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looks like I need to tweak some glyphs. Specifically-- S, C, t, k, O, & i Sadly I don't have a good solution to O. It really needs to be a 10x8 charset to get real good capital letter disambiguation for O and S, if you are going to have accent type. (Either that, or you need to give me 3 color mode somehow.) also, classic 99 is buggering the font a little? Inconsistent rendering.

when I asked about character order, he PMed me this PNG. It his this tiny little area in the bottom that I have not implemented. There is room in the magellan file to include them. I have not made any 5x5 EM versions of those glyphs yet. That is what I was referring to.

The section that is missing is the special characters, like the omega symbol and pals. Alphabet characters are all done.

Tell me about it... I came home from work, sanded on the lettering on the beige enclosure project, took a picture, then just fell into my bed. Woke up a little bit ago. Need to go back to bed. I will finish the font glyphs tonight.

And--- Picture! I still have a LOT of sanding to do, but look how sexy it already looks. Very good looking text this time. Like I said, the "wood" colored PLA accents nicely with the "desert tan".

OK. I don't have the very last special symbols section done, and it is time for me to do rounds. Go ahead and try this out in the mean time. Font1.mag I will do the last few glyphs in the last extended section after work here in a few hours.

OK. Magellan really wants to do 8x8 pixel glyphs, but I will shoehorn 8x6, by aligning all glyphs with the left-most edge, and making them 5x5 with 1px to right for inter-char space, and 3px ascender space. (Allows 2px size accent, with 1px wide space.) Edit: I have the base font made. Observe. Now I just need to copy/paste my base font and scribble on the accents. There is sufficient ascender zone to do it now.

I clearly need to make you a better font.. that one looks... not pleasant. Send me a magellan file so I know what the glyph order is. I will make you a nicer looking font in a few hours. When working in such a constrained EM space, (8x6), you need to truncate/compactify the accent marking, so that it only consumes 2 rows of pixels, with 1 row of pixel between it and the top of capital letters. That makes all characters have an actual EM of 5x5 (since trailing column is the inter-character space). Capitals have a strong typing, and lowercase a soft typing, but identical size. (this can be challenging with C, and S, but doable.)

The epoxy + toner powder alternative seems to work just fine. (It's even cheaper than the UV resin I tried first, even.) After work tonight I will finish the letters on the 2-tone enclosure. (I mixed up a small 5mL of the mixture in a paper cup, and dobbed it into the letters then razor bladed the surface to avoid having to sand through a huge excess of material. The letters just jumped right out at me. It's still not perfect, because my printer is not the most accurate with its steppers, but it looks pretty sharp all the same. Making them deeper was clearly the right call. It should be cured enough to sand after work, and then I will take pictures.) Since this seems to work fine, I bet I could use this with loose colored toners just fine too. Could be interesting for more detailed image decals. (Red and white TI logos, using 50-50 mix of magenta and yellow toner powders, and fine-sanded refuse white PLA powder left over from sanding?)

In the PHAT and the SLIM model PSPs at least, the display is fairly easy to remove. However, it is a very unusual ribbon setup, so it would have to be a custom display + diver board, and then a custom done display mount. It would also need a custom shell with a thinner bezel, to accommodate the larger display. That is not a thing I would expect to find in a kit. That is skilled custom fabrication, and the people with those skills tend to only do those kinds of things for their own enjoyment, due to the high labor thresholds involved. As for the modding and emulator stuff-- that's easy enough to do. The lastest CFW for the SLIM makes use of the leaked sony keys, and so installs without any obstacles. (Because it does that, no I am not going to give links, or give any how-tos.) I have a launch version slim that I have loaded up with a fair number of emulators. I take it with me on trips (but admittedly, with the current COVID situation, it's not gotten that much playtime for that use case this year.) Just get a working SLIM (or GO), and do the CFW on it. Easy peasy.

The new top has finished printing, Standoffs installed, shell assembled. Sanding underway. I have noticed a consistent printing anomaly, that is likely due to thermal contraction. In the top part, the walls seem to want to "bend inward" by a good half millimeter or so. This is unfortunate if you want the walls to be nice and smooth, as it means "aggressive sanding" is needed. I am thinking I will need to model in some material stiffening wedges in the inside of the walls to discourage this. There is more than enough material to sand through the anomaly and get nice flat walls. It just is a lot of extra bother. Fixing it for any future prints is good medicine. (I hope to one day end up with a "bulletproof" set of models that always prints nice, is aesthetically pleasing, and retains the very "rigid feel" this enclosure currently boasts. It really does feel very sturdy in your hands.)

Yup. 5pm for me. 4 hours early. Have to go to bed as soon as I get home.

After a misprint (because my upstairs suddenly got real cold because of a sudden bout of september winter-like weather, probably due to the fires in colorado and california screwing with the weather), the new top is approaching completion. I note that some of the letters have issues. It may be necessary to enlarge the font slightly, because of lack of resolution in the printer I have. I am not gonna mess with that too much right now though, I will just clean out the recess with the sharp part of some sewing pins before backfilling. I picked up some slow setting (5minute) epoxy in some bulk bottles. Gonna try that instead of the UV resin. (Been overcast and rainy for days. UV torch still MIA, no idea where it got off to.) I am also re-touching the letters on the one I will send to arcadeshopper. Monday rolls around, I will visit the post office and send it on its merry way.

Egh... 5pm CST is killer. I'd have to get up 4 hours early to catch it.

Okiedoo. But if you change your mind be sure to let me know. (If you can somehow get me 2 actual colors + the transparent/background color, I can make you some very lovely fonts indeed.)

So you need a font? I could maybe generate one for you if you really need one.

No no, I mean, since it is sitting on the sidecar, and is an intelligent device, it could be given a program to DO that. Not that it DOES do that.

Perhaps a trap routine set in the TIPI?

Use a small GROM image, (say, E/A as GROM), and use "Write on GROM" as the signal. Would allow you to catch an 8 bit value as the page to switch to. I even made a silly thread about the idea. The requirement for such a supercart would be a GROM image, and then a RAM image that is some multiple of 8k, and a new byte designator in the reserved byte of the header. Maybe "S". Specifically, the "Switch page!" signal, would be putting Grom Select high, combined with M and MO being forced low. (The same combination that already gets trapped by the finalgrom when it is emulating GRAM, to know when it is being written to.) In this case, since the GROM image is read only, instead of overwriting the GROM at the stack address held in the emulated GROM, it would trigger the page switch. The data written would be assumed to be the page number to switch to. This would switch out the whole 8k cartridge space to the page designated by the byte written.

Importing wav files would allow the speech module to be used in some very clever ways. Since it can be programmed with pitch control, it could be used "cleverly" as a sampler. (a really tinny sounding one, but still.) The speech synth would think it is saying "hello world", but would really be playing some instrument patches in place of the phonemes.

(redact about fonts) Of course, I click on this thing, and atariage shows me a many weeks old stale post as the "last viewed" instead of the "current message". A real annoying feature that. Wish I could turn it off. Carry on.

*reminded of an obscure "camcorder toy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000 Got around bandwidth issues by being only black and white, and increasing tape speed to almost dangerous degrees. Still looked like crap.

Aside from large avatars, most of the page is bog standard HTML. that's probably why. There's way too much emphasis on "MULTIMEDIA EVERYTHINGS!!" these days. (Believes modern UX/UI people need to be drug out behind a barn, and horse-whipped.)

I still think that the existing setup, with the "Dummy network pipe" we have for telnet and pals, would work just fine as a transport for X server messages. That's principally just bytecode instructions being sent over the wire already. https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xproto/x11protocol.html If the TI learns to speak X, you can draw whatever the hell you want on the PI, using existing libraries.

The finalgrom version you mentioned-- is this for the banked 4k feature? Otherwise, the 4k minimem image for the FG should work straight up, if the minimem cart itself does. If banking is supported (at some point), then up to 512k of data could be stored there. (!) That's a rather large text adventure indeed.