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About this blog

Atari projects, Mac mini DVR, and other things

Entries in this blog

Harp Twins and Volfgang Twins

Awesome cover of Paint it Black by Harp Twins and Volfgang Twins.       I saw them perform it live back in November at the Houston Arcade Expo:     For those of you in Europe they are currently touring in your neck of the woods. Well worth seeing them live if you can.      

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SpiceWare in Music

PRGE build of Frantic

Here's the build of Frantic that was shown at PRGE.  Al needed the demo ROMs at the start of October so he'd have time to build all the carts.     frantic_20231002_PRGE.bin   Changes:   Fixed issue where room sometimes changed color during transition to next room. Revised robot death sequence - when hit the robot's shape is now briefly color cycled (like the humanoid's death sequence) before the explosion sequence starts. Revised Otto logic for Fren

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SpiceWare in Frantic

Mac Studio

Picked up a Mac Studio today.  It's a stock M2 Ultra version. I used the Migration Assistant and transferred everything over from my nearly 9 year old Mac Pro.      I ordered a couple USB-C to mini DisplayPort adapters to use my existing cables to connect the Studio to my 4K monitors.   AtariAge is noticeably more responsive on the Studio, I was not expecting that.   Like I did with classic Doctor Who, I've been doing a rewatch of Star Trek in air date or

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SpiceWare in Miscellaneous

MenuMaker 0.4

Turns out there's an updated version of VecMulti that requires a slightly different format for the menu file. The menu created with MenuMaker 0.3 would show extra characters on those VecMulti cartridges, resulting in the names shifting.       Starting with Page 2 the names would no longer line up with the numbers 1-4 (game 1 on page 2 is AllGoodThings).     With the help of @NeonPeon I've been able to reverse engineer the new format, and have update

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SpiceWare in Vectrex

MenuMaker 0.3

NOTE: use MenuMaker 0.4. It fixes a bug found in version 0.3, and adds support for the 2019+ VecMulti.   MenuMaker has been updated for 64-bit macOS. This will create the menu for @Richard H.'s VecMulti SD cartridge for the Vectrex.       Program with source: MenuMaker20211211.zip   Port was done using Lazarus, which is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.   Use MenuMaker 0.2 if you're still on a 32-bit version of macOS.

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SpiceWare in Vectrex

MenuMaker 0.2 source found

This is a followup to the MenuMaker 0.2 blog entry from 2014. @eyelyft approached me in 2019 about recompiling MenuMaker as it was a 32-bit program and MacOS is now 64-bit only. I'd done a clean install of my Mac since then, so downloaded the source from blog post but discovered it was missing files.  I wasn't able to find the missing files so thought I'd lost part of the source during the clean install.   Last week during a @ZeroPage Homebrew stream on Twitch discussion turned

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SpiceWare in Vectrex

Later Facebook

Don't know why, but Facebook had taken to censoring my comments.   Comment about Liftoff and some awesome bookmarks to go with it       In reply to a "wind turbines aren't green" showing buried blades I posted a comment on how fiberglass recycling has only recently been possible:     Comment about covid delaying the ATSC 3.0 (next gen TV broadcasts, up to 4K) rollout in Houston. I've also noticed mentioning COVID in any way tends to get a

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DPC+ Jitter

DPC+ Jitter issues yet again, this time with text_adventure. text_adventure.bas.bin   Back in 2015 I added support to Stella for jitter emulation. It was initiated by the topic Game test on Harmony Cart where bB game Doom Patrol exhibited jitter on real hardware.  The jitter was caused by 2 different things:   Overscan running longer/shorter than normal, covered in blog entry Overscan Jitter DPC+ jitter if the DFxFRACINC registers are not updated every frame, c

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jEdit Index

NOTE: I think I tracked down all the jEdit blog entries, but am going to hold off updating the navigation links at the bottom-right of each entry for a while in case I missed some.  So if you spot any that are not in this index let me know! jEdit is a programmer's editor that I like to use for 2600 development. It's written in Java, so is cross-platform. Key feature I like is the syntax highlighting, which makes it easy to spot typos - notice the first GRP0 in SplashKernel was typed with th

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Minor revision to jEdit Mode files

While working on the next part of the CDFJ tutorial I noticed an odd coloration issue in jEdit - the 0 and 1 at the end of the labels were sometimes having the binary rules applied to them:     Took a look at the rule in the Mode file: <!-- %01 format for binary --> <SPAN_REGEXP TYPE="OPERATOR" HASH_CHAR="%" AT_WORD_START="TRUE" DELEGATE="COLORIZE_BINARY"> <BEGIN>%</BEGIN

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Who won Wacky Races?

Ran across this:         Which is a followup to some rather old discussions we've had here in the blogs:        

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Going 4K, Take 2

Take 1 was for my home office, when I bought a couple 4K monitors for my Mac & work PC.   This time around it's for the family room.  I currently have a 2001 Mitsubishi 65" HDTV.  It's worked well over the years, but started to have a problem with convergence when first turned on.  It used to be a rare occurrence and the picture would snap back into shape fairly quickly, but it's now happening multiple times per week and taking longer to snap back.     The curr

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Categories

Testing a way to reimplement categories.  Tagged Collect and Warlords the entries as appropriate, then used the following query which limits results to my blog - just fill in the appropriate value for tags=________.   https://atariage.com/forums/search/?tags=________&type=blog_entry&nodes=148   Collect Warlords   Need to figure out how to pin this blog entry to top.   Need to figure out how to sort the results as the order returned appe

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Draconian final ROM

While getting ROMs together for Nathan for his RetroN 77 contribution to the Stella-thon 12 Hour Gaming Marathon Fundraiser! event I realized I've yet to publish the final ROM for Draconian.   ROM: draconian_20171020_RC8.bin   NOTE: newer versions of the Harmony Cartridge use a different chip that does not work with the above ROM. batari posted this patched version of the final ROM in this topic where he explains why the patch was needed: Draconian_Harmony_fix.bin

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SpiceWare in Draconian

Trip to San Antonio

Headed to San Antonio for the weekend with my folks. We met up with my sister and her family, and stayed at the Éilan Hotel & Spa. It's part of the BlueGreen timeshare that my folks belong to. View from the balcony of my folks' room:     I preferred the view from my room, though it did not have a balcony so I took this through the window.     Hotel was nice, but they had no options for charging the car.  If they did the trip would have had a brief

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Minor enhancements

Center Console The shiny black finish on the center console in the Model 3 is a major dust and fingerprint magnet. Back in March I ordered the Brushed Steel Center Console Wrap from Tesla Bros. I finally got around to installing it in Talith today, turned out great! Edit: Added a nighttime photo as the daytime sun really lightened up the appearance of the wrap. If Tesla Bros sounds familiar, it's because I ordered their door stickers back in January. They help out quite a

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Another grid outage

Back on the 6th I posted about a grid outage and that I was surprised because the solar stopped producing.   I did some research and ran across this topic which said the solar gets turned off when the grid initially goes down, but will come back about 5 minutes later.   Today we had an outage that lasted long enough to confirm that was correct:   Major thunderstorm happening at the moment, so I'm surprised it was even able to produce that much.   Today also marks 1 year ownership of

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Net Metering Active!

Received my electric bill for April 15 thru May 15: At 9am this morning my meter showed 293 kWh total of excess solar production had been sent since turning on my panels. The bill shows I was credited for 254 kWh thru the 15th, so it appears they've credited me for most, if not all, of the excess solar.     Last year the bills for the same timeframe were $121 for April and $130 for May, so $73 is quite good considering we've had lots of stormy weather and my panels were turned on

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Car charging via Solar + Powerwall

After the comments on the blog entry Increased Backup Reserve I was curious how well this would work: As a reminder the circuits for the AC and the 14-50 outlet for my Tesla are in a new sub/side panel, which gets disabled if the grid goes down. My uncle had been visiting Texas. First week was here in Houston, then he picked up a rental at Exotic Car Collection by Enterprise and drove to Bandera for a week. He dropped the car off on Sunday so we picked him up, had a late Mothers

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LED replacement for Halogen

One thing about having the Tesla App for my Solar and Powerwall is I'm more aware of my power usage, which reminded me that my floor lamps use 300 watt halogen bulbs. Over the past few years I've on occasion looked for a suitable replacement for the lamp, but never had any luck. This time around I found an LED Replacement bulb that looked interesting, it's even dimmable. Only 200 watt equivalent though, so I ordered 1 to try it out: Halogen: LED: Looks good, and t

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First week

For some reason Impact is now back to being Performance (see addendum in a previous blog entry). With Performance the Self Powered shows 57%, though the date range for the Week is wrong: Energy Usage screen has the correct date range. Solar produced of 83% of my power usage (230/277) as Friday and Tuesday had low production due to storms. Home usage on those days does drop a bit as the AC does not have to run as frequently. Usually From Powerwall should be slightly under To

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Increased Backup Reserve

Yesterday was very stormy, very little sun made it thru in the morning so after charging my car after lunch the battery was down to 15% (usually it'd be in the 90s). There was so much cloud coverage after lunch that no solar power was produced for the rest of the day, so the battery did not gain any additional charge. From the afternoon on we lost power 3 times. Each time everything kept running with the exception of the AC unit. Just 1 Powerwall is not enough to run it, nor the 50 amp

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Hidden info shows better performance

Something unexpected happened, so one more daily update! Based on this: it appears solar covered 75% of my electricity usage yesterday (54% was used direct, 21% was sent to the Powerwall for use when the sun went down). However, this morning I discovered that the graphs: can be slid up to reveal more info. Based on this, I actually produced 2.1 kWh more power than I used (42.9 solar - 40.8 usage). Of the overproduction I lost 1.3 kWh to Powerwall (14.4 - 13.1) due to charg

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First weekend, and a grid outage

On Saturday I was 61% self powered: Saturday Usage: Saturday Solar: Saturday Powerwall: Saturday Grid: Saturday Overall Summary: On Sunday I was 70% self powered: Sunday Usage: Sunday Solar: Sunday Powerwall: Sunday Grid: Sunday Overall Summary: Sunday Grid Outage: Not the results I was expecting - solar stopped producing. I sent a screenshot of that to Tesla to see if something was mi

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First 2 days

On Thursday I was 62% self powered: Electricity usage for Thursday: Spikes = Air Conditioner Powering up things for the day - home and work computers, lights, coffee maker, etc. AC spikes disappear for a bit in the morning as my AC is set for 70°F during the night and 74°F during the day. Charging the car. Not usually done this time of day. The neighborhood kids have learned I work from home and that it's OK to come by if they need help - usually it's something with their bik

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