TheMole
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Posts posted by TheMole
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But it is handled using just software... All the HDX board is, is a battery-backed DSR replacement that presents the serial port as a disk drive. It's a shame that DSR's reside in ROM on most (all?) cards, otherwise stuff like this would've been as simple as loading a program on the TI to "update the driver".
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No, sorry... That would be me
. Blogger will automatically redirect you to a localized version. You can try changing the .be or .com to something like .fr or .it and you'll end up in exactly the same place. -
That device sounds both wonderful and painful at the same time. Reading through the posts, it seems it hooks up to both the cartridge as well as the sidecar expansion slot? And what's that stuff about the cassette and joystick ports?
http://forgottenti.blogspot.be/2009/03/some-hardware.html
Anyway, no further info on Andrew Fewl on the internetz, so we'll be damn lucky if we ever hear more of this. I think he's European, looking at his posting times... maybe someone knows about him in one of the local communities (looking at his English grammar, I'd say more likely to be Southern European than Northern European)?
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How can the documentary be on YouTube and still be on sale?
My guess would be because the Youtube version is shitty low quality and they're hoping that people will want to pay for a higher resolution version?
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1. No, not if I have a choice.
2. FreeBSD.
I'm gonna regret asking this 'cause I just know it has the potential to turn into a huge religious debate, but why do you prefer FreeBSD over Linux so much? Is it a BSD vs GPL thing, or the design of the kernel, or... ?
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But seriously, I think the main drawback to Linux when dealing with a large work force is the fact that most people still use Windows at home, are familiar with its apps (email, IE, Office etc...) and generally know their way around it to varying degrees. Linux on the other hand feels very unfamiliar to the uninitiated, particularly if one wanders away from the basic apps. In a work environment, you need to maximize efficiency, and there is no benefit to risking confusion among even a small percentage of the work force by using Linux when a perfectly good and familiar alternative exists.
Actually, I think there's definitely some efficiency benefits to be had from splitting what people use at home and what they use at work. Linux is often foreign enough to be associated with the workplace and Windows can easily take the role of the day-to-day fun-at-home OS. The short learning curve associated with the new environment ('cause henstly, if you're using a computer, what does it matter where you run Chrome or Firefox, right?) should be easily offset by the potentially more restricted environment of the rest of the OS.
Either way, I personally believe the discussion (although fun) is meaningless anyway, as more apps are moved to the web and personal smart devices...
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2- Windows PC's exclusively. Let's face it: for large non technology related entities, PC's are cheap, and Windows is very easy to use with lots of software options. Linux in nice but is still too intricate for the average user and with far less software choices. As for Mac's, well cost remains the main barrier...
I don't really agree with that, Linux is often just as easy or easier for the average user (browsing, email, watching movies, simple word processing, ...), and if you don't use cracked software there's probably a richer ecosystem of free software available for Linux than for Windows (again, for basic usage). I do agree that for a lot of computer enthousiasts Linux falls into that awkward category where if you want to thread of the beaten path just a little bit you'll need to learn some things that Windows can do with one or the other little program from the internet without much prior knowledge. Then on the other end of the spectrum, for those "in the know" Linux is typically considered much more usable than Windows.
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It should be pointed out that there is no reason why on-brand ink should be so expensive except for the fact that they sell the printers with next to no margin. It's a horrible business model that in the end will cost the consumer much more and we should feel like it's our duty as properly educated consumers to look for "aftermarket" solutions for ink. As with any consumable, there are inferior products out there and there are excellent products out there. As it becomes more and more mainstream to look elsewhere for printer cartridges there will develop a whole range of products in different quality segments for each type of buyer (just like with gas, or oil in a car), and you will have the experiences of so many others before you to lean upon when making a decision.
Bottom line, it is not ok for manufacturers to charge insane margins on top of consumable goods that lock you into a specific vendor, take a stand and look elsewhere for those products.
Oh, and as pointed out above: when you're looking at tanks only (Canon, Epson, ...) instead of cartridges with built-in printer heads (HP, Lexmark, ...) there's really very little chance of running into major problems. And with the remanufactured cartridges for HP and Lexmark type printers the worst that'll happen is that you get a bad cartridge (printer head completely worn out) and you wasted your money.
tl;dr: go for it!
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1. No, last time I did that was probably in 1997 when I used it to resolve graphs for my math courses. Simple @pesoft XB programs with the graph to be plotted translated in XB calls.
2. Mac (primary personal machine), Linux (development machine for non-TI development), Windows (Work laptop, although we will be allowed to move to Macs soon!)
3. The Mac is a mac mini (so desktop machine), all other computers are laptops. Tablets and smartphones are all Android (and of the Nexus variety at that)
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1. Yes, although not as my main OS anymore since I started getting into audio recording and had to get a Mac to run Logic Pro. Still prefer Linux of Mac though.
2. Ubuntu with stock Gnome DE instead of Unity
3. MESS and ti99sim, and in contrast with Retrospect's experience, both work perfectly on my system (although ti99sim is admittedly
a bit awkward initially when it comes to figuring out how to do basic stuff such as cartridge image loading and setting up your PEB).
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If I understood it correctly, TML is set of subprograms that allow you to use bitmap mode from XB. I think senior_falcon wrote it back in the day. It is targeted at the 9918a though, so it'd be interesting to know what the problem is...
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could someone at least make a screenshot or maybe a short video of the title screen if it is animated?
so that the ones without a TI can take a look at it
I wouldn't mind this too...
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A little project for any willing MESS user ...
Some people have expressed doubt about whether a decent wireframe display could be done on the TMS9918 due to the port-mapped interface bottleneck. Another computer that used the TMS9918 (actually, the later but equivalent TMS9129) was the Tatung Einstein, which had a port of Elite made for it, and for which a MESS emulation exists. Anyone fancy the challenge of trying to get it running in MESS, and seeing what sort of video frame rate was achieved? There are details from someone who got it running back in 2010 on this thread: http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1788. Down near the bottom that page there are some details about it needing a specific MESS version. The link near the top of the page to the Einstein Elite disk images is still working.
Stuart.
Why not just look at the MSX version? Same CPU and VDP as the Tatung and a lot more popular so one can find decent videos on youtube:
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Nice one.
I knew the meme, so I recognized the photo. I definitely think Sissy's a girl though (just not this particular girl), - at the risk of sounding sexist or particularly un-PC - her entire way of communicating seems to me to be uhm... statistically more likely to be that of a girl. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just something that strikes me as a pattern I've seen.
But yeah, it's probably best that people start realizing that simply right-clicking on a photo and selecting "Google this image" in Chrome will almost always show the true origin of the photo if you've plucked it from the internetz... For this particular photo, my guess the search term used would've been something like "pretty girl photo", which depending on your location will give you the above photo on the first page of results you get back.
Ah well... always fun to have a bit of soap-style drama on boards like this
. Maybe Sissy can clear this up by posting a real photo of herself next to her TI... you know, seems easy enough to me.-
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I think it really depends on the emulated system. We certainly did not intentionally implement a brake or so ... In principle, if the emulation remains on a higher level, the performance could be enough. As soon as we apply some deeper emulation detail (e.g. subcycle emulation of the CPU) we may cross the line where performance becomes vital
Yeah, I figured as much. For what it's worth, the TI and Geneve emulations run predictably at 100% on my 2012 lowest-end Mac Mini (I believe it has a 2.5 Ghz dual core i5). Of course, that's still a long ways off from a 1.5ghz quad core Android device, but still...
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Do you know what version Android that requires?
Not sure. As I said, I use it on my Ouya, and that's based on version 4.something. Why not simply give it a go? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.seleuco.mame4all
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MAME and MESS are not designed for performance, that's a major trouble for older PCs and these other devices, also including these micro-systems like the Raspberry Pi, Arduino boards, Beagle Bone etc.
On the other hand, Mame4Droid can certainly handle relatively powerfull systems (e.g. NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat, ...) on my Ouya, so the situation might not be so bad either.
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Hi guys, I just did a port of the old Ritchie C compiler from pdp11 to 9900. The source is here:
http://1587660.websites.xs4all.nl/
Some discussion is here:
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?15580-Powertran-Cortex/page60
For sure this compiler is not as good as gcc or clang, but it is small enough to run on a 9995 with 64kb of ram.
Enjoy!
Very cool!! I've read through the thread at the vcforum, but am not sure I understand it correctly. This can be used as both a cross compiler as well as a native compiler on 9995 based systems with enough memory? Have you tried compiling a 99/4a program with it, and if so can you share how to get something like a hello world up and running?
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That's how I see it too. It is possible; you choose the smallest affected rectangle, restore it, then draw your software sprite on top, then blast it into the correct place in VDP. You don't have to do a whole screen at a time (though a lot of spectrum games did, for example, Manic Miner updates the *whole* screen every frame) just the rectangular areas in which a change has been made.
Some games use XOR to remove the software sprite.
True, by updating the damaged area we're bound to be able to do some software sprites. However, recalculating the character definitions and somehow managing the color clash are not to be underestimated in terms of complexity either. Rasmus used software sprites in Scramble for the bullets, but those move in 8 character intervals and the background (star field° is simple enough to just paint the same character over it. Anything that must be able to move with pixel precision over anything but a clear background is very hard on the TI, not only because of the RAM-VRAM penalty but also because we only have tile-based modes on the VDP.
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This is interesting ... so, as we know, the Spectrum uses software sprites .... is it possible to have the TI use software sprites in the same way?
Since the TI has separate VRAM and RAM and it is quite costly to move data from one to the other so I don't think we can't directly mimick that way of working efficiently. I would also be much more memory intensive as you need a copy of (part of) your screen buffer in RAM.
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Well-if we are on a Colecovision conversion kick-howabout,
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Smurfs.Really? The game in which you immediately die if you run into a friggin' fence?
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Never played Elite, but from the few video's I've seen about it in the past it doesn't look like you ever have more than one object on the screen at once? If so, and seeing the simplicity of the geometry I'd reckon it could be doable... But I'm not volunteering, let me finish my side scrolling platformer first
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Sure enough! I checked my PC and the Bluetooth is 'COM3'. So if I went this route, I'd just have to re-assign the port used for the HDX program on the laptop. I'd like to hear if anyone tries this, and if works, how far away you get from the host computer.
Bluetooth typically tops out at about 10 meters; line of sight (that's roughly 30' for you metrically challenged folk out there). So physically putting your TI in another room is more than likely not an option using bluetooth.
I stick with my original remark regarding HDX and basically all those windows wares out there: if we would just port the utility software for all this stuff to Linux, we'd all be able to run all of it on a single 30$ raspberry pi neatly tucked away inside the PEB instead of cobbling stuff together using bridges, dongles, doohickeys and thingamabobs...
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Ah. Shame I'm not in the states. I'd build a (searchable) website out of them, making everything available online for download.
This is a killer idea and a very kind offer. If Marc would consider this an option I'll help pay for shipping if you want.
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"Quantum Leap" discovered!
in TI-99/4A Development
Posted
I was kinda expecting a post about this thing: http://oldcomputers.net/ql.html
But this is neat to
. Although I always wished these music maker songs used the features of the chip a bit better and allowed for attack and decay controls to make the music sound a little bit more lively...