Casio said "Let's integrate a digital camera into a wristwatch" and the result of that was the WQV series. This WQV-1 takes 16-greyscale images at a whopping 120×120 resolution -that's 14,400 pixels- and uses an infrared port to beam images to a PC (using a provided serial cradle and software) or another WQV. It's got 1 MB of built-in memory good enough for holding 100 images. A perfect example of the "practically useless but undeniably cool" category of tech.
This cute thing is a 2-inch "video floppy" used by analog still video cameras that were a thing in the 1980s. There was also a 1989 laptop that used an incompatible variant of these for data storage, squeezing 793 KB onto them. It's a bit sad that they didn't see more widespread adoption IMHO since they're a lot smaller than 3.5" floppies.
This behemoth is from 1996 - Sony's first truly portable digital camera, the DKC-ID1. I love that it pretty much looks like an analog 35mm camera, complete with camcorder-style batteries and AC adaptor. It has a seemingly uncommon 768×576 resolution (442,368 pixels); until you realise that this happens to be similar to the PAL TV resolution (702×576 or 720×576).
The LCD shows the number of pictures recorded or left and important settings. The viewfinder is electronic i.e. a tiny colour LCD and also allows to "play" (view) the recorded images.
Yep, this thing's got a 12× optical zoom.
Unsurprisingly, it uses full-size PCMCIA ATA Flash cards - the microSD card is shown for size comparison. I also got a 10 MB SanDisk card (which probably cost a small fortune back then) in addition to this one.
So how do you get pictures off this monster? You could remove the flash card and put it into a laptop's PCMCIA slot or use a card reader. Or just connect the camera to the computer via... USB? LOL. Serial? ROFLMAO. Parallel? Stop, I'm dying from laughter.
SCSI or bust!
The DIP switches are for setting the ID, termination etc. - and, curiously, for entering the "Set Date and Time" mode.
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Brilliant!
I had a WQV-1 with steel bracelet when it came out - using a third party driver I could pair it via infrared to my Nokia 9110i Communicator and email or upload with FTP.
I still have a photo from it that I treasure - capturing the moment my 2 year old spotted a housefly in the room (she was frightened of them at the time!)
I also remember analogue still video cameras - though had no hope of getting one in 1982 as I was 12
Ah yep, I've seen that —there's also software that pairs with Palms and PocketPCs — I've got to give this a try with my Palm IIIx. Seemingly no software for my 9210 though.
That's so cute
I'm also toying with the idea of getting a Gameboy Camera — though while the camera module itself is cheap, Gameboys definitely aren't anymore...I wasn't even born in 1982 but my grandpa (RIP) was an avid filmer, which is probably why I have a steady interest in camcorders. I got my first camcorder (an early-1990s VHS machine) when I was about 12 or so and the thing was so heavy on my shoulder that I could barely support itI also remember analogue still video cameras - though had no hope of getting one in 1982 as I was 12
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So got a chance to test the controller with the mini on Tiger, no dice.
On the 2005 iBook G4, no dice on Tiger as well. I had to use the first version of the driver on Leopard to get it to work. I tried the last leopard compatible version but that didn’t work. Did not try other versions, but that first version did work with the nightly sm64ex build.
Thanks for checking and trying.
It's interesting that you were able to find at least one working driver in the case of the iBook G4 and under Leopard. I wonder if there's some issue with the USB hardware on the Mini G4 and iBook G4 (and their OS drivers) that causes problems with the controller?
Not an eBay bargain, but a bargain nonetheless: I happened to be in my uni's bookstore the other day, and stumbled across this:
It's a FireWire 800 to/from FireWire 400 adapter cable. Nobody but us old Mac geeks has any use for FireWire any more, especially an adapter like this. Why they had it was a mystery to me, but apparently it had been there a loooong time - long enough for its original price of $34.95 to be marked all the way down to $0.50!
I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Not like it's a gold nugget or anything, but I use these things, and there's no way I'm picking one up anywhere for less than ~15x-20x what they were asking. And then I'd have to wait for someone to ship it to me. So, I happily forked over the 50 cents!
And that is absolutely the only time I've ever walked out of a college bookstore feeling like I got a good deal. Quite the cathartic experience.
It's a FireWire 800 to/from FireWire 400 adapter cable. Nobody but us old Mac geeks has any use for FireWire any more, especially an adapter like this. Why they had it was a mystery to me, but apparently it had been there a loooong time - long enough for its original price of $34.95 to be marked all the way down to $0.50!
I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Not like it's a gold nugget or anything, but I use these things, and there's no way I'm picking one up anywhere for less than ~15x-20x what they were asking. And then I'd have to wait for someone to ship it to me. So, I happily forked over the 50 cents!
And that is absolutely the only time I've ever walked out of a college bookstore feeling like I got a good deal. Quite the cathartic experience.
That's definitely a bargain! I found one of these and a FW400 cable on top of a dumpster one night and I didn't hesitate to grab them: they worked and I've been using them for years for TDM's between Macs with differing FW ports and HDD connectivity/daisy chaining - especially with FW400 and 800 external drives. Whenever I see these cables in thrift stores, I always grab them because you can never have too many.
This one did come from eBay, and it's long overdue here. I'm on break from law school right now, so I can catch up on unimportant cool stuff that I hadn't been able to get to. So, from back in July, here's my first ever iBook G4, the latest, greatest 1.42 GHz 14-inch:
It's a bit grungy, as I haven't gotten around to cleaning the outside yet. Or taking it apart, cleaning, repasting and upgrading the inside, which is still on the agenda. Apart from slapping a spare 512MB stick of RAM in there, I've done nothing to it. It still has the original 4200 rpm HDD inside, and you'd think it would be unbearably slow with that and just the 1 GB of RAM. But it's not, it handles Leopard just fine, and wicknix's Lubuntu 16.04 remix just a little slower.
I've never been an iBook fan, but couldn't pass this one up. I kept running into it on eBay in searches for PowerBooks, and each time the price got lower and lower, until it finally hit $20 and I couldn't say no. I had to pay shipping, but that wasn't too bad. When I got it, I opened up the box and was like, "Oh. Yeah. No wonder I never liked these things." Because it just seemed a bland chunk of plastic to me - but I've since learned to appreciate its charms. This iBook is solid and sturdy, the design has grown on me, and what I like best is that - unlike every aluminum PowerBook I've ever owned - I can handle this thing and tote it around everywhere without a care in the world. I don't have to worry about scratches and dents. I don't have to worry about preserving its value, because there's a million of them out there. It's a carefree pleasure to use, and I've grown to love having a knockabout computer again.
From what I can tell of the hard drive contents, this used to be a teacher's computer in a public school district in California. It's dirty, but I'm pretty sure I can get most of that grime off with some elbow grease. I got it cheap because the seller took such crappy photos that nobody else was willing to take a chance. I've used this tactic a lot on eBay, and rarely am I disappointed. You can usually tell the difference between photos taken by someone who just doesn't have the time, inclination or eye for presentation to produce a decent image, and those taken by someone deliberately trying to conceal something. I avoid the latter like the plague, but don't let the former discourage me if the deal seems good.
It's a bit grungy, as I haven't gotten around to cleaning the outside yet. Or taking it apart, cleaning, repasting and upgrading the inside, which is still on the agenda. Apart from slapping a spare 512MB stick of RAM in there, I've done nothing to it. It still has the original 4200 rpm HDD inside, and you'd think it would be unbearably slow with that and just the 1 GB of RAM. But it's not, it handles Leopard just fine, and wicknix's Lubuntu 16.04 remix just a little slower.
I've never been an iBook fan, but couldn't pass this one up. I kept running into it on eBay in searches for PowerBooks, and each time the price got lower and lower, until it finally hit $20 and I couldn't say no. I had to pay shipping, but that wasn't too bad. When I got it, I opened up the box and was like, "Oh. Yeah. No wonder I never liked these things." Because it just seemed a bland chunk of plastic to me - but I've since learned to appreciate its charms. This iBook is solid and sturdy, the design has grown on me, and what I like best is that - unlike every aluminum PowerBook I've ever owned - I can handle this thing and tote it around everywhere without a care in the world. I don't have to worry about scratches and dents. I don't have to worry about preserving its value, because there's a million of them out there. It's a carefree pleasure to use, and I've grown to love having a knockabout computer again.
From what I can tell of the hard drive contents, this used to be a teacher's computer in a public school district in California. It's dirty, but I'm pretty sure I can get most of that grime off with some elbow grease. I got it cheap because the seller took such crappy photos that nobody else was willing to take a chance. I've used this tactic a lot on eBay, and rarely am I disappointed. You can usually tell the difference between photos taken by someone who just doesn't have the time, inclination or eye for presentation to produce a decent image, and those taken by someone deliberately trying to conceal something. I avoid the latter like the plague, but don't let the former discourage me if the deal seems good.
LOL, that's how we got our house. On all the sale sites the pictures were trash. They were scans of physical photos, and they were all off center and cut off and showed essentially nothing. We took a chance and visited and here we are.
If they were that lackadaisical taking photos of a prime asset to sell, I hope they didn't do too much in the way of home improvements.
Oi! How do you suppose peeps get videos from their MiniDV camcorders into their computers?
Oh, wait...
As I've mentioned before, I use the A/V pass-through FireWire mode on my MiniDV camcorder as a quick and dirty (but in a good way) method to capture from PAL sources straight into my Macs. It's a walk in the park for when I want to record a gaming session from machines that have S-Video or in the case of my UK N64, just composite video. It's a major contributor (along with TDM) as the reason why every Mac I own: bar the iMac G3 - has FireWire ports.So here's a little oddity I picked up.
Let's say it's 2009 or so and you want to buy a music album. Easy-peasy. But you want it as MP3 files. No problem either, right? Just get a digital album from an online store. But what if you want to buy an MP3 album in physical form - from a retail store? Hm. This is what SanDisk came up with in search of a solution to this perhaps quite obscure question:
They really blew the packaging IMO - they should have used a CD jewelcase with the album cover occupying all of the front, just like on a CD or vinyl record.
This is what you get inside - the booklet looks to have come from the CD release, a card reader and a carrying case that's way too large for the actual medium. At least it has the artist and album name on it (not the full album cover though).
And that's it. A 1 GB microSD card with the bland SlotMusic logo on it. What about actually printing the album cover on it? And they actually tout the fact that the MP3s aren't occupying all the space as a feature - "Look - you can even put your own files on it!"
At least those MP3s are 320kbps.
Let's say it's 2009 or so and you want to buy a music album. Easy-peasy. But you want it as MP3 files. No problem either, right? Just get a digital album from an online store. But what if you want to buy an MP3 album in physical form - from a retail store? Hm. This is what SanDisk came up with in search of a solution to this perhaps quite obscure question:
They really blew the packaging IMO - they should have used a CD jewelcase with the album cover occupying all of the front, just like on a CD or vinyl record.
This is what you get inside - the booklet looks to have come from the CD release, a card reader and a carrying case that's way too large for the actual medium. At least it has the artist and album name on it (not the full album cover though).
And that's it. A 1 GB microSD card with the bland SlotMusic logo on it. What about actually printing the album cover on it? And they actually tout the fact that the MP3s aren't occupying all the space as a feature - "Look - you can even put your own files on it!"
At least those MP3s are 320kbps.
@Amethyst1 thanks for sharing that find, I had no idea that this product even existed: very interesting!
Here's an update to this post from a couple of months ago where I mentioned purchasing this classic 80s computer for the grand total of £5 GBP:
Here it is, after a good clean!
I plugged it in and it powered up fine. There was one issue in that (presumably due to age) a RAM chip had failed but a replacement for £1.50 GBP easily and quickly solved that problem.
A memory test in BASIC (I was a bit out of practice with using that!) confirmed that the full RAM had been restored and so I loaded up some games as a reward. I can't be bothered to faff around with looking for cassettes and a portable tape deck when there are much better options nowadays such as using an Android phone with an online repository as a data source. A 3.5mm stereo cable connecting the headphone socket to the computer's audio in port was all I needed.
£5 GBP (the seller also threw in some other retro tech too, which would individually fetch much more than £5 GBP) and all it needed was one RAM chip replaced and even that cost me a pittance! Evidence that bargains can still be found for retro tech on eBay - with a little bit of patience, perseverance and luck.
Here's an update to this post from a couple of months ago where I mentioned purchasing this classic 80s computer for the grand total of £5 GBP:
Here it is, after a good clean!
I plugged it in and it powered up fine. There was one issue in that (presumably due to age) a RAM chip had failed but a replacement for £1.50 GBP easily and quickly solved that problem.
A memory test in BASIC (I was a bit out of practice with using that!) confirmed that the full RAM had been restored and so I loaded up some games as a reward. I can't be bothered to faff around with looking for cassettes and a portable tape deck when there are much better options nowadays such as using an Android phone with an online repository as a data source. A 3.5mm stereo cable connecting the headphone socket to the computer's audio in port was all I needed.
£5 GBP (the seller also threw in some other retro tech too, which would individually fetch much more than £5 GBP) and all it needed was one RAM chip replaced and even that cost me a pittance! Evidence that bargains can still be found for retro tech on eBay - with a little bit of patience, perseverance and luck.