wierd_w

Push comes to shove, if it has a head, you can use an easy-out set to remove just about anything. I would try the flat blade first though. (Sometimes I wish there was a better retro computing presence in my area, and that I could get my hands on local treasures like he seems to. I may not be as photogenic, and may have an odd sounding voice, but I have LOTS of experience fixing those old clunkers from back in the day, and know my way around them without issue. I would happily make a channel and set up a donation system (for the repaired systems), just for the fun of it, if I could get a stream of broken systems to repair and re-home. Sadly, here in fly-over-country, we lack any such thing. I visited the Silly Valley area once a few years back, and realized that things like this were much easier over there than here, simply because there are more systems in the wild to work with, more resources to obtain them, etc... I am not gonna fork out ebay prices to do a youtube channel; and there are no "come explore our retro junk!" type warehousing operations here at all.)

the real issue is if your images can get good definition against their backgrounds, without clashing really badly anyway. This is a real problem with preset palettes, and one of the reasons I dislike them.

Well... It came off the printer. The gap is not sufficient. Parts are permawelded together. (when subjected to a flat punch and a hammer, the parts shatter irregularly, rather than break along the seams. the seams have too great a level of layer adhesion.) Gonna have to revisit the model, and increase the gap distances. That means at least another 3 days printing. Oh such fun! EDIT Ok, model gap increased to .25mm between parts. This is consistent with the built-in support material, which does actually release on hammer tap. It also means that the bottom lip of the door is gonna be a bit ugly. Oh well. Will report back in 3 more days. (well, 3 days, 4.5 hours)

Do you use sprites? If yes- then yes. If no, then probably not.

The glint of crimson and aqua colored beach glass, pink seashells, grey-black barnacles on basalt boulders... White flowers on the tree. Flamingos dipping for shrimp. Black coconut crabs, and orange mangos. Also, overweight tourist in hawaiian shirt, wearing a lei, relaxing on a beach chair and drinking a Mai-tai. (but the TI's 2 color per 8x8 tile restriction will make drawing that most difficult without doing per-scanline interuptions and other trickery.)

It really does depend what you are drawing. You can do a lot with greens and browns, sure-- but you need warmer tones too. If you are drawing something artificial, like a car, you dont want natural colors.

Brown it technically the same thing as a dark orange. If you design your palette correctly, you can double-duty one of the reds, brown/dark orange, and yellow as another color gradient, without sacrificing the red gradient at all. (and ninja by Carlsson) If you note in the above gradient I got ninja'd by, you will see orange brown and red make one gradient-- Yellow orange and brown another, Black, 75% grey, 25% grey, and white make a third, Cyan, skintone/ecru and pink make a very ugly fourth; Teal, true blue, lime, and dark green make a 5th... etc... The same colors co-exist in different gradients. This is very important to tie different game assets together cleanly without color clash. However, I tend to personally dislike general purpose palettes, since they introduce arbitrary and nasty restrictions. Also, try to avoid 100% saturation colors. blech.

Looks like a custom made enclosure. The sharpie marker TI logo is kinda ghetto though. The prior owner was clearly an enthusiast though.

Ahh. Thanks. @Omega-TI There are some lovely documentaries on Netflix about the rise of computing and nerd cultures in Silicon Valley that are worth a watch. Give me a minute. Here's one-- Part one of a 3 part. I watched it on netflix, but also apparently on youtube.

kinda sorta. It would probably take a long time to burn up. IIRC, the M68000 lacked a heat sink, or fan. If it was running balls-to-the-walls in a cycle counter, with no heat dumping, in a cramped pizza box (like a period mac, such as a IIci or a Macintosh(lc)...) it is conceivable that it would eventually overheat enough to damage it. That is, either opcode made the processor enter a mode, continuously performing memory read cycles from successive addresses with no intervening instruction fetches. Hence, the address bus effectively became a counter, allowing the operation of all address lines to be quickly verified. Once the processor entered this mode, it was not responsive to interrupts, so normal operation could only be restored by a reset (hence the "Drop Dead" and "Halt and Catch Fire" monikers). These references were thus to the unresponsive behavior of the CPU in this state, and not to any form of erratic behavior.[citation needed] The mnemonic HCF is believed to be the first built-in self-test feature on a Motorola microprocessor.[2]

Looks like we are actually BOTH correct.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)#Other_CPUs MOS 6502 has several invalid opcodes that will freeze the CPU. While none of them will trap the CPU in a testing loop that disregards certain safety issues (and thus cause the chip to burn up) like with the 68000, they are illegal opcodes that jam everything up hard when the CPU is instructed to decode them, and it is non-recoverable (without a power off). But hey, at least I knew it was a reference to a CPU instruction.

Ahh yes-- that seems correct.

I live at night. "Just before midnight on monday" is "Basically, it really started printing on Tuesday." It is now Wednesday. 30% printed.

It takes 3 days to print one yo. It's like 30% done!

Yup. The specific problem was that there was no (official, proper) way to LEAVE protected mode, and return to real mode, once you entered it. The LOADALL instruction could be used to get access to realmode again, "Kinda sorta", but it was a barrel of worms. This is the real reason why the protected mode of the 286 is not really supported by much of anything, and nearly all period software treats the 286 like a really fast 8086. There were some exceptions to the rule, like certain memory managers written specifically for 286s, like "EMM286.exe", which would get the XMS memory managing capabilities leveraged, without actually leaving real mode. (It abused LOADALL in a different way, to gain access to the xms memory to simulate EMS memory for applications that used it, and do so without entering proper protected mode. Since you could not return to real mode if you did, this was necessary to continue using DOS software.) There were XMS managers as well that did similar memory access shenanigans. Intel fixed this issue in the 386 by allowing the CPU to return to v86 mode after entering protected mode-- and as previously mentioned, this is why you can run a DOS application in a window, and do the preemptive/cooperative multitasking thing, and why you don't have to hunt for obscure memory managers to make it all nice and happy. 386 implemented proper MMU, and a functioning v86 mode.

The Halt and Catch Fire instruction was for the 6502, right? One of the "Undocumented Opcodes"?

Or get one of those dreaded Promise IDE controllers (or similar, I believe XT IDE also does INT13 interrogation and population) that has its own detection routine baked in.

OK, I am gonna go for broke, and attempt to print the "With Door" model. This will be the first time I have done a print-in-place type arrangement. I have left a gap of ~.125 mm between parts, which I KNOW will experience sag. However, the distance should be enough to prevent strong layer adhesion, and a gentle tap with a hammer on the support material should snap everything loose. In theory. We'll see

Okidoo. I just have a little more sanding to do, and then I can ship; Need an address Omega.

I have Omega's speech enclosure mostly done.. but I hit a small snag. It wont be cosmetically perfect. When digging on the text with the sewing pin, I popped off one of the inner bits of one of the 'e's, so it's kinda wonky on the text. I am not sure if I want to try printing another top or not... Are you down with a slightly defective enclosure Omega?

The internet is the global TCP/IP v4 network. What applications are using it are not important; they are just IPs, sockets, and datagrams all the way down so far as the internet and its infrastructure are concerned. HTTP was just a "Killer app". (sorry Tim Berner's Lee, Al Gore, and pals-- you did not invent the internet. DARPA did.) Usenet, IRC, and Co are all in the same category as applications using that network. They weren't the first, and wont be the last.

Well, I was not in a light duty hall (and I foolishly left my mouse at home), but it DOES look like the combination of the added stiffeners and printing on a cold bed have paid off/will pay off. It is at 85%ish complete, and is casting the web that is the inner roof of the enclosure. That means it is at the approximate level where the dreaded "Printing anomaly" occurs, and it has not happened yet. I am gonna go hit the hay, and when I wake up, I should know for sure. So far though, this looks like the best print to come out. Dont want to jinx it, but I have my fingers crossed.

I personally would have gone with an industrial PSU, such as is used to drive industrial machines. They are typically NOT ATX, but often provide the same voltages. They are designed to take more abuse than a typical PC PSU. You really dont want the GreenPC features of an ATX supply in this use case anyway, you want a PSU that can deliver power to a hungry appliance, do so 24/7, and do it with aplomb. Most PSUs on the market are not that kind of PSU. You really do need to shop industrial.

For me, my very first computer experience was dad's PCjr, which he had purchased to do police work with. We had a single game; King's Quest. In the days before the internet and walkthroughs, we sat around the computer while dad was at work, trying to figure out all the in's and outs of that game, and solve its puzzles. My sister learned how to use bios basic on that system, etc. I remember wanting a computer of my own so badly that I could taste it, but they were way too prohibitively expensive, and mom did not want to sink the cost. It wasnt until the early to mid 90s that she finally relented, and got us an AST Advantage 486sx 33 system. It did not come with a sound blaster, and came with a very customized version of windows 3.1. It had a cirrus logic based video chipset integrated on the motherboard, and had a whopping 4mb of RAM. My brother and I saved money, and purchased parts for it, and refused to wait for mom to take it to the computer store to have them installed. We just opened the thing while she was out at work, and dropped in all the parts ourselves. It about gave her a heart attack when she came home and found us in the finishing actions of screwing the case back together, and when everything worked as expected, she felt it was time for me to get a summer job working on computers (to keep me out of trouble.) This propelled me down the road to working in the slave-pit, but it's an experience I would gladly do all over again. It was a magical time to be working on computers; There were all kinds, and I got to have a very broad palette of experiences doing service and repair. (But, I did also have to contend with the Packard Bells... *cringe*.. You have not known pain and suffering until you have had to work on a 486 class Packard Bell Legend that has a Cyrix CPU installed in it.) Sadly, I missed out on the majority of the 8bit micro era. But I lived large in the early days of the PC. I have seen so many crazy things, it defies all reason. Still, I remember when the schools switched to PCs from Macs; I was right at home at the DOS prompt, doing shit at the console, and scaring the daylights out of the teachers. These days PCs are kinda bland; Back then, you could find truly radical, and mysterious devices inside those systems. Things like the digital data interface that drives a metal detector, built up inside a 486, and plugged into about 4 ISA slots. Or the byzantine multi-modem cards that drove automated telephone systems of the time. The strange world of single board PCs that basically plugged into a dumb backplane, like the WYSE 386s did-- and so much more.

You would need some kind of SIP modem emulator to do old-fashioned dialup. But most operators these days aren't gonna be running dedicated land-lines like that.