[Myarc cards for sale/repair tips]

The funny thing is that I cannot really be certain that it wasn't me who put the heat sinks under the regulators. After such a long time, you really don't recall every screw turn. 🙂

[Myarc cards for sale/repair tips]

So was my Geneve already improved when I bought it in 1990? (concerning the heat sinks, not the battery or SRAM expansion, that was me)

[SAMS usage in Assembly]

But it takes another memory access plus another ALU cycle, compared to indirect addressing, i.e. 2 machine cycles = 4 clock cycles more.

[Looking for help on TMS5220 Circuit & Software Design and Usage]

Just to remind, we discussed experiences with python_wizard two years ago:

 

[Off-Topic / Dumping Thread]

Is that carrier-grade NAT part of DSLite, or is that just another thing that one of the bosses deemed important? I know about CGN from the DSLite concept.

[Atariage has been aquired by Atari.. fyi]

I'd suggest to defer any kind of panic until the proper time has come.

[Mine Run ... a TI basic game]

2 hours ago, Retrospect said:

... especially on "cassette" for the sheer nostalgia.  

That just reminds me of those moments when you waited for CS1 to complete loading your 10K program, and then, after minutes, the noise from the speaker died, no DATA OK, and an error message popped up.

[Off-Topic / Dumping Thread]

See, all good suggestions for free, and I don't want to know what they paid the PR agency for that service.

[Off-Topic / Dumping Thread]

This reminds me of a funny thing at our university in Nuremberg.

 

Our university (of applied sciences, as fully named) carries the name of Georg Simon Ohm, who everyone knows from resistors, the unit symbol being Ω. Georg Simon Ohm was the headmaster of the predecessor institute that was founded 1823. As you see, we had our 200 years anniversary this year.

 

So the headmasters of the university called for a professional PR agency to find a suitable focus for the years to come, and how to present it in public. Since there are many competing institutions in the area, a clear message was sought.

 

So the agency delivered some concepts. Most things were acceptable; one of the more annoying things was a change of the university logo (which means changing all slides, letter templates, business cards etc.) and the change of the color scheme.

 

However, one thing was a plain failure, and it was the new motto. The agency, obviously unaware of physical details, created this lyrical masterpiece: "Ohm - unit of potential".

 

It is quite clear that the PR agency planned this as an ambiguous statement - potential for new scientific achievements, cooperations, whatever. What made all people in the more technical institutes facepalm was the literal, and blatantly wrong statement. Ohm is a unit of resistance, not of potential. This is Volt. The potential difference is better known as electric tension or simply voltage. Too bad you cannot formulate a catchy phrase with "resistance" in it. 😄

[New MAME release]

OK, good news: The recent changes made it into the 0.258 release. As described above, this means that the updated DSR of the TIPI is used by default if you put the new ti99_tipi.zip in the rompath.

 

Another fix goes to the HX5102 (Hexbus floppy drive): When you turn on logging with "-oslog" or "-log", the drive accepts DSDD floppy disks. Without the logging, it does not. This is an example of a Heisenbug: It changes behavior the closer you observe it. I found out that the reason was a boolean member variable that was not initialized, so the activation of logging seems to shift memory contents in a way that makes the variable return a false, while without logging, it returns true. Ugly stuff.

 

As always, you can find pre-built packages on WHTech for Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi OS 32 bit and 64 bit. I'll add MacOS as soon as it becomes available.

 

https://ftp.whtech.com/emulators/MAME/ti99/

[Pascal on the 99/4A]

A Gotek drive emulates a floppy drive at the Shugart bus level, so it does not even know what a sector is or even a byte. It only delivers flux changes.

 

The only thing to consider is that only the HFE files can save special information that is outside of pure sector contents. Gotek can handle DSK files, but those only contain sector contents. As we're not talking about disk protection schemes but only about direct sector access, this should be OK. If needed, HFE files can be created with numerous tools from DSK, including my TIImageTool.

[P-Code card won't boot]

9 hours ago, Ksarul said:

Zwangs-Ehe ist etwas näher. . .

Not quite, "Zwangsehe" is more like a forced marriage, i.e. forced from outside (literally in this case), as you find e.g. in developing countries where children are married against their will. So if you call it so, this would have some unwanted (and likely inappropriate) ironic notion. 🙂

[P-Code card won't boot]

Funnily, although there's a saying like "German has a word for it", I just can't find a proper (well-known) term for a shotgun wedding in German. The closest would be "Muss-Ehe" (Must-marriage), as Google Translate suggests, but when you hear it, you would start to guess what it means and then eventually get to the intended meaning. ("why must? ... ah, I can guess")

[P-Code card won't boot]

It took some time until I understood the meaning of a "shotgun wedding". You have some weird idioms, indeed.

[Classic99 Wigouts?]

I just downloaded Gamebase and picked both Robotron RPKs from it (2048 and 2j). The "2 Joystick" version does react to Enter, but not really fast; I have to hold it down for a while (about a second). The 2048 version does not react at all to Enter (on MAME).

 

Edit: I just noticed that the other keys ("2" for 2-player game, "+" to change level) do not work on MAME either.

 

[Classic99 Wigouts?]

4 hours ago, JasonACT said:

On real hardware, pressing ENTER works.  In fact, pressing Enter on my USB keyboard with my Pi Pico running my LOAD interrupt patching routine works too.

Interesting - on MAME, ENTER does not work either, but Fire button. Are there different versions of Robotron? I don't believe we have the exact same flaw in our emulators.

[Classic99 Wigouts?]

I found soduko.rpk in my collection (as a demo only), and as far as I know, nobody really cared about fixing the 4K mode in MAME's emulation of the VDP yet. That is, it may falsely run on MAME when it is expected to crash.

[Shit House Blues!]

51 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

This, ladies and gentlemen, is compromise!

When you write a manual to your software and later discover how people really work with it.

[New MAME release]

OK, the new DSR for TIPI has been uploaded by me to WHTech. It is available as ti99_tipi.zip. The zip file contains - for archival purpose - both old and new dsr files: tipidsr.u2 and tipidsr_2023.u2.

 

I added the hash codes to the new MAME release so you will not get any more warnings about bad hashes once you upgrade MAME.

 

If you use the earlier and current MAME (<=0.257) with the new zip file, it will use the 2021 DSR (without the CS1 enhancement). To force it to use the new DSR, you have to swap the file contents in the ZIP file (put the 2023 DSR into the tipidsr.u2 file). But then you will get warnings about the bad hashes.

 

Once you upgrade to the new MAME (assuming that my update was in time for the new release), the 2023 DSR will be used by default. You should then use the attached new ZIP file (or the one that is available on WHTech). You can then choose between both variants in the OSD ("BIOS selection") or in the command line by adding ",bios=2021" or ",bios=2023" to the tipi slot device:

 

-ioport:peb:slot6 tipi,bios=2021
-ioport:peb:slot6 tipi,bios=2023 (=-ioport:peb:slot6 tipi)

 

 

 

ti99_tipi.zip

[TIPI Usage and Support]

19 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

So, Python uses indentation as a grouping delimiter?  What is this, COBOL??

Yes, the interpreter complains about an invalid indentation if you happen to hit the space bar once more.

[New adventure game Kickstarter launched - The Forgotten Pyramid]

On 8/14/2023 at 8:01 PM, Reciprocating Bill said:

BTW, your cover art pyramid most closely resembles a Mayan structure (southern Mexico, Central America)

 

Tikal? Uxmal?

[TI99-4a strange keyboard issue]

This is the keyboard matrix. The columns are selected one by another, and a keypress shorts the connection to the respective interrupt line.

What you can directly check from this is whether there are more relations between column 1 and column 5 (pins 12 and 9). When you press Shift, and the computer has selected the column 5, Shift should not be active, but it seems to have an effect, so it appears as g. What about the pairs Space/H, =/N, Fctn/5, Ctrl/T, and Enter/Y?

[Pascal on the 99/4A]

I learned Modula-2 in my first semester 1989/90 in our introductory course at the university. Never used it again after that.

[What TI Games Were the Best at Challenging the Player]

For me, Marble Madness was the typical Amiga game back in those days, maybe because it was one of the first that I got for the new A1000.

[Favorite game?]

Funny game, though. At some times you tell yourself to let go off the fire button, but you notice that your free will goes astray on its way to your thumb.