Ask Lemmy

4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42

The "Turbo" button on a 486 PC was actually a CPU clock speed limiter. It was necessary to play older games who had a hardcoded framerate that depended on clock cycles, because they would otherwise run too fast.
But for marketing reasons, IBM labelled the toggle as "turbo" instead of a speed limiter.

Morrowind on the original Xbox came with cheat codes. Put the cursor over the health, magicka, or fatigue bar, enter the codes with the black and white buttons then hold A until the bar fills. If you close the menu before you let go of A, it will continue to refill constantly until you open your menu again.

Health: B, W, B, B, B, A

Magicka: B, W, W, B, W, A

Fatigue: B, B, W, W, B, A

You could actually use the magicka code for all 3, but I liked that there were 3 different codes.

in GTA 2, naming your player "GOURANGA" activates the cheat code mode. "IAMDAVEJ" gives you all guns.

in half-life 2, typing ent_fire !picker in the console makes the thing you are looking at catch fire. it's also the base command for a lot of other things; if you're looking at a door and add "unlock" to the command, the door will open.

when stacking firewood, always put the pieces with the bark facing up. that way, rain can't get the wood wet, and the logs dry quicker.

paper maps fold long side first.

the modern graphical interface of the personal computer was developed by Xerox and plagiarized by Steve jobs after he got a factory tour in 1972, but he missed the most important part of the computer that he saw: it was fully networked using what we today call Ethernet.

Loading a program from disk on the Commodore 64

LOAD"*",8,1

I haven't loaded a game on that system since I was probably 10 or so, but I'll never forget the command.

I memorized it as L-O-A-D shift-2 star shift-2 comma eight comma one.

doom cheat codes:
IDDQD, god mode
IDKFA, ammo
IDSPISPOPD, no clip i think

Donkey kong country on SNES

B A R R A L on the save game selection menu

My ICQ number; various employee numbers and alarm codes long since changed from previous jobs; procedures and rules from those jobs; all kinds of cheat codes from games that I no longer play or own; various old computer protocols, port names/numbers, etc. that no longer matter; and I'm sure more stuff (and some other stuff that, living in Japan, isn't relevant to anyone here).

The password for the final level of Crazy Castle on the Gameboy is GIFT.

(I have a friend with hyperthymesia and this was the last thing we spoke about)

Iddqd

Rosebud

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3.14159265359 (ok the last 9 is actually an 8 but it's followed by a 9 so I round up).

Not exactly obsolete, but there's no reason for anyone to memorize that many digits of Pi except for trivia. Number of times it has come up in trivia: 0.

The 7 names of the antique greek Muses:

Calliope
Clio
Polyhymnia
Euterpe
Terpsichore
Erato
Melpomene
Thalia
Urania

ZAPHODBEEBLEBROX is the code for level select in the wonderful game “The 7th Guest”.

I might as well go first. A friend read this to me once over the phone in 1997 or thereabouts, and it stuck:
Cracked
09B9085A

..Sadly, winzip stopped accepting that as a valid reg key some time in the 2000's.

Back when wr used parallel IDE, most motherboards only had two IDE connections. Each connection could support two devices, a master and a slave. If you had a hard drive and a CD-ROM, it was best to put them on separate channels. This is because only one device could talk at a time, and the slower CD-ROM would block the faster hard drive from operating. If you had to put them on the same channel, then the hard drive should be the master so it gets priority.

Then there's scsi. My family wasn't rich enough to have scsi shit when I was growing up, but I do know a few things. On paper, it's very simple; give each device a unique ID on the bus, and then attach terminator blocks at each end. I'm also aware that, in practice, this description is a cruel joke.

down, right, left, right, square, circle, square, triangle, circle, square, right, left

The level select code for Abe's Oddysee on the PSX. The last time I actually used this code was probably some time around 2002, maybe even earlier.

UUDDLRLRBA

The model codes to 2nd and 3rd Gen Intel I series chips. Made figuring out what processors were in used laptops quite easy back in the day. Now I have to Google them (doesn't help that their naming scheme is more confusing).

The idqdd for the game ChexQuest (which ran on that engine) was "charlesjacobi". I assume this was a dev's name.

L1 R2 R1 R2 left down right up left down right up