Chunky Onion’s Plans...

I am starting off this post with the intensions of sharing a blip with you guys on what the plan is for the future of this page and my channel on YouTube. I have said this about a hundred times now. On how I am going to post videos of all kinds especially gameplay. I have been quite busy with personal endeavors and mainly college stuff. It is about to be my spring break soon, and I plan to finally give you guys what you have been waiting for after all this time. I have recorded gameplay in Halo 2. I even have a video planned to show off my computer and console collection on the horizon. The reason why I am saying this, is because I honestly did not have a good enough plan to make time to spend the time recording video footage and doing the things I wanted to do over the winter break but didn’t get enough time. I hope to have a quality video up and soon! I just now have bit of guidance in what I want to post and when and what the videos will entail. Stay patient...

Chunky’s New Years Resolutions for 2019

So, 2019 is here… well almost, depending on where your geographical location is. Considering 2018 isn’t over yet I will finally make it my New Years Resolution to post as much as I can and get as much recorded gameplay for Halo 2, CSGO and even begin posting videos on my projects I have been working on and off during this past year and especially during the past 3 months. This year I created this blog and began to share my hobby and interests with the Internet and contribute to a community of enthusiasts and hobbyists who enjoy vintage technology.  I will keep this going for however long as I can make it, as far as I am concerned this will still continue for many years to come! Anyhow, I hope everyone in the States and parts of the world that aren’t living in 2019 is having a great and safe New Years

Merry Christmas From Chunky Onion

Merry Christmas Internet! I have decided to take the time out of my holiday to post something. Again, I have been so busy with finals and getting my first semester wrapped up. I finally now am back in the area and am glad to start up again. Like I have been saying, those videos I’ve promised on YouTube will finally get recorded and uploaded.  Due to the delay of other factors in my life at the moment has made it very difficult to keep up with this page and my Twitter. I have much to post! Tons of content for you guys and all sorts of things that are computer related and retro! Considering this is Christmas and this is a quick post just letting you guys know that I am still very much active and ready to deliver content and finally have the time! So be expecting more on this page to come! Also expect a video to be posted by the new year! I PROMISE THIS TIME! Anyway, I will go more in-depth after Christmas to give clarity on what I’ve been up too and what is to come! Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Happy Halloween

It has been quite sometime since I have last posted something on here and on my Twitter. As you may know I have just finished up my mid-terms for college and now I am prepping for final exams during this coming semester. So I before then, I will have a little bit of time to post videos finally again… but wait… I might actually will be coming out with a new video sooner than you think… In fact it will be posted to YouTube sometime this weekend…!? I finally have a bit of time before I come back to the tri-state again to see the family for Thanks Giving. So, what will this video be you might ask? Well, to be honest not exactly sure… All I know it’ll be some type of recording on something just trying to figure out what that something can be. I don’t know exactly what day the video will be posted this weekend I will just start recording some gameplay from a bunch of different games I have missed playing. Anyway, on another note, I have acquired some new vintage machines in last few months while I was at school. My school’s IT department has a dumping ground in the basement of one of the buildings and with my professors permission granted my roommate and I access to the as they call the “Graveyard”. It was filled with tons of old flat panel LCD monitors and a bunch of Lenovo M81 and M72 Think Centre desktops and a quite a lot of old HP machines that had Pentium 4 nothing too interesting… My roommate and I took advantage of our opportunity  and out of the 30 some odd computers we were only able to get two working. My roommate and I restored the Lenovo desktops and put them to good use in our dorm. My roommate built a Windows 10 machine and I build a Linux Ubuntu machine. Our main goal was to get these machines up and running and capable of running a few games. We got some games running without any graphics card just the Intel Integrated graphics. LOL. Not going to lie it is not terrible especially considering the amount of games you can play and run somewhat smooth. I can go into more detail later. Anyway I want to make this post short because I am tired and I had a long day and it was quite eventful. So let me just wrap this up and keep it short and sweet. I will eventually be showing off my vintage machines that I collected in more detail and maybe plan on posting it to YouTube.  THESE VIDEOS WILL BE UP I PROMISE! MORE TO COME FROM CHUNKY!

So This is Where Chunky Onion Has Been for The Last Month

I know I have been inactive for on the blog for almost about a month. The reason is, is that I have been very busy with college and have not made anytime to post videos on Halo 2 on YouTube or have been posting on the blog. If you follow my Twitter account I am still active on that platform because of the ease of tweet/retweeting. I try to make time to post for the blog but have been too caught up in my studies. Since it is the beginning of fall by the time I am back home in the tristate area I will be back in the swing of things like posting videos regularly on the channel and begin streaming Halo 2 and Quake Champions gameplay and CSGO gameplay with friends. I have plans with RedThunder121 for dual commentary CSGO videos and maybe some other kinds of videos. We hope to deliver good content and get progress with are video editing skills by improving each time we post a new video. I will be back in before Thanks giving for a week and will hopefully get videos up as soon as I can! Then I return after that week for exams in the first week of December then will be back for winter break for about a month which is enough time to get more and more content out for you guys. Chunky Onion is on a mission getting out the #Aesthetic lifestyle and sharing the way of life of a guy who enjoys the nostalgia of the past and bringing into the present. I will be posting videos on all my machines and different vintage devices I have, like I’ve said before, I will deliver all kinds of content from technology to gameplay. I am currently brainstorming more ideas for when I do get back, just stay tuned and keep up with my Twitter for it’ll be the most active account with the latest updates on what’s new with Chunky Onion. I do not know when I will be posting my latest video or what it’ll be but it’ll be a surprise, just stay tuned guys and have a good night!

Installed DOOM II on My Retro PC & What’s instore for the Future of Chunky Onion

Today, I successfully installed, Doom 2 Hell On Earth by ID Software and finally have a game on my vintage PC. I've played the original Doom game before and have played different versions of the engine. I played zDoom and GzDoom and played the free to play online areanas like Zandaurm Doom. It was nostalgic to play Doom on my modern rig but when I installed it on my Windows 98 PC it felt right. Seeing it start up and boot into MS DOS and the title says 'DOOM II' on the screen and ID Software next to the copyright date of 1994, it felt authentic and truly nostalgic. From seeing it run on a system with a Pentium II and 224mb of Ram seemed like it was a match made in heaven. The game runs beautifully and I get a buttery smooth framerate! The version of the game is 1.666 which was the original retail release of the game. Most people had shareware copies of the game back then. So I did confirm this copy is in fact a legitimate copy. I plan to get more games maybe in the future or build a beast Pentium III Windows 2000 rig in the future. Anyway that project will be in the distant future or when I have the time to build another PC but built for power. (at the time)  But.. hey I might run Windows 2000 Server to see what I could do with it and maybe work on a small network in my office to get my older machines linked and also somehow get a modern machine connected as well to the network. It'd be interesting considering the system is 20 year difference. Anyway this machine may do a lot of things another example is like the YouTuber VWestLife ran a Pentium III radio station. I would want to try that. I'll figure this out on what to do for my next project. I can be able to run it on a but its not even built yet... so only time will tell. Also till when I come back from college in the fall I may start searching for parts to buy so I can begin the project in the first place. I will go in more depth in a later post regarding what's going to be going on for the next few months and what I am doing, but for now this is what's happening for the time being.

Pionex Computer: Chunky’s New Windows 98 PC

FYI I am typing this post on my Windows 98 PC in Word Pad 6.0 and was able to send the document over with a floppy disk. Back in 2015 when I was searching for a Windows 98 computer that is in good shape (near mint) and a computer that works! But it was out of pure luck that I found a Windows 98 computer that caught my attention. I clicked on price for 100 dollars for 'brand new old stock' and was a complete computer set up with not only the computer but the monitor, accessories, software and everything I need for a Windows 98 PC and more. I messaged the seller on eBay who was located out in Texas. I messaged the seller asking if the they didn't include the monitor because I already had a CRT monitor that was a 15" monitor instead of the 17" Pionex monitor that was included. The Acer View monitor that I ordered a few weeks before which was 20 dollars was the perfect monitor that I was looking for my 90s PC. It is a perfect size monitor that doesn't consume all my desk space and the resolution is fantastic! Anyway after I made my order the PC arrived within a week and... oh boy there were a lot of boxes... I was surprised it was free shipping and it arrived so fast at my house. It came in a big box with smaller boxes inside containing the keyboard and mouse peripherals and speakers, microphone and a TON of software! I really was surprised that seller wasn't kidding that they didn't know what to do with it! So with excitement I set the everything up and try and see what is on the hard drive in the system and it said on the auction it was 11Gb drive. So I do a power on cell test and boot the system up for the first time in its life since it was turned on by the previous owner to load all the software in 20 years ago then it was put away in the box and was stored in a church for most of its life then was sold to me on eBay. So as it powers up the hard drive begins to spin up and at first it sounded normal but then right away as I started using it for the first time it was already beginning to make all sorts of skipping, popping and grinding noises. I knew right away that it needed replacing. Later on, I was installed a new HDD and a planing on giving the RAM a 128mb upgrade! The Pionex machine originally came with 96mb of RAM and now with a 128mb upgrade I will have 230mb of RAM which is plenty of RAM for this system and enough to get a lot of work done and run heavier programs that take a bit of the resources up and will be more than enough for what I need to run games and such. This machine is a beast! And is only getting better with more upgrades! 20 years old and I got it to work as if it came out of the factory yesterday. I ordered DOOM II on eBay and I will install and play some classic DOOM
on a system that it was designed to run on.with it! So with excitement I set the everything up and try and see what is on the hard drive in the system and it said on the auction it was 11Gb drive. So I do a power on cell test and boot the system up for the first time in its life since it was turned on by the previous owner to load all the software in 20 years ago then it was put away in the box and was stored in a church for most of its life then was sold to me on eBay. So as it powers up the hard drive begins to spin up and at first it sounded normal and then... well yeah it was very, very slow and it was making popping ans skipping sounds so I decided to change the drive and get a new one. This computer has seen 5 different drives and now I a recently upgraded it to a 20gig one. I am planing on giving the RAM a 128mb upgrade! The Pionex machine originally came with 96mb of RAM and now with a 128mb upgrade I will have 230mb of RAM which is plenty of RAM for this system and enough to get a lot of work done and run heavier programs that take a bit of the resources up and will be more than enough for what I need to run games and such. This machine is a beast! And is only getting better with more upgrades! 20 years old and I got it to work as if it came out of the factory yesterday. I ordered DOOM II on eBay and I will install and play some classic DOOM on a system that it was designed to run on.
                                                                                            
I have looked for a 90s PC for a long time and wanted one that can work with new hardware and one that can run DOS applications and older games as well if I so please to install them. Anyway my next step on transferring data between a modern system from the 2018 and has parts that date back to 2014 in my sleeper build. This machine has a Haswell 4th Intel Core i5 4460 3.4Ghz Processor with 8Gb of DDr3 1600 RAM and runs Windows 10 with a modification to the UI. I tweaked the shell by converting it back to the Windows XP Luna theme and re-arranged how the operating system works by these simple modifications with the program that I downloaded 'Classic Shell' which you can modify the entire start menu to your needs and what I was going for was the Windows XP look.And it came out looking good though the it is still Windows 10, like for instance Cortana exists and the metro apps are accessed by hitting the Windows key and the Shift key at the same time which gives you the Windows 8.1 metro app start menu. So my mods made Windows 10 a whole lot better and a lot more usable and catered to what I am familiar with for so many years. Anyway, I plan to get these two systems connected vial serial connection. So, I can easily transfer data instead of having to only just rely on floppy disks. Serial is slower than say Ethernet but I want to try something different and something that can make this old Windows 98 machine more useful. I will be posting more on this machine and I think that it will be getting another system that is a a few years older than the 98' PC because I still have plans to an OS/2 Warp computer up and running. I was planning on running OS/2 on here but I chose Win 98 because it was easy and I was already familiar with the process. I am planning in the future to run build a early to mid 90s PC that runs OS/2 or maybe buy an IBM and run it on something that it was originally designed to run on. Either way, I have plans for the future and hope to see what I can do next for my next vintage computers I have my sights on.

A New Storage Upgrade For the Pionex PC

So today, I decided to work on my Windows 98 PC that I bought when I was 15 and it was on eBay as 'brand new old stock'  Pionex PC with an Pentium II MMX 350Mhz CPU and 94mb of ram it was brand new. It included a monitor keyboard mouse, speakers and everything like software and old subscriptions to AOL 4.0. I’ll be honest I didn’t know what the original card was (still don’t) and also the entire setup came with all the accessories but not the monitor because due space constraints that have to deal with. I would’ve gotten it with the entire setup but I had a 15” Acer View 55L on the way that was 20 bucks which I had ordered from Memphis Tennessee. I upgraded to a new graphics cards like the Nvidia TNT m64 and I mainly now use this machine for working in MS Visual C++ 5.0. I am able utilize CD-ROM drives to transfer my documents through CD-ROMs. So, I can easily transfer data between my main PC and my Windows 98 one. It has been a working progress with this machine, due to the fact that I want to learn more about older machines. Especially machines of the late 97 all the way to 2000. I have been using this old PC for tests on different versions of Windows 98 and trying different cards. From all my experimentation on this machine and trying configurations and running all kinds programs of the 90s.

I finally took out the quantum big foot drive out of the computer and it was a pretty obscure way of doing it. Basically when I removed the power supply and then proceeded to remove all IDE cables, I began to push the drive up against the 5.25” bezel cover and like that, the cover popped off. I move on to sliding this drive out of the chassis and was surprised how much this thing weighed. I haven’t put on a scale yet but I’m going to give a guess between 5-7 lbs. It is a 5400RPM Quantum Big Foot 11Gb HDD. When I did receive it back in 2015. When I first booted it up the drive was making grinding noises and skipping and popping. I came to the conclusion right away that the old hard drive was on its last limb. It was not even 20 years old yet at the time when I purchased the machine back in 2015. That old Quantum Big Foot drive had I believe 7gigs worth of preinstalled software and Pionex bloatware. I was too laggy and was at some parts when I would try to open explorer it would freeze then lag out. I bought a lot of different storage solutions for its new life and had fresh copies of Windows 98 SE installed. Now I’m installing Windows 98 again because the operating system is 20 years old. So, in order to celebrate its 20 years existence and how it was one of the many operating systems that contributed to the modern Windows we know today by shaping how you used multimedia and being able to render some impressive 3D graphics at the time. Though like I said before I am not exactly sure what Graphics card it is all the computer recognizes it as in the Device Manger and even in the Bios is ‘16bit PCI Graphics Card’. I look all over online on the chip set and the serial numbers and also the manufacturers of the card and couldn’t find a thing, not even any drivers that worked and I wasted a lot of floppy disks and CD-ROMs to figure this out. Though I got the solution to that problem… just buy a newer graphics card and get swap it out. Which is what I did and got the Nvidia TNT2 m64 16mb Graphics Card that is quite powerful in the standers of PCs in circa 1998. But all though it may seem like a laughable amount of onboard RAM on Graphics card but it packs a punch with DOOM II Quake and Fallout 2. I’ve made mention of this card before on my blog but I always like how powerful it can make an old PC like this run well with that Pentium II MMX technology under the hood.

I now finally uninstalled that old drive and put in a Maxtor Drive like I mentioned lasted post. (If you haven’t read it highly recommend). Since its the same speed as the original drive it makes the boot up times feel more authentic, so 20.4gb is more than enough to run Windows 98 and have MS Visual C++ installed. I might install games but I mainly want use this machine as workstation because I want to have a real use for my old machines and not just use them for games but as a tool. Because a PC is meant to also do work and I want to be that guy in 2018 to be using Windows 98 in 2018 and lives an AESTHETIC Life Style. I will be posting more updates on this machine soon this is all for now and it is another one of Chunky Onions late night posts. Anyway that’s enough for now, I’ll be posting more before I am off to college but when I’m off to college doesn’t mean I won’t be able to post on my blog Chunky Onion always keeping it alive and living that Aesthetic Vibe. GOOD Night fam.

Chunky Onion Has More Daily Fresh Updates

Yesterday, I just recently just got in the mail from eBay is a Maxtor 20gb IDE HDD for my Pionex Pentium II machine. I was originally going to use the disk on module approach with the 16gb one I got a couple weeks back, but the machine wasn’t wanting to read nor write to it. Or rather, not recognize it as a working drive entirely. I tried many different diagnosis for the drive for hours but couldn’t figure out why. I looked up my issue on the internet and to no avail couldn’t find the solution to the problem. So, I decided to bite the bullet and get Windows running, might as well get a good old fashion IDE hard drive that can be easily recognizable for the machine. I know it will natively work on these old machines. I’ll format the FAT 32 drive to utilize the full 20.4gb and install a fresh copy of old school Windows 98.  My old drive that was in this machine originally had Windows 98 Second Edition (SE). I wanted to have the correct OS running on this machine instead of Win 98 SE or OS/2 or even Windows 95. So, this machine is finally going to never get another hard drive swap for a long time now. Only until this drive begins to die out but considering its a ‘new old stock’ hard drive. I hope that it’ll work and will work for years to come. It is quite amazing that you can still find these old drives these days especially discovering it on eBay. The drive was one of those old Maxtor drives, brand new and has 20 gigs! So anyway, I am going to get this machine hooked up and up and running and maybe get it hooked up to a modem to dial-up internet and for the first time in this PCs 20 year life will hook up to the internet.  Or maybe I will get a network card and have ethernet hooked up directly to my wall. Though for now I do know I am going to use my vintage machine as a C programming machine which will have MS Visual C++ 5.0 installed and I’ll be practicing my C programming. I will be also getting a couple a games maybe as well like DOOM 2 and Fallout 2 the list goes on but I will go more in-depth in a later post. Anyway, My windows 98 machine is my second hand PC which is used for coding and also considering I have floppy drives and CD- ROM drives on both my modern PC and my old school one I am able to transfer my data through CD-ROMs and floppy disk. I am excited to get this old school drive spinning up and running!

Also another announcement! I am getting more YouTube videos up not just on Halo 2 I am also doing a WAW video and it is going to be a good one it’ll be uploaded to YouTube soon in a few days to a day depends if I’ll get to it or not… lol! So, I will being going on an upload spree in the next coming days with all sorts of games I’ll record a Nazi zombies game play on World at War and even get some MW2 clips up very soon and definitely Goldeneye Source of course as well , some clips will be voice overs, some will be live commentary and also I will just have game play clips with no commentary. I’m just kind of brainstorming at this point on trying to get fire content on the channel!

Updates at the Corner

I am now uploading videos to YouTube and are well on my way on posting another Halo 2 video! I have plans for my YouTube page and I have to say it has been quite some time since I’ve been doing YouTube stuff. I think since 2013. But that was the past before Chunky Onion came online. Anyway like I have said before more to come to YouTube! I am doing voice overs not only in Halo 2 but in CSGO as well but I am going to focus a bit of my attention to the xLink Kai community because I would love to see more people play on these servers because these classic games on xBox should be revisited by the younger generation! LAN tunneling has been around for awhile and their system link servers work and run pretty well especially over the years it has been up and considering they revised the dead xBox Live servers! Obviously the most popular game and really only game being played right now with around 120 players on Halo 2 and 25 players active in SOCOM II even 2 people are in a server on Tony Hawk Underground!

Anyhow, at my home office I am planning on upgrading my vintage machine and run a new copy of Windows 98 instead of OS/2 Warp 3.0. The reason is simple. Graphics capabilities or far superior in Windows 98 over OS/2 Warp. Now yes, I know OS/2 can multitask DOS applications and run DOS within the operating system environment. Also, I just wanted to make my life a little easier and just use an operating system I am most familiar with. Plus, I have Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 sitting in the box and I am planning on making this machine more useful considering both my main computer and my 90s one both have CD-ROM drives and floppy disk drives it will be easy for me to work on both machines and transfer files or drivers between my modern system and the old school one.