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LTO Flash! - Intellivision Flash Cartridge Information


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First who in Salt Lake City doesn't want to keep their LTO!?

 

Second they only ship within the U.S. so the internationals wanting this would appear to be out of luck on this ebay listing.

 

Darn, I didn't check that shipping was limited to USA. Perhaps someone here would be willing to help out?

 

But yeah - biased as I may be, I have the same question: Who wouldn't want to keep it? It's even unused, and it's even being sold at a slight loss, IIRC the price.

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Someone has a LTO Flash! on eBay - so you chickens who are afraid of sending a money order can get one quick now! ;) (PayPal accepted there.)

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/LTO-Flash-Cart-for-Intellivision-FREE-PRIORITY-SHIPPING-/112362483379

Hmmm. None of those pictures are of the item being sold. They are all Google image search hits.

 

Edit: actually they are from this thread, including one image from a person's warped shell.

 

WTF?

 

Something smells scammy...

Edited by intvnut
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Hmmm. None of those pictures are of the item being sold. They are all Google image search hits.

 

Edit: actually they are from this thread, including one image from a person's warped shell.

 

WTF?

 

Something smells scammy...

Great Catch on that warped shell and box picture... Maybe they were too lazy to upload pictures. Strange for sure though.

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I just purchased one of these cartridges. It killed me to take off shrink wrap on what looked like an authentic Intellivision Cartridge!!

 

It took about 20 minutes to get everything running - software install, hardware install, rom search, rom transfer. After that it was INTV heaven.

 

I don't have the ECS but my INTV II and voice module played everything like original carts! I love having flash carts - multiple Krikzz, Harmony, R4 - and this one is slick! I'll be getting a ton of use from it. Thank you Joe!

 

PS - damn shrink wrap....

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  • 2 weeks later...

What is the deal with the latest version of LTO! Flash?! Everytime I start it up it takes like 2min of just sitting there not responding while my hard drive goes nuts before I can click on anything. Move a rom over to the LTO...takes about 1 min while it thinks to do this before again..I can click on anything. The previous version was boom! instant with starting up, finding new roms and certainly didn't pause for 60 seconds everytime I dragged a rom over to the LTO menu list.

 

Seriously....

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Looking into it. Meantime, if you're seeing this slowdown, disconnect the cart while doing menu edits. Once you're ready to copy everything to the cart, you'll have to suffer through the performance syrup while the cart connects and then the copy to the cart. Preliminary investigation indicates that I'm computing file CRCs way too often.

 

What, you want code that's fast *and* correct? :P

 

Hope to have a fix in the next couple days.

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So the 20 minutes of install, find and flash is abnormal? I had no idea. Since it was my first time using it I didn't think twice about it.

 

I went back downstairs today and checked it. I am seeing what you are seeing. Just didn't occur to me it was abnormal. On the plus side since I didn't know any better it works fine and my cart is completely loaded anyway. :)

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:hangsheadinshame:

 

LOL...

 

yeah I guess if you were just now getting an LTO and hadn't used it earlier under the older versions you wouldn't have realized. But no..the 45 - 60 second wait when you start it up while it Validates the cart contents isn't normal. And again when you copy over Roms to the LTO Flash menu side...it shouldn't hang then either. It is also taking a bit longer than it used to when doing the flash process. It does work... but yeah...slowwww.

 

Thanks intvsteve for listening to my cry for help on this and for allowing me to try some things to help get to the root of the cause. We all still love you man!

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I was among the first to get one, but due to life, only loaded it up about a month ago. I'm assuming this was the case then because it was way slower than I expected, but as it was something I was only gonna do very rarely when I find something new to add, I didn't think much of it, figured it was the nature of having nice things for old systems that are affordable.

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Status Update:

Unfortunately, it's not a simple brain-dead kind of problem, so a good fix will be a little longer in coming. I'll see if I can come up with something that has some quick upside, at the cost of sacrificing some accuracy.

 

The joke about speed vs. correctness is actually the nub of the matter. The slowdown is in the PC-side code that checks to see if files on the computer have changed compared to files on the cart. This code executes more often than you'd think, so part of the improvement could be to simply remove some of those calls.

 

When updating the cart, the UI intends to only send a 'delta' rather than blasting everything down again. Saves wear on the flash, etc. Downside right now is that in egregious cases, it may take longer to figure out what to send than it would to blast the whole thing.

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I've not purchased the LTO Flash, yet, so I am not too familiar with the LUI outside of using it to launch jzintv on occasion, so I am curious if there is a mode that can be activated so that it functions in an offline type of state and you simply click on a "sync" button to check the files and synchronize on demand and not a constant process.

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I've not purchased the LTO Flash, yet, so I am not too familiar with the LUI outside of using it to launch jzintv on occasion, so I am curious if there is a mode that can be activated so that it functions in an offline type of state and you simply click on a "sync" button to check the files and synchronize on demand and not a constant process.

 

To put files on the cart, you click a 'sync' button (Copy to LTO Flash!). The notion of a 'live editor' has crossed my mind, in which any change you make while the cart is connected is immediately applied. Not on the radar, though.

 

You can edit the menu layout to your heart's content without having any hardware at all. You just need ROMs.

 

The 'has anything changed?' feature is the troublemaker here ... When the cart is connected and you're editing the menu, it's called often (even more than it really should be). And is operating at mode "eleventy" where it'll find out if a single bit has changed between the cart contents and the local menu -- if you're editing while the cart is connected. (Presuming no CRC collisions.) It really needs to narrow its scope. (It's looking at the entire contents for every single edit! :-o :dunce: )

 

On top of that, I just noticed that two settings that, by default, should​ mitigate some of the problems (launch and initial cart connect) were, :blush: not finished by some slacker. I'm going to have to call him to the office and gently tell the lazy sack of sh*t that his bonus check has been cancelled. Unless he's skulked off somewhere to drown his shame in some seedy dive.

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:-o :dunce: )

 

On top of that, I just noticed that two settings that, by default, should​ mitigate some of the problems (launch and initial cart connect) were, :blush: not finished by some slacker. I'm going to have to call him to the office and gently tell the lazy sack of sh*t that his bonus check has been cancelled. Unless he's skulked off somewhere to drown his shame in some seedy dive.

Don't be so hard on him, perhaps a meeting with the "cat o nine tails" will set him straight.

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The Mac version works just fine. :)

 

The code in question is identical on the Mac as Windows.

 

The main issue I've identified early on is that files are being processed (a checksum computed) *way* more often than necessary. How much this affects any given user may be highly system dependent. Since it involves file I/O, it can vary a lot from system to system, OS to OS, driver to driver, and file system to file system.

 

I'll continue to update if anyone's interested. There's no *functional* problem - just a speed problem. It appears that it's been there quite possibly since last September -- I have not verified that yet, but based on code inspection, that seems the most likely time frame. Mayhaps I'll take a few minutes tonight to see if there's any truth to that.

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I also flashed mine from a non-powered USB hub connected to an 8ft cable, connected to a $90 mini-PC, so I thought that might have added to the slowness for me.

I don't really care, but someone swapping ROMs out a lot or doing dev stuff may want it to be faster, especially if it is an easy fix, or even something we could adjust. Could you just make it so that there's an option for the user to tell it to check for changes, and it doesn't do any checking outside of that - or at least have that as an option that could be toggled. I'm definitely not a dev in this part of the coding world and probably don't fully understand the scope, but just some suggestions.

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The code in question is identical on the Mac as Windows.

 

The main issue I've identified early on is that files are being processed (a checksum computed) *way* more often than necessary. How much this affects any given user may be highly system dependent. Since it involves file I/O, it can vary a lot from system to system, OS to OS, driver to driver, and file system to file system.

 

I'll continue to update if anyone's interested. There's no *functional* problem - just a speed problem. It appears that it's been there quite possibly since last September -- I have not verified that yet, but based on code inspection, that seems the most likely time frame. Mayhaps I'll take a few minutes tonight to see if there's any truth to that.

 

Indeed, if you have an SSD or decent disk caching (or some combination of both), it may go by without much notice. I do most of my LTO Flash GUI work from a 5 year old MacBook Pro. It's SSD based, though, and the underlying OS caches the FS pretty well, so I hadn't noticed that much delay, despite having a very full LTO Flash menu.

 

(I did notice some lag, but I attributed that to having an out of date copy of LUI and a 5 year old laptop.)

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I also flashed mine from a non-powered USB hub connected to an 8ft cable, connected to a $90 mini-PC, so I thought that might have added to the slowness for me.

I don't really care, but someone swapping ROMs out a lot or doing dev stuff may want it to be faster, especially if it is an easy fix, or even something we could adjust. Could you just make it so that there's an option for the user to tell it to check for changes, and it doesn't do any checking outside of that - or at least have that as an option that could be toggled. I'm definitely not a dev in this part of the coding world and probably don't fully understand the scope, but just some suggestions.

 

That's the irony. There ARE such settings. I've had a stern discussion with the yokel who put them in the UI but didn't bother to, you know, actually finish them. He started back at me, nonplussed, then ran away.

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That's the irony. There ARE such settings. I've had a stern discussion with the yokel who put them in the UI but didn't bother to, you know, actually finish them. He started back at me, nonplussed, then ran away.

 

What the LTO Flash development process may look like:

 

post-14113-0-63497200-1492641114_thumb.gif

(click to animate)

 

;) ;) ;)

Edited by intvnut
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