What obsolete knowledge do you know by heart, and would like to share?

To tell the age of any horse Inspect the lower jaw of course; The six front teeth the tale will tell, And every doubt and fear dispel.

Two middle nippers you behold Before the colt is two weeks old; Before eight weeks two more will come Eight months: the corners cut the gum.

At two the middle "Nippers" drop: At three the second pair can't stop; When four years old the third pair goes, At five a full new set he shows.

The deep black spots will pass from view At six years from the middle two; The second pair at seven years; At eight the spot each corner clears.

From the middle "Nippers" upper jaw At nine the black spots will withdraw. The second pair at ten are bright; Eleven finds the corners light.

As time goes on the horsemen know The oval teeth three-sided grow; Then longer get - project before - Till twenty, when they know no more."

The phrase "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" comes from this. If someone gives you a horse, you shouldn't look into its mouth to see how old it is because, hey, free horse.

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.

Fun fact: There's a common misconception that this would load the first program on a disk, but it actually loads the most recently loaded program from the disk. If the disk is detected as being freshly inserted (as determined by the 2-character identifier in the disk's directory header), that defaulted to the first program in the disk's directory.

Admittedly, most of the time that makes it a distinction without a difference, but if you'd loaded something else from the same disk first, and you then wanted to load the first in the directory, you would need to use LOAD":*",8,1 instead.

That extra colon is vaguely related to the colon in C:\ on Windows computers. A lone colon was taken as an abbreviation of 0:, because in Commodore DOS(es) the drive "letters" were numbers. Dual slot drives were possible and then the two slots were 0: and 1:.

"So what's the 8 for in the LOAD command?" you might ask; "Isn't that the drive "letter" "? No, that's the device number. Note that drives on the 8-bit Commodores were always external. The 8 was more like the drive's "IP address" on the serial bus.

"What about the ,1?" That meant to LOAD the program at the memory address specified by the program's header on the disk. Without that, the computer would ignore the header and try to load into BASIC memory.

The neat part about loading at any address meant that it could overwrite parts of zero-page where the computer kept pointers to important internal functions. Overwrite the right one of those and the computer could be convinced to jump to a routine in the program that had just loaded without the user needing to type RUN.

So, if you wanted to be i) certain of loading the first program in the directory of ii) the disk in the second slot of iii) a dual-slot drive on the serial bus identifying as device/address 9, and then iv) have the program load at its preferred memory location, you'd need to use LOAD"1:*",9,1

The number of people who found the need to type that command in earnest, even back in the heyday of Commodore, probably numbers in the low tens, but there it is.

How's that for an obscure info dump?
- You're the person I enjoy talking with at parties.
I choose to believe that the * means everything... but what does the 8,1 signify?
- There's another user who replied to me who answered much better than I could.
Along these lines, I have several important memory locations memorized. POKE 53280 and 1 to change the border and background colors. 828 is the cassette buffer, and 49152 the free memory above BASIC ROM. SYS 64738 resets the machine.

I also can recite the powers of 2 up to 65536.

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

SPISPOPD stands for 'Smashing pumpkins into small piles of putrid debris'.

Back in the usenet days I remember someone making a crappy freeware game with that title.

That's right, a cheat code in a game inspired the creation of another game.
- The cheat code was inspired by a Usenet meme, could be the game was also inspired by the meme
obsolete knowledge

doom cheat codes

The second article on [email protected] is about Doom (running on PDFs)
- Can I use the cheats on the PDF doom? 🤔
You could use the IDKFA code in MechWarrior 2 as well.

If you did, it would immediately eject you from the mech and display a message something along the lines of "this isn't doom you idiot".
- Same in Heretic - IDKFA takes all your weapons and ammo, IDDQD kills you.
  
  And I think both codes do a similar thing in Earthworm Jim.
I don't ever remember using the last one, but I'm sure I knew a code for no clip.
- They changed it to idclip in doom2

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.

~~well, actually…~~ It usually changed the clock speed on 286 PCs, but on 486s it often disabled the L1 cache or introduced additional waitstates instead

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.

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.

I read this as being another feature of half life. I was very impressed by the level of detail the devs put into such an early game. Although slightly confused why log stacking would be part of a game
- Secret bonus level
BUCKFAST for GTA 1.

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.

Lol, just reminded me about win XP CD key. Not 100% sure it's still accurate but:

fckgw rhqq2 yxrkt 2b7q8 8tg6w

Edit: aww, I fucked up the ordering of the last two

The 7 names of the antique greek Muses:

Calliope
Clio
Polyhymnia
Euterpe
Terpsichore
Erato
Melpomene
Thalia
Urania

It wouldn't be antiquity if the 7 anything were actually 7 would it?
- Don't you complain when you have paid for 7 but got 9! 😉

Konami Code

D U L L A R D

Morse code. Did a science project back in middle school with wires, buzzers and tappers on a board. Then I taught it to my boy scout troop for a badge. Then lost some of it before joining the army in communications (as well as a ton of other outdated means of communication) and then in Iraq, me and another commo guy wired up our rooms for it so we could talk shit about our leadership even if they were in the room. Anyways, after working with it that many times over a stretched out time frame, I'll never forget that. Or the phonetic alphabet.

It's not exactly obsolete. The HAMs use it from time to time.

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)

Wait I thought it was WXCJ.
- Crazy Castle 2 I realize he meant. He probably never saw the 2.

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.

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

Good ole FUCK George Dubya!

Adjusting a carburetor.

I was never really good at it, I never actually went through with selling my soul to Satan to gain true knowledge of that black art.

If that's your idea if fun, I can recommend the game My Summer Car. It's basically a simulator for Finnish country life in the 90's.
You spend most of your time drinking, going to the sauna, driving a crappy old Datsun hatchback (which you first have to rebuild in excruciating detail) down country roads, and adjusting your car's carburetor.
- I looked up a gameplay series, and there is so much minutia remining me of Norwegian country life as well. The ticketing machine on the bus is exactly as I remember it from the 90's.
- Sounds like how I spent my summers in Canada, but substitute a Chevette hatchback and a hottub.

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.

Damn that's some nostalgia. I can almost remember the invincibility code from Abe's Exodus, but not quite.

6922251 x 8 = 55378008

Is this obselete? Did multiplication and boobies disappear?
- I hope not but I assume the opportunities to bust this trick out in math class has been mostly diminished or forgotten about

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas was the mnemonic when Pluto was still a planet. I suppose not totally obsolete but I find myself ending at "nine" instead of something you'd serve beginning with N.

Naan
"Served Us Nine" works tbh... There's 9 of us and we all got served... Seems fair
- By Jove, that's true!
Nachos

4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42

Is this ~~loss~~ Lost?
System FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem FailureSystem Failure

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

I know way too much about the propagation of plasma in fluorescent lighting. When you first hit a fluorescent tube with high voltage you need some cosmic radiation to rip off the first barium ion off the cathode which causes a tiny little lightning strike of plasma that skitters across the inner surface of the tube. Once it makes its way across the length of the tube to the anode you now have a conductive path. This path then grows tremendously until it envelopes the whole cross section starting from the anode and works it's way back to the cathode until the whole tube is filled with wonderful plasma that makes light when it excites the phosphor coating.

That's kina beautiful. Thank you.

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).

Iddqd

Rosebud

What did dqd stand for anyway? I know the spispopd and kfa/fa ones (though the doom wiki says it's full ammo, whereas I always thought it was firearms armor because it does both those things), but there's nothing on the wiki about the meaning behind dqd
- You're not going to believe this but, I smashed DQD on my keyboard as a child by accident after typing in ID for IDKFA.
  
  I'm not entirely certain how I managed to brute force discover a cheat code, but at least 3 other phrases enabled GODMODE in the original doom.
  
  I've always held DooM as some of the original simulation hypothesis proof.
- Everything you need to know.
  
  DQD stands for a made up fraternity. Hence "degreelessness mode".

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.

I used to stop there but just beyond it some small palindromes follow, so they're somewhat easy to remember (and gives even more useless nerd cred)

3.14159265358979323 (you got 535, then the 8 leads into 979, then 323).

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).

If you put as your name grm3110 in NBA jam you can play as death

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

Latin palindrome, roughly "we enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire".

Boolprop testingcheatsenabled true/false

Testingcheatsenabled true

And finally testingcheats true

The entire shortening of the Sims cheat codes.

Also motherlode.

IDKFA & IDDQD and off you go. Lots of childhood memories.

IDSPISPOPD was fun too.
Is it really obsolete when Doom is still played to this day?
- That's true! I still play it from time to time, although I do not need the cheats nowadays anymore. There is something about the design that was never matched by any of the new doom games. For me, all the demons look the same in the modern games.
  
  So in that regard it has not yet been superseded, at least for me.

The password to reach Mike Tyson / Mr dream in Punch-Out! is 007-373-5963. Burned into my brain.

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.

Former NBA players Jarrett Jack and Chris Duhon are cousins.

| ||

|| |_

Is this ~~loss~~ IDE jumper settings?
- Yes, but you have to guess which motherboard.

Donkey kong country on SNES

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

I can recite the names of the Books of the New Testament in the bible by heart. I'm not even Christian.

Way back in Sunday School at the church we went to when I was growing up, they taught them to us in a song. I still remember the whole thing.

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

thats definitely a guns cheat from GTA ... Vice City?
- I believe vice city and San Andreas had similar codes but this one from my memory is San Andreas.

Open NFS MW 2005

In the titlescreen (Do not press Enter yet) type

burgerking (unlocks hidden challenge)
castrol (shows hidden castrol themed Ford GT)

V21 is the shortcut to call for a medic in Wolfenstein Enemy Territory

In an older version of Stellaris, a cheesy strategy is to abduct or force relocate the entire galaxy onto a single planet.

Usually having an overcrowded planet, has a several drawbacks.

Since you can never generate enough food, your population will always be in decline. But this decline is capped per planet, and is quite small. As long as you can keep abducting and force relocating pops from your conquests, you can grow.

Similarly, you ignore consumer goods for the only cost of a reduction in produced goods from jobs. But you barely produce anything via jobs anyway.

The low happyness and overcrowding causes stability issues on the planet. But again, the negative stability is capped, so you enable martial law on the planet, and build fortresses, which provide a stability boost per soldier job they create. And only stability matters for revolts.

You need minerals, but you can get those from mining asteroids.

Your energy credits come from being a mega church, in which each pop following your religion, generates some credits, along with trade generated per pop.

Alloys come from turning the planet into an ecumenopolis. Although you get a -50% production modifier, it is the only thing you need to produce yourself.

But the real trick is giving all the cramped up pops utopian living standards. In this version of Stellaris, any unemployed pop living in utopian living standards, generated science points and trade value. Usually those are barely worth the extra cost of letting the pop live so luxuriously. But even if you don't provide food and consumer goods, they still provide sciencd and trade.

As a result, you got a stable planet generating insane amounts of science, energy credits, and alloys. While remaining a small empire, which kept tech costs low.

C9 means RET

In NFS Underground 2, if you place an empty file named “FOOBAR” with no extension in the game directory, you can bypass disk verification and the game just launches.

ATH1 ATH0

09f911029d74e35bd84156e5635688c0

I think lol

nope. last "e" is a "c". real close tho

?TJL-BDFW-BFGV-JVVB (enables cheats in Doom 64)

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

Don't remember if any other titles used it, but BARACUDA on Sonic 3D Blast on Genesis/Mega Drive for level select.

Not sure if it works for the other versions or on any of the collection games it's included in, though.

281-330-8004 hit Mike Jones up on the low cos Mike Jones is bout to BLOW!

RRTANGENTABACUS

I know it primarily as a cheat code in Star Wars pod racer on N64, but I've seen it in other games too, and even referenced in different non-gaming contexts. I still don't really know what it means.

When I was a kid I remembered it as "RR-Tan-Genta-Bacus". It wasn't until decades later I realised it is real words "tangent", "abacus".