MaximRecoil

I think gameplay differences are are a lot worse than graphics and sound differences, and in many, if not most, cases, gameplay differences aren't due to hardware limitations, but rather, they are due to someone simply deciding they want to change it. The first time I played an arcade port on a console that had the ~same gameplay as its arcade counterpart (not counting the Excitebike thing, because the "arcade version" was just the NES game to begin with) was when I bought Street Fighter II: The World Warrior for my SNES soon after it was released. I was already good at the original arcade version at the time, which I'd been playing regularly for about a year, and the SNES version had practically identical gameplay, so I was automatically good at it right from the get-go. I was very impressed with that port, especially considering how much more powerful the Capcom CPS-1 arcade hardware is than the SNES hardware, and how much more ROM data the arcade boardset has than the SNES cartridge (over 7 MB vs 2 MB).

Yes, I should have mentioned within a given size package, since we're talking about the TRIAD power supply which is roughly the same size as the original NES power supply. If there's any difference in efficiency it's minor because you can't increase the cross-sectional area of the transformer wire by much without making the transformer a lot bigger due to the high number of turns in the windings. Also, the NES is a low power device to begin with. Even if you had a power supply that was [impossibly] 100% efficient, you might save what, several cents per year on your electric bill? When compared to an electric oven, stove, water heater, refrigerator, etc., what little power the NES uses is a spit in the ocean, and a small difference in efficiency between different step-down transformers only amounts to a tiny fraction of that spit in the ocean. I never said anything about brand new ones for $11.95, and it's not a significant issue because the chances of the transformer itself ever failing are slim to none. The cord can break, but that's an easy and free or cheap fix. The most common spot for the cord to break is where it enters the transformer shell, and in that case, you can just cut off the bad section, i.e., cut off an inch or two of the cord and re-attach it to the transformer. You'd still have a longer cord compared to the TRIAD, since it's a couple feet longer to begin with. By the way, the TRIAD's cord is only 22 AWG, so that won't be particularly durable either. Do you have any experience with filing a warranty claim with the TRIAD company? What are the details? Who pays for shipping? How long does it take to get your power supply repaired or replaced? When you contact them by e.g., email, how long does it take for them to respond? Do they respond at all? Do they answer their phone? If so, is it a real person or a recording? Since the only thing likely to ever fail on a product like this is the cord, will they honor the warranty for a broken cord or would they say that you must have mistreated it and they aren't responsible? Some companies are good about warranties and others aren't. Either way, I'd much rather have one with no warranty at all that I can easily fix myself than a permanently sealed unit with a 10-year warranty. Not that brand new matters in terms of the performance of a step-down transformer (they are just solid wire wrapped around an iron core; they don't degrade with usage or the passage of time like say, an electrolytic capacitor can), but that's still a better deal than the TRIAD one, especially for people who like their system to be all OEM. I don't lump China and Taiwan together. Taiwan's manufacturing has a better overall reputation than mainland China's does. Look at electrolytic capacitors for example. With regard to Asian manufacturers, bottom-tier ones are mostly made in China, mid-tier ones are mostly made in Taiwan (e.g., Taicon, Teapo), top-tier ones are mostly made in Japan (e.g., Rubycon, Nichicon, Nippon Chemi-Con, Suncon, Panasonic). The quality of that TRIAD power supply is probably fine, but I highly doubt it's better quality than an original NES one, and I definitely wouldn't pay as much for one as I would for an original, let alone more, especially since you can't take it apart without breaking/damaging the shell.

That isn't even possible. It is literally just a step-down transformer. The rest of the power supply is in the NES itself. There's no way to use less energy when using nothing but a transformer to step ~120 VAC down to ~9 VAC with a given amount of current draw. The same amount of energy will be wasted/dissipated as heat no matter what. Of course, but finding an original one is as easy as falling off a log. There are hundreds of them on e.g., eBay, at any given time, which isn't surprising since there were tens of millions of them produced. Would you rather pay $12 for an original one which is serviceable and has an 8½' cord or $37 for a new aftermarket one which is disposable and has a 6½' cord?

Yeah, and that's not likely to ever happen, except maybe in the event of a lightning strike. A short can happen if the transformer wasn't made right, e.g., if the enamel that's coating / electrically insulating the transformer wire is poor quality or defective it could break down. That's unlikely too. Nearly all "wall wart" type power supplies have a shell that's permanently glued/fused together. I was [pleasantly] surprised that original NES ones have a shell that's screwed together. Better quality how? It's just a transformer, i.e., solid copper wire wrapped around an iron core. The only thing it's doing is stepping down the voltage from ~120 VAC to ~9 VAC. I'd rather have an original NES one mainly because it's serviceable, whereas I don't see any screws in the shell of that TRIAD one. Plus, you can find original NES-002 power supplies on eBay all day long for a lot less than the $26.97 + $9.99 shipping for the TRIAD one from Newark. Many of them sell for around $20 or less, shipped. eBay item number:125595224381 is only $11.95 shipped right now, and he has two of them available at that price. So the to-your-door price of that original one is only $2 more than the price of shipping alone for the TRIAD one from Newark. Furthermore, the original ones were made in Japan in the '80s and '90s, whereas the TRIAD one is made in China in 2022. If either one has an edge in quality, I'd bet on it being the original one. And the original one has a cord that's about 2 feet longer than the TRIAD's cord.

That's awesome, but it seems like a waste to use it with a bad port of Ikari Warriors. I consider all ports of Ikari Warriors to be bad, since they all omit the best feature of the game: the rotary control over the gun, which allows you to aim the gun in a different direction than you're walking. Using it with MAME isn't all that great either, because, for some strange reason, MAME treats the rotary function in Ikari Warriors as an analog dial even though it's supposed to be a switch. Someone makes, or made, an interface that allows a rotary joystick to work with MAME but it takes a lot of fiddling with the analog dial settings in MAME, and even then it's never going to be perfect. Also, you already said you don't use emulators, but rather, you're a fan of hardware, so why not get a real Ikari Warriors arcade boardset and build a supergun for it? There are several other arcade boardsets you could use it for too. I have an original Ikari Warriors arcade machine and in addition to the Ikari Warriors boardset, I also have Victory Road, Guerilla War, TNK III (which was the first rotary joystick game), and Heavy Barrel boardsets, all of which I can easily swap into the cabinet and work perfectly with the SNK/Seimitsu LS-30 joysticks. There were also the early rotary joysticks that SNK used on TNK III. I have a pair which came with my TNK III boardset but I've never used them for anything. They have a short, wide, black octagonal knob: The one on the left is just a standard LS-30 which probably replaced a worn out original one, and they just swapped the weird knob from the original onto it. The one on the right is an original one, and it has a different design in general, as well as a hardwired harness for the rotary switch (early standard LS-30s had a hardwired harness too). I don't know if that one on the right is considered an LS-30 or if it had a different model number. By the way, when microswitches go bad in an LS-30, I don't know where to find new ones. The original ones were Matsushita AH76515 or AH76525, with the newer equivalent being Matsushita/Panasonic AM51661A5 or AM51661C5. They have a 13.5mm lever, which is shorter than most microswitch levers. I have a few LS-30s here with one or more bad microswitches. Fortunately, the LS-30s in my Ikari Warriors cabinet are like new, and I also have a pair of NOS ones that I've been saving for when I refurbish the cabinet (I also have an NOS control panel overlay and NOS sideart for it).

To me the differences stood out like a sore thumb, but I was playing arcade SPO just about every day at the time, and had been for the past year or so. After my initial disappointment it did grow on me somewhat. It's not one of my all-time favorite games, but it's still fun to play. I remember renting it after I got my own NES in 1988 or 1989. I had a NES Advantage and I thought maybe it would feel more like the arcade game using that. It did a little bit, though the joystick on the NES Advantage feels drastically different than a Nintendo arcade joystick, plus it's 8-way whereas the PO and SPO joysticks have a 4-way restrictor. I had Ninja Gaiden, but back then I never even knew an arcade version existed. I never played the NES port of Donkey Kong back then, but I wouldn't have noticed a difference even if I had, because the only time I played arcade DK was when I was 6 years old, in the entryway of a Kmart or Zayre in Bangor. In 1987/1988, it wasn't far fetched for a home console to come close to matching the new or fairly new arcade games. The PC Engine was released in 1987 in Japan and that was far more powerful than the NES. The Neo Geo console was released in 1990 which actually was true arcade hardware, not that anyone that I knew could afford one. I think that any of the main "16-bit" consoles (PCE/TG-16, Sega Genesis, SNES) could have done an ~accurate port of arcade PO or SPO in terms of graphics and music / sound effects, though I don't know about the speech synthesis. I know the SNES could do it, since it did clear speech in more than one game, including its own version of SPO.

I was used to it too, which is why I said this in my original post: "When I started playing it on Mike's Nintendo I was amazed, because the graphics, sound, and gameplay were all identical to the arcade machine. That was the first time I'd ever played a console game that was even close to its arcade counterpart, let alone identical." I suspected you didn't actually read my post. As I said in my original post, I first played MTPO in late 1987 or early 1988; winter either way, so your Nintendo Power magazine, which didn't yet exist, couldn't have helped you explain anything: "Nintendo Power was a video game news and strategy magazine from Nintendo of America, first published in July/August 1988 as Nintendo's official print magazine for North America." Is that a joke? I saw with my own two eyes that Excitebike was the same as the arcade machine I'd been playing regularly for the past year or so, so in that case they absolutely weren't "dramatically different," nor different at all, since the Vs. System literally used the same architecture as the NES/Famicom. As I said in my original post: "When I started playing it on Mike's Nintendo I was amazed, because the graphics, sound, and gameplay were all identical to the arcade machine. That was the first time I'd ever played a console game that was even close to its arcade counterpart, let alone identical." You were apparently thinking of a time traveler in the '80s, who jumped ahead about 6 months and read the first issue of Nintendo Power. Who said anything about plugging two TVs together? And no, technical knowledge of console and arcade hardware doesn't even remotely fall into the category of common sense. The Punch-Out arcade hardware was created in 1983; that's the copyright date on the PCBs and the control panel overlay. It was released in early 1984. Punch-Out was an older game than Excitebike; in fact, the Vs. Excitebike arcade machine that I started playing in 1985 replaced the Punch-Out machine that I played in 1984. You didn't know any more about it than I did, your tacit assertion that you're a time traveler notwithstanding. You may have assumed that the NES Punch-Out game wouldn't look or sound as nice as the arcade versions, based on past consoles, but I didn't make that assumption, because I had seen a NES game look and sound exactly like an arcade game, one that was newer than Punch-Out no less. I had no way of knowing that Vs. Excitebike wasn't running on true arcade hardware. From my perspective, if it was at the arcade it was an arcade game, simple as that. Comical Irony Alert (see above). Also, since there's no emotive language at all in any of my posts, your attempt to redefine the terms "pissed" and "hysterics" is dismissed. You have no idea what you're talking about. I have the TG world record high score on arcade SPO and I've recently topped it by over a million points. Go ahead and name someone who knows the game better than I do. Zallard1 has the second place record, and is one of the best all-around Punch-Out series players in the world, and he will tell you the exact same thing about lag on emulated arcade PO and SPO. The lag has always been there in MAME and the emulation on the Switch, which Zallard1 has played a lot of, is no better. More attempts to redefine words / serve up a crystal ball reading.

Explain to me, using only things you knew when you were 11 or 12 (assuming you were 11 or 12 before the World Wide Web existed), why the NES could do Excitebike exactly like the arcade Vs. Excitebike, but couldn't do other games exactly like their arcade counterparts. How would I know anything about the hardware of either the arcade machines or the NES back then? Where do you think I would have found such information? At the library? Look up "Punch-Out" and "Nintendo Entertainment System" in the card catalog? By the way, dual CRTs has nothing to do with graphics and sound capabilities. I knew that the only arcade game I'd played on the NES was the same as the actual arcade game in terms of graphics, sound, and gameplay, and had no way of knowing that wasn't a typical scenario, until I saw how downgraded its Punch-Out game was compared to the arcade. You're talking about things you know now. I'm sure that in 1987 you could have told me all about it; could have gone with me to the arcade, pulled out your Nintendo back door key, and shown me the custom hardware inside the SPO machine, and rattled off all the specs/capabilities, and then done the same for the NES. Emulated versions of arcade PO and SPO have lag. It's not a big deal on PO because that game is easy / slow-paced no matter how far along you are in the game, but on SPO it makes the fourth-and-higher Dragon Chan's kicks very hard to react in time to, whereas they are easy to react to on the real hardware. And the third-and-higher Super Macho Man has attacks that are very hard to react to even on the real hardware, let alone on emulation.

I already wrote about why I expected it to look and play just like the arcade, i.e., Excitebike did, so why couldn't any other arcade game? I didn't know anything about computer hardware when I was 11 and 12. I knew from experience that previous consoles couldn't match arcade games, but the Nintendo was brand new to the US at the time, and the first game I played on it was a perfect match for the arcade game I'd been playing for the past year or so (Vs. Excitebike wasn't running on true arcade hardware, but I had no way of knowing that at the time). Also, the gameplay wasn't there, which I also wrote about in my previous post. And that wasn't because of any hardware limitations, it was because they just wanted to re-imagine the gameplay. Being somewhat smaller than the opponent is one thing (like Rocky Balboa vs. Ivan Drago), but MTPO takes it well into the realm of absurdity. "Little Mac" is literally about the size of one of the larger opponent's legs, so maybe 2½ or 3 feet tall; about the size of a toddler. How many of those kids back then even played arcade PO and/or SPO, and how often? Arcade games are in a different category than home console games. But either way, I've never taken popularity into consideration when deciding what I like or don't like.

What rage? I was disappointed (which is what this thread is about), not in a rage. I've owned MTPO now for quite a few years, and have beaten it once. It's not a bad game, but I still much prefer the arcade and SNES versions. I like it better than the Wii version though, which I played one time about 7 years ago for long enough to beat it, and never played it again.

The original NES power supplies rarely even need to be replaced, since they are just a step-down transformer (plus a component with stripes like a resistor; not sure if it's a resistor or not; looks different than a typical axial through-hole resistor), which is just windings of wire around an iron core. If the transformer wasn't made right, I guess it could theoretically develop an open or a short, but that's unlikely. In most cases, a "dead" original NES power supply just has a bad cord; the break in the cord's conductor(s) is usually up near where it enters the transformer shell, because that's where flexing/strain tends to be concentrated. Since you can take the shell apart if you have the right type of tool, it's easy to replace the cord. I made my own tool by grinding a flat-blade screwdriver bit to remove the shell's screws in order to fix the "dead" one that I had here (which just needed a new cord):

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. My very first experience with a Nintendo was in 1986 at my cousin Mike's house. He was the first person I knew to get one and one of the games he had for it was Excitebike. When I saw that cartridge sitting on his shelf I wanted to try it immediately, because I'd been playing Vs. Excitebike at the arcade for about a year at that point, since before I or most anyone else in the US had even heard of a Nintendo console. When I started playing it on Mike's Nintendo I was amazed, because the graphics, sound, and gameplay were all identical to the arcade machine. That was the first time I'd ever played a console game that was even close to its arcade counterpart, let alone identical. This gave me an inflated sense of the Nintendo's capabilities, i.e., I figured if they could do that for one arcade game, they could do it for any arcade game. What I didn't realize at the time was that the Vs. Excitebike arcade game was running on NES/Famicom architecture in the first place, so the NES version wasn't even a port, but rather, it was the original version and the arcade version was just an official hack. I started playing Punch-Out in the arcade when it was a brand new game in 1984, and I was immediately hooked on it. Then in early 1987 Super Punch-Out showed up at a different arcade and I liked it even better than PO, and to this day it's still my all-time favorite arcade game, and it was the first arcade machine I ever bought (in 2005). In late '87 or early '88, a kid I went to school with named Ryan said he just got a Nintendo game named "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out." He told me because I was known for playing Super Punch-Out at the arcade, and he wanted me to come over to his house after school, thinking I could help him play his new game better. Based on my misconception that arose from playing Excitebike on the NES, I was expecting great things as I walked with Ryan to his house on that bitter cold Maine winter day. I wasn't sure how the game would deal with only having one screen rather than two, but I expected graphics, sound, and gameplay to be identical to arcade PO/SPO. What a huge disappointment when I actually saw the game. Instead of the big opponent's sprites, which could get even bigger due to the sprite scaling capability of the arcade hardware, the MTPO opponents were tiny, and had no shading: And instead of the normal-sized see-through wire-frame playable character, there was "Little Mac," who appeared to be a 2' tall, 15-pound dwarf. Instead of an announcer with a realistic sounding human voice, there was an out-of-place and out-of-proportion Mario who said something that sounded like "wah wah wah." The graphics and sound downgrades weren't even the worst part though; I hated the gameplay changes. Instead of your gloves staying where you put them and blocking automatically, your gloves defaulted to "down," and you had to hold up on the D-pad to punch high, and you had to, counterintuitively, press down to block high. Then there were the ridiculous hearts and stars, neither of which have anything to do with the two arcade games; the multiple rounds which mean you potentially have to knock your opponent down up to 7 times before he stays down; having to button-mash to get up from a knockdown; the unskippable bike riding / running scenes; the reduced number of frames of animation in general, and so on. I was far more impressed with Super Punch-Out for the Super Nintendo when I first played it in 1995. My only complaint was that your gloves defaulted to "down" like in MTPO, but at least they blocked automatically like they should, i.e., if your gloves are already down, covering your gut, why should you have to do anything beyond that to block a low punch? Other than that, it was on par with arcade SPO. The graphics were even technically improved over the arcade versions, though I still prefer the look of the arcade graphics. My next disappointment was with Double Dragon, which again was due to it being a drastic downgrade from the arcade version, which I played a lot. It wasn't as big of a disappointment though, because arcade DD wasn't my all-time favorite game, and my expectations of the NES had already been drastically lowered due to the MTPO fiasco.

That Photoshop job on the DK machine was obviously done by someone who has no idea what an actual DK machine is like, nor what an arcade machine in general is like, for that matter. I've yet to see any arcade machine that displays the video right on the front glass. In reality it looks like this:

My cousin Mike was the first person I knew to get a Nintendo, in 1986, a week or two after the first national commercials for them aired on TV. We were both 11 years old. Mike had had the Nintendo for a couple/few weeks the first time I visited him after he got it; I was expecting to play his ColecoVision; I was very surprised when I walked into his room and saw him playing that newfangled thing from the TV commercials. There was no "common knowledge" about SMB at the time, and the game itself was completely different than any video game I'd ever played before. Plus those controllers were really weird; I'd only ever used a joystick to play video games. It was too foreign for me so I mostly just watched Mike play it. He couldn't get to World 3; he normally died in World 2-3 due to the flying fish (which I called bees). Mike never thought to try anything other than the most straightforward/obvious path. He hadn't even tried going down a pipe until I suggested it. And he used to hit the block that made the vine grow up out of it, but he'd ignore it and just keep going. He didn't try climbing it until I suggested it; the same goes for getting up above and running on top of the ceiling in the underground levels, which led to the discovery of the warp zone in 1-2. After that discovery, as well as the discovery of the warp zone in 8-2, it didn't take us long to beat the game. I was getting more comfortable playing it by that point, and I can't remember who beat it first. In '87 I got a Nintendo and it wasn't long before I could run through SMB practically on autopilot, beating it without losing any lives in about 8 minutes (using the warp zones to 4-1 and 8-1 of course). I could beat it just as easily and quickly in the second quest, which isn't significantly harder, since I jumped over most enemies anyway, so it didn't matter whether they were those beetle things or mushroom things. I never beat the game by going through all 32 levels until relatively recently; maybe 15 years ago, because I had never bothered to try. The hardest parts for me were the "puzzle" castles (4-4 and 7-4) because I didn't know the solutions. I figured out 4-4 using trial and error, but I looked up the solution for 7-4 online. In 2008 I saw Mike for the first time since the early 1990s when he moved out of state; he came over and spent the night. We couldn't really do anything, like go to a bar and play pool like we used to, because he was fresh out of prison and on parole, so for old times' sake we played a Super Mario Bros. game. I decided we should play one that neither of us had ever played before: SMB 2J, on an emulator, and because of its notorious difficultly, I fully intended to use save states like they were going out of style. We took turns playing and "beat" the game using many save states. There's nothing wrong with using save states and/or a "rewind" function for fun, but I don't considered a game truly beaten unless it's done without those sort of things.

If you're including JAMMA-type power supplies as being hard to source, they aren't, since they've been an industry standard for over 30 years. Plus, they all have a -5 VDC rail, and their screw terminals make it very easy to connect them to anything.

That isn't lag. You're talking about the vertical refresh rate, and there is no inherent specific amount of time that it takes a CRT to draw a frame. The number you mentioned applies to a 60 Hz vertical refresh rate, but the refresh rate is determined by the video signal, not by the CRT. The best direct-view CRT monitors had about 400 MHz of bandwidth, which means that if you fed it a standard resolution like classic consoles and arcade games used (in the neighborhood of 320 x 240), it would have enough bandwidth to sync to a video signal with a 3,500 Hz (3.5 KHz) vertical refresh rate. It's zero because refresh rate has nothing to do with input lag. A CRT responds in what is effectively real-time to the video signal, and it is always responding to the video signal regardless of what position the electron beams are on the screen. Of course, nothing actually happens instantaneously, so it isn't truly zero input lag, but it happens at the speed of electricity through its circuitry, which might be a nanosecond. There is no hyperbole; 9 ms is 9 million times longer than 1 nanosecond. An SED couldn't equal a CRT's lack of input lag. SED was a digital display, so it would have input lag in the millisecond range like any other digital display. In terms of picture quality, the SED could equal a CRT because it's using the same electron-beam-exciting-phosphors method of generating light, and it could exceed it in terms of geometry, purity, and convergence (which would all inherently be perfect on an SED, while close-enough-to-perfect-that-you-can't-tell-it's-not-truly-perfect is the best you can get with a CRT). An SED wouldn't make for a good replacement for a standard resolution arcade monitor for a similar reason that high-resolution CRT PC monitors don't make good arcade monitors. But an SED would be even worse than a high-resolution CRT PC monitor, because it is a digital display, which means it has a fixed resolution. To get a 240p image to fill a screen that has a fixed resolution of say, 1920 x 1080 (or even worse, 3840 x 2160), it has to be scaled, and scales images look like crap. CRTs have no fixed resolution, so any resolution they can sync to, they can display fullscreen without any scaling involved.

Yeah, that type of power supply has been the standard for video arcade machines since the JAMMA era began (1986), and the Happ Power Pro has been a popular one for a long time. The other popular one, at least with arcade operators, is Peter Chou from Betson Imperial: https://www.betsonparts.com/amusement-redemption/power-supplies/15-amp-power-supply.html Those were the original design that others copied, and popular enough that some people use the term "Peter Chou" as a generic term for that type of power supply, like people using the term "Kleenex" for any brand of tissues. Here's some information about them from arcade guru Ken Layton: However, they aren't as popular with regular people because Betson is the primary retailer for them and if you're not an operator with an account with them, you'll end up paying big money for shipping, and they're one of those annoying companies that won't tell you the shipping cost upfront.

A JAMMA type power supply like I linked to above would give you all the amps you could ever want (15 amps on +5 VDC), but that little Mean Well wall adapter power supply only has 2.5 amps on +5 VDC, and the TI's motherboard will be drawing about 1 amp of that at idle.

Or, you might find that that little wall adapter-type, probably made-in-China, replacement power supply isn't as robust as the original. Also, the motherboard in your TI is just as old, and has a lot more likely points of failure, especially those TTL chips, and in my experience with TTL chips from the 1980s, they fail like it's their job. What do you see on there that's likely to fail, especially after you've replaced the 6 electrolytic capacitors? Most of those components, such as the coil, diodes, and resistors don't fail very often. That DIP14 IC is an 89-cent part. Those linear voltage regulators are cheap too, as is that transistor. You could replace every component on that PCB for not a lot of money, with the possible exception of that DIP8 IC, which doesn't seem to be available new anymore and might be hard to find. If I were concerned about it, I'd replace the electrolytic capacitors, the TO-220 package linear voltage regulators, that TO-92 package transistor, and the two ICs (or just the DIP14 one if I couldn't find the DIP8 one for cheap). That covers everything on the power supply PCB that contains an electrolyte or silicon.

I don't know if there are any new power supplies made specifically for the TI or not, but the original one only outputs +5 VDC, -5 VDC, and 12 VAC, so you could use any JAMMA-type switched-mode power supply (like this one - http://www.arcadeshop.com/i/804/switching-power-supply-15-amp.htm - for example), which would mean you wouldn't need the external brick anymore. However, unless you're having problems with the original power supply, why replace it? The original power supply is a very simple design; not much on there to fail: http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/hardware/power_supply.html If you wanted to replace the electrolytic capacitors just for good measure, it wouldn't take long to do because there aren't many of them on there. Use first-tier (e.g., Rubycon, Nichicon, United Chemi-Con, Panasonic, Sanyo), high-temp @ long-life capacitors and it will probably last for a very long time.

That's awesome, though I don't think his was that clever. He typed it in while we were at lunch or on recess or whatever, and then just typed run when we were watching the screen. The rocket scrolled up and off the screen and that was it. A bunch of blank print commands after line 180 will make that happen.

The first place I ever saw a TI-99/4A was in fifth grade (1985); there were two of them in the back of the classroom, connected to a pair of 12" B&W TVs. It was strange because there were no other TI computers in the school; there were only Radio Shack TRS-80s and Apple IIs. It turned out that they weren't school property; they belonged to the teacher; a fact that he pointed out whenever students felt entitled to use them. We did get to use them sometimes, but not very often. Parsec and some text adventure game that loaded from a compact cassette tape were the only software I ever saw him run on them. He also typed out a BASIC program once that created an animation of a crude-looking rocket taking off, and challenged us to figure out how he did it, but no one ever did. In hindsight, I'm pretty sure he did it purely with print commands, i.e., something like this... 10 print " /\ " 20 print " / \ " 30 print " | | " 40 print " | | " 50 print " | | " 60 print " | | " 70 print " | | " 80 print " / \ " 90 print " | | " 100 print " | | " 110 print " | | " 120 print " | | " 130 print " | | " 140 print " | | " 150 print " / \ " 160 print "| |" 170 print "| |" 180 print "|_/\__/\_|" ... followed by enough blank print commands to make the "rocket" appear to scroll up and off the screen. We knew how to make the crude rocket with print commands, but none of us could figure out how to make it "take off."

When tracing, you're inherently going by eye rather than inputting values, because there's no way to know the exact mathematical values of say, a bezier curve in a raster image of a letter or number. A raster image isn't even particularly precise to begin with, especially one that's a photograph/scan of already-printed letters (as opposed to one that was created from scratch in a raster program such as Photoshop). When you zoom in on any raster image you quickly see that its outline is very vaguely defined and jagged, due to the nature of pixels, so human interpretation is necessary/inevitable when tracing with vector lines. Additionally, already-printed letters (scans of which being what you're normally working with when doing reproduction work) already have several generations of loss built into them, and your scan creates yet another generation of loss. In some cases, such as with elements of letters that were obviously intended to be straight lines or circles / circular arcs, geometric perfection is easy to achieve with any vector or CAD program (though dimensional perfection is impossible using only information from a scan, because of the outlines of a raster image being vaguely defined), but you'll never get exact duplicates of the bezier curves that the original designer of the letter drew (except by pure one in a "zillion" chance) because the raster image you're working from isn't precise enough. Since tracing of raster images is inherently done by eye with a fair dose of human interpretation, AI is plenty precise for that, and its pen tool is the ultimate tool (IMO) for tracing bezier curves and other irregular shapes by eye. Many, if not most, commercial fonts were drawn in AI to begin with. That's especially true for Postscript fonts, since AI was the original GUI for Adobe's Postscript language, which was the original standard language for creating modern vector fonts (as opposed to the old raster fonts which are rarely used anymore).

You can do all of that with AI too, though AI doesn't necessarily have built-in tools for doing some of those things. There are various ways to get precise and consistent spacing, such as by setting the nudge value to the exact spacing you want, or by making squares of a given size to use as temporary spacers that you can snap to, or using the distribute spacing tool, etc. If you need a perfect arc you can just use the circle tool and then cut out a section of the circle to join into your tracing. If you have multiple letters that have parts which are supposed to be identical, you can copy and paste the identical sections to ensure they are identical (there are other ways too), and so on. I've done countless tracings in AI, many of which have included tracing letters/numbers/glyphs, both commercially and for myself, for about 16 years, and when you've spent that much time in AI you naturally find ways to work around its ostensible limitations. When it comes to tracing letters/scripts which have bezier curves rather than just circular arcs (such as the Coca-Cola script logo), AI's pen tool is far better for that than anything in any CAD program (it's better than any other vector graphics program's version of the pen/bezier tool too, for that matter, in terms of overall functionality/usability). Also, most of the popular commercial fonts aren't of the geometric type (an example of a geometric font is Avante Garde, like the font used for the classic Adidas logo). Most of them, like Helvetica, use subtle bezier curves. For example, this is a closeup of the top right-hand corner of a capital letter R, Helvetica: In any case, making an actual font file from the tracing isn't usually needed or even beneficial for reproductions, because you can just print out the tracing directly, either as the film positive in the case of a screen-printed reproduction or as the actual print in the case of a digitally-printed reproduction. I can't remember if I've tried PStoEdit or not. I know I tried quite a few ways to convert AI/PDF files to .DWG the last time I was working in AutoCAD and wanted to use some of the elements that I'd created in AI. AI's own .DWG export function worked somewhat, but had issues. I eventually settled on pdf2cad, which is an expensive commercial product, but the free trial lasted long enough for the project, and it worked perfectly; zero issues.

That's what I do when I can't find an exact font match when I want to reproduce something, except I trace the letters in Adobe Illustrator rather than CAD software. There's no need to make an actual usable font file from the tracing, though I did do that in one case when I was replicating an old screen printed T-shirt that I had as a kid in the '80s. Being able to type the letters made replicating the text layout easier, because some of the text was in an arch (Illustrator has tools for typing along an arched path). I used an ancient version of Fontographer if I remember right. It's just a matter of importing the Illustrator files; it can use them natively because modern fonts and Illustrator files are both vector; in some cases, the exact same vector language even (Postscript). By the way, did some of them come without the white label strip above the number keys? I have one that doesn't have it (it doesn't have the "Solid State Software" label either), and I've seen pictures of others that didn't have it too, like this one. On mine, there's no adhesive residue to indicate that a label was ever there, plus the way the plastic is molded in that area is significantly different than on my other one which has both the label above the number keys and the Solid State Software label.