x=usr(1536)

Agreed, mobile screens or not. Forum responses are like watching porn: both look better when properly trimmed.

It's probably best to not judge your order's approximate arrival date by when any others made it to their respective recipients. Things are just too fluid right now.

Wait - the year of the Linux desktop was 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 never mind.

PM received.

Having decided to not proceed with the Atari 410 refurbishment project (more on that below), I'm offering it to anyone who wants it for the cost of postage. It's a later six-button model, 110VAC, SIO cable still attached. The good: You'll receive it with four new belts; these came from Console5 and were installed earlier this week. Also included is a pack of three unused Danco 80925 faucet washers, used to replace the idler tyres. Motor and tape counter both work, and it was reliably loading from cassette until this morning; rewind and fast forward also worked, but recording was not tested. Cosmetically, it's pretty passable. No major dings or damage, but it won't be confused with being fresh out of the box. The bad: Someone else has been in this unit. When I opened it, two of the four mounting posts holding the case halves together were broken but present, suggesting that they were overtorqued during reassembly at some point. Possibly fixable with superglue. This morning, while loading a game from tape, there was an interesting small 'crack' sound from within, followed by everything coming to a halt. I opened it up, took a look, and discovered that the plastic axle pin for the following idler had snapped: (Image is not of the unit I have; I just stole someone else's and annotated appropriately.) Because I lack a spare 410 to scavenge for parts, I've decided to move on to a 1010. Having had one growing up, it's more significant to me than the 410 so I'd rather put my efforts into one of those and let this one go to someone who has another 410 that could be cannibalised to make one good unit from. I'm offering it for the same deal as I received it under: pay postage and it's yours. Note that it may be a few days before I am able to get to the post office. We're supposed to get hit with a pretty nasty Winter storm starting today (15" of snow predicted over the weekend), so there's a strong chance of things being shut down or inaccessible into next week while it does what it does. If interested, shoot me a PM and we can figure it out from there.

That was exactly the position I found myself in any time I was someplace where the other kid had CX40s attached to <insert system here>. They had a shorter throw than the Odyssey2 sticks, to be sure - but were let down by how much effort it took to move them, as well as a lack of any real sense of having moved to the position you wanted them to. If you've ever driven a car with a manual transmission where it's not clear if you've gone into 3rd, 5th, or are in neutral, the sensation's not dissimilar. Just a lot more stiff.

Yes, but I seem to recall only ever seeing it as OEM CDs.

Replaced all four belts in the 410 this evening and cleaned the playback head. Loading is now much more reliable. And yep, cassette drives are of limited use these days - but they're good for a quick-and-dirty SIO test as well as a way to test booting on 16K machines.

Adding to the 'USPS is currently a shitshow' pile: three weeks ago, I ordered an item from China. Three days later, it had cleared customs and was at a distribution centre in Texas. That same day, it was handed off to USPS for delivery. I'm still waiting on it to get here, and we only live about 2.5 hours away from the USPS facility in question.

That makes me suspicious of the TV right off the bat. In my experience, finding settings pegged like that usually indicates a problem with whatever picture component that setting adjusts. Try this: give it a factory reset if you haven't already. Also make sure that it's set for home use, not store display - a 1991-era TV may be a little early for that, but it can't hurt to check. Next: attach a video recorder, DVD player (preferable), or other 480i device to its RF input and play back a good-quality recording. Adjust the picture until everything looks natural to you. At this point, you can replace <insert RF-based media source here> with the 7800 and have a visual baseline to compare against. Trying to figure it out from controls that were cranked to 11 as opposed to what looks right to begin with is going to be a frustrating exercise. Go with what your eyes and brain say look best for a movie, then take it from there

Don't assume that screenshots of emulated games are 100% accurate. They're probably fine, and generally OK for reference, but taking them as empirical evidence of how a game should look in terms of colour can be misleading. Different versions of even the same emulator can have huge differences in video output. And how a screenshot appears on one computer's display will be different to some extent compared to another display; your CRT may not even be able to match those colour ranges. What I'm saying is that if things look acceptable to you, then great, go with it. But because this can easily become a case of better being the enemy of good enough, don't knock yourself out trying to get a perfect match for a screenshot. With that out of the way: is there a particular issue you're trying to solve? I'm running my 7800 on the same CRT all of my RF-based systems attach to, and I've made zero changes to the picture settings. They're probably not optimal, but everything looks fine by me.

The idea's been floated a number of times over the years, but has never really taken off. A few reasons for that: Even once-common games such as Pac-Man, Galaga, and Centipede have reached the point where functional PCBs are becoming harder to find, and non-working ones have value for parts or even the board itself. Natural attrition is the main culprit. Granted, those three aren't as hard to find as some, but decent survivors at reasonable prices are requiring more and more effort to come by. Your main audience for games developed for the platform are going to be emulator users. There's no lockout or exclusivity on most actual boardsets for limiting the game in question to physical hardware; it can just as easily be run in software. This reduces the desirability of the PCB-as-console idea since MAME removes the cost considerations of physical hardware. There's really nothing stopping anyone from doing it - all they need to do is write the software, package it in a ROM format that the emulator / PCB can understand, and distribute the images. However, the amount of actual demand for new games on old arcade hardware is significantly lower than for dedicated consoles. Note that this was how a number of games were developed BITD, though, not counting bootlegs. See also: Kyle Hodgetts' games, which performed unnatural acts without consent on different arcade platforms. FPGA it. Compared to building a dedicated PCB for each platform you want to develop for, it'll be a lot more flexible (and reliable). It's also a lot simpler to fix post-release issues or expand functionality when your hardware exists in software.

I have to say that I'm starting to admire your ability to derive an entirely nonexistent message from things people write. The consistency with which you do it is impressive, too!

Funnily enough, we had exactly that opportunity due to one of our cars (a Jetta) being a dieselgate vehicle. The best way I can describe how things looked was that, at the start of it all, people fell into three main categories: The professionally-outraged, for whom this was the single greatest injustice in the history of mankind, and they were gonna sue, sue, sue. Those who were going to return their cars to VW ASAP. Many of these people were underwater on finance or just didn't like the car for <insert reason here>, so were going to use this as an easy way out. Some were actually genuinely unhappy with being deceived and wanted out on those grounds, to be sure, but they seemed to be more of a minority within this category. Everyone else who was going to wait and see what happened. They might not have been happy with VW's dishonesty, but they had no reason to return and replace their vehicle(s) either, so would hang on and see what shook out. Similar to the VCS, this was something that took a period of a couple of years to reach resolution - at least, for those who didn't immediately call their lawyer or return their vehicle. But there was one huge difference between VW and Fauxtari during this time: VW kept in touch with its customers and took responsibility for their actions. They didn't just go dark for weeks or months at a time, and didn't make promises that couldn't be kept. They also delivered on promises that they did make, and extended significant amounts of goodwill to owners keeping their vehicles. While I'm not defending VW's actions in allowing emissions-defying software to be placed into its vehicles, I will say that their actions once they had to deal with the public were, IMHO, extremely good from the standpoints of taking responsibility for their actions and not trying to offload blame onto others. This is in stark contrast to the VCS' development cycle, which was more or less the polar opposite in many respects.

Duplicate post.

Next, make sure to tell us how much more money you make in one afternoon on eBay than we all do combined in a year. That one will really put us in our place, let me tell you! Root cause confirmed.

Hi! Welcome to the Internet, where people may have opinions different to yours. Speaking of the Internet, things have historically not gone well for eBay sellers who sign up on forums specifically to leave overly-defensive replies for a few cranks making wisecracks about the item up for auction. If you want to carry on that way, that's your prerogative, but bear in mind that you've now made your comments publically-searchable to anyone and that they'll be really easy to tie to your eBay username. HTH, HAND, GLWS!!!

@CPUWIZ: I'm jealous of your double unks; mine didn't even have one. Hell, they even stuck the fuel tanks under the seats. For anyone wondering: yes, they came from the factory with two engines.

Exactly! This is why a Skoda is a much better bet; they always put the motor in the trunk before it leaves the factory!

It's like a one-stop-shop for all things Texas Chainsaw Massacre! Well, assuming you need videocassettes or game cartridges, anyway. You may have to go elsewhere for the bath towels and 10W40 motor oil.

Does it matter? What matters is that you're doing it, and doing such a fine job of it, too!

Glad to hear you got it working! What was the fix?

Folks, you'll be pleased to know that the price has been dropped to a bargain-basement $60K: Bid early and bid often! You don't want to miss out on it at this or any price!