EricBall

IIRC the POKEY waveforms are the same as the TIA (although the numbering may be different), but the main difference is the 8 bit (16 bit in linked mode) frequency divisor and the additional 2 channels. Hmm... what's the A8 POKEY's base frequency? That will affect how you map POKEY AUDFn to TIA AUDFn. (And it looks like there are a couple of POKEY options too.) Hmm... It looks like I was wrong, the POKEY has a 17 bit LFSR while the TIA has only 4 & 5 bit (combined 9 bit) LFSRs. So there may need to be some tweaking there too. The registers are also slightly different with the volume & tone generators being merged into one and the addition of a separate control register. So it looks like more of a reverse engineer & rewrite than a straight port. You need to figure out what POKEY register values the A8 code is generating and then determine "equivalent" TIA values.

A hot coffee mod? And you a married man!

Yes, tools were part of the eBay deal. It still took a lot of work to pop the case open.

Last night I replaced the hard drive (which had died) & battery in my wife's iPod color. So now she's happy again. Plus I upgraded the drive from 20GB to 30GB and replaced the faceplate with a brand new glossy black one (from the U2 model). The only difficulties were finding a Torx T6 screwdriver (well, not that hard, but I think only one multibit at Home Depot had it) and prying open the case. (It looked much easier in the how-to video.) Oh, and I did manage to install Win2K onto the TP760ED and it's been quietly (heck, it's silent except when it's actually working) running for almost a month. My only mistake was partitioning the drive rather than sticking with a single 4GB partition, which made installing the SP tricky. (I had to partition to try to avoid some bad blocks on the drive.) When the drive dies I'm going to put in a CF adapter and a 4GB CF card.

And after you trap & dispose of the intruder you need to figure out how they got into your attic in the first place.

In high school I don't think we were allowed a programmable calculator (if we were allowed one to begin with). However, my RS scientific/engineering/hacker calculator had lots of constants and converstions which I used. Typically we weren't allowed crib sheets or other notes. In first & second year university (CompEng) we were typically allowed calculators and a one page crib sheet. (Of course, there were the exceptions like the E&M midtem where we didn't get a cribsheet and were expected to derive the equations for a dual dielectric coaxial capacitor from first principles - ick!) I think the only restriction was typically on graphing calculators. For an MSci class I programmed my HP to solve a particularly strange annuity question where my hand solving had come up with a negative number of years. Once the HP gave me the answer I simply wrote down my answer and left the rest of my written calculations as-is; and received full marks! In third & fourth years we not only were allowed crib sheets, but often could bring the actual textbooks and any other notes we wanted to bring. The profs actually preferred us to look stuff up (and get it correct) than work from memory. (Like the time in on my high school physics midterm where I mis-remembered an equation as d=Vit+at^2) For one of those tests I actually learned what "companding" was from the textbook during the exam! Then there are the actuaries where they get a professional association approved basic 4 function calculator handed to them for each exam.

The economics simply aren't there to pay someone to program a game for a retro console. There's just no way that you're going to be able to sell enough units at a high enough price to pay for the man month(s) of effort required to create a decent game. bB may have lowered the bar significantly for the VCS, but it also adds significant constraints to what may be created. Development will also have to be done in a semi-vaccuum because you can't risk having the game leaked. That will reduce the amount of feedback and assistance you will be able to obtain from the larger community.

Laptops typically don't allow for many upgrades. Maybe more RAM, swap out the HD, PC-Card slots & USB jacks, and maybe a (probably semi-proprietary) connection for a modem or wifi card. But I've found most people don't upgrade desktops either. Yeah, you might be able to swap CPUs, add RAM, or swap video cards . . . at least until the sockets change.

I'm not sure I would have given your new-old hosting company as much of a chance as you did after they decided to go Linux.

The TiVo's serial port is a 1/8" headphone jack - transmit, receive, ground (tip - mid - ring), so I can't take credit for the idea.

I wonder who did the Vetrex title sequence.

I love eBay. Where else can you easily buy something like a 25' headphone extension cord dirt cheap? Yeah, there might be a local supplier but I have no idea how to find them. And places like Radio Shack will charge you the item's weight in gold. It's the long tail idea. And why did I want a 25' headphone extension cord? To connect my old TiVo on the first floor to a computer in the basement via it's serial port to retrieve guide data. So now I can use the TiVo's far superior search & record capabilities to record stuff off digital cable. Previously I had to use the STB's clunky & clumsy interface to select shows to record (then set up manual recording on the TiVo side). My next trick is to install Win2K on an old Thinkpad 760ED. Hopefully it will be more stable than the MediaGX PC which I'm currently using as a PPP gateway.

Hmm... I have an SC, but I don't think I paid that much for it.

Are you using the hardware collision detection registers for the key+gate? The collision registers are very literal, so if you're flickering both the gate and the key, then you need to make sure your flicker code knows that both must appear on the same frame.

Although there may be some relationship between CD and DVD tracks & chapters (actually, I was looking at Wikipedia, and they were officially known as indexes), but I suspect there's nothing more than a casual causal relationship. Consumer VCRs were always meant for recording broadcast TV.

I tried taking a picture of a large (couple inches long) spider, but I had real difficulty getting the camera to focus when I held it close enough to have it fill the frame.

Just remember the switches don't work the same on the 7800. The difficulty switches are less accessible and the B&W switch is now a pause button.

The original CD spec had a provision for "chapters" within tracks. (So you could hit next chapter in addition to next track.) IFAIK very few CDs used chapters, and most CD players don't even acknowledge their existance. (Yeah, I got into CD very early so had players which knew about chapters.) The problem with a 40 minute track is you can't skip ahead. On Tubular Bells there are some parts I really like, but I'd hate to have to listen from the beginning every time and fast forward through 30 minutes. My Phantom of the Opera CD is like that - one track per CD. Very annoying. So maybe if chapters had caught on then you'd see more 40 minute tracks. (I once made MP3s of the commentary tracks from the Lord of the Rings DVDs to listen to on my daily commute. I broke them up into 10 minute songs so I didn't have to search as far to get back to where I left off the previous day.)

PVRs are nice aren't they. I have a TiVo dual tuner (upgraded to 300GB) in the bedroom and an old Sony TiVo in the family room to manually record stuff from the digital channels the other doesn't get. I don't think I've watched any primetime TV live in over a year. And DVDs mean I seldom go to the theater.

I'll have to check out your code. My next first step is to get one cog generating a stable screen using a modified version of my multiple cog code. It won't do anything more than kick out the COG RAM buffer, but that's a start. Then I'll see if I can get two cogs doing the same thing, but overlay the outputs and play with syncronization. Time, she is precious, and I'm spending far too much free time playing Half-Life (for the second time) and watching network TV.

PC gaming will only survive in niches which can leverage it's strengths: 1. Keyboard / mouse interface. Yes modern consoles can support both, but they aren't ubiquitous. The same problem exists for PC games - no standard controller outside of keyboard / mouse. 2. Higher resolution screens (1024x768 and better versus 640x480 or 1280x720), though consoles will have larger screens. 3. More CPU, RAM, HD & GPU if they are willing to set the minimum system requirements at those levels. (This doesn't include cross-platform games where EA releases the same title for PC, PS3, XBox360, Wii, PSP, DS . . . ) But even a lot of the traditional PC games like FPS, RTS, MMORPG, RPG have made the transition to consoles. Developers simply find it easier to create content for millions of identical potential customers.

I agree, walkthroughs are addictive. For me, it starts with me getting absolutely stumped and frustrated. Then I start referring to it more often; especially if I feel the first solution was overly obtuse and non-intuitive. ("There's no way I would have figured that out!") Hopefully at some point I find myself "I shoulda been able to figure that out on my own" and put it away. Of course, things like HHGttG and RTZ almost required walkthroughs to have any hope of completing them.

You'd think there'd be a market for about 3' of fibre optic cable with integrated lenses and mounting bits. But I haven't found anything (even put a post on hometheaterforum and only got the super-deluxe wireless transceivers). My latest idea is to see whether putting a magnifying glass on top of the TV does anything. I will give my other remote control a try. Maybe the cablebox one doesn't have enough power to bounce off the ceiling.

One thing with Linux is there's often multiple tools which do the same thing. GParted probably would have done as better job. Of course, sometimes each tool is just a different interface on the same underlying utility.

6502 assemblers can run into problems when they can't determine if an address is zero page or not. (So whether the instruction is 2 or 3 bytes.) This can then mess up branches if the offset is close to the maximum. Also pay special attention to the branch offset calculation as it's signed and based on the PC of the next instruction(IIRC).