JB

Dang. That sucks, especially with it all clearing away as soon as the show was over.

I was pleasantly surprised down here in Dallas. Sky got progressively cloudier until about ten minutes before the main event, when it suddenly cleared up. That said, as frustrating as it was not knowing in advance, "partly sunny" was a hilarious forecast for a solar eclipse.

Don Quixote did a final debug pass after the manual was written.

So am I supposed to bet it all or the 49ers or Taylor Swift? How is Taylor Swift even going to win the Super Bowl without a team of clones? Is she even supposed to play? Are there really 49 of the 49ers? I'm so confused!

I tried to be an optimist, but I misheard and turned into a red truck.

Well, there's the lawyer that had ChatGPT do his legal research. He got in a lot of trouble for citing made-up cases.

They will experience more than zero zaps.

So you're saying I should use Zero Zap to test?

The Geneve is now an accelerator card!

Reminder: ChatGPT is not a search engine, nor is it a reliable source of information. To my knowledge, there are no "accelerator cards" for the 99/4a. And I'm reasonably sure the "300 kilohertz" thing is equally bullcrap(though there is truth in the 4a's architecture restricting performance)

In before an entire warehouse of 'em shows up in an estate sale!

TI did build a very robust system. The problem, as I understand it, with the RIFA capacitors is they were manufactured with a plastic shell. Over time that plastic has gotten brittle and developed microfractures, and there's no way to tell if those fractures have exposed the interior of the capacitor to the exterior environment yet. If they have, humidity from the air can short out the capacitor and the capacitor goes bang and catches fire.

You will still need cartridges.

That's how it used to be in Texas. Shortly before "the tollway" paid itself off, they changed the rules to allow the operators to, I believe, engage in creative bookkeeping to hide the tollroad being paid off. Shortly afterwards, a metric buttload of toll projects all started. I hate it. DEATH TO THE TOLL ROADS! A POX UPON THE NTTA!

DEATH TO THE TOLL ROADS! A POX UPON THE NTTA!

And he was never heard from again. Some say he died on those freeways. Others claim he's still out there, waiting forever for someone to move so he can creep forward another six inches.

If your TI is near your PC, you plug the TI's tape cable into the PC's microphone and headphone jacks. Record to a wave file when the TI is saving, and play that wave file back when the TI is loading. Since(unlike Atari or Commodore) the TI tape interface is just two audio lines*, theoretically anything that can record and play back audio will work. You don't need a tape player, just something that can record from a microphone jack and play back through a headphone jack. ... In practice, it wants a LOUD signal and a lot of modern playback devices lack the ooomph needed. *Incidentally, this is also why there's no tape drive emulators for the TI. As we lack any special tape interface, any tape replacement we can make is just... reinventing the MP3 player. Our lack of custom floppy drive replacements is a similar situation. Our floppy scenario wasn't a proprietary drive, it was a controller card with a connector for standard drives. No need to create a replacement. By the time flash RAM was interesting, the Gotek existed, so... why reinvent it?

You know how it is. No one fights as fiercely as family.

This is true, but it has been a decade or two since things have been this hot.

Why does it have to go onto tape? Why can't you connect the digital recorder to the TI?

Except Australia!

At the time, there was no indication the mylar keyboard modules would have long-term reliability issues. And TI was not planning on exiting the home computer market, they were still planning to dominate it. Their departure from the market was a sudden and abrupt decision due to the home computer division's absolutely CATASTROPHIC financial performance(the one division lost enough money in one quarter that the company as a whole posted a loss, for the first time in TI's history) You can see the cost reduction in other ways besides "two sheets of mylar and a ribbon cable beats a few dozen switches and a solder bath". The mounting bracket on the mylar modules is molded plastic instead of stamped steel, and most of the various types of microswitched keyboard modules are black while most of the mylar modules are beige. The beige cases mark the beginning of earnest cost-reduction efforts.

Other way around. The mylar keyboard module was a later cost-reduction decision.

The real question is why anyone's eating Taco Bell when they could have food instead.

Well, now it's just a rude version of Meteor Belt.