Tax time again. So I try installing TurboTax on my business laptop which is running Vista and the thing errors at the end with an unknown installer error. To add insult to injury, it won't even fully UNinstall. I can't repair it. I can't uninstall it or reinstall. It's in zombie-land. Luckily the CD is dual-platform so I popped it into my daughter's Mac Mini and had no trouble installing it there, thanks in part to the fact that installing software on the Mac is almost always little more t
I really am not much of a fan of satire. It too often trivializes important topics, as if laughing about things is all we need to do instead of fixing them. But the Onion does it so well. The social critique is so spot on. It's a work of art.
Looks like Christian Bale is now going to be the butt of a thousand jokes. I'm waiting for the phoney phone calls with real people. Howard Stern must be having a field day.
I'm never watching anything with him in it again.
This will go down as the worst recorded rant in history. Worse than Shatner's "sabatage".
Worse than Orson Welles' famous rant about peas.
I mean, it's one thing to call a guy names. It's another to threaten to tear the set apart and kick the guy's ass. I swear Bale sounds like a typical teenage bully. I can only imagine he kicked the shit out of his fair share of nerds like me who got on his bad side growing up. I kn
I did a google search on myself and noticed that I was a runner up in an Atari music player contest. I can't remember whether I even saw my name in the magazine or not, but I do remember spending way too much of my time working on those things. I transcribed them directly from sheet music, but I had to do some compression down to 4 voices.
Anyone know of an easy way to play this stuff on the PC without running an emulator?
This is looking better and better. But like I said in the netbook threads, progress is marching quickly in the netbook space. As good as this looks, it may become obsolete tomorrow. The big deal right now is the NVidia Ion platform and giving these things some actual graphical horsepower. If this still has the GMA950 style graphics it might not be that great value in the long term. It would be great having a netvertible that would actually have enough horsepower to work as a desktop replace
This is what I've been waiting for. 8.9" netvertible with GPS!!! Hopefully it will have decent battery life. This would be the ultimate car computer.
Eee PC T91 convertible tablet
No new Mac Mini at macworld.
Lame
Lame
Lame
Did I say lame?
No wonder they aren't going to do these shows anymore.
I've got my EFI-X so it looks like I'll be building my hackintosh after all.
Chris Wilkson has let me know that he's finalized the board design for the new run of the Cybertech A/V mod. More details to follow. I know Longhorn's mod is coming out at the same time but this has been a long-germinating project and we have to go ahead with it.
More details here.
This clip was brought to my attention recently. It is, as far as I know, the only video footage of Death Race online. I have the old VHS tape that I got from Rob Mitchell but I haven't digitized it. The DR section is very brief at around 1:00 in. Enjoy.
Just a note that I moved back to the Boston area last month and have been trying to get settled ever since. I still have a lot of boxes strewn around and haven't set back up my Atari "testbed" so to speak. I've been involved in a "death march" for my dayjob so I haven't had as much time to think about Chimera lately, and Delicon has I guess taken advantage of the downtime to do other things. But I will try to get organized again and see where we are. I really had hoped to get farther over th
Thought it would be time to make a statement about Death Derby...
I just moved from California back to New England. Still waiting for the truck with my stuff so I can set my Atari back up again. I'm on a minimalistic Mac Mini system right now. Anyway, right before I moved I loaded my Death Race cab up and brought it up to Chris Wilkson's place. That was the California Extreme weekend. The deal there is that Chris gets the machine in exchange for redesigning the CyberTech A/V mod and let
Splitsville is a band that wrote a song called Atari 2600 which I licensed for Stella at 20 and the Stella Gets a New Brain v.2 CD.
I thought this song was pretty good and had some Atari-like connections in it, so enjoy:
When the cartridge powers up, we're going to try to do a nice flashy sequence ala the Playstation 1, something that showcases that you are running in the "Chimera Environment" as it were. So that's where LS_Dracon's logo image comes in. Tonight I got the cart to display this image. We're still working out some glitches, however. Also, I just realized that the pixel aspect ratio of sprites is more like 2:1 so the image needs to be rescaled to be twice the vertical resolution. So for now I'm
For those who want to cram more characters per line, please send me the data for your preferred 4-bit font and we'll try to include this into the firmware. It should be as complete a font as possible, with mixed case and symbols. You can bit-pack the characters into pairs if you want. The ARM can surely mask out the proper nibble.
Delicon is embedded the data in the firmware using C array syntax. Like so:
unsigned byte ansicharacters[256][8] = {
{ 0x00, 0x7C, 0x82, 0xAA, 0x82, 0xB
We're getting close now. We just need to make this interactive and embed it into the firmware.
Unfortunately I had trouble photographing the monitor and the youtube clip is even more blurry. Hopefully you can get a sense of what it looks like.
Here is the microSD file lister:
What's going on now is I've submitted a kernel variation to Delicon that uses queues for the color register changes per row, and I added a function call that sends the user input registers to the ARM on each frame. So really the ARM can pretty much take over the VCS to drive the menu. The only thing it isn't doing is generating any audio, which could be added if it were deemed important
Prior to this I was doing a rather lame attempt at debouncing the console switches. I have my own noti
Here is a photo of my screen running the character printing demo. The Atari is feeding characters into the character print API function. The ARM does the rendering to queues, and then serves the queues in the kernel itself.
Here is what some of the code looks like:
ldy #0
ldx #0
.keep_printing
lda CHIMERA_LINE,X
jsr print_character
inx
cpx #12
bne .keep_printing
ldy #3
ldx #0
.keep_printing2
lda Character,X
jsr print_character
inx
cpx #9
bne .keep_printing2
ldy #4
When Chimera is serving out queues, it's acting like the DPC chip in Pitfall II. It's an impressive enough feat, but simple enough to have been done in programmable logic. But the big distinction with Chimera is having it do more calculation-heavy operations that only a true processor could do. So we've specced out a scheme for sending commands to the ARM and polling for execution status. This is pretty exciting because it's really using the ARM as a true coprocessor for the first time.
Text
Note, we tried getting the ARM to spit text out with no artificial delays and it winds up looking like video snow. The ARM is FAST.
Also notable is that these queues are being read out in steps of 2, because of the data interleaving. So we know we should be able to support skip reads. This will be a common requirement of many 2600 kernels.
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