Ideas

Powe

I have lived aboard for most of my life so I speak English, Dutch and Swedish. I'm planning on learning French in the future since it would help day to day living where I live now.

Whereabouts do you live now?

polish is my second language but im not a very fluent speaker i can generally/vaguely understand what someone says based on context clues but my reading skill is like 1/10 and writing is 0/10 hahahaha

Keep at it, you'll get there!

I haven't seen a topic for this on the forum, so I might as well make one.

Languages are one of my biggest interests, and I love being able to speak languages I'm not native in, and be fully immersed in it.

I am bilingual Scots and English (and have been working hard to promote the former), and am learning Italian and Scottish Gaelic.

I feel a huge satisfaction when I learn a new fact or get information in one of those languages without any assistance from a native tongue!

I also plan to learn Ainu, Japanese and Korean one day! Because I'm a bit of a weeb and koreeb. :p

What languages do you guys speak? Do you have any interest in learning more?

Metal

I like the forum as it is, it's just that I rarely see topics I'm interested in. ^^"

I've been trying to find ways to escape Discord, and this forum is a good refuge!

Feathe

I thought it was a Gemini capsule at first. There should be a Gemini mirror! :omg:k:

I just discovered this in one of my surfs across the internet. There was this 3D online chat room in the mid 90s to late 2000s called "Cybertown", and it was pretty revolutionary for it's time!

You had custom 3D avatars, got to explore 3D worlds and chat via text. It was way more limited than the likes of VRChat and Second Life today, but I imagine I'd have loved it if I knew about it at the time! (Though my PC probably couldn't have run it)

From what I've been told, it even had a virtual currency, and they had people do jobs to earn it, which could be used to buy avatar items and furniture for your house. It was like a full digital economy!

There's a revival project going on, though functionality is fairly limited for now, but more is to come.

Anyone here ever used Cybertown back in the day?

Hey, welcome to the forum!

I'm getting into Usenet myself, do you know of any cool active newsgroups?

So, in theory, someone could've made a Lazer Disc based video game console?

Pioneer did, in the early 90s.

You're not too far off with your assumption. Laserdisc was the predecessor to DVD, and many of the technologies behind LD ended up in DVDs.

LDs have an analogue composite signal. It works similar to DVDs, but the pits represent points in a signal rather than bits of data.

The quality I'd say is about the same or even slightly better than DVD in theory, but most films were released in letterboxed format, as opposed to DVD using anamorphic widescreen (where it's only stretched/squeezed horizontally), so most discs won't look as good.

However, a few "squeeze LDs" were released in Japan, and it's said the quality is pretty much exactly the same as a DVD.

There were a few programs released on LD, most notable BBC's Doomsday program. It's said that these LDs stored about 1GB of data per side, so yeah, it was bigger and less space than a DVD.

balloon

Ooo I like the 5th Element disc! That's one of my all time favourite movies

Yeah, I love it! I own it on Widescreen VHS and Laserdisc, and hope to get it on UHD Blu-Ray, too!

Though you have to be careful when getting it on Laserdisc, since it's a known rotter (meaning it's very susceptible to disc-rot), unless you get a Pioneer pressing. (which thankfully I did)

Unfortunately, I never owned a laserdisc player and for a guy that primarily uses steaming to watch movies I don't think it would be much use to buy a laserdisc so I can view for myself.

Yeah, you'd have to be a sucker for old tech and media like me to even be interested, tbh. Especially with the prices players go for now...

However, to add to the conversation I did find a video about HD laserdisc.

Yeah, analogue video was doing HD a full decade and a half before digital got there! Makes me wonder how quickly it would have reached 4K if people didn't ditch it altogether.

Sure. My player is a Pioneer CLD-950. It's a very low end player, and the only one I could afford in the now-inflated market of players, and I need to manually flip the discs, but it does the job! It plays both PAL and NTSC discs, and CLV/CAV.


I've attached a photo of my collection as of right now. I'm on the lookout for a PAL copy of Die Hard.