Casio Cassiopeia A-20E Review | Ashens
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- čas přidán 11. 09. 2024
- Ah, Casio. We'll always love you for your cheap but reliable digital watches, and that calculator with a built-in boxing game.
But there's no love for this weird halfway-house device that had no specific use, even at the time. Frankly it's a big pain in the arse. (I only ever saw one of these in the nineties - an insecure businessman was trying to show off by repeatedly referencing it during a conversation and waving it around. The tit.)
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For those technically interested, Windows CE is basically Windows 3.1 (not 3.11) updated with the Windows 95 shell to replace Program Manager.
Windows 3 as such didn't really _have_ much in the way of a kernel (relying heavily on BIOS), so certainly, one would need to have been crafted to match the hardware (lacking BIOS) and reduced specs, though the 1MB RAM target was the same for the CE kernel as it was for the 3.1 runtime. While there were unique API services made available on the platform (ugh, that object store), desktop-equivalent APIs like GDI, Win32s, , etc. were supported, too. (They just dropped the older APIs and non-Unicode completely.) CE 3 featured large rewrites to achieve microsecond realtime capability, but similarly, the userspace was relatively unmodified. After CE 4, yeah, it turns into more of a unique and beautiful butterfly.
So while the kernel tier is certainly distinct to Windows CE-the original developers having locked themselves in a closet for two months to rewrite Win32 from scratch-with principle API compatibility, there is no need to rewrite the entire userspace. This is part of the reason why CE was used to help port games from desktop Windows to the Dreamcast, amongst other odd uses.
I've had the misfortune of working on OEM integration for this stuff for education verticals and pre-WiFi era wireless development. Oh, fun times. Such memories. ;)
+SwizzleDude Long live open embedded solutions, eh?
Thanks for the short explanation lady-bro, I like simplified stuff :)
GothAlice if someone could hack it to have ms dos... Think of the possibilities! Playing games.
wouldn't work, those things ran on non-x86 hardware and ms-dos only knows x86
When I was 11 or so, back around 2001, a friend and I found one of these in a dumpster and I somehow finagled my way into being the one who took it home. I loved this thing so much, despite of course having no use for it whatsoever. Tried to take it to school, but they yelled at me just like for some Palm knockoff I got a few years later. Knowing every kid has an iPad or whatever in schools now makes me a little salty!
I remember the Cassiopeia much more than I do the friend, which says a lot about my interests.....
Here I was hoping for a discussion about the Cassiopeia but here be bots.
@@BeaverIAB but.... flixzone much bro?
We don't have iPads in my school. We have highly restricted Chromebooks. Only because of the Hybrid school though.
we still have 2nd gen ipads
i brought my macbook to school and my iphone has a VPN because they rarely enforce the rules, and when they do, it’s only a slap on the wrist
Awesome find
"You could store a whole.... rude picture in it"
I lost it. This man is god of comedy sometimes.
Yes
@@darkusblader Aren't you a tad late?
@@SerenaDeerGirl ?
@@darkusblader Why'd you delete your comment lel
@@SerenaDeerGirl cant find it
the keyboard well....starts with s ends in hit
SUPERHIT
@@novaryx Shit.
smallbloodyboxwithphit
XD
supershit
The most "innovative" keyboard I've seen in years.
"Cobrian comes out"
"Oh, good for him."
I died
I wonder if he took the trouble of replacing batteries just to make that joke.
I realized halfway through this video that I was watching this on an iPad Mini with a bluetooth keyboard case. I am literally watching this review of this device with something a thousand times better and very similar looking. Such is the progression of time.
I worked Tech Support for Cassiopeia North America in the '98 and '99. It sucked back then. It sucked the day it came out. HP Palm Pilots were so much better. Palm Pilots were cheaper and worked better. So you can't blame the time period. Half of the calls we got were people calling in pissed off because it did not do what Casio claimed it could do. I felt so bad for the callers, I couldn't defend the product. 8 hours battery life it claimed was if you didn't open any programs or do anything it might last a few hours. I played an MP3 on mine and it died before the 3 minute song finished playing. A new lithium back-up battery would then last 30 seconds. Also synchronization was such a pain in the ass. The IR sync never worked. They were so hard to type on, they sold voice recognition software to type for you, just speak into the microphone. Voice recognition did not work in the '90's. So they had handwriting recognition software which didn't work either.
did you know drmiller09?
So it's a paper weight? Well than
Bretton Ferguson did you know drmiller09?
That was a helpful summary. Thank you for the insider's view.
@@bizzzzzzle No I did not know DrMiller09.
- I have three of these still and I was a power user of this. I synchronized this with my PC every week. I downloaded into it the Bsquare software suite and gained efficient backup capabilities from this software that created back ups onto the two compactflash card slots. I used the voice recording & voice recognition often.
- I made massive complex spreadsheets in Excel & created 100-page Word documents in it for my schooling. I used the calendar for sales-call reminders. I loaded Outlook contacts with everybody I knew. I kept my call logs in Contacts.
- Internet connectivity wasn't productive so in didn't bother.
- I downloaded mp3 files and they played fine.
- I used both memory card slots frequently with 128MB & 256MB compactflash memory cards.
- I downloaded a few impressive action games too.
- I trained myself to touch type 40 wpm it and I can still do that today.
Nerd
I used the later Cassiopeia E-15 model in around the late 90s/early 2000s for university and studying abroad. People have become far too spoiled by smartphone convenience but back then having one small device that replaced having to carry around a calculator, language dictionary & address book, as well as have text versions of class notes and programming reference guides, was incredibly useful. The fact it could also play MP3 files and some games was also a big plus although I did generally just carry a minidisc player and gameboy for those functions. Much like netbooks, PDAs seem to get mostly overlooked by the general public but for people who actually needed that kind of mobility they were a lifesaver back in the day.
I suspect, and this is merely a guess, that you're losing voltage because that wad of foil isn't exactly a great contact, and so the thing thinks it's running out of power.
I agree. Stuart needed to tighten up the connection to make it secured.
If it can run, the power connection is fine.
Also, battery hog.
@@jasonking1395 Not if there's a high resistance between the batteries and the device, it could still receive enough power to run but with the foil dropping it down enough through bad contact resistance that it thinks it's running low
It may be shitty as all hell but it's fly dude. I want one.
Same
ikr where do u buy these
what??^
Thx :3
Hipsters. Hipsters everywhere.
I lost it at "transfer data at the speed of a dead slug". Comedy gold.
6:06 Free Windows CE 2.0 key
Kevin Rodriguez Jr Current windows CE don't require keys
TheCoolProGamerBG no
Back when Cassio meant technology, nowadays it means cold sweat of the memory of calculus homework and exams.
C'mon, they make keyboards and electronic pianos. Not the best ones, but they don't just make calculators.
Now it means 14.99 Illuminator (TM) watches
8MB? You can store PS2 saves with that much space!
Not that it can run any PS2 games. Or any type of game for that matter. :/
Bear in mind, that was ram not storage.
Zabby I think you can get a ps2 emulator on smartphones, tablets etc
Tag McSlayer Yeah, but they don't work too well.
Zabby What are you talking about? the PSX emulator is on androids (makes me roughly 90% certain IOS has it) And that's the best emulator available for it.. It runs great.. It's mainly the phones hardware that needs to be up to snuff and quite frankly only the Iphone 5s+ and the GS5+ have the hardware available to run them. (however your batter will die..quickly..)
Knight Solaire of Astora I meant "Work", as in "Run". I used the wrong analogy, I guess.
7:30 "used it as a stylus and very kindly pre-chewed it for me" :D
I had one of these! I was 16/17 and just started my first job at a fast food restaurant. I saved for weeks to buy one from a local store. I had absolutely no justifiable reason to get one apart from the fact I love gadgets. I remember the serial cable, I remember the back-light noise, I remember the terrible typing.
Those were the days... :)
Holy shit that's a legit 3ds.
+Dr. Fun But it's 2D and only has one screen. Therefore it's just an S.
+Psythik soooo 1s?
+Arthur Gaming 2DS*0.5DS
+Psythik Thanks, Captain obvious!
+Dr. Fun no its the 1st 90`s laptop that fuck your lives
I wanted one of these a teen. Turns out now, I don't
im gonna send an email to drmiller09, to see what he is up to nowadays.
You'll find him in Town Hall 23, but right now the chat room is full. Try playing Skifree for a bit or just Skee on your Popstation, until someone's mom needs to use the phone and space in the chat room becomes available.
2010CiscoLin This made me laugh xD
Back in the day *_everyone_* was on AOL or they weren't cool. Then all of a sudden everyone got smart or grew up a bit & moved on. ;)
These days, he probably goes by the name "Professor Miller" :-).
I think he is dead
you're voice is so gentle, it managed to play through 11 mins whilst having music on without me noticing.
Can it run [INSERT CURRENT GEN GAME HERE]?
Mick 92 can it run PAC-MAN
No, but it can run skifree
Can it run Tennis for Two?
Mick 92 Can it rung GTA5 on Ultra.Yes,yes it can.
It could run far cry 4 on highest setting 60fpd (frames per decade)
I used a Cassiopeia A10 (worse version of this) to read Project Gutenberg text files on the bus ride to and from campus. Also PocketExcel was great for keeping track of trip expenses. Used it around... 2005? It only cost $60.
'sounds like a frog being tortured to death' -- would love to make that line my ringtone!
I don't know. It's funny and all, but it sounds a lot like blaming a stagecoach from the 1850s for not being a car.
Good point.
+Steven Smyth Problem is that this was shit when it came out too.
The Toshiba Liberetto was out at about the same time, a similar size and it was a real PC of some use. My friend had one. Nice little device. :)
"'Cobrian comes out' oh good for him"
He never changes throughout the years, does he? I love how he has kept everything the same. Same intro, same couch, same type of videos.
If companies actually made modern versions of these running Windows 7 or 10, I would get one.
that's why there are windows 7 and 10 tablets or laptops with detachable screens that turn into tablets; so yeah...
I mean ones you CAN fit in your pocket
well i think the closest u can get to that is a phone with a bluetooth keyboard nowadays, and maybe in the future they might be making portable devices compatible with windows os like windows 7, 8 and 10 and with quite a few components like usb's, a good amount of ram and maybe a good processor as well. after all, u never know what the future has in store for us...
Sony made a pocket laptop that is capable of running Windows. Search up their VAIO mini laptop.
why on earth would you want anything with Windows 10? It's the worst os next to windows me.....
The buzzing/whining noise is due to the electroluminescent backlight, which is normally only found on Casio stuff. This required a high voltage and a lot of juice, and it sounds like it hasn't held up very well 20 years later. This also explains why in this video the low battery alert kept going off (I don't mean the coin cell CMOS battery alerts in the beginning), because he was using AA alkaline batteries which only last long in very low drain appliances. With the EL backlight on this device was high drain, hence the issues. If you use rechargeable Ni-Mh batteries instead (which are great for high drain stuff) it should last far longer.
I once had a similar model, the A-22T. It was quite nice for taking notes in class, since it had a decent keyboard, a wide screen,.and fit in my pocket. It had remarkable battery life, too, apparently because it used aggressive power management to use as little CPU power as needed, but was still able to speed up rather quickly if one were to open a more power-hungry application. Unfortunately, it was destroyed in a tornado. I miss that thing...
when these were out, my dad acted out like he HAD to have one. and he bought it, sadly.
I'd actually like to have such a thing.
Would you still? XDD
@@DangerNoodleReads I would personally. At the very least as a shelf queen.
i know everyone is joking about if it could run windows 8 or 10, but what i would be curios of it being able to run damn small linux.
maybe just the terminal by itself
volkswagenginetta xxrrrrrsrrss
ChemicalFun27 nah, if it runs wince it'll also run a Linux based OS (powerwise, anyway). Looking it up it has 8MB of ram. I have actually run, in production use (albeit as a home router) Linux on an old 386 with 4 MB ram. Hell, you *might* even be able to get a GUI to run on it quite decently, with xfce. My early Linux PC experiments sure didn't have more than 8MB and did have a working GUI.
That said nobody's ported Linux to this CPU, so you're screwed.
Jasper Janssen I didn't even check to see if it was an x32 cpu
AFAIK Wince was not available for x86.
I really want one of these now. Not even joking.
Nathaniel Emm same xD
Am I the only one who actually thinks this is a decent device and would be useful to a point back in the day?
I can see functionality in the device. For what technology was like back in the day. That is actually quite impressive.
Brenden White It still has some uses nowadays, like i have one and the many uses of it's impressive, Like even the table or the chair, give it to my grandpa (or grandma), and many many more
it might have been impessive, but it still looks fiddly. same thing with the ipad, its cool but you would be better off with an iphone or a macbook
***** This section is only for computer related or video related topics. Brony arguments should be somewhere else please.
BTW how can ANYONE not thought of importing classic PC FPS like DOOM/Quake/Half Life to mobile devices? If there are imports I'd be damned but there seem to be none to my disappointment, just quirky and stupid games in which have DRM for no fucking reason....At least the Classic GTA series were ported...
xx_yoloswegblazeit2fazeit1v1uirlfugu_xx what did he ever do to you? Is it because he's a brony/pegasister?
wow I'm gonna upgrade from windows 8 to this!
...I wonder if it can run the original doom
yep.
fuck doom I want to run crisis 3
Fallout 4!
doom 4
+Deadpool do you only problem with the game King is you have to do you connect to the modem if you want to use any of its Internet features however it was very forward in its time and it's sad that it ended
RIP bobby the circuit board
When I was a kid, I remember seeing some business guy using one of these on the train to Norwich.
This is my first time watching your video and I did not expect this to be a funny one 😂 Very good review and actually not boring!
God...I feel like I am looking at a 3DS here. It even fits the exact same frickin' stylus!
Did cassio sell the design to nintendo when they realized they couldn't make money off it themselves?
4:45
Yep. Totally unlike today with Apple trying to patent the rectangle or King trying to trademark the words "Candy" and "Saga". Things are totally more reasonable today.
16:54 Four shades and not fifty? The device looks like it had potential, just the keyboard that needed sorting out. Also I'm thinking the reason his sound file didn't work is because it was MP3 and it could only play wav files.
I'd be surprised if it can play more than even just some simple beeps and clicks
Is it bad that I want one?
Not really. It's actually kind of an interesting device, honestly.
thepirategamerboy12 I agree, old technology that actually runs decent is fascinating. I also want one, for a decent price.
I want one too kind of
I want a casio digital diary.
Wow, I actually remember someone's dad brought in their cassiopeia to our class. First time I had ever seen a laptop, let alone one that was that tiny
13:14 when you forget how to spell 'unnecessarily' and need to bail out
That Email address... stay classy Casio, stay classy.
Fuck, I had an email address called "metallicafan-somethingsomething@yahoo.dk". I am now slighty ashamed of myself, thank you Ashens.
Were you running a company out of it?
PsylomeAlpha No :D But that's a great idea.
"Where's the commode in this dungeon, I've gotta take a squirt" - Rick Cassio, 1997
Ahh the good old days, back when browsers were named "The Internet".
The most professional video of a right bodge of a product I have ever seen...Brilliant!
So you can transfer data at the speed of a dead slug XD
fish owns an obese dead slug with an 18 wheeler on top of it with Down syndrome.
fish owns that also had a major birth defect and was born paralyzed.
This brings back memories of the Palm Pilot. I remember when those were all the rage.
Palm V (c? Can't remember) -loved that thing!
I miss these old tech reviews.
It's all fucking lootcrates now.
What makes ashens so entertaining is his witty improvised comments. All with that calm British accent
I remember being obsessed with one of these that was in the window of Currys when I was a teenager. I'm sure I would have been horribly disappointed had I ever managed to buy it.
These did have one use, I bought 50 and used them as a render farm. It was screamingly fast for the time but I had to hire a small boy to sit there putting fresh AAs in.
I even made a small profit as I was able to charge £30,000 to render short clips.
Of course technology has moved on so much these days I used 50 iPaqs.
....... *hides*
Whats an ipaq?
"Cobrian comes out!"
"Oh well, good for him."
i gotta wonder if it wouldn't render the dinghy photo because the file extension was .JPG (in all caps) as opposed to lower case.
also, i wonder if dr miller's aol email still works lol
Wow....A 486 DX33. I remember our old 486 DX66. I remember being really excited to play a demo of MDK that came on a magazine, and the crushing disappointment at seeing the message "This game requires a Pentium 75MHZ or greater to run" after installing.
I'm always instrested in old technology and this channel is perfect for me to look at all these interesting finds. Keep up the great work and videos!
Dear Mr Flavour
I am extremely unhappy with your surname.
9 years on, still makes me laugh!
RIP Muhammad Ali
cashew clay
RIP Cas Cas
can it run crysis?
+William Stipcevic cuz if not then its gaaaarbage
+William Stipcevic Pfft, you do know it is a very old gadget! If you tried to run a game like SCP Containment Breach or Crysis, it would have a severe lag spike and most probably crash
+Rouge Take a joke like a fucking joke oh my fucking god rogue you're tearing this family apart stop
-_-
+Rouge YOU'RE TEARING THIS FAMILY APART TYRONE
So you sat in a car with an eyelash in your eye for hours without just rubbing your closed eyelid for 8 seconds which usually fixes it? :T
This reminds me of the handheld scanners we use at the grocery store I work at. They run a gutted version of Windows CE that was customized to work with an IR and QR scanner
I had a few of these back in the day.. they were already outdated then, in the early 2000s (one even had a (256) COLOR screen!).. still fun to play with. I just enjoyed seeing tiny windows.. kind of.. I actually found when when visiting my parents a year or two ago. Couldn't get it to turn on though.
I never managed to get one online either, which was really my dream/goal with em. Despite the 33.6kb/s modem.
Woaw, 256 colors you say? That sounds really impressive for back at the time for a thing small as this to have a decent amount of colors!
@@CutieFakeKirby most definitely! Especially compared the the 4 or 16 greyscale that most had. I wanna say that most of the early color pdas were 256 as well, again from the early 2000s.. I wanna say I had a couple that displayed something like 33k colors as well, a few years later.
Little did we know, it actually can run crysis 3.
But can it run GTAV?
The special CE version
Sadly... It loads faster then windows xp laptops did.. Remember those old ones that took like.. 5 minutes to boot and like a million years to load the internet?
My XP laptop (Acer) had over a gig of RAM and ran just fine.
My printer takes a whole minute just to get ready.
The sarcasm is strong with this one. Quite entertaining
I had one of these, I found it in a jumble sale with lots of extras for not much at all and had it for about eight years and I found it to be an excellent device and nowhere as frustrating as ashens is putting it out to be and I found it extremely useful for when I was doing my college based electronic engineering course! What is your problem? There is nothing wrong with the keyboard at all, I found it very easy to use and not as slow to respond as you state it is! Maybe you're one is playing up or you're obviously doing this for more comic effect then you would do normally as there is actually nothing wrong with it and you need to make it seem this way to make a twenty minute video out of it! Oh well, ive had things worse than this for the same uses and this is nowhere as bad as you making it out to be!
''With a lot of extras'', Have you considered that you were possibly using a model that actually had a RAM extension? That'd speed things up a bunch and make the thing more responsive.
No my one was standard, I meant extras like cables, a dock, extra firmware (the unit was still faster than his one with it from factory reset ne!), software for the PC and this device. As far as I know there wasn't a upgrade for ram, but there was one for expandable flash memory but that was through the dock extension as well as the ability to plug in a full sized RJ-12 and network adapter as well as a parallel port for -plugging a printer into it, so I could print save files to it, go into school and print my documents and pictures off it! I also had a better battery unit for it and a full sized PS/2 keyboard/num pad. The speed thing was referring to responsive timing not being able to load programs and pictures (I never loaded picture on my cassiopeia device, but I did make some custom programs for it for networked programs which I found woefully slow on this device, where I had a Epsom device that had worse spec than this and seemed to be faster (but these were obviously non-standard programs and could have been issues with how I coded them and the fact that I may have not programmed them efficiently enough!). So ashens one seemed much more slower than mine and my one was pretty standard apart from the extras that I plugged into mine, but didn't make it faster.
Cool story but unfortunately you can get powerful androids dirt cheap so no need for a old toy.
Interesting point....but this was back in 1997 and google didn't even exist back then, let alone make devices!
stuart w Founded 15 september 1997, you're right about them not making devices though.
Still better then windows 8
Seems legit.
Still better than Vista!!
Nope
Still better than Windows ME! (Obsure Windows references FTW) look it up
DatCZcamsr _Me_ was pretty shit :L
Remember when we all thought that 256 mb was a vast chasm of storage? Good times
Still got my vintage 2007 256mb flash drive.
ultra wide monitor master race
Just got my A-11 in the mail. So pumped.
The most important question is, can you game on it and upgrade it with latest hardware?
Can you play Fallout 4 on this?
+Arianasus Gode zzzzzzzzzzZZZZzzz....
I think you can run gta v on highest settings at the same time as playing fallout 4 on highest settings
+Arianasus Gode You can play Ark: Survival Evolved at 200 fps. Ultra High settings.
+Arianasus Gode No, it's not compatible. You know how it is when you try to play old games on the newest, flashiest hardware.
+happy4you Don't frget Cod Bo3
I remember when I had this thing, the only thing I did with it was play Solitaire.
They could've called it the Cassio SS (Single Screen), but... you know.
Heil Microsoft 'n all that.
The reason why it says low battery is because your metal piece to connect the batteries lowers the voltage, and electronics usually use voltage to guess the amount of power left in a battery since it is dependent on that.
Reading it in Ashens' voice makes that statement even better
I bet drmiller is actually the Certified Casio Seller this was bought from...
I was actually looking for the Japaneese Jazz-Funk band called Casiopea but here i am.
Perhaps you should upgrade it to windows 10?
No
I think your intro is the best i've ever seen on youtube, hi laugh everytime x)
I keep coming back to this review as it makes me laugh so much
Still better than an iphone
Doctor Celly No. No it's not. The iOS can at least show pictures correctly.
Its a joke :P
***** like i care its just a joke
Android 4 lyfe!!!!
***** Or your just a 6 Year old Apple fanboy that has nothing better to do but rant against people on this internet
'Schrodinger's music thingy' 😂
Windows 98 SE
Windows ME
Windows 10 N
_w i n d o w s S E M E N_
Good god that page rendering brought back memories of using the internet as a kid.
I remember bringing up a pre-release screenshot of Morrowind before school so I could see it when I got home... I mean it was only a minute or two load but it's the thought. XD
I actually used a HP Jornada 820 running Windows CE 3 to take notes in high school and through most of college until I finally replaced it in 2008. They were actually pretty good machines for that purpose. Everything's solid state so start up times are virtually instantaneous and the machine itself is more or less indestructible.
It runs Windows Crap Edition? :P
Yes, that OS made by Spoof OS Inc. :P
Doesn't run Windows 10, sorry.
You had an eyelash in your eye for 36 HOURS!? Look, I know you might feel iffy about touching your own eye, but speaking as someone that wears contact lenses... Wash your hand and take it out with your finger, you great sod! Leaving it in for a day and a half. That's just... how to you even DO something like that!?
Yeah, I've always wondered why he said he didn't have anything to take it out. What would somebody use, besides their finger?
Windows CE Crap Edition
Computer clan nostalgia
Bringing you the worst of Windows CE, Windows ME, and Windows NT, we present to you Windows CEMENT!
@@elephystry why is Windows NT bad?
iProgramInCpp
I didn’t say it was. Compared to 9x, there’s no contest, but compared to other things, probably. It definitely has its failures.
@@elephystry I thought you did, sorry
"What's it like to play solitaire on this thing? A living, fucking, hell." Haha!
Ahh, I dreamt about owning one of these back in like 1996 when I saw it in a computer magazine... these were the days :P
There modern scientific calculators really are fantastic though
HA! I just emailed the address and no, it does NOT work.
Ha it's like a Nigerian Scam email address
I really want one of these. I'm collecting Embedded Windows systems, and I've already got a PDA with Windows XP Embedded installed on it.
It's a Casio PDA of some sort, I know that much
www.ebay.com/itm/CASIO-CASSIOPEIA-EM-500-COLOR-POCKET-PC-W-ORIGINAL-BOX-DISKS-DOCUMENTATION-/111591585430?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item19fb607696
Thanks!!
I have a Witstech A81, I'd sell it for like $15 USD plus shipping. Windows CE is a horrible OS though, you must be a masochist XD
Nice Meowth avatar.
Some dark, perverted corner of my mind actually wants one of these now.
Ashens, where did you get the games for this? I've been looking for 3 months.