AtariAge Forums: AtariAge Forums -> mos6507's Blog

I was a little hesitant to try building my own PC. Every time I do it, I run into some snag somewhere, but this was the only way for me to really be choosy about components. The ASUS H57 motherboard has a lot more slots in it than the Gateway and Dell systems I considered. Anyway, sure enough, I've hit a snag. Because graphics cards keep sucking more juice, the ATX power supply standards have changed. All this in the last few years apparently. So I go down to the electronics store and buy the only power supply they stock. But even that seems to be short by two 12V rails. The board doesn't seem to want to power up. So what I really need is a EPS12V supply. Nevertheless, I'm half expecting that when the new supply comes in from Newegg that the board will still fail to power up, causing me to go to the geek squad or something and have them work with it. You know, no matter how long I work with PCs, I just do not enjoy working under the hood like this. I should...

Last year I got sucked up in the hype over the E-Fix dongle to effortlessly build hackintoshes. This was after the boot drive on my main XP machine bit the dust and I didn't want to restore it because it's an old AGP/PCI motherboard that will never be HD-ready. When I got my business laptop I decided to hold off on building out a system since, as you know, motherboard and CPU technology changes at the drop of a hat, and the product was still very new. Periodically I would "check in" on the progress of E-Fix and it seemed like it was getting less stable over time and the HCL was not growing fast enough. So fast-forward to this fall. The Core i7 boards seemed really overengineered, but then they came out with the simpler P55 motherboards. That seems like a good place to jump back in. But I'll have to decide how to handle hackintoshing since I have a version 1.0 E-Fix which requires a lengthy and expensive upgrade swap. And then I read this expose.So it...

I'm about to ship out the AtariVoxes I built for the 25th anniversary 7800 project.The problems we were having with the PIC turned out to be firmware-related. So after we got the firmware resolved, I went back and fixed all of the boards that seemed not to work by soldering on the 10-pin headers and reprogramming the PICs with the good firmware. Since then I haven't looked back. I now have, oh, about 75 AtariVox+ boards built, and another 60 in progress. I have enough parts on hand to probably build probably about 100 more at least, except for the Speakjet. Speakjet supplies have dried out through normal channels and I'm going directly to the source now.Pricing has been established and Albert should be starting a label contest soon but I don't want to steal his thunder. So stay tuned.

We're making some progress now.

This is the first batch of 25 AtariVox boards earmarked for the 25th anniversary 7800 project.All the boards are assembled. They still need to be individually tested, and I am 4 Speakjets shy. Also, I'm troubleshooting a custom startup speech line.These are using the new PCB that Richard designed that I'm calling "AtariVox+" The + part is the ability to switch to VecVox or VecVoice mode. However, since these are meant to be installed internally in 7800s, I am hardwiring it for AtariVox.Once these are done, the real AtariVox boards will get built. The AtariVox+ boards will all be black. The green ones you see here were the initial run of 20 boards that Richard made before handing it over to me.More details to follow.

I think one of the reasons I'm still into classic videogames is I've always stayed on the sidelines of the computer hardware treadmill. I had a Playstation 1 when it first came out, and then proceeded to get very few games for it. I had a PS2 as well and didn't buy many games for it. And don't get me started on PC games. My rig has never been where it should have been to facilitate cutting edge gaming, and so I keep procrastinating on getting into games. The most recent PC upgrade was a Pentium IV 2.4 GHZ system I put together a few years ago. I made the fatal mistake of buying into an PCI+AGP motherboard at the time when everything was shifting to the new PCI Express standard. And I had a graphics card without HDMI, hence no Blu-ray.I keep waiting for the upgrade cycle to slow down long enough for me to jump on board, but no matter what is current today, something better seems like it's just on the horizon. This paralyzes me from buying anything due to...

I think I'm a little late to the party and my instincts tell me this startup may not be around too much longer but man, this is the most fun I've had since Software Automatic Mouth.

LINK

I swear I've laughed more in the last couple days than I have in the last 20 years combined.

A news article on it.

If this company goes out of business I am going to be so pissed. After all these years I've finally found a way to make movies in a way that gives me near instant gratification. If this company goes under, something else better take its niche.

I tried scouring youtube and couldn't find any clips of people playing the Death Race that was there. This is the best I could find online:

Photostream

If anyone finds a youtube clip with it, let me know.

I think Steve Jobs is not long for this earth. He seems to want to ignore or be in denial of his medical problems, and I wonder whether this hasn't just magnified his medical problems rather than taking time off earlier for treatment. The case of Jim Henson's hesitation to seek treatment for pneumonia comes to mind. I really think Jobs' attitude towards his own health will be his undoing, and the company's privacy shield around him only further enables this dysfunction.

So iPhone 3.0 OS is here, and I can finally cut, copy, and paste. Great. One of the things that annoyed me was replying to email messages. There was no way to get rid of the quoted text. So now you can select all and clear out the old message including the "sent from iphone" footer. It's about damn time. However, they added the tethering feature only to have AT&T keep it disabled. So I screw around with the hacks that supposedly enable this and was not able to get it going despite following all the steps. I could jailbreak my phone but I'm just, I dunno, I'm kind of burnt out on the hacking. The whole thing about Apple stuff is it's supposed to just work. Now what I'm really waiting on is true turn by turn navigation. The free Mapquest app looks pretty good because it at least gives you the turns, but I dont think it speaks them to you at the appropriate time the way a GPS does. I've always resisted getting a dedicated GPS because...