EricBall

One of the things I did while visiting my in-laws was to do some cleanup of their computer. In spite of having the McAfee suite, they'd managed to pick up a bunch of malware. I suspect it started with some kind of "free" download which installed a toolbar or taskbar tool, which then installed something else . . . and next thing you know they're getting random pop-ups and error messages. Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone has ever found a sensible guide to safe computing? Not just "install anti-virus*, anti-spyway, system updates", but behaviour rules of thumb. And websites with solid info on anti-spyware software, not just regurgitated press releases and links to malware in disguise? * I firmly believe that true viruses are virtually extinct 'cause they don't spread fast enough and generate $$ for anyone except the anti-virus sellers. My home PC has run without anything more than my NAT router/firewall and MS utilities for almost a year.

Certainly, anything is possilbe given time, money & effort. But why expend any when reasonable alternatives already exist?

For the majority of games the cartridge only contains ROM so externally powering the cartridge will not maintain the built-in RAM. And even carts with onboard RAM the games still use the built-in RAM. (Having two separate power sources also makes things difficult.) New games could either use the HS Cart or the AtariVox/SaveKey/MemCard.

Have you ever played a game and wondered whether you bought the same game as reviewers? Super Monkey Ball 2 is like that for me. Another one of my cheap bastard eBay purchases. I don't have Super Monkey Ball 1 yet, so I can't compare the two. But I'm glad I only paid $10 for it. Maybe it's because I'm playing the single player story mode instead of the multiplayer games. Or maybe the reviewers only played the first ten maps and cribbed the rest from Super Monkey Ball 1. Who knows? The problem I have with Super Monkey Ball 2 (story mode) is the level of difficulty. We're talking having to play a map dozens of times before catching that lucky bounce. And the way story mode is structured, you have to finish all ten maps in a level before you get the next cut-scene and onto the next level of ten maps. And more often than not, it's luck, not skill, which is the difference between success & failure. The only saving grace (or is it a curse?) is you have infinite lives to attempt each map. (There's another single player mode where you have a finite number of lives to play through the same maps (plus some bonus maps) in a set order and without the cutscenes.) Two examples: The main feature of the map is a tall cyndrical tower with a flared base. The finish line is on lying on top of a small platform circling near the top of the tower. At the bottom of the tower are four kicker blocks. So the idea is to position your Monkey Ball in front of one of the kicker blocks, which will then shoot you up the side of the tower. The problem is you have virtually no control once that kicker block fires. Just landing on top of the tower ('cause you can't even to the finish line on the way up) is maddingly difficult and a stroke of luck. Bit then you have to time your roll off the edge so you fall through the finish line. More than one level puts a web of holes to fall through between the start and finish. If Super Monkey Ball 2 was a game of skill, you'd have to pick your route and carefully manuver yourself between the gaping holes. But the timer is far too short and the pathways too narrow (believe me, I've tried). The alternative is to send your Monkey Ball careening at top speed to fly off either a bump or the far edge of a hole then catch a lucky bounce that doesn't send you plunging through a hole or off the edge of the map. And forget about trying to stop and maneuver your way through the finish gate, you've got too much speed - that's another lucky bounce you need. Other complaints: no way to jump, so even the smallest bump or edge becomes a major obstacle after you have completed a map in stroy mode there's no way to go back to try to improve your time or pick up more bannanas (which typically get ignored to reach the finish) multiplayer games are opened by accumulating "play points" Now, the multiplayer games may be heaps of fun, and Super Monkey Ball 1's story mode might be actually fun to play. But, at this point, I've given up on the story mode of Super Monkey Ball 2 - it's just too hard to be any kind of fun.

Did you see this thread: Algorithm for tracking a target

I had the opportunity many years ago to play with video working for a division of Scientific Atlanta and I've added to that knowledge base over the years. One advantage of NTSC is it's been around for 50 years so is well documented (unfortunately, there's a lot of bad documentation out there as well). I happened to stumble across a PDF of a reference document which contains almost everything I have ever needed to know about analog video.

10-bit uncompressed at what sampling rate? 910fH 4:2:2 I bet. Is the timecode stored on the Betacam SP tape (i.e. not just an offset from start of playback)? The only problem using DV as a source for DVD is the 4:1:1 versus 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. (Although 4:1:1 makes perfect sense for interlaced sources while 4:2:0 gives the famous chroma bug which plagues many DVD players and STBs.) But what you're doing makes perfect sense for off-line editing.

Plasma TVs aren't any worse than CRTs (when properly adjusted for brightness/contrast) when it comes to burn-in. (They both use the same phosphors, after all.) Don't overdrive them with static images 24 hours a day and you'll be fine. Hmm... number of dedicated systems... I've got an SNES (w/ SuperGameBoy), N64, GCN, PSX along with a DVD player, VCR and cable STB connected to my main TV. The bedroom TV only has a TiVo, DVD, VCR, 7800 and an old PC (masquerading as the TiVo mothership until Zap2It dies and I get a new dual tuner replacement). S-Video switchboxes are great things.

You accidently posted this in the "bads" list I put it in "bads" because sometimes it feels like I'm playing a rail shooter. I guess I could put the "obvious" bit in the "goods", although I prefer a little challenge rather than being lead by the nose through the game. For example, yesterday I got stuck on the third Spell Stone - I couldn't figure out how to open a door. Slippy said look high & use ice, but I'd been up to the balcony, and even extinguished some of the colored flames without effect. Just before I went to the walkthrough, I stumbled into the solution. It turned out the blue flamed torches at the entrance to the hall were part of the sequence giving the order the balcony flames needed to be extinguished. That's the level of challenge I like. Obvious once I figure it out, but not so obivious I don't need to think. Coincidentally, I was just playing this with my brother Tuesday night, and he discovered that if you roll towards an enemy and strike out of that roll you can perform some different moves (which are pretty cool looking). I looked at the IGN walkthrough and the position of the control stick controls where to hit the baddie. I also tried the roll attack and it's neat when you get the timing right. I still get better results from button mashing.

I recommend Old Navy for khaki pants and Land's End for dress shirts. When I was in Cleveland Ohio I was thrilled to discover Sears has a Land's End section and they had the button-down Oxfords on sale at two for $25. (Land's End only ships to Canada, so I'd have to pay shipping, duty, taxes, brokerage fees and the exchange rate.)

That same joke as in the morning paper. But I bet he wasn't getting 50mpg at 100mph!

Although it's no Zelda OoT, I'm quite enjoying ripping through Star Fox Adventures. the bads: #1 Exit doesn't save, or give the option to save! (I lost an entire stage discovering this.) #2 Very linear. There's one path through the game and very few (and very short) side stories. In most cases it's pretty obvious where to go & what to do. #3 Although the manual seems to suggest a complex attack system, it really comes down to A-button mashing while wiggling the control stick. (Although it's far easier to freeze the biggest SharpClaws than to find that first hole in their defense.) Plus, there's no combat tutorial. the goods: #1 Save anywhere, anytime - although the restore brings you back to an earlier point. #2 Hints from Slippy & Peppy for when that path isn't obvious. (Although this does make the game even easier.) #3 Fox's expressions I was able to pick it up for $10 (including shipping) on eBay. Definitely worth it at that price.

Michael is basically correct. Analog color TV (NTSC, PAL & SECAM) is made up of four signals - a black & white signal (luma) and two color difference signals (chroma) and framing/synchronization signals. One field of NTSC is 262.5 lines of 63.555555uS and two fields make up one interlaced frame. However, the Atari 2600/7800 doesn't bother with interlacing so each frame is only 262 lines. Officially, only 241.5 lines are active picture (21 vertical blank) and only 52.855555uS (or a little over 83%) of those lines are active video (10.7uS horizontal blank). So an interlaced frame could have up 483 active lines although a bunch of those will be lost on most TVs to overscan. Okay, what about horizontal resolution? The TV industry often uses the term "TV lines" to describe the horizontal resolution of a CRT, which is a very confusing metric and is typically 75% of the value we normally consider to be horizontal resolution - the number of active resolvable pixels per line. It's also almost entirely meaningless because it ignores the limitations of the input signal, which brings us back to chroma and luma and how they get to the TV. If each of the three signals is sent separately (ignoring the sync since it happens outside of the active picture) then it's a component connection. This also means that each of the three signals have virtually unlimitted bandwidth and horizontal resolution. An NTSC DVD uses 13.5MHz sampling (6.75MHz bandwidth) producing 858 samples per line of which 720 are encoded (which includes some horizontal blank). (Actually, the chroma bandwidth is 3.375MHz, half of the luma bandwidth, due to downsampling before encoding.) Component is also the only time when the resolution of modern displays could be exceeded by the source material. Next is S-Video which combines the two chroma signals into one using a 3.579546MHz carrier, which therefore limits the chroma signal to 3.579546MHz or 455 samples per line (378 active). The luma signal is not limitted, but is typically less than 7.159091MHz, or 2x the chroma carrier, for 910 samples per line (756 active). The next step is to combine everything into a single composite signal (which can then be modulated to a given RF frequency for broadcast). This is also where color aliasing comes into play. Ideally the chroma bandwidth is limitted to less than 1.3MHz (137 active per line out of 165 samples) and luma bandwidth to less than 2.27MHz (240 active per line out of 288 samples) to prevent overlap (luma bandwidth + chroma bandwidth < chroma carrier). Okay, what happens if they do overlap? That's when aliasing occurs - instead of detail you get colors. Unfortunately, the 7800 320H modes output pixels at 7.159091, which is twice the chroma carrier and so any on/off patterns will generate color instead of detail.

In general, any NES/SNES controller conversions will require significant effort because the Nintendo controllers (in fact most controllers after the 7800) are serial devices (with one wire/pin for all control signals) while the Atari/Sega controllers are parallel devices (with one wire/pin for each button or direction). For a typical controller conversion you rewire the controller, but that would defeat the wireless nature of the device in this case. You'd need to somehow de-serialize the output of the wireless reciever and make it into something the 7800 could handle. A little more work than rewiring.

Plot-wise, it's very "Cars"-like, but the filmmakers didn't have the time to change the film once they found out the similarities. At least it wasn't like Antz versus A Bug's Life.

tribal tax? Remind me to avoid going to Oklahoma Indian Casinos (not that I'm likely to be in Sooner country at any point in the forseeable future). You're better off sticking with craps or roulette if they're going to supplement their house percentage by 10-25% on BJ.

Ahh, the legendary expansion port and the LaserDisc interface. Yes, the idea of connecting the 7800 to a LD player may have existed during the original design, I'm not sure how far it made it past the concept stage or whether it is, in fact, possible. The expansion port is almost entirely outputs, not inputs. So there would need to be an external video mixer which would combine the video from the LD and the 7800 (and sync the two somehow, not a trivial operation since the capability isn't built into the 7800 or the LD; maybe the EXTMEN signal was meant for this). There would also need to be some sort of interface from the 7800 to the LD to select specific frames (CAV tracks) via the joystick port. But the big problem is the 7800's video is not standard NTSC (See: LaserDisc Memo) It's half a colorburst too wide and non-interlaced. Now, it might be possible to record an LD with matching frame characteristics, but you might end up with something requiring a custom LD player. (Or maybe the EXTOSC & OSCDIS signals were meant to address this.)

They've been holding an annual garage sale in my development for a goodly number of years. This year there didn't seem to be as many sellers (at least in the immediate vincinity) as previous years. I don't know if people didn't know or were just sold out from previous years. (There have also been a couple of organizational screwups in prior years around handling rain days.) I managed to sell off a couple of big ticket (size and price) Little Tykes toys which were taking up space in the basement. One other problem is the development is much larger and there are more ways in. So a single big sign on the main entrance doesn't catch as many people. The town is also doing roadwork next to the main entrance which probably didn't help.

I agree with supercat - the biggest difficulty in making a "big sprite" fighter for the 7800 is going to be the ROM size needed to store all of the pre-rendered sprites. (Though you might be able to cheat a little bit my having the sprite selection be part of the bankswitching instead of part of the display lists. Though I'm not sure how well that would map to up & down movement. Probably need to play with the display lists anyway for shots etc.) It will also be difficult to reproduce the backgrounds, again due to ROM size and DMA limitations. Assume 320B mode (3 colors per sprite, 4 color background), which is 2 bits per pixel, 4 pixels per byte. So the background would be 80 bytes wide and span three 4 byte headers. Each player would be a single 4 byte header (max 124 pixels wide), and then two more 4 byte headers for shots or other non-player sprites. 415 available GPU cycles per line - 264 cycles for the background leaves almost 10 bytes (40 pixels) per sprite, probably not wide enough. Hmm.. go to 320D (4 colors/1 bit per pixel) for the background and 5 byte headers for background & sprites... only need two headers for the background. Sprites could be 18 bytes (72 pixels wide), much more reasonable. That's assuming that you can live with the 4 color graphics (versus 1024 in the original), no 6 button controls, and no voice unless you do some kind of custom cart-based APU. (Well, you're gonna need a custom bankswitch anyway...)

Depth perception is overrated. (My right eye is -2.0 nearsighted and as a consequence I have no true depth perception, i.e. able to determine distance based solely on parallax, even with correction.) Instead you can use depth cues, i.e. bigger is closer and changes in size versus other objects. Much more likely is you don't realize that you now have a huge blindspot on one side and clip a Hell's Angel.

From my wedding, in spite of getting it right during the dress , the minister entered (along with myself and the groomsmen) the church before her cue. I doubt anyone outside of those at the rehersal noticed.

I was a carnie a couple of summers for the Calgary Stampede running a skeeball booth (good except for people who would managed to jam the coinslots or people who used the wrong lane) and a knock the bottles over with a baseball. For the latter I always felt guilty pulling out the tiny & cheap stuffed animal which was the prize for knocking over the bottles. (If you kept playing, you could eventually trade up to something larger. But by that time you'd paid 10x what the stuffed animal was worth.) I've tried to explain to my son that these games, while not rigged per-se, are designed to make money for the owner. Thus, challenges which are much harder than they appear and prizes which cost less than what it costs to play.

Ahh Lady Luck, godess of random number generators, smiled on Andy; twice even. He should never, ever bet on anything else 'cause he's used up all of his luck for this lifetime.

Figured out how to do it in 2 opcodes and 0 extra cycles for the main loop! :byte6 IF_NZ MOV sprdata, sprbyte SHR spraddr, #8 WZ MOVS :byte7, spraddr MOVD :byte7, sprdata DJNZ count2, #:byte7 MOV :byte7b, :byte7 JMP #:byte7b :byte7 IF_NZ MOV sprdata, sprbyte :nxtspr ADD sprptr, #4 DJNZ count1, #:loop WZ ' 48+16+223 = 287 (288) max cycles / sprite :byte7b IF_NZ MOV sprdata, sprbyte The neat bit is the DJNZ count1 sets the WZ flag when it falls through, which then means the :byte7b instruction gets NOP'd.

Nope the SHR changes sprgfx1 which is then used by MOVS.