Bruce Tomlin

How exactly does an FPU help with web browsing?

Quick update about the ROM: * First of all, the game is only 24K. The lack of bank select is obvious to me from looking at the chips used. * RAM write is E000-E7FF, RAM read is E800-EFFF, and F000-FFFF is unused. I have no idea what's in the last 16K of this particular ROM dump, but Exxx wants to be at Axxx. * To run this in an environment with 2K of RAM at some address, one or both sets of RAM addresses will have to be changed. But I've already got it disassembled far enough that this is easy to do.

I'm pretty sure I included spinner support in my old controller test program. (Note to anyone trying to understand the code, the "MAKECART" thing was because I was putting it in the 1K or so of space I had optimized out of Coleco's BIOS ROM.) ctltest.zip

Yes, start by clipping the pins at the top, then you should be able to get them out without messing up the board. But then you will need to clean the holes, with either solder wick or something like Radio Shack's 64-2060 desoldering iron. (#1 rule: tin the tip before first use, #2 rule: expect it to erode relatively quickly and get a fresh tip for important projects) Then install a socket. Of course you need to buy the chip before you do this, so buy two of them. If you can find a schematic, you can know which one is the bad chip before you start.

Since we're comparing, uh, "storage size", let's see what I can remember off the top of my head: * TRS-80 Model 1 (my original computer) * (I got rid of what Model IIIs I had years ago) * TRS-80 Model 4 (though I've had troubles getting them working, including gassing a green screen CRT once when trying to put the lid on the damn thing, thank you Tandy for the crappy design, and at least one that has raster but no video signal - and I am not caring much since I ripped all my floppy disks) * TRS-80 Model 4P (they always need that stupid pot adjusted to sync 80 columns, but at least I have one with a low serial number) * TRS-80 Model 12 and 16 (I wanna get one of these babies up and running Unix someday, and I have a bunch of 8" floppies to rip if I ever get a cable to hook a drive to a Catweasel) * Apple IIgs (two complete units, one with a Vulcan HD and another with a SCSI card, both with 8M or so of RAM and Woz lids swapped from ROM-0 units) * Franklin Apple II clone, but the keyboard has foam pieces that have disintegrated * TI 99/4A, and I think I may even have a PEB lurking somewhere, but I don't know where * VIC-20 (one of two of them with the original box) * C-64 * C-128 * C-128D (two of them, and why I never fired up the other C-64/C-128s) * Aquarius (with some carts and the joystick module and I think I have a 16K module) * Spectravision SV-328 (or maybe it's a 318) * Atari 800, 600XL, 800XL, 1200XL, XEGS * Atari ST * Atari ST-030 (TT?) (re-cased for some musician application) * Heathkit H-8 and a dual floppy box for it, never powered either this or the H-11 * Heathkit H-11 (no floppy controller card, but manuals that indicated it had one once) * Zenith Z-19 (?) the one in a computer terminal case, and it has a floppy drive * Kaypro 10 (CP/M with HD) * Kaypro 16 (?) (their 8088 clone) * Osborne I (bad power supply - I got rid of all but one without testing that last one) * An Intergraph Unix workstation (freaking boat anchor) that used the Clipper chip * I also have an ADM-3A terminal in less than good condition, and it seems to have a raster but the digital electronics don't work ...and that's all I can think of right now I wouldn't mind getting rid of a few of these things, and will be happy to sell many of them if I don't have to ship anything, which essentially means we need freaking meet-ups/shows in Texas already. (All we have right now is a pin/coin-op thing in Houston)

Actually, the most annoying part is going to be that you will look like a complete moron holding one of these things, once everyone realizes how lame it is. It won't be cool until it's properly hacked.

It's just a wrapper around an exploit. And Sony is very good about patching the holes used by exploits... once they get exploited. You can be sure that they've patched all known holes before releasing this. And you know what? I think it would be fun to start calling this thig the "PSP STOP".

That's actually a good point. If NiMH cells are being used, they have only 1.2 volts per cell. Using 6 NiMH cells in a Nomad will give you a very short battery life. And, in fact, Sega's rechargeable battery pack uses seven NiMH cells.

Is there a dump of this thing somewhere? It might be interesting to disassemble to see what's inside it.

This is NOT going to be a "replacement" for the UMD model. I saw a rumor of a PSP-4000 a month or two ago. This is just more inSONYty from Sony thinking they can lock you into their own little world. The same little world where everyone uses Minidisc and Memory Stick, and happily watches UMD movies on their XBR TV sets. Like most of their altered reality, it will eventually go away. (Blu-Ray apparently won't go away any time soon, but that's only because they bought out the competition.) I had a bit of a scare a couple of weeks ago when I actually wanted to rip a UMD and Dark Alex's old ripper didn't spin up the drive. I eventually found another ripper that worked, but not before I confirmed that the drive was still working.

Decent by what standard? They were better than O1 games, at least. There's not much you can do on a 64x32 pixel display. (FWIW, the graphics chip could do 128x32, and you could see that mode when you "fried" it, with the stack blinking and everything, but there just wasn't enough memory for games to use it.) But the "educational" stuff was about on the level of the early "kid quiz" machines, in that all it did was have you go through a bunch of questions in a booklet, and enter the answer into the console. All it did was look for the right sequence and score you based on that.

I once got a small box of broken Genesis games that (as far as I know) had previously been rental units. Most of the games had a good ROM chip on a broken board, and I was able to fix them by desoldering them and putting them on another board. But there were SEVENTEEN copies of Sonic that had a dead ROM. So it is possible to find dead carts, but it apparently helps to rent them out to get them broken real good. As for the original poster, it's possible that there could be a bad soldering job, and there's a bad solder joint or two causing the problem.

Amen, brother.

I've typed in the article: I do have to wonder how much of that was from RCA advertising copy.

You know, I was just starting to wonder what the Studio I was. And one more thing. People complain about how the controllers are built into the console. And they complain that you have to find the magic RF switch to use it. But they don't make the leap of logic that by combining the RF and power into a single wire, the result is that the whole unit IS the controller. So it's an exceptionally large controller, and it has to be shared across the lap for two-player play, but technically, it IS a controller, with one wire and a lot of buttons. And that wire was long, too. Like 15 feet or so, I think. So it has a few more buttons than the Jaguar controller. So it's a bit larger than the original Xbox controller. So the cartridge goes into it, but the Power Joy does that too. Think about it. Also, only the second programmable system ever made put power over the RF wire. The 5200 did too, but then Nintendo said " " and reversed the direction of the power (powering the switch box instead of the console), forever freeing us from having to reach behind the TV set.

That's important enough to deserve some bold tags. Also, most pong machines back in the day did not have color, and neither did the O1, so you can't say that color would have been expected. I had a Speedway/Tag back in the day, and my brother and I had some fun with Tag. But when I found the pile of our carts from back then, it wasn't there. And I never found one in the wild since then. Seriously, folks, this was the second programmable system released, EVER. The 8-way joystick hadn't become mainstream by then. Before you call the Studio II the "worst system ever", I dare you to play a few Arcadia 2001 games. And without earplugs, since the awful sound (I've described it as being programmed by someone who was tone deaf) is a part of the experience of its awfulness. And remember that this turd came out at the same time as the 5200 and Colecovision. I'm pretty sure I remember it had an "English" feature, maybe that's what you were seeing?

Hmm... it seems that the problem with XTRSHARD may be because I was using 5.1.2? From the TRSDOS 6 programming guide: And that's what the code is checking for, as it should. But apparently this isn't always true, at least with 5.1.2. I don't have an LDOS 5 programming manual handy to confirm this. Nor do I have 5.1.3 or a later Model I LDOS available right now. EDIT: I found a 5.3.1 for download, and it works properly. This seems to be something that was added in between those versions.

Arcadia 2001 is pretty awful, and most people have never heard of it. But I'm going to have to agree about the Atari 5200... good games, but crappy joysticks and MOAR HUEG THAN XBOX. It's not just the contact problems in the sticks, it's also the side buttons being anti-ergonomic. Notice how all systems since the SNES with side buttons have them along the top edge?

I've been playing around this for a couple of hours. First of all, it's a good thing I ripped all my disks with a Catweasel a while back. I had even gotten around to making a file extraction program a few weeks ago to get all the files I could out of the .DMK images. For what it's worth, all my old stuff is Model I / LDOS 5.1.2, and my old boot disk worked just fine. I've found some problems with it, but most of them seem to be general xtrs problems, not specifically the OS X version: * After playing some games, it seems like this thing is running about 1.5x - 2x "normal" speed on my MacBook Pro. The speech from Robot Attack (a Berzerk clone) is definitely at a higher pitch than I remember, and I was getting killed at Super Nova (Asteroids clone). Is there a speed control option for this? A look through an old TRSDOS6 manual I had lying around indicates that the M4 had a fast and slow speed, so maybe the emulator is running the M1 in fast speed mode, which the M1 never had? The crazy thing is that the SYSTEM command in LDOS 5.1.2 (the M1 version) actually has the SLOW and FAST options, and they actually WORK, so the M1 mode must be emulating a speed switch from the Lobo Max-80 or LNW-80. I can live with this now that I know I can control it. * Keyboard key list in the documentation does not say that ESC is the BREAK key, and it really should. * XTRSHARD/DCT whines about needing to be run from the SYSTEM command (when it is)... because it's looking at a flag bit (cflag$ bit 3) backwards. I don't know how ANYONE ever used that thing. Ever. This is not exactly an obscure bug that would only affect a few people... the same bug appears to exist in all three code paths (M1, M3, M4). I just hex-edited over the jump with some NOPs as the quickest fix. * TRSDOS/LDOS numbers drives starting at 0, right? So why does the Media window number drives starting at 1? Ditto for the hard drive units. This is confusing enough to be annoying. * DMK disk images seemed to be read-only, even when created from the disk image creator. Trying to run the AUTO command on a single-density disk gave a "GAT Write Error" message. I also got the idea that I couldn't make a mixed-density disk (which is needed to make a bootable double-density M1 disk), but maybe that's what the "ignore density flag" option is for. I'm mostly interested in reading DMKs and writing to HD images, so I'll just use JV3s as necessary for temp floppies, and leave it at that. * The screen text copy function can leave selection rectangle garbage on the screen. I'm not exactly sure how I did it. Anyhow, it seems to do stuff basically like I would want it to.

Not too much interest in programming PCE/TG16 here. Maybe it's because the card slot makes it harder to make homebrews for the real hardware. So in other words, the CPU in "slow" mode is as fast as the CPU in an ATARI 7800, except that it doesn't have a single-bus architecture robbing it of cycles when you put a decent amount of graphics on the screen. And the largest 7800 games made were 144k... but you're "limiting" people to 512K? I've just barely broken 64K myself, programming a Sega Genesis with GCC. (And I presume PCE even has a real sound chip, and a video system that isn't as much of a pain in the butt to program as the 7800's MARIA chip.) That's not much of a challenge, compared to what the homebrew coders around here have been doing. Just sayin'.

Incorrect. The automatic switches depend on a DC voltage being sent over the wire to operate the switch. Older consoles don't have this, but it is not impossible to mod them, and I've done it a couple of times.

Have you ever opened up the module? There's really not much room in there.

Get a bunch of RCA-to-F adapters and a multi-way RF switch. This is sometimes called a "Cable A/B Switch", but you can find them with multiple inputs, or at least you could back in the day when everything used RF inputs. Even a cheap A/B switch is going to be much better built than almost any of the switches that came with games. The exception is that an automatic switch like Nintendo used should work in a longer daisy chain than slider switches.

That doesn't work in the general case, because then your tiles have to be every combination of half tiles used in the display. It gets even worse when you scroll in both directions at the same time. Also, when you scroll 4 pixels horizontally like that, the half tiles could use different color combinations, which doesn't work on the 9918.