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Albert

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Posts posted by Albert

  4. Posted

    9 minutes ago, bluejay said:

    Interesting. Do IBM terminals have some proprietary protocol or is it standard RS232?

    Very much proprietary, along with them not using ASCII (they used EBCDIC) and specialized keyboards with lots of extra keys:

     

    1397000.jpg

     

    Very interesting that such a large and expensive device was required to turn a Macintosh into a terminal for these IBM machines.

     

     ..Al

    • Like 2

  5. Posted

    Took some digging, but it's an AppleLine Protocol Converter.  Looks like it's a device that allowed you to use an (older) Macintosh as a terminal for IBM mainframes:

     

    https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1002/retro-scan-of-the-week-appleline

     

    Here's a manual:

     

    https://manualzz.com/doc/7082315/apple-comp-ter-apple-cluster-controller-and-appleline

     

    I imagine this is quite rare, as you might expect for an oddball peripheral like this released back in 1985.  I'd never even heard of this before!  According to a comment at the first link, this sucker cost $2,000!  It's also much larger than it looks in the above photo.  Here's a photo I found on Facebook that shows it sitting next to a Macintosh computer:

     

    May be an image of ‎text that says '‎ע PLELINE APPLELINE ELI Protocol Converte 1985 A9M0307 apple apple muzeum‎'‎

     

     ..Al

    • Like 1

  6. Posted

    The Last Strike Soundtrack CDs have arrived!  All copies of the game will include this soundtrack CD free of charge!  :)

     

    Jaguar_LastStrike_SoundtrackCD.jpg

     

    Also, the printer claims to have solved the issue with the Jaguar manuals, and I will have the fourth (!) set of physical proofs either tomorrow or Saturday.  Assuming those look good, I can put the manuals into production and should have them relatively soon after that.  Still working on fixing some issues with the labels, and once those are resolved they will go into production as well.

     

     ..Al

    • Like 14

  10. Posted

    There's a significant new update..

     

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/3019900

     

    Looks like they are also doing a System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition, and will be releasing that at the same time as the System Shock remake.  Any Kickstarter pledges $30 or higher will also receive SS2:EE for free.  Really look forward to playing both of these games in order once released!!

     

     ..Al

  11. Posted

    9 minutes ago, Greg2600 said:

    As for the multiple accounts, he did so "to plead his case to Al."  If there are other accounts, he said his employees are on the same network (hence same IP).  Not exactly AA's finest hour.

    Yeah, please, don't give me that bs about other accounts being his employees.  The other accounts were using the SAME COMPUTER, not just an IP match.  He created a second account last fall to post as another user in the same thread his primary account was posting in (responding to himself!), as someone else noted above.  That alone is a perfectly legitimate reason to ban someone, and that's happened before resulting in bans.  He then created a third account after a moderator banned him from posting further.  And he did send me PMs with his Itchy account (which I only saw after most of this had already transpired, including his initial ban), as well as sent emails using the forum contact page.  For example (click for a larger view):

     

    ArgonautWarrior_2021-01-21.png

    I don't have the time or patience for stupid games.  And remember, he's the one who took his ball and ran home, asking to have his account removed.

     

     ..Al

    • Like 5
    • Thanks 2

  15. Posted

    2 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

    Thanks for explaining, Al. That might explain why I got some notifications and some not.

    Email is such a pain in the ass, especially when you are sending so many emails. The forum sends about 10,000 emails a day!

    2 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

    BTW: That voting is new, no? But isn't that somewhat redundant with the likes? Also I don't like the option of down voting on a friendly website like AtariAge.

    This is a "Question and Answer" forum.  This is the only forum I've setup like this so far, but if you can think of more forums where such a format would be useful, please let me know.  The up and down voting is to allow the best answer to percolate to the top.  An admin or moderator and ultimately select the best answer, and that will then appear directly below the original question.  So it's not really the same as the likes.

     

     ..Al

    • Like 1

  17. Posted

    Just now, Ikrananka said:

    Just reset my email to hotmail and got the validation email within a minute.  Notifications already seem to be coming through okay but I guess time will tell.....

    Thanks for confirming.  Should be fine until I start playing around with this again.  ;)

     

     ..Al

  20. Posted

    This is a bit of a complicated issue.  The forum sends a ton of emails, and over time there has been a growing list of users whose emails are no longer valid.  This results in many emails getting bounced, and worse, continuing to send emails to accounts that are no longer valid.  Mail providers frown upon this behavior and your domain will earn a poor reputation for doing this.  Some providers were sending a lot of AtariAge.com email to spam folders, such as Gmail, Yahoo!, and Hotmail, even though AtariAge has never been used to send spam.

     

    To try and fix this, I first setup an external SMTP email service, in this case, Amazon SES (Amazon Simple Email Service), along with Amazon SNS (Amazon Simple Notification Service).  Together, along with a third-party application ("Mail Bouncer"), this allows the forum to monitor when emails are hard bounced.  When this happens, the forum disables the user account until the user changes their email address.  This also immediately disables email notifications for that account, which will stop emails to that address from bouncing. 

     

    There are also soft bounces, where an email cannot be delivered immediately, but are still reported. These do not result in the account being blocked, but will show a warning that deliveries are failing. 

     

    Here's what one of the bounces looks like:

     

    Screen Shot 2021-01-17 at 10.10.24 AM.png

     

    Looks like Microsoft blocked one or more Amazon IP addresses that were being used to send emails to their customers (Hotmail, MSN, live.ca, etc.)  Until I can dig into this further, I have disabled the application that monitors bounces and also stopped using Amazon's email service.  Hopefully that will allow things to return to "normal" for now.  Which is too bad, as it was working pretty well for a time, greatly reducing the number of bounces the forum was generating, and improving the domain's reputation.  I'm guessing another user was abusing Amazon's mail service and happened to be sharing the same IP that was being used to send AtariAge forum emails.

     

    I can lease a dedicated IP from Amazon, which costs $25/month to do so.  This would likely fix the issue, as long as that IP doesn't already have a poor reputation.

     

    I sent a test mail from the AtariAge mail server to a Hotmail account I rarely use, and it immediately was immediately sent to the "Junk Email" folder. I marked it as not spam, sent another, and that one came through fine.  Really annoying. 

     

    Now that I've disabled the forum application and have stopped using the Amazon email service for now, I would appreciate if people can report whether their notifications start coming through again.

     

    Thank you,

     

     ..Al

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 2

  25. Posted

    8 hours ago, Synthpopalooza said:

    So a thought ... And maybe a question for Albert:

     

    I was thinking about double POKEY for this.  What are the logistics of including PokeyMax or double POKEY mapped at $440 and $450?  Or making it a digital release playable on Dragonfly?

    I don't think you'd be able to fit two POKEYs inside a regular 7800 cartridge, so the PokeyMAX would be a better solution.  Would probably require an updated board to support, though. It's fairly expensive for use in individual games with its $69 retail price.  Even I was able to get them at a discounted price in quantity, it would still significantly increase the price of games.  I think there would need to be a really compelling reason to do this.

     

     ..Al

    • Like 2
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