Bruce Tomlin

If you're just flickering on background tiles, all you need to do is have two different character cells and change the name table entry on every frame. (or of course you could re-download all 8 bytes of the cell graphics data) A bigger problem is scrolling, but scrolling 8 pixels at a time may turn out to not be so bad after all.

That'll only work until Sony releases an update to fix the bug. Then once someone updates or buys a new-in-the-box PSP with newer firmware, it's game over. Again. TIFF bugs go a long way back on the PSP. I'm surprised there was still one lurking in there after all this time.

I don't think it's the fuses. I recall that in the first days of the slim (and even some fats in the pre-Pandora days) there were problems getting the display to work. As long as you have the battery, you've done the hard part. You probably just got an old version of the Pandora loader. If you look in "the right places" you might be able to find a newer Pandora bootloader, or it may help to get an old fat so that you can properly generate up-to-date CFW through more freely available means that decode a Sony update to generate CFW. (I'll warn you right now to not have a background screen or skin set when you generate a fresh Pandora image.) But yeah, there's a reason why even CFW utilities are paranoid about the battery level, even with the power adapter plugged in. The good news is that this probably didn't mess up the partitioning, especially the partition that includes the important config data.

There is no way it can even know that a cassette is hooked up. It's just audio and pause wires that go to a regular cassette player.

The red button is the reset button. Hold down the BREAK key while pressing and releasing it and you should enter cassette-only mode.

If it happens all on its own, it could also be a cold solder joint to the jack on the circuit board that the yoke wires plug into. That's when a microscopic ring-shaped crack develops around the pin, and it only needs the joint reheated with a soldering iron to fix it. The hard part is taking things apart enough to get there, then putting everything back together.

It's called EgaXorBasic or something like that. ("That System" referring to Mega Drive / Genesis)

Albert, did you miss my post above about the Reputation Bar problem with Seamonkey / Camino? It's apparently a CSS problem, where the "left" value is defaulting to zero instead of the width of the bar contents. EDIT: I just filed bugzilla 513561 on the browser problem.

Level III BASIC was cassette-only, for the Model I. With a good disassembly, I was able to get it to work with Disk Basic back in the day, and it could also theoretically have been made to work with the Model III.

I continue to point to the chaotic plethora of "mappers" as the main problem, the CIC (lockout) chip as another part of the problem, and even the metric connector of the circuit board is a speed bump. The lack of internal VRAM ended up making the NES more versatile, but that just adds to the mapper chaos. Join the Mega side of the force... 4 megabytes of non-bankswitched ROM... 64K of RAM... feel the power of the 68000... you can even use GCC...

The first thing I can say is don't use a Nintendo or Sega RF switch with the Atari. While it is possible to mod a system to support the switch, those switches expect power on the RF port to operate the switch, so they won't work. If your TV has an RF input, try an RCA to F connector adapter and either plug it directly into the TV, or use a cable TV A/B switch. Beyond that, Atari used S-video internally in their stuff, so they can be modded (if you have enough patience) to output S-video. Anything more than that (component or HDMI) isn't really worth the trouble. The Colecovision is a special case because its video chip outputs component video (I still suspect that they got a price break from TI on a chip variant nobody else wanted), but S-video can be tapped from inside its RF modulator too.

I've done some tinkering with a copy of the HTML, stripping down things until the bare minimum to show the problem, and it appears that the problem is in rendering the ".rep_bar" and ".rep_bar ul" styles from "public/style_css/css_16/ipb_styles.css". I can change ".rep_bar ul" to float:right, which puts the add button next to the reputation count, but it does not affect the left side of the reputation bar. Removing the add button and its entire enclosing UL and LI tags removes the add button, but again, the left side of the bar goes all the way the left to the 10px left margin of the "body" style. The problem is apparently in the default of the unspecified "left" value. If I add a "left" value to ".rep_bar", both Seamonkey and Safari make the bar the same size. The only thing I can see is to add a "width:70px;" or similar value to the ".rep_bar" style. This will force the left edge to be that distance from the right edge. With my browser's font settings, this is enough for a 4-digit reputation count without it blowing up into two separate lines. And hey, it looks like this works. So the minimum fix appears to be to add "width:70px;" to the ".rep_bar" style in "public/style_css/css_16/ipb_styles.css".

One of the reasons I recall given was that of quality control, that they had no way to be sure that no bugs were added. Which is ironic because I apparently found a gameplay bug in the orignal MSX version.

When you're in a forum, and click on the icon to mark messages read in a sub-forum, the sub-sub-forums do not get marked as read. Specifically, when you go into the Programming forum and mark the messasges in "Atari 2600 Programming" as read by clicking on the AA icon, the sub-sub forums "2600 Programming For Newbies" and "batari Basic" do not get marked read. As far as I can tell, if you do this from the top level forums view, all sub-sub(-etc) forums do get marked read. It's just when you do this from inside a forum that it doesn't work right.

I just checked this thread and noticed it said nothing about my reason for stopping anything to do with Black Onyx. Basically, someone on the board with a 2-digit number of posts (not anybody connected with Opcode) was employed by BPS, in some unknown capacity, presumably not in any management or decision-maker position. He decided that he would take it upon himself to inform BPS about the situation, even after he was asked not to. (They're still around because of an obscure game called "Tetris".) In other words, it was his own personal vigilante crusade about the posting of ROMs in general, which he had no obligation to pursue. They said no. End of line.

I think you're a bit confused here. There is memory card support to make the HD act as a memory card by adding support to the OS, but not all games support that (some may even be hard-coded to assume that there are only two memory ports, period.) This is also how some 3rd-party memory cards are supported that need you to run a driver disc every time you power up the PS2. Games like FFXI actually store files on the HD, and in the case of FFXI, it only runs installed from the HD. The other games merely use it for faster loading, like typical Xbox games. In any case, there is special support in the HD drive firmware for MagicGate. Without this, the PS2 will not recognize the HD at startup or in the installer disc. Only Sony's HD supports MagicGate, so you can't use any other HD for the games that support it, particularly the one (FFXI) that requires it. That's why I say that if you're going to use HD Loader, sell off the drive (and utility disc if you have it) to someone who actually wants to use it for the PS2 support, and put in a 250-750 gig drive for loading games. With the average game being 3-4GB, you can't fit more than about 10-15 games on the Sony drive anyhow.

You should know that a "fireproof" safe is only designed to keep paper inside from burning. Plastic will probably still melt.

Mozilla Seamonkey 1.1.17 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.22) Gecko/20090605 SeaMonkey/1.1.17 When I get some time I'll play around with the HTML and see what it takes to fix it.

Ask yourself: "Do I really want to run Linux on a PS3? Ever?" If your answer is no, just get the slim. Less space, less power use, less heat, and presumably more reliability. (we'll see about that last one, but I'm guessing it'll prove true) If you're still on the line about Linux, remember that I've heard it's a pain to switch back and forth. Whatever you last booted as, it's going to keep booting as, until you go out of your way to change it. If you're not going to run Linux full-time, what's the point anyhow? And even if you are, just get a real computer. As a computer, the PS3 is gimped. The video chip is gimped, the Cell is gimped, and even the HD is sort of gimped because of your partitioning options. If you really want to tinker with "high performance computing" stuff, go play with CUDA instead of Cell. If you just want to play emulators, get a PC (or even a chipped Xbox 1).

Yes.

I'm having this exact same problem with Mozilla Seamonkey, and they're both Gecko-based browsers. Is this happening with Firefox too? The problem seems to be that the rate up/down button appears on the left side of the window instead of next to the rating number. (Even when it's your own message and there's no rate-up button.) This causes the gray in between them to pave over the bottom of sigs.

WASD? You heathen! One of the nice things about that keyboard (before they broke it with the later M4 keyboards) was how nice it was to use the arrow keys with two hands in games, and your thumb on the spacebar. Let's see, left arrow is CHR$(, right arrow is CHR$(9), down arrow is CHR$(10), and I think up arrow was probably CHR$(91), which was the remapped "^" in the original Model I chargen chip.

Well, this is certainly something I'm qualified to answer, since the L216K was my first computer. The main way is by using the SET/RESET commands. This gives you 128 x 48 blocks. The POINT(X,Y) function will return whether a block has been set or not. The fast way is to print the character codes that correspond to the blocks. Codes 128 to 191 will print all the various combinations of six blocks. PRINT CHR$(191) prints a character with all six blocks set. (FYI, 192 to 255 print a large number of spaces.) Even faster was when people would poke the graphics right into the string constants in a program, but those would get de-tokenized on listing and make the line un-editable. Also, Microsoft's "Level III BASIC" added a LINE x1,y1-x2,y2 command, but that was cassette only. (I did hack up a version to overlay over Disk BASIC, but I don't remember whether I had to make a point of setting Memory Size or not. I still need to make a program to extract my TRSDOS .DMK image rips... I did a CoCo dumper yesterday.) Of course, in assembly language you had nothing but the character codes to work with, and the graphics would be pretty darn fast.

I can't see why it wouldn't work. One interesting thing is that it's referred to has having a "sequencing" tuner. I guess that just means it can be programmed to constantly flip between multiple channels, like a security cam monitor. A VCR is the standard answer, but they're bulky as hell. This one is no worse than an RF modulator. The 50-60 dollar price is probably as much due to low demand (or low expected demand) as anything else. If they become useful in the future, maybe the price will go down to 30 or so. Another suggestion is to find an old cable tuner box, preferably one of the third-party ones without a descrambler. They're at least going to be smaller than a VCR. I've found a few of those over the years, but I don't remember if they had A/V outputs. Some satellite boxes may be useful like that, but a few of them (notably the Hughes 10 HD receiver) won't let you watch OTA TV without a working satellite subscription. A few of the older "converter box" HDTV tuners may tune analog too, but most just had a pass-thru.