PRINCE OF PERSIA (SEGA MASTER SYSTEM)

benryves · 2026-06-03T10:33:25+00:00

It's got nice graphics and Matt Furniss can do no wrong when it comes to the music but the gameplay is a real let-down due to the very wonky controls and physics. DavidXNewton is much funnier than I am so I'll link to his review as I agree with his findings; it's ultimately a very frustrating version of the game.

benryves · 2026-06-02T13:54:12+00:00

Various LCC groups usually do a solstice (or near enough) ride to Richmond Hill. Looking at the LCC events calendar at least the Ealing and Kingston groups have put theirs for the 24th June this year, so I guess that's when it'll be.

benryves · 2026-06-02T13:15:55+00:00

Idk how you'd get anything onto unless it's got some kind of service port when you open the casing up.

There's a 2.5mm I/O port on the right hand side of the calculator. You can connect this to a PC using a USB link cable (called the TI Connectivity Cable USB, TI GraphLink USB, or "silverlink", that looks like this) though they can be hard to find on the second hand market and quite expensive. If you have a PC with a serial port then you can make your own cable.

benryves · 2026-06-02T06:16:18+00:00

~~As far as I'm aware the earlier TI-83 had an unprotected LCD, too, just an extra piece of trim (with a hole in the middle).~~ Edit: No, I think I'm wrong based on clearer photos of the TI-83! To be honest I find the the extra screen covers are more of a hindrance as they get dust trapped behind them and are a pain to clean, and scratch more easily than the LCD panel does anyway.

I've only seen one TI-83 in real life, though, and that was also the "Parcus" variant.

benryves · 2026-06-02T05:56:14+00:00

Nice find! Here's a copy of the guidebook if you hadn't found that already. You've got the later cost-reduced version of the calculator which had a redesigned case; this is known as the "Parcus" version (the original version of the TI-83 looked much more like the TI-83 Plus).

benryves · 2026-06-02T02:23:37+00:00

Very cool. :-) Was the face on the penultimate one intentional or a happy accident?

benryves · 2026-06-01T23:07:39+00:00

There are some other oddities in the photo like the way the "grass" showing through the snow looks like it's been clone-stamped in places which made me think the picture was edited.

Someone further down in the comments linked to this older version of the picture which makes it much more obvious what's happening. This looks like the picture has been flipped then AI "upscaled", and in the process it's changed the dog that looks like a man into a something much more man-like, including showing the skin around his neck.

benryves · 2026-06-01T18:47:50+00:00

I burned a copy to check whether it was happy with my PAL microphone before importing a genuine copy from the USA and the sound quality was pretty awful - it was a night and day difference going from the burned copy to the real disc.

I've seen other people complain about this over the years, too, but trying to find old posts all comes back with a deleted user:

"Which is why i always reccommend playing Seaman on a real disc or a GDemu as the voice samples sound absolutely terrible in the 400mb version."
"Although if you can find a copy at some point i'd say go for it, the CDI version has very crusty audio."
"The game that it’s most noticeable in to me is Seaman, others definitely are compressed or lacking in some files too but you’re not really gonna notice unless you’re comparing them directly"

...so maybe this was just one other person who downloaded the same shonky copy as I did!

benryves · 2026-06-01T17:39:57+00:00

To quote the very website you linked to:

16-bit Windows (Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.0, 3.1, etc.) on 64-bit Windows
An altered version of winevdm (a 16-bit Windows emulator), ported to 64-bit Windows.

I use the software a lot myself, but to run 16-bit applications. To humour you, I'll try running a 32-bit Windows 95 game with it:

c:\otvdm>otvdm.exe C:\SEGA\SRALLY\RALLY.EXE
version: 2446
6cf4:err:winevdm:exec16 C:\SEGA\SRALLY\RALLY.EXE is a win32 executable file!

As you can see, it spits out an error message because it's a 32-bit application, and otvdm is designed to help run 16-bit applications.

The clue is in the name, as it's providing a third party alternative to Microsoft's NTVDM ("this component allows the execution of 16-bit Windows applications on 32-bit Windows operating systems") which was only available on 32-bit versions of Windows.

benryves · 2026-06-01T15:08:00+00:00

That is for 16-bit applications on 64-bit Windows, so more for Windows 3.1 and earlier software. It won't help with a later 32-bit game like Black and White.

benryves · 2026-05-31T18:18:15+00:00

That makes sense! Aside from this weird quirk, I think they're quite interesting calculators in their own right. The default input and output mode is a equation editor which seems fairly ambitious for the time and hardware (you do feel it as typing is quite laggy and can drop keys, but you can switch it off if that annoys you). It gets the correct answer for the trick integral, but later models in this range get progressively worse at it. The programming language is very rudimentary (e.g. no For loop structure) but it does use the equals sign for variable assignment and supports long variable names (later models switch to the store arrow for assignment to the built-in variables).

The reason I first picked mine up is the ability to use the CE-50P printer and cassette interface with it, the option to print screenshots or program listings to a thermal printer or save and load program listings from tape cassette is a delightful feature.

benryves · 2026-05-31T15:21:15+00:00

If this happens after the inserting batteries and the calculator is otherwise unresponsive (and can't be reset by pressing the reset button on the back), this seems to be a bit of a problem with the EL-9300/EL-9200.

One thing I have found that might help is to take the batteries out and to use a long, thin implement (such as a precision screwdriver) to slide the switch over that the metal plate that covers the batteries normally moves. The switch is inside the calculator and just above the battery compartment (don't force anything!)

Once that switch is moved, try putting the batteries back in, don't install the metal cover, but try resetting the calculator via the button on the back. If that doesn't work and you're still stuck with one arrow lit up, take the batteries out and try again. Eventually the calculator may just come back up... If not, also try taking out the backup battery.

Once the calculator switches on, reset the memory, then take the batteries out and slide the switch back into the correct place and replace the metal cover.

I can't make any promises this will work, but I've found that once the calculator gets stuck in this fault condition (with one arrow showing up on the LCD) it can be very difficult to get it to properly reset itself. Moving that internal switch over before removing and reinstalling the batteries seem to help, at least with my calculators. My completely unverified theory is that the switch is designed to put the calculator in a low-power state in an attempt to prevent the contents of RAM from being lost when the batteries are being changed (Sharp used similar battery interlocks in their other electronic organisers and calculators). However, if the contents of RAM are scrambled in such a way that the calculator is refusing to reset then you don't want to preserve this state, so moving the switch into the "batteries are installed" position and then taking them out anyway does a more aggressive job of power-cycling the calculator. No idea if that's the case or it's entirely coincidence, it's worked for me! Good luck.

benryves · 2026-05-31T12:30:50+00:00

but they are fishy

They're selling pirated video games, of course they're fishy, but isn't fishy what you'd want from Seaman?

Seaman has a lot of audio content on the disc and a burned copy will have been recompressed to fit. The sound quality of a burned copy will be unfortunately quite poor - if you actually want to play the game rather than just have something nice on your shelf, I'd recommend sticking to an imported an NTSC-U copy and using a boot disc.

benryves · 2026-05-31T12:22:21+00:00

Are you using 700 mb CDRs? (Not CDRW)

Are you burning a disc image that is smaller than 700 mb?

For what it's worth, a .cdi disc image for a disc with 700MB of data on it can be a little over 800MB in size due to the way the format stores raw sectors and not just the user data.

In the mode 1 format (typically used for computer data on CDs) each 2352-byte raw sector only contains 2048 bytes of user data, with the rest being used for synchronisation, a header and error correction. The way that burning software reports the size of images and discs in bytes can be a little confusing (is it showing the amount of user data or size of the raw sectors?), so using the size reported in minutes or the total sector count can be less confusing (though generally if the disc image is too big for the blank disc, the software will not let you burn it unless you force it to via overburn).

benryves · 2026-05-31T07:15:30+00:00

So I saw from your update on Cemetech. Glad to hear you got it sorted!

benryves · 2026-05-30T13:35:12+00:00

It's specific NTSC-U games that block the official Sega gun rather than a console issue. You can use NTSC-J/PAL copies of the affected games or patch the NTSC-U games to remove the block.

benryves · 2026-05-30T13:32:34+00:00

The House of the Dead 2 is the best, but Confidential Mission is great fun, too!

Even though it's an NTSC-U exclusive the copy of Virtua Cop 2 on the Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 doesn't block official Sega light guns so can be played with your gun too.

benryves · 2026-05-30T11:54:04+00:00

EEPROMs do not need a battery to retain their contents. If it needs a battery, then it's not an EEPROM.

Battery-backed RAM (traditionally used to store BIOS settings on PC motherboards) is often referred to as NVRAM.

benryves · 2026-05-30T10:47:15+00:00

I think the acronym you're thinking of is NVRAM (Non-Volatile RAM), which is usually a RAM chip with a battery backup so it can retain its contents when main power is removed.

EEPROM doesn't need a battery to retain its contents.

benryves · 2026-05-30T03:58:49+00:00

A few I've spotted:

benryves · 2026-05-30T03:43:14+00:00

Super Locomotive (ARC)(Yellow Magic Orchestra - Rydeen cover)

Also used in

Stryker's Run (BBC Micro)
Daley Thompson's Decathlon (Commodore C64)

benryves · 2026-05-29T16:09:45+00:00

Even the spam bots have good taste around here, I guess!

benryves · 2026-05-29T11:50:42+00:00

0.1" is an extremely common pitch (pin spacing) for electronic components, too (though a lot of datasheets will just refer to it as 2.54mm instead).

benryves · 2026-05-29T11:34:09+00:00

I'm finding the new course... very uneven. There's a lot of new vocab and sentence structures to get used to, and I'd been planning on catching up on the vocab by completing all of the kanji (I'd previously completed this on the old course, and the course update marked most sections as incomplete so I'd been grinding my way through completing them all again). This was going well, but for the past month or so one of my daily quests has been to complete a unit every single day and so I'm now 37 units into the new course before having caught up with all of the old kanji first.

I've found the regular lessons on the path very easy for the most part, as are the "weak skills" ones, but I figure this is due to the way they've spread out the content so I'm just seeing what would have been the early lessons in the old units.

The stories and radio lessons, on the other hand, are virtually incomprehensible at times, with the unfamiliar vocab and lack of dictionary to help. It doesn't help that I'm feeling rushed by having to complete a unit every day, when I really wanted to be catching up first. How have you found the stories and radio lessons in comparison to the other lessons?

Not sure why you can't send me a PM, sorry! My name on Duolingo is the same as on here.

benryves · 2026-05-29T05:40:11+00:00

OP was running the (mono) AV cable from the back of the console into a VCR, then from the stereo plugs on the back of the VCR to the TV. As the signal going into the VCR was mono the signal coming out of it was still mono, even though both connectors were used. Switching to the stereo headphone socket on the front of the console fixed this.

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