x=usr(1536)

Okay, I'm confused. Earlier in the thread, you said: So, in light of where you ask as to whether or not you should mod it or sell it just with the RF adapter... What question should we have answered instead?

True, and I've seen the same thing. My gut feeling is that modified systems tend to go for more if the buyer is looking for something plug & play and doesn't want to undertake the work themselves. And that's fair; I get that not everyone wants to break out the soldering iron. With that said, it's really going to depend on the buyer. To me, going through the motions of AV modding a console to make an extra however much on the sale isn't really worth it because I'd rather spend my time doing something else, but if someone else feels differently, that's fine by me.

Hey, you asked for opinions and he wasn't attacking you. It's a valid point where any modifications are concerned: pictures can't completely show how well the mod works in actuality, or if components are in proper working order. Realistically, though, if it were me, the value-add would be zero. Sure, the convenience factor is there, but the machine is no longer original, and that's more important to me than using it on a 60" plasma LCD. If I want to do that, I'll feed it out through a VCR and get the same end result without having to alter it. Someone else may feel differently. There's a good chance that you're going to get answers from all ends of the spectrum on this depending on whether someone wants something in original or modified condition.

While I agree with everything you've said re: the sheer usability bliss that an external print buffer provided, there was one downside to them: The daisy-wheel printer. You touched on this briefly, but something that younger readers may not understand was that dot-matrix printers were generally faster and quieter (though not by very much) than daisy-wheels. Ultimately, though, the choice was between the sustained screech of a dot-matrix or the staccato saw-wave of a daisy wheel. Consider this scenario: you have two relatives in your immediate family who print 600-plus-page manuscripts. They are required to do this on a daisy-wheel, because the publisher of said manuscripts will not accept output from a dot-matrix printer - even one that was capable of near letter-quality output. Do you know how long it takes to print 650 pages on a Qume daisy-wheel printer? I do. It's a very, very long time. Now, imagine for a moment that without the print buffer, the computer is going to be tied up for hours and hours printing. That's fine; it's dedicated to that task, and isn't going to do much of anything else because it's an Apple ][+ or //e running WordStar under CP/M, so there's no multitasking. Even when that same computer became a 286-class-or-lower PC running WordStar under DOS, it still wasn't multitasking. You weren't going to use it for anything else, so you found something else to do while it was busy. Then came that taunting little bastard, the print buffer. Someone bought and installed one, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now the computer was free for use again a few minutes after sending the print job to it. But you were sitting with your ear six feet away from the damn daisy-wheel as it machine-gunned its way through the document at what seemed like several thousand clacking and clattering decibels, which made you not want to use the computer. But you still really wanted to use the computer. Badly. And you might, for a short while, until the noise became unbearable. You'd go away, thinking you'd just come back when it was done, but you wouldn't. You'd think that this time - this time - it wouldn't be so bad, and you'd subsequently figure out in no short order that nope, it still sucked. Acoustic hoods? Load of crap. Still needed to have somewhere for the fanfold paper to be spit out from, which meant a slit in the case, which let out a different kind of muffled, annoying noise. Quieter, but still annoying. And earplugs didn't stop the vibrations, or slamming of the print head, that reverbrated through the floor and desk. Oh, and for a delicious bit of irony: the publisher in question allowed writers to upload their manuscripts via modem to a BBS they had set up for that purpose. But those uploads could only be used for proofing, not publishing. All publishing required printing out the manuscript and FedExing it to them, exactly the same as if it had been banged out on a Smith-Corona. No, they would not print it out on the author's behalf and deliver it, internally, to the appropriate department for typesetting and printing; that was up to the writer. There are large parts of my early life that are punctuated by the sound of a printer on the other side of the house running off a manuscript well before I went to bed, and continuing on in the morning until well after I had woken up. Nostalgic and appreciative as I am of old hardware in general, the laser printer was one of the 20th Century's greatest inventions.

That or possibly the relocation of Hong Kong from South-Eastern China to Japan

Related to comments others have been making: please go back and re-read my response in PMs to you from a few weeks back. What I said then may be useful to you now.

In my case, it was SNA over leased lines. This will tell you a lot about not only the types of systems at each end, but also the sector that would have systems like that in use. Frankly, it's better that they were keeping those well away from the Internet. It's interesting how, with the rush to tear out POTS service, everyone is suddenly discovering just how useful (read: reliable) it actually is as a backup circuit.

You'd be surprised at how many leased lines are still in use. If you need site-to-site connectivity that doesn't touch the Internet or require a lot of bandwidth but does need a reliable circuit between the locations, they're a decent bet.

Re: Gyruss: it does use Bach's Toccata and Fugue, but the music in the game is based on the 1979 version by Sky: Classical pieces are generally pretty common, though, since their usage is typically unencumbered by licensing and royalty considerations. That said, early arcade games made a lot of use of more modern music without really giving a toss about the ramifications of doing so. Vanguard also used the theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture for its opening music, and if we're talking other SNK games, Fantasy used Lipps, Inc,'s Funkytown. Nichibutsu's Radical Radial used Kiss' I Was Made For Loving You, and there are other examples I'm just not recalling right at the moment.

The Ataribox sharts a taco on Valentine's Day. I repeat: The Ataribox sharts a taco on Valentine's Day.

Nice! I used to own one of these - definitely one of my favorite games, if a complete pain to keep working. 1.7 million is impressive; don't think I ever managed more than about 500,000. Getting over the initial learning curve takes some work, but once you do everything just sort of falls into place.

I would wear this suit. However, I would wear it for exactly one specific purpose: swaying opinion. Think of it this way: turn up at, say, a town council meeting where some resolution is going to be passed that you're opposed to. Wear the suit and speak in favor of the resolution in an entirely too-enthusiastic manner, perhaps with some odd nervous tics thrown in for good measure. Smile unsettlingly a lot and put on a thousand-yard-stare at times during your monologues. Granted, you might not get the result you want, but you'll sure as hell be remembered.

It's built-in, and you start it with the -debug switch (the name of your MAME executable and path to your ROMs will likely vary from the example below): mamearcade64 -debug -rompath /path/to/your/roms/ pacman That'll start Pac-Man with the debugger window open. In the debugger, type 'help' for a list of commands. For the rest, you'll need to hit up Google - going into how it works is a deep rabbit hole, and pretty much outside the scope of what we can get into here. One hint: search for MESS as well as MAME debugger usage.

That one's also very outdated. The current MAME driver is here. Someone familiar with Z80 dis/assembly would need to tear apart the original game, figure out where the screen drawing routines are (the MAME debugger may help with this), and go from there. That's not going to be me, however.

One other possibility would be to do TV scan system conversion through a multiscan VCR. These were more common in Europe than in the US, but have two advantages: one, they convert the TV system from <insert source here> to <insert target here>; two, they can generally take RF as an input and output some form of composite, which opens up the possibility of using a wider variety of displays. Now for the caveats to that. If you're tracking one of these down, make sure that it can take input from sources other than tape and convert them. A lot of these devices would only convert tape playback; anything sent through the inputs had to be the same as the output format. Also, pretty much every TV scan system in use (which at the time meant PAL, NTSC, and SECAM) had a variety of subsystems with varying degrees of incompatibility. Make sure that the VCR can cope with a multitude of varieties of scan types; PAL had subdivisions of at least B, G, and I, NTSC had North American, Japanese, and other standards, and SECAM also had ME-SECAM. I'm probably forgetting some of the others; it's been a long time since I had to deal with this. It's not really as complicated as it sounds, but you do need to know what it is that you're looking for. This also applies to modern displays - some will cope with only one variety of PAL, for example.

I actually happen to agree with you on that. But, for some weird reason that I can't quite pin down, the idea is slightly appealing to me. That's something I don't get either. To me they're neat as a storage medium, but as far as sound quality goes, there's a reason why CDs were invented.

A good number of modern TVs can support a 50hz framerate and display a 625-line PAL frame; check their specs to confirm. However, the catch is that you'll need to send a composite signal to the TV. As for powering the system, just swap the original wall wart for a 110V unit that outputs the correct voltage and amperage. The 220V/240V unit you'll receive with whatever you end up with should have the power requirements printed on it, so tracking down a suitable replacement shouldn't be an issue.

Vectrex. I've had the same one since I was nine years old, and there's nothing else out there like it if you're a fan of vector games.

If the level designs are derived from the bitmaps for the numbers involved, it might just be a case of flipping a byte from 0x09 to 0xFF and you've potentially got 254 levels ('0' isn't used, IIRC). I'd be willing to bet that anything above 0x0F would glitch the display (or crash the game), though, since it only seems to be set up to base the screen designs on single digits. Could be wrong, though. Somehow, though, I suspect that they're stored as data rather than generated based on the character set.

Along these lines: I'd like to see a modular cartridge adapter that would allow using different systems' cartridges (via USB) with various emulators. The way I see this working is to use a swappable end on the adapter that could be changed out depending on the cartridge in use. That would then feed to an intermediary device which would present the cartridge's contents as a file over USB using the standard USB mass storage device class(es). There are some cases for which this approach likely wouldn't work, but for the most part it should be workable. Sure, it's fairly pointless in that you could just use a dump of the cartridge to begin with, but there is some novelty value to it. Getting adequate power feed to both the cartridge and intermediary device could be a pain, though.

It's worth sifting through, but I don't recall Page 6 publishing PD software that spanned more than two disks - and even two-disk sets were comparatively rare. Do you remember anything about the content of the demo? Nothing that huge is ringing bells with me, but it's possible that parts of it may have been extracted into standalone demos that some of us may remember.

That's quite an impressive find - the number of PAL Colecovisions sold was quite small. The fact that they decided to release the Adam into a market as saturated as the UK computer market was at the time is amazing; I'd no idea these even existed before you posted this one.

Sexy being in the eye of the beholder, there's the PPC-based BeBox... The LEDs (named 'Das Blinkenlights') on the front of the case would bounce up and down based on the load on each of the two CPUs. It was really quite mesmerizing to watch in the dark.

Since you don't seem to care for the replies that your assertion has been garnering, why not cut out the middlemen and find out for yourself? Release the OS ROMs publically, attach your name and valid contact information to them, and see what happens. You'll undoubtedly have every opportunity to present your opinion to the judiciary, who may or may not be in agreement. Either way, you'll find out whether you're right or not. Problem solved!

Yeah, that wasn't exactly clear from either of your previous posts. It's nice to have hobbies! Ah, yeah, right above ol' PowerDubs the penny-stock pimp, too.