wierd_w

I am really quite surprised that for things without moving parts, people in the tech community do not use silicone pour molds with resin. I mean, COSPlay kids use the darn things, and get real elaborate with them-- for one-off pieces. A proper pour mold will give you reliable reproduction and durable end result, with multiple pulls before the mold degrades.

Amazon has an amplifier... Do not know if it would be fit for function here or not, but it does have a nifty knob. Put a standard Stereo->Mono plug on, and maybe bob's your uncle? The bigger issue would be the whole "The TI's cassette grounding situation leaves an open ground loop that introduces god awful buzzing" problem. Basically, the ground line leading off the microphone is not properly connected to the audio circuitry of the TI. I found that you need to bridge the tips of the speaker and microphone leads to use the TI's grounding, and get agreement, to silence the buzzing. Maybe that stereo->Mono breakout plug would be sufficient, if it connects the tips of the channels? Then you could connect speaker and microphone of the cassette cable, and then route that into the amp, then use a patch cable to the phone?

Sounds like all you really need is a small linear amplifier with a built in stereo->mono plug adapter. You could probably get away with using one of those "Indoor use" photocells like they use to run calculators, to power the amp.

Too young to partake in the heyday of the 8bit generation. I was wearing diapers then. The best I can interject here, is that I got a PC instead of a Mac, because I felt there was vastly more software, a much wider selection of hardware, and it did not have an overbearing digital gatekeeper keeping watch over what hardware you could install. (seriously Apple, your scsi setup software checked the ID tag of your drive to make sure it was apple OEM? What rot.) It helps that I was already familiar with a DOS console prompt, and that such things did not frighten me. I recently picked up a 99/4A (as in, within the past 2 years), because it was a system I had not heard so much about. (the C64 and pals are much more well discussed, IMO), and it seemed like a fun idea.

Well... The PSP has a gamepad. Keyboard input is.. Let's not discuss that. I really should install that old version of TI99Sim and see how it runs.

I can't really vouch for it at this time... (I DO have a CFW PSP, but have not tried it.) https://www.brewology.com/downloads/download.php?id=7464&mcid=1 But there exists a TI99 emulator for that handheld. As long as you have some way to just autoload diskette images, it should work fine I would think.

Peace and harmony brothers, peace and harmony.

The issue is with the trend curves of both models. EG-- Model 1) Workers get appropriate pay, and retain their free time, and thus have a motivation to spend that money, resulting in more total sales, and thus a higher overall market cap to capitalize on and Model 2) Workers are overworked, because all employers are slavishly trying to satisfy the parasitic demands of the investor and banker classes, which reduces their ability to consume media, at both ends, forcing employers who remain in the market to have to resort to hyper abusive marketing strategies (such as adiction based behavioral models), to drive sufficient sales to keep the lights on, while simultaneously promoting the problem through requiring their workers to work Seattle 120s or higher numbers of hours. For the same expenditures (including wages), there is more market to be gained in model 1, than there is in Model 2. However, because of the slavish devotion to the investor and banker classes, model 2 gets the most traction. (It's basically Prisoner's Dilemma, Economics edition.) You COULD solve it by regulating industry, and legislating appropriate minimum wages (and thus force employers to make the "best" decision, which is against their own short-term goals), but then we get into politics, and is topica non-grata. The issue is that model 2 is unstable. In order for producers to continue seeing growth of their businesses, they have to continue to demand more hours for less pay out of their employees, while basically blackmailing people to use their products at increasingly (comparatively) extortionate pricepoints. There are only so many physical hours a human is able to work before they start dying. (see Japan.)

Indeed! This problem ^ is why I specifically mentioned that I inspected the disk media to check for signs of such wear, and found 0 signs of it, in my case-- which is why I considered the issue to be likely caused by incorrect coercivity of the media, from large domains forming. (and why blasting it with a randomizing, high power magnet with oscillating flux, could potentially fix it.) You should ALWAYS be listening for sounds of scratching, scraping, and such when the media spins-- AND, you should regularly inspect the mylar surfaces of your disks to ensure that no scrape marks are on it. Once the oxide layer starts getting scooped off like icecream, the particles can accumulate inside the dust sleeve of the disk, further damaging the media-- also, the abrasive particles sand-paper the epoxy coating on the disk head, further damaging the disk drive. Always examine diskettes for physical signs of wear, then address accordingly. Again, in my case, there were 0 signs of such wear, so I explored other potential sources of media reliability issues. ------ Concerning the video and the bearings he has: I would personally have submerged the bearings in isopropyl alcohol, and spun them while submerged, to help remove the old crud from the inside of the bearing assembly. Often, once those seals fail, dust contamination is INEVITABLE. The seizure is really from the dust gluing the bearings to the bearing race inside, and forming a thick tar-like goop. Cleaning that crap out is necessary to properly restore the bearing. It will move and sound SOOOOOOOOO much better after a thorough cleaning like that, than it will if you just relube it and move on. I find the same issue often is the culprit for failed ball-bearing fans. You can often revitalize such fans and get several years of hard use out of them before they get noisy and awful again, after a good cleaning like that. (Eventually, the cumulative impacts of the dust infiltrations will cause pockmarks on the balls and the bearing race, as the particles promote irregular surface wear, and corrosion, which you cannot fix.) Once cleaned and dry, I would give them a slight shot of deoxit, allow to dry once more, THEN lubricate with a quality synthetic lubricant.

The phenomenon that drives the demand for "Pay to win" coincides with the "Wages too low; People working side jobs for basic quality of living and barely getting by" problem; If you are working that side job, that is the time you would have previously invested in "Getting Gud", but you still want entertainment. You crave the chance to win, even if you lack the skill to do so--- Enter the microtransaction-- "Hey-- If you pay me 5$, I will help you WIN!". Most people do not do rational calculations about their time's value, and so do not make a proper calculus. They know they have an innate need to have social entertainment, the mobile device platform can be used discretely on the side job when the boss is not looking, and that 5$ lets them WIN, and scratch that psychological itch. So they do it. (And since that is where the new money is, because of this actual reality, that is what every damn publisher does now.) However, it discourages anyone who actually would otherwise have engaged with the game to Get Gud, because there is no high from success, as you rightly point out. In all cases, the correct solution is for employers to pay actually living wages, instead of trying every bit of chicanery they can to "BOOST SALES!!" and "MAKE THIS QUARTER BETTER THAN THE LAST, NO MATTER WHAT!!". You can only trim fat until there is no fat left. Pretending that there is always fat, is how you end up with a skeletal economy, which we are on the verge of having. An economy only exists when money is changing hands in exchange for goods and services. When all that money is tied up in stock options, buyback programs, overseas bank accounts, and golden parachutes, the economy withers and dies. You would think that people who profess an insatiable love of the market would comprehend how this tragedy unfolds, and be loud proponents of ensuring high levels of common liquidity, such that the economy is strong and healthy, but that does not seem to be the case in practice. In practice, the bottom line is all about hoarding as much currency as possible to attract the investor class, and the wider economy be damned-- OR-- to ignore the situation of the economy, and go through the "bargaining" stage of denial about the problem. (EG, "We can keep going as we have been, if we just buckle down, cut every expense to the bone, and weather it out", or in the case of Hollywood "If we JUST increase the length of copyright another 100 years, we can milk the long tail and make up for it in the future, even though all our metrics say otherwise!!", and "We gotta lobby for even more draconian DRM protections to stop those evil pirates that are clearly undercutting our sales, regardless of what Netflix's data says!") rather than go to the acceptance stage of grief, and honestly admit to themselves "We cannot continue to pour all of our financials into AAA titles, because the economy cannot support it, because people do not have sufficient disposable income to support that kind of business model." People do not have the money, or the time (because they traded the time to get the bare minimum of money to survive, because of how pronounced the problem is), to consume that content legitimately, at the pricepoints demanded. That is the hard reality. We either fix that as a society (globally), or we watch the content industry die on the vine, and get despotic copyright laws as it tries desperately to survive through denial in the process. That's all the further down the politics hole I want to go. Since it relates intimately with modern gaming is the only reason I am bringing it up here. You do in fact have to address the elephant in the room, since it is parked on top of the game controller, and is blocking the TV.

If the data is safe to lose, you could also try reactivating the iron oxide in the diskettes/break up the domain boundaries, by subjecting the diskettes to a degaussing wand/bulk eraser. That would remove any bias the coating has developed from storing a pattern for a very long time, and make it more useful again after a good format. Did that with a few of the 360k IBM PC diskettes I inherited. (they had attenuated so bad from sitting for 40 years, that the data was not recoverable-- so I reformatted them. Most were fine. Some that showed 0 signs of media damage insisted they had bad sectors after a format with aggressive test-- so I degaussed them a few times, then formatted them. Work just fine now.)

This is skirting dangerously close to politics-- but still needs stating. The "Wages have not grown in proportion to productivity or with inflation for 50+ years" thing is starting to actually have fangs instead of small nagging nibbles it's had in the past. Alarming numbers of people cannot endure the loss of a single paycheck without risking a debt spiral that ends in their being impoverished. Is it really... Sensible?... to be in a business that believes people can make flippant financial decisions about entertainment, when the above is true? I would think not. Yet, there you have it-- with the entertainment industries of the world in abject denial of this reality, focusing instead on their own personal realities-- that the costs of producing modern content are high, and mandating high prices. The lack of sales is attributed to any number of things (Piracy, et al-- despite the clear data that Netflix provided about pricepoints) except what really needs to be accepted--- People do not have sufficient disposable income (in aggregate), to support a large entertainment industry with large AAA properties being produced. The content that is popular is the "Free* content", no matter how shitty. (as evidenced by the presentation). People still want entertainment, but they cannot justify the 60+$ pricepoint for a AAA title, or the 5 to 10$ pricepoint for mobile, without some very serious value being offered. This is why these industries are suffering so bad. I would personally say that unless the generating situation is changed, and soon, then the handwriting is on the wall for paid content, in any form.

A TIPI might actually work... (CRU bus is exposed on the tutor "expansion port".) Does anyone know if 99/4A DSRs can work unmodified on a tutor?

Can't attend. Work this weekend.

No. If anything, extra waitstates were introduced to deal with the slow speed of extending the bus that far, and dealing with the repeater baked inside the PEB interface card. I just feel that a round (and properly shielded) cable would be easier to have effective cable managment with, and that you can get 50 conductor cables that are already industry standard, with standard connectors. Devising a proper port adapter dongle for either end would solve the problem neatly.

It's real hard to get the cats to leave the monitoring equipment alone. Also, despite being notoriously difficult to corral, their migratory paths follow predictable patterns, (at least when the monitoring equipment is not ditched within seconds of installation.) Cats really are not a good source of random--It's a common mistake to think "does not comply with ordered environments" == "Chaotic". Rather, the cats simply have no desire to comply with an externally applied source of order-- they are rather orderly within their own behavioral domain, and simply refuse any externally imposed ruleset.

The CL chipsets could really rock that 2D performance, for sure. The 486 was not really powerful enough to do true 3D. Hell, a 486 DX could *BARELY* play an MP3 file. (there was contention at work one day about if a 486 could play MP3s or not-- The boss was of the opinion that you needed at least a pentium 90 to do it, but I dug up a 486 DX 2/50, and fired up winamp on it. Sure, it COULD NOT multitask while doing it-- but it COULD in fact play MP3s without dropping out-- just barely.) For the majority of games that were available at the time though (with the exception of things like Quake, or Unreal, which were real 3D) it was plenty good enough. By the time I was building my own systems though, I was using Trident cards. The better CL chipsets were faster, but it was hard getting an affordable discrete graphics card with CL chipset in appropriately large memory sizes. (Needed at least 1mb vram to do anything modern, for the time-- Most CL offers that were in the same price range as the tridents were 512kb, and that was not acceptable. Of course, the Trident offer pool was saturated in 512kb vram offers too-- you had to dig to get one of the 1 or 2mb cards. Eventually I migrated to an Nvidia Riva TNT. (but first got a voodoo2, to go with my aging Trident card. STILL have that 8mb voodoo 2!!) It was amazing to feel that silky framerate on Unreal. For a long time, when people would ask about running a second monitor, I would always suggest an S3 Virge PCI. They just played nice with every other card out there, and had solid 2D performance. (and very few people needed 3D on both heads.) I installed so many of those things back in the day for that purpose. (Customers would see me through the window in the techroom, driving two displays-- with one display showing file copy operations, and the other showing various other things going-- and they were all enraptured by the idea of having two heads like that. Looking back on it, I think the shyster boss I worked for left the blinds open for that very reason... At the time, I thought it was because he was convinced I was slacking off back there, but in retrospect-- I installed a SHITLOAD of S3 Virge cards to drive secondary displays.) I also have fond memories of setting up ethernet networks for local businesses on service calls. I remember one deployment that needed a massive kluge to get going-- A local aerospace company had two engineering labs that were physically too far apart for un-shielded ethernet. I hunted, and dug up a local switch that could do both 10base ethernet, and 10base-2 coax ethernet. Used a coax drop to link the two labs, and advised to keep traffic on the link to a minimum. (I remember suggesting that fiber would be a better choice, but the cost was exorbitant back then. For the budget they quoted, 10base-2 was the only viable offering with the distance involved. It was not "just a little over", it was more "2x the max cable distance of 10base-T ethernet", which is why it needed the shielded coax drop to even remotely work.) I often wonder when they replaced that, and what they replaced it with.

Jeeze.. My land line gets blown up like clockwork at noon every damn day. How do I know? Because I am trying to sleep at that time. Always some chicka saying she is "From the HR department". I hang up. I have not been applying for jobs, and the opening is always 100% the same, so totally a scam anyway. I have noticed that they seem extra thirsty for suckers lately. I just wish I could get them to stop blowing up my landline.

Aren't reverse-biased zener diodes cheaper, and faster? https://hackaday.com/2020/05/23/a-4-bit-random-number-generator/ The circuit could be scaled up to any size bit-depth.

beige controllers you say... https://www.ebay.com/itm/Atari-2600-Suncom-Tac-3-Totally-Accurate-Controller-Commodore-64-works-100/123807206029?hash=item1cd37c0a8d:g:v6wAAOSwPHZdCZir

Verb is totally legit too. Fun use of language to piss off the grammar Nazis: "The builders were building a building. Some scaffolded the exterior, while others walked on the scaffolding to lay brick and mortar."

Why not just cast a resin gear replacement? It's what I did for my large format printer, after the goons from UPS dropped it. (The gear for the ink servicing station got shattered. I superglued it together, then cleaned it up with a file, then made a silicone mold out of some bathroom grade silicone caulk. Used the UV resin and the UV light to fill the mold, and produce a new gear.)

OK. I have them both at more or less "High gloss" now. I am not terribly happy with the normal speech synth box though. Those letters really irk me. While I will send the unit, I am thinking I will make another one to send to replace it later. (you have waited enough, and I am super picky) I AM however, rather happy with the one with the door, cosmetically speaking. I am gonna go hit up the local walmart, and get some rubber feet to stick on them.

The issue I see is the "Being available" to service an incoming packet event. The TI is already living behind a wall of waitstates. Throw into that it having to do actual work behind memory that is hobbled, and then having to do strange things with the data bus and a signal line to access the CRU interface... and then try to throw in "fast network response" on top of it. The more users you have, throwing data into the hosting TI, the worse it will be. That's why I suggested moving the server portion into the PI itself, and just using the TI as the presentation interface. It gets pre-processed data streams that way, and does not have to have multi-user contention issues.

So, how shiny do you want these? I have some 2000 grit paper that is able to put "Glossy shine" finish on this plastic. (got a few spots that has happened in accidentally while trying to get all the rough sanding marks out, but I was going to go over with a melamine sponge to get satin finish afterward.) It will just take longer. I aim to please, so let me know. I need to scrape together some packing materials to send these.