ElectricLab

lol no - no turning traces into fuses What I was getting at was, if the current is limited to 50ma through current regulation, then I wondered what's happening to your voltage level if you're sourcing 65ma. It may bring the voltage down inversely as you pull more current. If the voltage drops below the min required by the ICs, you might get some flaky behavior.

[email protected], How's the voltage with the current at 65mA? I'm wondering if it's causing the voltage to drop a little since you're technically exceeding the 50mA "limit".

That's a good idea, since those things are typically smaller than your average wall wart. You can get 500ma from USB 1.0 so I'd think any of those would work OK in terms of, although I'm not sure how clean the signal is. Since they're designed just to charge batteries, I wonder if they have much in the way of filter caps in them.

I like the pigtail idea. You'd just need a regulator to get to 5v, which would add another component to the board, but not too big of one.

Right you are Omega. I know jedimatt is going for plug-and-play which is the whole point of his project. Hopefully he can build this to not require an external 5v source, since that complicates things too. I know the TI sidecar 32K ram had its own supply built in - does anyone know if other manufacturers' ones did too?

It's possible that this design was to discourage 3rd party development. I don't see why you couldn't tie that line in with an internal wire, straight to the PS's regulated 5v output.

When the wife notices your latest acquisition: "What, that computer/ham radio/misc boat anchor ? That's been there for years." Practice in front of a mirror until you can keep a straight face.

Thank you. Do you know his AtariAge user name?

Off-topic question: I have the chance to purchase a TI 980 (the TI 990 is the successor), and I might get it just for the heck of it. I have a Silent 700 and an early 70s Texas Instruments printer that I could connect to it. It's just the big box with a backplane and power supply, and it's loaded with cards. I have no clue what to offer the guy. Does anyone have any idea what something like this is worth?

Awesome. I can't see the pictures though. Perhaps you're still uploading them.

They're called, at least when I still worked at a PCB shop, tooling holes, and are also used for registration for electrical test to align the finished board on a fixture. When you get more complex in your designs with tighter pitch SMT and multiple layers, you really need them. Often they're left unplated which allows for tighter tolerances since plating and solder makes the finished size a little less predictable.

Packet is largely dead, and is no where near as popular as it once was. I talked to the ISS once too back in the height of packet. Mostly what I see when I camp out on a frequency are beacons for mail relays. Not much actual traffic though. I would like to set up a station for doing packed on HF and relaying email for people - maritime mobiles and what not, but I don't know when I'll get time to set that up. APRS is popular, but not terribly exciting for me. The Emergency Communications guys are all about the APRS, and there are packet nodes at many hospitals in my area and they're set up to exchange data in the event of infrastructure failure. There's that D-STAR stuff, but being proprietary and therefore against the spirit of ham radio, not interesting to me.

I have a collection of the things and I've gotten them printing with AVR microcontrollers, and more recently, with Raspberry Pis. I only have two that speak ASCII, since most of my collection pre-dates 1963 which I think is when ASCII became a standard. When I was a kid, my Dad had a model 19 hooked up to a radio and was doing RTTY. I became enamored with the mechanical wonders.

I'm a sucker for old tech.

There is a project where a guy did create RS232 functionality using the joystick port: http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/joytalk/joytalk.html It wouldn't be a drop-in replacement for the standard RS232 port and software would have to be written to use it, but a really cool project. I am an active ham and I've always loved digital modes. In about 1987, I used to decode morse by feeding in the audio from my HF transceiver into a simple circuit with an LM567 tone decoder chip. One of the LM567's pins would go low when a tone of ~1000 hz, as controlled by an RC circuit, was presented in its input. I fed the output of the tone decoder into a 2N2222 to simulate joystick button presses, if I remember correctly. I was able to write an XB program to listen for pulses and calibrate to the sender's speed and could decode the dots and dashes into text up to about 10 WPM. Any faster than that, and the poor TI running XB couldn't keep up. I new zero assembler back then, or I'd have made it work a lot better. It was cool nonetheless. For modes like PSK31, you'd need some more computational power to sample fast enough to be useful, even though the bit rate is just 31 baud. If you were able to feed Q and I into a TI, you might be able to do something in assembly. There are some interesting standalone projects like this one that I bought when they came out: http://www.nue-psk.com I still tinker with packet radio and am in the process of putting a digipeater on a hilltop near where I live so I can do some experiments. I fully plan on using a TI console at home using an RS232 port connected to an old TNC, running at 1200 baud.

I just published my little artillery game for Stuart's browser, and have a few other web-based games in the pipeline. My adventure engine is nearly complete also, so hopefully someone will help create some cool new text adventure games that we all can play. I'm a sucker for those, since they were among the first games I ever played and I started writing some half-baked ones 30 years ago in XB. To add to what Matt stated - it would be fun to get together again, even if there's not much new. I think I'm like others here in that there is no shortage of ideas, but spare time in which to execute them is the item in shortest supply.

I wanted to let users of Stuart's Internet browser that I got inspired this past week to hack together a program to simulate an artillery game that would run in it. Basically I put together a simple trajectory algorithm on the server-side that takes two fields of input from the user: Angle and Velocity. A couple of mountains are rendered on the screen and a projectile's trajectory is calculated and plotted on the page using custom character definitions which are created on the fly. Basically I wanted to experiment with maintaining a bitmap of the TI's screen on the server side, scribble stuff on it, and run it through an algorithm which would iterate through the bitmap and create <cdef> statements on the fly. These <cdef> statements are then printed ti the browser to show the screen. I want to make it multi-color (Presently the "target" is a bump on the side of a mountain, and is the same color of the mountain), and also make it 2-player. I'll keep working on it as time allows, but wanted to see if anyone else could help me test it in the mean time. It's linked up to the home page of myti99.com (It works on a modern browser too, using Javascript, but what's the fun in that?) I think this approach could be used to make some cool games. If anyone is interested, I'd happily share the code - I wrote it in Perl. If anyone wants to create some games or apps, I'll be happy to host them on myti99.com. I am working on making a TI web platform using Python and Flask, but it will be a while before that's done. Thanks to Rich Gilbertson for suggesting such a game for the browser, way back at TI Fest West this past April -Corey.

To clarify, is there any interest in out there in creating new adventure games for others to play? Some years back, I created an adventure engine that uses MySQL on the backend, and I could create all the needed ingredients for interactive adventure games that could be played from the command line in UNIX. Basically I made it so one could create Zork and Pirate Adventure type games just be adding the right entities to database. I never did much with it, but I recently modified it to work on the web and tied it to MyTI99.com (It's not active just yet. read on if interested) and I've made it work with Stuart's Internet Browser. I've been putting the finishing touches on web-based admin screens where one can create new adventures, create all the needed parts like locations, items, phrases, etc. The goal was to make it REALLY EASY for anyone with a little creativity to use these screens to put together adventure games, and publish them on MyTI99.com for others to play on their TIs. I've only made one simple 18 or so location game that I created to test and debug the engine and admin tools. It's kind of fun, and I always enjoyed these types of games. I understand they're not for everyone, but I suspect there must be someone who will be interested in this project. I hope Personally I have fond memories of staying up way too late with my best friend in High School, circa 1983, trying to solve Pirate Adventure on the TI. Say YOHO anyone? If anyone is interested in creating some games, please let me know and I'll make the admin tools available to you when I get them completed. I should mention that the admin tools are meant to be used on a modern web browser, but the finished games/maps are all playable on the TI itself using Stuart's Internet browser. Just throwing this out there to see if I'm the only one that would be interested in this stuff or not.

With the external supply I'd double-check that shared ground, and make sure the voltage is staying at 5v. I wonder if the addition of buffers is affecting (data not being held?) the ability to read data. If you want to borrow my Logic Analyzer, it could shed some light. At least you'd be able to record some traffic and look at the timing. It's a Gould logic analyzer k205 and it is about as loud as a stock PEB, but useful. I even have the manual and several pods and connectors. I've not used it much other than going through its own internal diagnostics. Anyway you're welcome to it if you want.

I see what you did there You were billions of nanoseconds too late!

Haha true! Sure if the RAM's not ready, you don't get your data. It might take more cycles to perform a read or write with a sufficiently long cable, which would be just as slow an approach as waiting for your data to be read/written. I think the TI is slow enough that you'd not even notice if a physically long bus was slowing you down, unless it were some miles long.

Can confirm, that bumping the firehose cable has caused me many a crash. Also, that cable is looooong in terms of nanoseconds!

I've heard that Micro$oft does indeed still patch XP to this day and that updates are being created. It's because XP is so widely deployed on important systems that aren't easily upgraded or upgradeable at all, like point-of-sale systems, and it would be a bad thing tm for M$ to abandon them. I've also heard that you can change a registry setting in your home version of XP so that M$ will think it's a PoS (Point of sale, not the other meaning of pos which may also apply) system and that you can still get updates that way. Has anyone ever tried this? (I heard this on a security podcast about six months ago, so your mileage may vary.)

"bunch of bongabongabonga" lol

I have a silent 700 at home, with its power cord. I don't know the name of that type of cord but I'll look when I get home to see if there are any numbers or markings on it.