stepho

It appears to work very well - I'm mighty impressed. I can move the rudder and elevators around with the keyboard but not the throttle. I'm using Altirra 4.01 on Windows 10 with default settings. Also tried Altirra 3.90 with same results.

That's typical of a 2K or 4K chip being sold as an 8K chip.

Hmm, quite different to what we did in Australia. Even though we both had PAL. Learning something new every day ...

Sorry, should have said VHF 3-6 .

A few times I have copied a good, precious disk to a blank disk - but got the direction wrong A write protected drive helps avoid stupid but easy to do errors like that. Putting sticker tabs over the write protect holes also works but that involves finding a sheet of sticky tabs, unpeeling, putting it on the disk, cleaning the sticky stuff off my fingers and later peeling it off again. Self-believing that nothing will go wrong, I just skip all that and blissfully corrupt my precious disk. Having a simple write protect switch is simpler, quicker and safer.

I certainly did this to my own kids. Never could get them interested in maths/spelling drill programs. But I did buy them iPods and loaded them up with plenty of puzzle games to get them to think creatively. Also gave them hand-me-down PC's and loaded them up with flight simulators, car games, etc. My son (10 at the time) figured out how to use Photoshop to edit the car graphics and put his own colour schemes and logos on the game cars. He's now a professional programmer.

I see the same thing on other types of auctions. I see an item that I would value at, say, $100 . But the item is listed at $2000 . Nobody in their right mind would pay that. But the auction remains up for a couple of years. Eventually somebody sends an offer of $500 - which is accepted. Seller got way more than it is worth. Buyer thinks he got it for a fraction of its value. Or it might just be the seller parking it for a while without paying list/delist fees to eBay - or possibly just doesn't want to recreate the listing details again.

Your cable is designed to plug straight into your TV's aerial socket - tune the TV to somewhere around channels 3 to 6. As said above, it looks like it was damaged at some time and the end was replaced. For the moment, just ignore the switch box and/or any adapters. One step at a time.

The OCD in me is twitching real bad. That should be 130XE - with a number 0, not a letter o. Other than that - I'm enjoying the conversation

Perhaps another analogy would be image scanners. A normal drive scans the image (say, a book page), converts it to ASCII test and presents you with the text (possibly with mistakes). The flux type just gives you a massive JPG and leaves the decoding to you.

Is there a 64-bit version ?

Australia does a double whammy on us. We pay for: the goods, postage charges, 10% GST (like VAT) on the goods price an import duty (above and beyond the GST) on the combined goods and postage costs. So if postage goes up high (like it does when coming from the US) then the import duties go up too. I was looking at a US$20 (AU$28) item that became AU$100 by the time when totalled up - I passed on it.

If you intend to sell them later then opening them will slash their resale value - you'd be mad to open them. But if you don't intend to sell ("cold dead hands") then do whatever pleases you. Your money, your property, your choice.

Look to what the cars do. The young ones just play with recent stuff. The old guys play with stuff from their teen years and will eventually die off. But some of the younger guys see an opportunity for being unique and then really get to appreciate things from more than a single angle. They see the different aesthetics. They appreciate the genius insight that makes them work in spite of older technology. In our hobby, the numbers will drop off as we oldies die. For many of us, it's a nostalgia trip that younger ones find hard to get into. But some of the younger ones will see the genius required to make our old technology work. To see the trade offs and optimisations needed to make it work. Things that are hard to see with new tech with gobs of resources. Just like buggy whips, the numbers will drop - but they won't drop to zero.

I'm with TPR on this one. It's his property, it's not ultra-ultra-ultra rare and it's being used for its original purpose of enjoyment. I collect Japanese model cars from the 70s and 80s (tinplate, diecast, plastic, whatever). Most are left outside of their boxes because I enjoy looking at them more than I enjoy looking at their boxes. I also let kids play with the more robust ones. I displayed some at a car show. Kids would naturally reach out to play with them and the fathers would scold them to "not touch". But I just told them to go ahead and play with them. The more fragile ones were, of course, placed further away from tiny hands. I am not a curator for a museum 200 years in the future. They are for my enjoyment and I share that enjoyment with those around me. None of them are sacrosanct. I assume TPR has similar thoughts.

The "To" field says "Zipcode or Country". I poked around for a little and found https://support.pirateship.com/en/collections/249259-international-shipping Seems like it can ship from the US to other countries. I'm not in the US, so I didn't bother poking around further.

If you are going to have flickering then perhaps it could be something that flickers in real life. Possibly downed electrical lines. Or an "Eat at Joes" sign.

Did you make the include files idempotent ? In C, we do this by wrapping them with something like: #if not defined (__THIS_HEADER_FILENAME_H__) #define __THIS_HEADER_FILENAME_H__ ... the rest of the include file #endif Obviously you would have to use the DASM equivalents. Also make sure that the objects are defined only once in proper module files. The include files should only have extern references to them.

To my mind, it was the 40 column limit that would be the killer. 40 columns is fine if you're just playing games and dabbling in code. But you really need 80 columns to supply the business market. Apple had the right idea. The Apple II had 40 columns but the Apple IIe had 80 columns (although requiring an optional RAM card). And the 8-bit machines were much cheaper than any of the 16-bit machines in the early/mid 1980s. The Apple II line was Apple's cash cow even when the Lisa and Mac came out. Even the (deservedly) unloved PC Jr did something like this by booting in colour 40 column mode so that budget users could use cheap TV based monitors. It could later be changed to 80 column mode if you had a better quality monitor. Atari could have done the same thing by upgrading the GTIA and ANTIC chips with relatively simple mods to add 80 column modes while still supporting the old modes (ie, not requiring separate monitors for graphics vs 80 column text). As for the modem, I had some related experience with this in the 1990's. I was programming ETPOS credit card terminals in Hong Kong. Our standard model had a 1200 V.22 baud modem. Every (and I mean every) bank asked if we could use a 9600 V.32 modem. To which I replied "yes, it will save about 2 seconds during a 1 minute transaction (mostly waiting for the merchant to type in the amount and for the customer to swipe the card and type in their PIN) and will cost an extra $xxx". Luckily, the code upgrade to drive the new modem in 9600 QAM mode wasn't too hard, the new chip supported all old modes and the new chip was pin compatible with the old chip. I can't remember the actual price of the chip upgrade but it was substantial. Every (and I mean every) bank withdrew their 9600 request. I'm guessing that circa 1983 the price of a 1200 baud modem was still a bit pricey for the budget conscious home market. I do remember gulping a little at the price when I bought my first 1200 V.22 baud modem circa 1985. But I do agree that they would have been better off future proofing it by putting the modem on a replaceable card.

Storing the exponent with an offset is common - even in the IEEE floating point representation used in the current CPU's. For C2 46 03 12 00 00 the exponent is C2 . The top bit is the sign (ie $80 means negative). So we remove the top bit, leaving $42. Then we remove the offset of $40, to leave $02. The mantissa is 46 03 12, which is BCD for 46.0312 (implied decimal point is just after the first byte of the mantissa). Treating the exponent and mantissas as BCD, this gives us 46.0312 * 100^2 = 46.0312 * 10000 = 460312 . Remembering the sign, we now have -460312 . 40 12 34 56 00 00 therefore reads as 12.34560000 * 100^0 = 12.34560000 41 12 34 56 00 00 therefore reads as 12.34560000 * 100^1 = 1234.560000 42 12 34 56 00 00 therefore reads as 12.34560000 * 100^2 = 123456.0000 43 12 34 56 00 00 therefore reads as 12.34560000 * 100^3 = 12345600.00 44 12 34 56 00 00 therefore reads as 12.34560000 * 100^4 = 1234560000 3F 12 34 56 00 00 therefore reads as 12.34560000 * 100^-1 = 0.1234560000 3E 12 34 56 00 00 therefore reads as 12.34560000 * 100^-2 = 0.0012345600 and so on

Most of my bikes squeaked when moving. Or you can have a puffing sound from an exhausted rider.

Both versions are quite nice. The one found by zzip is about 32 studs wide and has very nicely detailed switches and joysticks. The one found by zph is about 12 studs wide and is very well designed given the size constraint.

Beautiful !

Agreed that there was no real road map back in the day. Every version of Basic was quite different to every other version (even MS Basic had differences for each platform, mainly around file handling, graphics, audio). It was more like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. Perhaps MS might have done better if they allowed your programs to be written to a new disk with a cut-down interpreter with no editor and no save command. That way you could give/sell your Basic program to others and they could run it but still need to pay MS if they wanted to develop programs of their own. Kind of how today we would do that by providing runtime libraries. But, as you said, there was no real road map.

Don't forget Gates' open letter to discourage people from copying his Basic without paying. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists.jpg Your program written in Basic is free to whoever you want to give it to. But the Basic interpreter itself is under copyright. Atari Basic is also technically under copyright - but since the only people who can run it have already paid for it when they bought the machine, therefore this isn't a practical problem. Remember that MS Basic is a third party product.