General Arcade & Retro Chat' Special Championship Edition

I have F1 World Grand Prix but have never seen that sequel, that looks really impressive!

Random thought but are any of you guys still blown away by current internet speeds compared to dial up? I used dial up regularly for about 6-7 years covering everything from downloading MP3s to playing games online, so it's capability still forms a large part of 'the internet' to me as a baseline.

Last night I set an Everdrive torrent to download - 330GB. Basically every console you can imagine and an SD card image set up for it's corresponding Everdrive. Also looks like there's loads of MiSTer stuff in there too.

Woke up this morning and there it was waiting for me, completely downloaded.

I used to average 1MB of a download every 5 minutes on my 56k dial up, which is 83 hours for 1GB, 27,500 hours for that 330GB download.

1,145 days or 3.13 years.

3.13 years of dial up speed in one evening. If you went back in time and showed that to me circa late 90s/early 2000s I think my brain would have instantly vaporised trying to comprehend it!

I was lucky on that one. Installed it first on my laptop in college, much quicker than the ISDN line I had at home.

Also remember when Eircom were advertising ISDN as broadband, while the 64k connection was much better than dial up due to less noise if you wanted to use the 128k connection you got charged double the rate for using both lines.

And then when ADSL did eventually become available they bumped anyone with ISDN to the back of the queue as it required an engineer callout to install.

It was great for downloading larger things from the internet in a more reasonable timeframe, but not something to use for long periods of time. Even the 64k was good as you got a consistent 64k connection while I usually got about 45k on dial up due to line noise.

Getting fixed rate internet in 2005 was a godsend though, reduced the phone charges to about 40% of our dial up monthly rate.

I had ISDN on a residential line without being tied to a business, it may have been that way initially though(iirc the same happened with broadband) as it was installed here in 2002.

At the same time the internet situation was absolutely crap. It was so bad at the time that Microsoft built their own network for the Lepardstown campus.

What ? Ye aren't using Oceanfree.net anymore

Technology is also a lot better these days. UPNP has been around for years yet only last year I bought an app on my phone that will cast any video to my TV. I can torrent a new episode of a show on my phone at 1080p/5.1 in literally 60 seconds and cast it to the TV. No need for Chromecast or Firestick. The pain of having to convert stuff to CD, PSP or iPod back in the day. It didn't seem that long ago when I was leaving the PC on overnight to download the latest weekly American shows on our 6Mb connection...

Now I can download something, go make a coffee and it's ready. No need to transfer stuff to USB or turn the PC on etc.

I remember working nights in a petrol station in the UK as an 18 year old, coming home and putting the internet on and then subsequently falling asleep. Waking up mortified as I'd ran a bill up for nothing, that coupled with my mum making me get a second line for the internet and having to pay those charges.

I always used to hear about the fabled cable internet where anything was possible. No idea on the speeds but it felt like a dream I aspired to.

Not gaming but remembering how I'd used to impress people that I could download a whole album in a few hours.

That and constantly wanting to play half life but my 486 wasn't powerful enough.

You really can't beat those moments where you've fully levelled up your main weapons and waves of enemies are just being obliterated as they approach you. Can nearly step away from your computer and let the game play itself!

Really satisfying stuff though, I keep telling people to buy it, especially as it's practically being given away for free.