x=usr(1536)

Agreed, but no one controller is going to fit all situations. FWIW, I comfortably use my Tankstick sitting on the couch, but not reclined; it's definitely too big for that particular position. That said, it's great for when my wife and I want to play doubles.

Yep. I've been noticing that as well - I'd like to be able to use USB controllers I already own with older systems, partly to cut down wear & tear on the original controllers, but also to have a pool of stuff made with arcade parts that can just plug right in. Maybe, maybe not. I was thinking that the microcontroller / RasPi / whatever could just translate control inputs to whatever the system in use was expecting. Doing it that way would allow for different profiles to be stored - so a single microcontroller could conceivably support any, say, 9-pin D-sub joystick regardless of whether it was being connected to an Atari, Commodore, ZX Spectrum, etc. Obviously if there are physical differences in the sticks (e.g., wiring) there may not be a good way to make that happen, but it is at least a possibility.

Speaking as someone who has, in the past, built the arcade cabinet control panel that was a) ridiculously huge and b) festooned with damn near every conceivable controller, this is a very valid consideration. It's incredibly easy to start out with good intentions and end up with an overcrowded, awkward, barely-usable mess. Separate controls make a great deal of sense when trying to eliminate or circumvent this problem. Using the Tankstick as an example again: that is about as big as a controller can be and still be usable by the majority of humans. It has the controls (sticks, buttons, trackball) the vast majority of games use most frequently built in, with ones seen less-frequently (anything pot-based, light guns, etc.) completely absent. With the appropriate microcontroller in place, any of these controls should be usable with just about any system from the past. But going for an everything-on-the-same-panel approach becomes impractical very quickly.

This could (mostly) be accomplished with an off-the-shelf X-Arcade Tankstick and the addition of the pot-based controllers. Something like that would actually be rather useful - the ability to move the controls between systems would be a huge plus. Arduino / RasPi conversion to Atari DB-9 standard would handle the logic of mating USB controls to the console / computer. Hmm...

Yep, still looking. Not picking up the NIB one on eBay with the $1500 BIN price, either - someone else can proudly add that to their collection

Something makes me want to say that the 830, 835, 1030, and XM301 were Bell 103. The SX212 was Bell 212, however, hence the name.

I'll need to track down the manufacturer (think it may have been Suncom), but there was at least one made for the A8 and C64 that worked in exactly that way.

OK, I've never heard of these before. Any background info / recommended reading available for them?

As Coleco found out with the Super Action Controllers, and others did with their respective designs. Anything targetting hardware above or different to a baseline configuration is going to remain niche at best.

Seems to be working without issue here - Concerto + POKEY, V0.95 firmware. Really like the sound. One small thing: the heading on the high score table is missing an apostrophe - it should read, "TODAY'S TOP 5".

Right, but even if you do that, the TV's settings are still going to affect the picture from the RF-to-HDMI converter. Can your TV do picture settings that are different for each input? Some can; no idea if Insignia supported that or not, though.

It's not so much that the TV is at fault as it is the TV is just doing what the TV does, which doesn't necessarily match up to what a CRT would show. See my post above for suggestions on things to tweak on the TV. Can't guarantee they'll work for you, but they're a decent starting point at least.

I'm not interested in splitting hairs, or continuing to go in circles. Unless you have something new to add, I'm pretty much done with this end of the conversation.

Yeah, modern displays do a fairly awful job of dealing with analogue RF input. Of the three HD TVs we have (all Samsungs from the 2012, 2013, and 2016 model ranges), you can watch the decline of RF input quality from 2012 (best) to 2016 (worst, and appallingly bad). The problem here is that LCD TVs don't process signals in the same way from manufacturer to manufacturer, so it's impossible to come up with a silver bullet that will make things workable for every TV out there. As general rules of thumb, however: Expect that the picture settings used for movies, sports, etc. will not be suitable for gaming Refresh rates may cause picture elements (not pixels exclusively) to have a reduced or absent appearance Colour temperature settings are likely to need adjustment There's no escaping LED/LCD element reaction times In short, expect to do a lot of experimentation with the TV's picture settings. Even then, there's no guarantee since the A2D conversion quality is likely out of your hands.

Which is part of a long, long downhill slide through various owners with increasingly-incompetent management. We're going in circles on this one. All of this has been said before, and repeatedly. See also: going in circles. And we've been here as well. Kindly don't assume what I may or may not want to hear, as you put it.

Interesting. I'm wondering if she wasn't one of the people who got one for attending a timeshare presentation - that was how my parents got mine.

They've very much become one of those things where people have realised that anyone still needing to digitise videotapes will pay for them simply because there are no alternatives. It might be a long wait to find the buyer, but if the shelf space isn't that important then I'd imagine that the seller can afford to be patient. Agreed. About the only way it would make financial sense would be if you had multiple systems that required scan conversion; they could more or less be converted at your leisure while still being usable on PAL. Even that's something of a corner case, though.

If past history is anything to go by, there will be three to five more macOS releases that support universal binaries built for both Intel and Apple Silicon. Then there will be an announcement that Intel compatibility is about to be dropped, and that'll be that. My expectation is that macOS will be locked to something in Apple Silicon that will prevent it running on other ARM-based architectures, at least not without performing major surgery to remove / circumvent whatever that dependency may be.

What sort of display are you using? Reason I ask is that I'm testing on a CRT, and they're pretty visible.

Please note that the red highlighting makes the text extremely difficult to read; doing a select all on the page is the only way to make it at all legible. Unless it's a super-rare model, its value is probably not much if anything. Check eBay for an idea of what that model is selling for, but I'm willing to bet that it would be perfect for donating to a charity shop or similar. Sell for small change to a collector on eBay, or send for recycling. After 30-plus years in the same wrapper, that battery is a leakage problem waiting to happen. Can't see anyone wanting to use it in a system that they care about. For everything else, check historic eBay auctions, past sales here, AmiBay, etc.

Very common in a number of European countries. Sorry, should have made that distinction

I remember when wall-mounted arcade games were a relatively common thing. The form factor was not a very good one from a playability standpoint.

Apropos of nothing, I just realised that there's a nod to this in Galaga. Let one of your ships be captured, then kill the alien that captured your ship while the captured ship is still at the top of the swarm. The next time the captured ship dives to attack, it'll be unescorted. Let it go off of the bottom of the screen, where it will disappear. On the next level, it'll be dragged in with the aliens as the swarm is being formed. Doesn't work if the next stage is a Challenging Stage, IIRC.

Which is very true. Analogue isn't quite as dead on this side of the world yet - despite broadcast stations having transitioned to digital in (IIRC) 2009, analogue tuners are still included as a part of digital tuners in most new televisions. Two reasons for this: one, compatibility with legacy equipment; two, in some rural areas where there is no digital over-the-air coverage, analogue transmitters (aka 'translator stations') are still being used to retransmit now-digital stations over analogue. Whether or not a modern TV can cope well with displaying analogue signals is another matter, however. On the 2016-era Samsung TV used for my second monitor, analogue looks completely awful. On a 2013 model, it's noticeably better, but still not great. But on the CRT, it looks great. Not surprising, really; analogue tuners and A2D signal processing for OTA sources likely aren't high-priority items on the list of features to cram into a TV these days. There is some overlap in the frequency range, but off the top of my head I don't recall if the channels used under NTSC for these systems fall into that category or not. One other consideration is that PAL used (again, IIRC) an 8MHz channel width, whereas NTSC ran at 6MHz. A digitally-controlled analogue tuner can overcome these issues, but, as you point out, there are no guarantees. God, do I miss SCART, even now. Can't understand why it never took off in this part of the world, apart from manufacturers just not being interested - which seems odd, given that they really didn't have to R&D anything that didn't already exist. See if it can't be fed via a video recorder that handled NTSC playback on PAL. I had one in the 1990s (Mitsubishi; don't recall the model, unfortunately) and it did the conversion on the fly. Worked beautifully for copying NTSC videotapes that hadn't seen a PAL release yet via the miracle of SCART and another video recorder