iKarith

There was more than one? I guess there could be easily enough. I've got a cassette cable for the TI and obviously the nanoPEB I've discussed in a few places now, but I just got my XB cart last night from Arcadeshopper (Thanks Greg!) and haven't had time to do much more with it yet yet.

I dunno about history, but I've always wanted to get some heavy duty foil (the sort used for like disposable baking pans) and fold it like a newspaper boat/hat so I could have a properly ridiculous tinfoil hat for use whenever someone cooked up a particularly ridiculous conspiracy theory.

Hey everybody, One of the two carts that came with my TI was Adventure. This one seems to require a cassette, and a few moments of poking around whtech finds me a couple of cartridge images, but no cassette files. Is this because the cassette is actually not something that exists until you create it in-game (in which case I'm doing something wrong?) or is this something that has not been archived or is it there and I just missed it?

In my area, the problem was that it wasn't one player, it was about ten players who worked together and called all of the boards in town one after another, tying up half the boards in town until they'd finished pillaging in Usurper and moved on to the next board as their buddy came in behind them. Nothing they ever did was expressly against any rules or anything, and back in those days I was a big stickler for rules. Nowadays rule #1 is: You have the right not to be an ass. If you give up that right, everything you say and do will be held against you. If you cannot afford to stop being an ass, someone will be appointed to kick yours out. There's usually not many more rules needed beyond that, I find.

I find these days plain 'ol Debian is pretty user-friendly. That definitely didn't used to be true, but a lot has changed. Ubuntu isn't necessarily an "easier Debian". It's just a different Debianish system with a bunch of custom software that may or may not be useful to you. Eh, so they include proprietary drivers by default, big deal? You can get Debian builds done that way too, and aside from just a couple of questions someone should tell you how to answer, the rest is much the same as installing Windows. Except actually easier.

#1 use of terminal in Ubundu: Disable the Ubuntu crap so you can have a standard installation not running Canonical's own little ecosystem and instead have a normal Linux box.

I've seen Apple //c go from free to a good home to $300+ on eBait. Auctions often close a little under $150 for a basic //c in reasonable condition, plus shipping. Subtract whatever eBay fees likely are and you have a fair idea of what people are willing to pay. The //e tends to go for less than that unless it's pretty decently tricked out. I'm talking the items that sell, not the buy it how prices few people will pay.

I had $0201 errors with 2MB using 6.0.1 and 6.0.3 with fairly minimal setups including AppleTalk. That's why I now push for 4MB because I've never seen a $0201 with 4MB that wasn't a bug in a program.

That's not necessary if you give the interface card some ROM to tell the Apple // how to do it and perhaps provide a small microcontroller onboard to emulate the videx standard. That'd work with all 8-bit Apple // machines, and it'd replace your 80 colum card. How to replace the //e extended 80 column card I'm not sure, unless it actually sat in the aux slot.

Usurper was never very well balanced. Seth tried to make LoRD play well for whatever kind of character you wanted to play. Usurper rewarded the backstabbing trolls and such and made it a contest to be the first person to dial in for the day so that you could trivially slay everyone else first. Basically I considered it a game not fair to the majority of players who weren't using autodial scripts one minute after maintenance. I never needed my BBS games to foster Kum Ba Ya (BRE/SRE/Falcon's Eye were all popular after all), but I didn't fancy the ones that encouraged players to behave in an antisocial way toward the BBS and the other users on it. We had a copy by request, but it was the source of constant complaints and grief. We had three LoRDs with different IGMs, two LoDs with different gamedata, BRE, Falcon's Eye, TW2002 (I'm getting a headache just thinking about that angry fruit salad), TEOS, even PimpWars (somewhat against my better judgment, but it too was popular and we didn't get complaints about it constantly...) We also had a couple of word game doors that were popular with some slightly older players who weren't so much into the hack and slash and space games. I'm forgetting a couple. We had lots.

Sometime, we've really gotta get you set up for file transfer on a version of Windows from this millennium.

Kind of merging my two documentation efforts with not much to show for either one yet: Github: iKarith/ti-docs So far I've written just a little bit about the TI power supply and the external brick. Can someone fill in the info about the voltages to help people test their transformers? That'd be the only part of this file that has anything in it. You know what a TI could render even more easily than ePub or PDF? A strict subset of Markdown that maybe didn't allow HTML tags unless we come across some that we really can't live without. Might even be able to make it work with a TI-renderable graphics format for figures.

You just run the python.exe file from a command line and pass the name of the emulator to it. If there's a PYTHON_PATH, you could write a batch file that runs %PYTHON_PATH%\python.exe "Lantronix Emulator.py" and put it in the directory with Lantronix Emulator.py.

I think I just read Ksarul offering to help--everybody else read the same thing right? :D

Interesting. It seems to me that you could probably turn this into an 80 column card replacement for the 8 bit Apple without too much fuss. You'd need a ROM (to tell it what to do when you PR#3) and you'd basically need to build a terminal driver somehow or other. I'd suggest a small AVR could do it. I have no idea how you'd do the 64k RAM upgrade in the //e 80 column card with it, and I have NO idea how you'd use it without major stuff done with the VGC or ... something. Interesting!

I wonder if I still have my license key somewhere. Actually, I don't know if I need that anymore--I think I heard somewhere he released it as freeware or perhaps even open sourced the whole thing? That latter seems not to be the case, or at least I can't find it. Wow, I haven't really thought too much about LORD or Seth Able since like 20 years ago when I actually ran a BBS and the guy was local. The freeing of it came signficantly after that which is why I can't recall details. There's an official page but it seems to indicate that the game is owned by someone else now and you can't get registration info if you've lost yours, and you cannot register it new. The source exists, but it's in the hands of someone who's afraid of the legal consequences of doing anything with it. It's also written for Turbo Pascal, so it would have to be ported nowadays. If I thought he still had it, I ... used to know ... some guy ... who might have ... stuff. I would see if I could find his info and ask him if he'd arrange for stuff to end up in the hands of people. I suspect if it wound up on archive.org, nobody who had the power to object has any idea that they do, let alone the desire to do so. That's all hypothetical of course, assuming the info here is current, accurate, complete, and I actually thought I could get in touch with anybody, etc.

Possibly not, but I have heard of a few people using alternative stands that worked well enough and look like they were made for it, even if they don't look original. Javier Rivera might have some ideas.

Apple //e has been pulling the Laser 128EX's hair again. *sigh*

I have the older zip-RAM-based GGLabs option. It works great. With a CFFA 3000 in slot 7, the top of the RAM touches the top of the USB port, so be aware of that if you are using a card with lots of jumpers at the front of the card and whatnot. I'm very happy with the GGLabs option and recommend it.

"Check out this auction on eBay, LOL" could practically be a persistent thread, FWIW. When I looked at that one earlier I saw a low-bid machine with a crazy low(!) shipping. That machine's gonna cost $80-150 to ship most places in the US if it's shipped right.

I have one of the older GGLabs 4MB cards (the kind with Zip RAM) and have been really happy with it. The 1MB card is really only worthwhile in a ROM3 machine or a ROM01 that will never actually be used with GS/OS, and it's barebones on the ROM3. I'd get the 4MB option.

Well, I was not successful in getting the eBait auction with the manuals. PDFs do exist for them such as http://www.99er.net/files/userrefguide.pdf for example, but these online copies would be poor source material for OCR. The pages are slightly askew as you can tell from the jaggy lines, and the scan resolution is too low for the OCR to be amazingly accurate. And of course, for the purpose of a technical manual, you want pretty accurate scans. Scanners from the past decade are high enough resolution that you actually can have the opposite problem in that they can see every flaw in the paper, especially lower quality pulp papers used for printing paperbacks and the like. Scans are megabytes per page, but those crazy high resolutions are useful as subpixel data when you generate a deskewed lower resolution file around 300-600 DPI or so. My preference is to OCR before and after deskewing and compare the text in case the deskew introduced artifacts that make the OCR job harder, not easier. Any differences can be corrected by hand in the generated text. Before OCRing, I will tend to mask out the page layout in the source material since that is recreated by hand anyway. The deskewed version of graphics will be inserted into the word processing document at as high of a resolution as I can get away with until they are converted to vector images. I don't really have a good automated way to trace raster graphics into vector images. Certainly not one that can reproduce embedded text, but that'd be my goal. I'll keep my eyes open for source material. These original pack-in manuals don't seem to exist anywhere I found in a high-resolution PDF (which is totally understandable as they'd be CD-sized each) or text-converted formats. And being a blind guy, I have some little experience converting text from printed page to something a speech synthesizer can read. It's an involved and imperfect process at times--but it's not like TI can give us the original manuals from 1979 in whatever format they used to typeset them or anything.

It takes standard 41256 chips, 256k x 1. I believe you need 150ns or faster, and I'd be shocked if you find anything slower than 120ns nowadays.

Oh NOW you post that... Mine arrives Friday. Granted, I'm not sure I have a standard modem cable here anyway, so I'd have to wait for something regardless.

You are reminding me that I've been meaning to try and come up with a modern low-profile storage solution for retro media storage. The nicest I've seen is drawer units that hold floppy disks and CDs, but those are expensive because people who are into retrocomputing really like them. Trying to find a way to build an affordable alternative and it's just not coming together yet.