x=usr(1536)

In fairness to MAME, this is really more of a Retroarch / libretro issue. All of the forks listed are ones maintained by those projects or persons involved with them, and they're the ones maintaining 20-plus-year-old MAME builds - some with backports from newer versions - in order to run specific versions of the emulator. Had those projects been willing to do custom builds based off of a modern MAME release, the issue could have been avoided.

OK, I think I see what you're referring to now. When I read that thread that you linked to earlier, I missed Claus' post with the scans of the 130XE-compatible version of the upgrade. Will have to read through them more thoroughly tomorrow when I'm not nodding off at my desk, but I think you may be on to something

I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong on this, but I don't think it's that one. Or, if it is, it's a modified version of it. That Byte article, funnily enough, was the last one I read before making this post. Differences I've noticed are that the 74LS151 and 74LS500s in Claus' circuit aren't present on the one I'm looking at; my best guess is that they were replaced by / consolidated into the 74LS153, 74LS139, and the additional 74LS158, but someone who is better at TTL ICs than I am would need to confirm. PIA also has fewer jumpers in his design (3 vs. 5), and there are a couple of other differences.

You may be thinking of Telenet, which was a dial-up packet-switched network. CompuServe (amongst others) was connected to and accessible through it, IIRC.

Received a nice little surprise today when I popped the RF shielding off of the 800XL I've had for the past 20 years or so and found a 256K upgrade in it that I was previously unaware of. It's welcome to stay In any event, I've been trying to figure out which upgrade was performed. It's obviously home-made, probably from instructions in a magazine - but, from what I've been able to dig up, I don't think it's one of @ClausB's upgrades, and I'm not finding anything that is an exact match for the hardware it uses. Starting off: Pretty obviously wired up on hobbyist breadboard. I've so far been unable to find a design for this upgrade that requires five ICs; every other design has topped out at four. There are no components on the back side of the breadboard, just a spiderweb of wiring. From left to right, the ICs are: Top row: 74LS158, 74LS393, 74LS153 (the numbers 1, 5, and 2 are scratched into them, respectively) Bottom Row: 74LS139, 74LS158 (scratched with 3 and 4, respectively) Moving on: ANTIC is a C012296, and has pin 8 jumpered back to the breadboard. Seems fairly normal from what I've found. Pins 12-16 are also jumpered on PIA, which also seems to be fairly standard. Here's the RAM and attachment for the breadboard. Also pretty standard; RAM is 256kx1, 150ns, Micron model number 1257-15. Note that there is no jumper running to the topmost IC, which the other upgrades seem to need. However, there are resistors attached to pins 2 & 9 of all sockets, with the exception of the bottommost one which has it between pins 3 & 9. And, finally, the bird's-eye view just for giggles. So... Does anyone know which memory upgrade this might be? I'd mainly like to know so that I have a point of reference in the future.

I don't have a 2600, so as close as I could get to that hardware was an NTSC 7800 running the game from a Concerto cartridge. Worked perfectly, and managed a score of $03C3 before my reflexes gave out Plays really well on the system, and reminds me a lot of the Speedway! game the Odyssey2 came bundled with. My only suggestion is to rename it 'Los Angeles Freeway Commute Simulator' 🤪

If that PlusCart can do also do 7800 games, I'm in 🤪 And miracle of miracles, the unit I ordered apparently arrived at our local distribution centre this afternoon. Might actually have it tomorrow or Wednesday if all goes well. This makes me incredibly happy because not only will I be receiving my item, but also because it means there's now no point in calling the USPS' customer service number tomorrow to find out what's happening with delivery.

Nope. The 600XL has been completely functional, so I'm taking the 'if it ain't broke, don't open it up' approach with it. I've also got two other sources of POKEYs that I'd rather go through first before taking the known-good one out of the 600XL, let alone the keyboard. It also doesn't help that I'm having a 'SQUIRREL!' moment over the 256K upgrade which, up to about 45 minutes ago, I was unaware that the 800XL contained. It's all bright and shiny and new and fascinating and totally derailed any shred of concentration on the problem at hand

Mappy. Apparently this was really popular, but I only ever saw it on location once when it was current.

VAT used to not be charged on orders leaving the UK that weren't destined for the EU. I'm assuming that Brexit changed this? HMRC are setting themselves up for some nasty culpability down the road. They simply don't have any authority to charge VAT outside of the UK - this is what customs fees and duties are for on imports, and exports should be exempted, IIRC. Can't see this going well for them.

Aaand both cables test out fine. Guess I can swap in the POKEY from the 600XL and see what happens. Going to give it a good cleaning while I'm in there, though.

Have to admit that I thought total failure was odd. More extreme than would have been expected. Bear in mind that this model doesn't have the backing plate - just the two metal strips across the top edges to keep it in place. It's generally the most-loathed of the XL keyboards, but I'm OK with keeping it. I'll run some continuity tests on the flex today and see what shakes out. I seem to recall having to do the razorblade-to-the-motherboard-end-of-the-flex routine years and years ago on my original 800XL, so we'll get to find out how good my memory is on that one.

Which is a valid point, and certainly one to keep in mind. FWIW, I ordered mine directly from the manufacturer and no mention was made of accepting only ASCII transfers on the product page. I'm hoping that the eBay copy was cut & paste from another product, but am not holding my breath. Yup, saw those, and ran across similar comments as well. Holding off on a replacement until I can get this one a) delivered and b) figured out.

Still waiting on the card I ordered to arrive. It managed to make it from China to Grand Prairie, TX in about three days, and has apparently been sitting there after being handed off to the USPS. Grand Prairie is a USPS hub, so it's almost certainly in their possession. Going to call them tomorrow and see if I can get anywhere.

Opened up the 800XL tonight to swap out the mylar, and discovered that this one has the Mitsumi keyboard that uses rubber switches and conical springs. For reference, it's the same as Type 5 in this list of XL keyboard variants, and uses conical springs with rubber contacts on the PCB rather than a membrane. Despite searching, I haven't found a particularly good reference for cleaning and/or repairing these keyboards. Does anyone have any suggestions? My main concern is that I don't want to risk damaging the contact pads if at all possible, and could also use a recommendation for how to reattach the rubber switches to the PCB. FWIW, the symptom that caused me to open it up in the first place was no response at all from any of the keys. While that could be a bad POKEY, knowing how susceptible to failure the 600XL / 800XL keyboards were had me starting there rather than with the ICs. And even if it is a bad POKEY, it's open now so I may as well do what I can to take care of potential issues.

Yeah, the first time I came across it it was just bare Asterisk. Want to say that was 2003-ish. The first packaged distro I can recall was Trixbox, probably around 2005 or 2006. My MacBook Pro recently had to be mailed in to Apple for service a few weeks ago, and the only spare machine in the house that was more or less ready-to-go was a RasPi 3B+. Running it as a desktop machine was... Painful, and this was with a fresh image of Raspbian Buster to boot. I can live with things like integrated video and slow SD card access times, but the amount of memory is what really kills it. More than a half-dozen tabs in Chromium and it was on its knees performance-wise. It was abandoned in favour of just doing the phone-as-PC thing for a few days. A 4B would undoubtedly be much improved, but as I'm holding out for the 4B+ to release before upgrading I have no practical experience with them. My use cases for them are basically as small, portable servers. There's a half-dozen Zero Ws running NUT for USB ups monitoring, and another 5 3Bs and 3B+es doing SDR, 3D Printer serving, serial console, etc. It's not a platform I'd consider for emulation even though it's perfectly capable of it, at least for the types of games that I like to play. But I have enough other ways to do it without needing to dedicate a RasPi to that function.

True, and options were a lot more limited back in 2007 or so. That said, I really did like StarOffice and the earlier OpenOffice incarnations. OOo went through some real rough patches after Sun dropped it, though, which was a shame. It was also a shame about what happened to Sun (and SGI), but that's a whole other ball of wax waiting for its own thread. Which, to be fair, has a nice featureset. It just needs less Ward Mundy. I ran PIAF - briefly - on a RasPi here before switching over to RasPBX. Mundy's 'it's a feature, not a bug' attitude was what caused that migration: all of his little tweaks and add-ons made the system really f***ing annoying to have to admin, and most were pointless in a setting where the PBX is firewalled. Well, when you start actively blocking traffic on a network that was explicitly set to be ignored, that's not a feature in my book.

Don't forget CAPTCHA. That's been a great way to crowdsource AI training for cases where the AI is having difficulty identifying certain types of objects and / or features. And best of all, it's pretty much free (if involuntary) labour for whoever's running the CAPTCHA service!

What ultimately pushed me away from Linux as a desktop was interoperability. Things had reached a point where I needed 100% compatibility with Office, and OpenOffice (as it still was at the time) just wasn't cutting it in that regard: my clients were using Microsoft Office, and spending a couple of hours correcting document compatibility issues on top of the six or eight hours it might take me to write an assessment for them just wasn't feasible. That was what finally pushed me over to OS X full-time: it has all the *nix tools I know and love, but can also run a real copy of Office. That's suprisingly similar to my PBX experiences at three different employers. Trying to explain to the owner of the company that just because he knew someone whose company had integrated theirs with Exchange didn't mean that ours could do that (or that it's not necessarily a good idea in either case) was an exercise in futility. Yes, you really will have to scrap the whole thing and start over if you want that feature, and yes, I am going to contract consultants to handle it because anytime you touch the phones beyond setting up or tearing down an extension Bad Things Happen. We're just running straight FreePBX at the house. Yeah, it's CentOS-based, which I don't particularly care for, but the amount of system interaction outside of the GUI is pretty minimal, so I can suck it up for that. We've got semi-crappy cell coverage here, so having a backup landline (even if it is a Google Voice number) is kinda necessary.

Yeah, I started out with Yggdrasil then moved over to Slackware, so can definitely identify with starting from re-rolling the kernel and building from there from source. In all honesty I am more of an fBSD guy (used to hand-build firewalls / UTMs based on it), so Slack was a good fit for me; it's still the most BSD-ish of Linux distros IMHO. Agreed on fBSD's installer. In a way it's nice that it's remained consistent throughout the decades, but there are improvements that could be made. And it's still more of a pain in the ass (though it has become easier over the years) to get a desktop up and running on BSD than on its Linux counterparts. Debian's pretty much the distro of choice these days - we've got something like 11 RasPis here running Raspbian Raspberry OS (stupid, stupid choice of things to rename Raspbian to), so it's the predominant one. The PBX is CentOS-based largely because I went with a pre-built VM on that one.

1994 here, though I did move off of it around 2007.

Confirmed; seeing the same thing here.

Interested in Telelink I and E.T. Phone Home. $10 plus shipping sound good?