phoenixdownita
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Posts posted by phoenixdownita
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Some have been through many micros over the years and now that some of us "settled" if one looks back what micro 8 bits that you didn't know or didn't care for you wish you had given a look instead?
My first 8bit was a Sega SC3000 (overzealous store clerk pulled a number on my folks here, note it wasn't a bad one, just not what I wanted) fast followed by a C-64 (this is the one I wanted so we traded the SC3000 back), and later on I had at the same time the C-64 and an MSX.
I also had the chance bitd to sample the 800XL and the ZX-Spectrum, and also a C-16, all of them borrowed from friends but I kind of figured C-64 + MSX gave me gaming nirvana (as I always say Konami production on MSX is just something to behold).
Never really saw in real life an Apple II, nor any Acorn (BBC or otherwise), or even a CPC (well to be fair these I saw but turned off on the side of the shop), or even a C-128 (again turned off yes I did see) which I really really wanted ('cause it's the next C-64 right!) but then it was decided that my gift for Xmas should have been a video-camera which "they" [my folks] really wanted ... aaaaaaaargggghhhhh, it's been 35Y and I am still maaaaaaad .... don't do that to your kids, if you want a fancy gadget just buy it for yourself, please!
But I think if I knew they were out there I would have given the Jupiter Ace a try (aka the other ZX Spectrum-ish
without color, so like a ZX-81++), because Forth ... so exotic ... I'm sure I would have been somewhat disappointed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace ) as I was into playing with "them computers" more than anything, still right now I find it a fascinating choice.
BTW my fascination with Forth came about because of:
https://archive.org/details/Input_Vol_4_No_47_1997_Marshall_Cavendish_GB/page/n1/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/Input_Vol_4_No_48_1997_Marshall_Cavendish_GB/page/n1/mode/2uphttps://archive.org/details/Input_Vol_4_No_49_1997_Marshall_Cavendish_GB/page/n1/mode/2up
(other convenient links here https://commodore.bombjack.org/generic/magazines/input/input.htm )
and of course in the years since that publication I have never had to code in Forth
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9 hours ago, MrMaddog said:Haha, more like a pissing contest Jack Tramiel had with his former company, "Well if Commodore has 64K, then our 8-bit computers will have 64K RAM & 1K ROM for a total of 65!"
And that's how we got the 65 XE as the base model with that co-efficent number going well up to the ST series...
Say one more time? How does the 520ST gets to 520? 512K RAM + 192K ROM?
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Click the link and read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA_connector
from that page
so in general you can ignore the extra pins as they were an added tech to allow the gfx card to detect info about the monitor (like max VGA supported resolution and then eventually all supported resolutions, color depths and frequencies).
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This iteration comes quite close to Kevtris Z3K, as in, it has embedded Wireless/BT receivers + 2 USB + CD-ROM reader ... if only it had a switchable cart adapter and switchable joyport adapter we'll be done here.
If I ever buy this one that'd be my third Analogue, which summed together + shipping is probably in the 700US$ range .... wish we could have headed straight for the Z3K, this bit-a-time is good for their business but not so much for my pockets given it's more of the same (refinements for sure, improvements etc.... on a basic design) ... maybe it had to go through all of the iterations, at the same time I want to have less plastic boxes around and not more.
With a little luck next one will have joypad adapters, and cart adapters ... with an integrated CD-ROM which appear to be cheap enough it should give us all the Z3K as it was meant to be and then some, likely about the same price point ... one can dream.
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23 hours ago, SainT said:.... retailers will have stock in around 6 weeks.
Please, please, please let AA have a portion of that stock .... maybe 2020 can have 1 good thing happening ... there's time 'till Xmas
PS: my apologies for the hyperbolic statement, and my heart felt condolences to all that have lost someone in these dire times (I just had a friend losing her father to COVID .... it sucks, only meager consolation is that the other way around would have been worse as in no parent should survive his/her children)
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3 hours ago, CZroe said:...
As you can see, Darius Alpha shows everything on both displays while Darius Plus is missing elements on the digital display. That's because those elements are generated by the second VDC and the EXT port on the back only taps into the first VDC.
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Say what? Seriously? Why would they do that? Does that mean the various "AV booster" that connect to the back don't really work on SGX?
https://nicole.express/2020/super-ultra-mega-tera-grafx.html
seems to be using the output from the ext port so is she seeing things?
[never tried to move the compat switch to see if the gfx looks different] -
You're not gonna make a 3d adapter for free (or almost free), and you still need to have the gfx generated for your hypothetical "weird"-VGA signal/format ... so unless you plan to convert whatever it is you plan on making 3D it won't work.
VGA is analogue RGBHV at stated frequencies and with signals of the right impedance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA_connector , mostly progressive but there were (S)VGA modes that were interlaced too (800x600 87Hz interlaced was a thing). Note that the BNC variant is supposedly at 75ohms (like normal TVs).
Here's the connector:
if you ignore pin 4,9,11,12,15 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel ) you get literally the separate channels for R G B + H V.
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Am I the only one a little upset wrt to
?
I don't care about their "square" shape design, and I really hope they registered the logo and not the acronym FPGA .... if they registered literally the 4 letters f p g a that would be so stupid, FPGA existed way before analogue did, and project MiST started way way before (I am sure there were even earlier ones, I just used MiST as an example)
So weird, I guess they really want to stress their being FPGA based, at the same time I am not sure you can really register something like that (a little like Intel could not register numbers for their 586 and switched to Pentium etc...).
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To be totally honest, if this thing does not get jailbroken for the CD portion then it is kind of missing the mark "a little".
We complain wrt old systems getting older and prone to failure, especially CD-rom based system with their cheap mechanics ... this thing is allegedly only 10US$ more expensive than the MegaSG/SuperNT but with an onboard CD-rom reader ... which can't really be that high quality and in specific has the same issue we want to solve in the first place aka not having to deal with a broken/temperamental CD reader down the line.
Time will tell, obviously.
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By definition if Analogue wants to be faithful to the original TurboDuo/Duo they should not care CD-R or others, just like the original.
The interesting part would be on the BIOS, I am sure the actual CD HuCard (system cards and arcade cards) would work, my guess more like HW keys than actually be used (but maybe they would just work direct) and that is the way one would enable the CD-Rom portion.
Afaik each and every system card has some BIOS ... not sure how that would work (if at all) without ... note that Krikzz Turbo-ED can function as a CD-BIOS loader but one would still need the extra RAM that those cards actually carried, of course it can load SGX title if you have an SGX ... I don't think Analogue would block the Turbo-ED and so SGX gaming would be possible right away imho.
We'll know soon enough ... 2021 sometimes ... I will buy "wave2", I refuse to participate in the pre-order limited run crap ... that's just not for me, and if I miss it entirely and there's no wave2 I'll live just as fine.
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This fella seems to like it:
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Imho only reason we find it sad that most if not all of this stuff will disappear is that it is engrained in our memory of our youth, so its doom reminds us of our own fleeting situation, and of course our own life experience must be the most valuable/interesting one because ... you know ... it's our own.
Other than that it's no different than tons of other tech that disappeared without a peep and nobody really cares as much .... anyone remembers TACS or AMPS phones? ... or anyone think we should keep the fax alive? How about that scanner that became so important after you had your rig sized up and a printer to boot ... should we really care for dot matrix printers?
I have no sympathy for the tape cassette of yore ... I was lucky I had lots of free time to be able to "please wait while loading ..." but other than that ... the disc-jokey of 16bits systems multi-disc games ... nope, I'm good.
There is just too much stuff anyway .... let it go, enjoy it while you can but don't get hung-up on it, don't make yourself "the custodian" of old-computers ... have some fun but don't obsess.When it is all said and done you'll remember people, experiences and places .... the rest is there to keep us busy and add some color but it is not inherently valuable ... no more than say a calculator or a monopoly board.
The 8bits, then the 16bits then the 32bits will all be just a footnote on a course on computing, exactly like when I took mines and we barely talked about bit-slice processors and 4bit processors and I am sure a lot of other tech that came and went but was at a point hot-stuff.-
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3 hours ago, fimbulvetr said:I don’t know where cheap C64s are anymore.
That's so weird, they sold a crapton of them (30+ M) and even if a good chunk of them is likely in landfills by now I wouldn't think it is rare ... but then again it is just demand/supply, the more people want one the higher it'll cost and when someone finds a long lost one in an attic he wants to sell it at the high price and round and round we go.
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6 hours ago, Zoyous said:I enjoy emulation, and I also enjoy using the original hardware. In the case of the 32X, though... once I started really looking into it and reading about how you install it, I sort of settled on the "why did they ever release this?" point of view. I was originally under the impression that it was kind of like the Master System Converter... you just plug it in as if it was an oversized cartridge itself, and then place another cartridge into it. When you're done with 8-bit games, you unplug it. But the 32X is more like... you're making a permanent, or at least difficult-to-undo, modification to the console. And you've got to somewhat awkwardly insert these metal plates that are heat shields or serve some kind of grounding purpose or something... and it has its own very large power adapter... it's just surprising to me that they would release something as sketchy as that. As for the actual capabilities of the 32X, it's really cool. Really cool and an obvious, dramatic upgrade to the system. But just the physical interface and the installation - to me as a collector, who is able to thoroughly research this and has access to any information and resources that I could want, I just decided to pass on that aspect of the system and let emulation do the heavy lifting. But I can totally understand the people who are dedicated to using the real hardware, it does have a feel that can't be easily simulated by anything else.
No need for the metal clamps, they were required to pass the then FCC regulations.
So in the end it is like a giant cart with its own power input and an awkward but necessary video-in to mix the base genesis signal, I believe in no small part so that you can actually play non-32X games without needing to remove it, plus some/many games used the "genlock mode" to have the base genny render backgrounds ... it's not all that bad.
Was it necessary? Probably not given the Saturn was released so soon after.
If you have only 2 (Genny+CD or Genny+32x) it is actually not a bad situation since double power bricks exists now, there are triple bricks as well but double for me is the sweet spot (if only genny 1 and genny 2 had the same power connector and polarity .... but alas).
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18 minutes ago, JamesD said:Totally tubular will forever have a new meaning for me.
I don't know what to say, sometimes it is rabbit day for me (pellets, pellets and more pellets), other days Montezuma's revenge (doesn't really matter I've never been to Mexico), then there's the day of the dingleberry, humans are a miserable race, only consolation is that I've seen my cat having a few issues of her own ("consolation" being a very very generous term because when she scrapes her butt into the carpet to get "the cat version of a dingleberry" sorted out I'm the one to clean the streaks ... glorious day awaits after that!!!)
Programming under the wrong management chain is like that, you know it's going to be crappy, but that's about it.
Note: I've been sipping me some Rum, so if the mods feel like "cleaning up" I would understand.
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19 minutes ago, JamesD said:Other than that one programmer, we were a good team.
It was one of these:
"Give me an estimate of how long this will take"
"If we work 50 hours per week, and a couple weekends, it will take 4 weeks"
"I'll get you at least 4 weeks"
...
"you have 3 1/2 weeks starting 1/2 week ago"
It just wasn't possible.As we all know there are 3 variables at play:
1) scope
2) quality
3) time
you get to choose 2, the 3rd comes out of your choices.
Or, in a much more direct way:
Even when you take a crap you hardly get to decide shape (aside mostly tubular), color (mostly brown-ish but I've seen me going Pantone™ at times) and smell (from "did I do anything" to "please someone call 911, my nose is under attack"), with proper nutrition you may get ahold of a couple.
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35 minutes ago, JamesD said:Self sufficiency!
There are so many programmers that are helpless!
....
But when you are putting in 60 hours a week, you don't have time to help someone else, and they weren't even trying to figure it out on their own...Yes, but in the end as always:
"if you want to go fast you go alone
if you want to go far you go together"And yes, modern days have made people lazier, but there's still plenty that are actually ready to listen if you put the effort to find a way to talk to them. Obviously you can explain it to them but you cannot understand it for them, still it is worth the effort even when it leads to "not much".
My mom thought I was lazy because I wouldn't go anywhere without a bike, then a motor-bike, she used to walk a lot when she was young and poorer than she managed to lift us out of, nowadays if there's no wikipedia/intellisense etc... people have a mental block and think "it can't be done" ... it's also partially the fault of the industry that does not try that hard to teach to "fill the gap", it is what it is, I feel blessed to work surrounded by so many people much smarter than me both younger and older, and when I can share some of my knowledge even if at a certain point some tricks just cease to be relevant (no, really, modern C compilers don't need to be "hinted" by ++i vs i++ vs i+=1 etc..., we're in 64bits land and the OS memory does no longer have the highest bit address set to 1 like the 32bits "of old", even Java has a built-in for LeadingZeroCount so you can have a int(log_base2) pronto etc... etc....). -
The sad realization is that no BASIC available on 8bits allows you to get any close to the games you'd try to reproduce.
The 80s was the time of twitchy arcade games and BASIC just did not cut the mustard. You can barely scrape the barrel.
My first home computer was a Sega SC3000 because the store clerk convinced my parents because "SEGA" .... the games were not too bad and the BASIC cart was alright, within 2mo we returned it and got a C64 and was surprised BASIC did not require a cart, never regretted the swap, and yes the fact that its BASIC 2.0 did not allow me to program gfx or music kind of let me with a little bad taste in my mouth, but eventually I bought Simons' BASIC and I made peace with it as it really didn't make the difference I expected it to make.
One day I was at a friend's house, he had an MSX and he coded in BASIC a little gfx adventure, literally just 3 "rooms" coded via line, circle, fill etc... in the second "room" he had this "sun" rising from the center screen (just a circle with increasing radius being traced) and I was mesmerized by it (that's when I really wanted Simons' BASIC), I tried to reproduce it but Simons' BASIC wasn't as fast (but neither so slow to be unbearable) ... not that it mattered because even the MSX BASIC wasn't that fast (as the radius grew you could see the border being drawn) ... in the end I wanted to try to simulate a tunnel ... aka 2 "rising suns" one delayed by a certain amount of steps ... and boy oh boy was it slow. I bought an actual MSX and enjoyed greatly the Konami games and a few others, tried my little tunnel idea and it was slow still.
In the end even with gfx and music support BASIC was in large part a missed promise in a way, it was functional and it worked as a basic machine interface (pun intended), but you could not really make the kind of games you'd see around .... it wasn't until the time of STOS and later AMOS that one can use "BASIC" and actually, realistically build those games. GFABasic and Omicron BASIC on the Atari ST were also extremely fast but by that time I was learning compiled languages (it was the late 80s and Turbo Pascal was the "teaching" language at school) on a PC-XT and using my home Amiga to play and learn some rudimentary script (startup-sequence anyone?!?!).
So even if BASIC did get me interested in programming, that's really all it did for me. As I said earlier I had the chance to try for an extended amount of time both an 800xl and a ZX-Spectrum but did not fell I missed out on either with my combo C-64 and MSX ... they are all valid options to start on.
VisualBasic rekindled the spirit of "BASIC" in the mid 90 when everyone was a GUI programmer thanks to it .... nowadays I feel the place of BASIC has been taken by Python (and I don't like it any more than I ended up liking BASIC, which is more of a necessary evil ... it gets the job done ... slowly).
What the C64 really missed was a proper monitor/inline-assembly, in the end you needed it and DATA/POKE/PEEK were a pale surrogate, that BBC BASIC got it right (and so much more, but I still would not recommend a BBC model B unless you are a child of the UK, then you absolutely should).
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12 minutes ago, Mr SQL said:Disagree, retro computing was all about BASIC like the introduction in the manual for the Interact illustrates - an obscure 4K Computer I just saw on this thread here which I might possibly also recommend.
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Let me get this straight ... you'd possibly recommend an obscure computer you just saw and have never used before ... yeah why not, sometimes "surreal does it".
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I'm pretty sure in the US SVideo was a thing, and its quality is not bad, much better than composite, not as good as RGB (but not by a whole lot).
It was available all the way to the Wii, XB360, and PS3 era, coexisting with component cables.
My first TV when I moved in the US had SVideo connector and my PS2 looked much better on it than via composite. My first flat panel TV also supported 2 SVideo alongside component and HDMI so .... there was one higher fidelity alternative than composite before component was a thing (which as already mentioned started getting traction with Progressive Scan DVD readers).
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17 minutes ago, Mr SQL said:X2 all excellent points - phoenixdownita has brought up a related point that is missed from some of the comments:
"Second we are not making a first time user of an 80s computer a master programmer in BASIC"
Yes we are, that was a big part of the home computer revolution as an extension of Dartmouth "programming for everyone" teaching concept; learning BASIC was what you were supposed to do with a home computer in those pioneering times, not just play games on it.
NO, we are not, he just needs to get a feel for it not become a professional BASIC programmer.
Even bitd you'd move away from BASIC and try to learn assembly, BASIC was merely a stepping stone to get you interested not the end goal, for the most part there was no need to become a "master" of it, you could if you wanted to but in no way it was necessary (I am not sure assembly programmers all became Spinjitsu™ masters of BASIC).It was cheap, already existed, was ported widely for the 8bits of the time and was easily licensed (thanks to Microsoft no less) .... it had an immediate mode so it could work as the base interface to the machine, but that's pretty much it ... it served the purpose well, it was not the goal on itself.
If you pick up a professional developer career then you need to master one or more languages, but as a hobby ... it was fun to copy from magazines, adapt here and there while learning a few things and sometimes try something new but eventually (especially in the gfx dept) you always stumbled in its limitations way before you hit the ones intrinsic to the machine it was running on ... and it was slow. -
33 minutes ago, JamesD said:
Well, since I said that C64 BASIC sucks, not Simon's BASIC, you are avoiding the point.
If you want to play that game, here is MCX-BASIC for the MC-10.
The circle command can also draw partial circles or even ellipses. It's the same syntax as EXTENDED COLOR BASIC on the CoCo.10 PMODE 2:PCLS 20 CIRCLE(64,32),25 30 IF INKEY$=""THEN30 40 ENDIt doesn't suck, it simply has no support for sound and gfx.
The rest works as expected, you can use the PETSCII semigraphics characters for some games (card games, simple tile maps) .... you can create text adventures etc... the MC-10 has a better default BASIC but it is 2020 and all of that is largely irrelevant as the OP can find all the extensions he may want.
Could Commodore have shipped a better BASIC? Absolutely (and they did 2Y later with the BASIC3.5) .... did it matter? nope!!! Were there alternatives? yup!!!!
Not dissing the MC-10, just it's not "the machine" to recommend for what the OP hinted at.If it was all about BASIC I'd suggest BBC BASIC over an RPi (Zero even) with RiscOS:
http://www.riscos.com/support/developers/bbcbasic/index.html
http://www.riscos.com/support/users/userguide3/book3b/book3_9.html
(lots of BASIC goodness and proper inline assembly support in glorious HDMI and modern keyboard/mouse .... can't beat that, but 80's feeling ... not so much [well RiscOS got its name in 89 so technically ], still I'd recommend that setup for BASIC nirvana).
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3 hours ago, Mr SQL said:....
I did see creative people exploring the C64 and writing all manner of programs for it bitd but it didn't encourage efficient coding for having too much memory - here's a quote paraphrased from Lonnie Falk, the editor of the Rainbow to illustrate this issue:
When we upgraded to 16K we had so much room our BASIC programs were no longer as well designed
Lonnie was a friend and business partner as well and he hit the nail right on the head -
Spaghetti code and lack of structure was more due to the growing memory space available to BASIC as best illustrated by the C64.
I think that if I traveled back 35 years in time and gave Marty McFly a 4K MC-10 or Bally Home Computer or the 2K ZX-81 then he would grow up to become a most excellent programmer like @JamesD and if I gave him the C64 he might also but it would much be harder because he would be learning inefficient coding practices with all that RAM.
A good question for this threads perspective is weather folks would make the same recommendation in 1984 to help Marty get familiar with home computers and learn about computing as to help him learn about retro computing Today?
C'mon now, I don't even know where to begin, I wonder if you ever suggest one should run a marathon with the arms tied behind the back so than when she fells (and she will) she can smack her face to the ground, that'll teach her to maintain proper balance, wouldn't it?
First those home computers were single purpose (no multitasking), so do with RAM as you please, if it makes your development faster and performances are where you need them to be so be it, go waste around, you already paid for it, it uses the same power as if you let it untouched, if you can fit what you need spare no bytes.Second we are not making a first time user of an 80s computer a master programmer in BASIC (any BASIC), he doesn't need to, he may not want to, he actually just doesn't care yet (once he does he can learn "the tricks", until then more memory allows him to largely ignore them, and with good reasons).
Third, it is BASIC, a language that was invented as an introduction to programming, it's inefficient, doesn't really matter what tricks you use with it, it can obviously be beat by assembly (and disguising assembly as DATA statement and POKE + "SYS/CALL" [for the systems that have them] is at the same level as BASIC2.0).
The example above to draw a CIRCLE is not very friendly, it's better than the C64 BASIC 2.0 (because that has NO support for gfx/sound) but worse than Simons' BASIC, MSX-BASIC, ZX-Spectrum etc.... but hey, the OP can try the MC-10 on the web ( http://mc-10.com/ ) and maybe he likes it and decides to go with it (link to the manual https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/MC-10/Documents/Manuals/Hardware/MC-10 Operation and Language Reference Manual/MC-10 Operation and Language Reference Manual (Tandy).pdf ) .-
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Sega games on non-sega systems. Why?
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted
Because .....
... no really, just because!