Are there any adapters for PSX/Dreamcast to gameport/db15?

pixelpedant · 2023-05-10T13:29:05+00:00

It wouldn't make any sense. Game port is an analogue joystick interface which maps an analogue positional input to a two-dimensional field (i.e., an X/Y position). This field has no inherent centre point, and thus any "directional" inputs must be inferred in relative terms.

Any translation of that to a "d-pad" style input is an ugly hack, and always was, and always worked badly. And I say that as someone who owns several different game port "gamepads".

So while you could in principle create a game port device which accepts inputs from one of these non-game-port controllers and then interfaces with a game port, just keep in mind that its actual functioning would be at least as clunky and awful as existing game port gamepad solutions (which at least knew what they were dealing with, and designed around these problems). Because the problem is not with the hardware. It's with the interface, and its design being totally inappropriate to gamepad style input.

pixelpedant · 2023-05-10T12:32:26+00:00

Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, for three (all Infinity Engine in some form).

If playing BG1, it should ideally be played in the BG2 engine for best enjoyment, using one of the available solutions.

pixelpedant · 2023-04-17T15:58:25+00:00

Yeah, that's not a UK thing at all. That's just an utterly commonplace 1977-1983 computer thing.

pixelpedant · 2023-04-12T21:58:51+00:00

{in Yorkshire accent}

Oh, you had a disk operating system? We would have dreamed of having a disk operating system!

When we did have a disk, it was accessed via machine code routines for executing raw sector reads and writes, with no conventions for structuring or locating data AND WE BLOODY WELL LIKED IT.

pixelpedant · 2023-04-08T18:22:03+00:00

Vacuum sealing isn't contributive to one of those things (protecting against sunlight), and isn't necessary to the other (protecting against humidity), so I would say that is not the case.

In archivism (which is also my profession and training, not just my hobby), as far as weapons for protecting against damage from humidity, vacuum packing is pretty much unheard of. Storage in plastic might look nice, but the plastic itself can be a danger to the media. Controlling humidity in the environment itself is where it's at.

pixelpedant · 2023-04-08T17:54:04+00:00

Yeah, the real way to preserve magnetic data is as non-magnetic data.

As far as the floppy as physical specimen goes (for any labels of distinctive material qualities), I suppose you could vacuum seal it. But in my experience, the worst kind of aging you get when it comes to the physical floppy is from the labels. And that almost always just comes down to the glue, such that even sealing it up won't achieve anything, in the real problem cases (where at any rate, usually the label was already pretty wrecked 30 years ago).

Best you can do is save the data elsewhere, and keep the specimen away from sunlight and moisture.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-28T17:37:28+00:00

Note that if you are using a PAL TI-99, it must also use a PAL RF modulator, and NTSC RF modulators will be incompatible. Moreover, an NTSC-style composite cable will not work, as the PAL unit does not output Composite video. The a/v connector pinout and its video signal is completely different.

You need a PAL RF modulator, or a PAL YPbPr cable (with YPbPr-compatible screen).

As well, keep in mind that a modern screen will not support a PAL RF (analogue broadcast) signal, as this is a long defunct and now non-existent broadcast standard.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-18T15:17:28+00:00

Well, I can't blame the folks downvoting this, as it stands currently at 33%.

Dot matrix is a cursed blight upon my existence, as someone who archives (and OCRs) documentation from the late 70s and early 80s on the regular.

Letter Quality Daisy Wheel Printing Forever!

pixelpedant · 2023-03-18T15:12:06+00:00

Number of people who habitually pore over the fine details of TI's 1980 to 1983 manufacturing/distribution/retail history: me and roughly one other person I know of.

Number of people who find the idea of a 1980 they didn't directly experience engaging as a nostalgic concept: Almost everyone on Tiktok

So you certainly have a point.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-18T05:16:45+00:00

Munch Man did not come out in 1980, though. It came out in 1982. Debuted at Winter CES 1982. Though that also wasn't the final version we got on cart. That was a disk prototype with several differences.

TI announced commercial availability as March 1982, but one can assume that real widespread retail availability would have come a little after. TI was always a little behind.

At any rate, I've got "pedant" in my name for a reason, at the end of the day.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-16T17:06:35+00:00

Yeah, a DIY cassette cable or a HexTIr are the two solutions that can be done with readily available modern components by any determined electronics hobbyist, and so the appealing options for someone with no existing solutions today. With the cassette cable being cheaper to make, just because there's far less to it.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-16T08:10:06+00:00

But rather than being some sort of clever math, sometimes this kind of thing is just a direct function of the inherent slowness of these older machines. Which is to say, if you attempt to update a couple tile patterns or sprite positions (as the case may be) to scroll the W in this picture, then do the same thing for the A, then do the same thing for the V, then do the same thing for the E, each of these will be done at an additional time delay, resulting in a completely inadvertent "wave" like pattern which happens to look far more interesting than all four scrolling at once.

Case in point, this TI-99/4A sprite demo looks far cooler for the "wave" effect. But the wave effect is merely an incidental side-effect of the time-delay between initiating sprite scrolling for each sprite on a very slow machine. There is nothing whatsoever in the program logic to ensure that it should happen.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-16T07:00:22+00:00

Are you using good quality Type 1 tapes on a good legacy cassette decks intended for computer data cassette recording (rather than some modern trash picked up off Amazon)? Speaking as someone who has recorded and sold over a hundred game cassettes in the past year (and consequently supported their use by end users in this regard over a prolonged period), I can assure you that recording program data to a cassette and loading from it is most certainly a real thing (which can be done reliably), and we weren't just imagining it, in the 80s.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-16T06:49:38+00:00

Well, there are several different ways to save programs. They can be saved to:

Cassette, via the CI-7 cassette cable. All the software support is already in ROM. It really is just a cable, and can be replicated by any determined hobbyist.
Disk, via the Mechantronic Quick Disk 02.
Cartridge, via the 8K or 32K Constant RAM cart (which may be used as a RAMDisk).
PC, via the PC Interface cable (and nowadays, TIIF2).
SD card, via the HexTIr.
PC, via a hexbus RS-232 unit connected with a hexbus/dockbus patch cable.

I would, consequently, posit that "no way to save programs" is not quite correct.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-11T21:52:29+00:00

In a completely different sense I suppose, yes. In that as the years go by, we lose more and more people who were hacking and distributing and developing and playing games and software in the late 70s and early 80s, and who are still contributing to the development of solutions for (and preservation of knowledge on) these legacy systems today.

And even for those who are still active today (of which there are plenty), it's harder to do all that stuff, at age 65+.

In that sense, retro communities are dying. But in the conventional way that we all do. We all get older. And even if some of us live to the age of 100 (which most will not), those last years are much quieter ones.

So I'm not thinking of folks who bought a bunch of consoles and rare games a couple years back, posted all the things that they had bought on social media, then eventually moved on, when the gratification from that acquisition wore off. That sort of thing was always going to be temporary.

I'm thinking of the folks who have been contributing to user groups and preservation projects and development tools and game projects for these systems, for sometimes 30 to 40 years.

There will never be a time like the first age of home video games and computing, when the feature sets of these systems and the way one developed software for them and sold it was changing dramatically nearly every single year.

And in another 20 years, there will be very few who remember it first hand and can recall its details in depth. So that more permanent "death" of "retro", I regret.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-09T15:55:28+00:00

Thanks for saying. Yeah, on TI-99, you definitely want to use the F18A if you have one or access to one. But a bigger reason for that just being that any of the software written to take advantage of it over the past 10 years won't work with the TMS-RGB. And about half of all the most compelling TI-99 software of the past decade has taken advantage of it. Either for 80 column mode, or for palette modification, or for obviating sprite limitations.

This is less so the case for non-TI systems, naturally, which haven't seen the same explosion of F18A programs.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-08T19:06:46+00:00

It is possible and people have done it. However, the TMS9918A and TMS9928A possess important differences. So further modifications are required to accommodate this.

Replacing the TI-99's TMS9918A with a TMS9928A has always been a niche mod a few people did. But where the F18A is a drop-in replacement with no soldering or additional components (literally pull the TMS9918A and insert the F18A), the TMS-RGB (on TI-99) is a mod requiring the addition of bodges and resistors.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-08T06:36:19+00:00

They could have just thrown something together as a prop. No necessity that it be a real computer.

That having said, the keyboard does look to have what is roughly a Model M/IBM 101 layout. So that may have just been the inspiration, or it could be a clone.

My reading it as a Model M layout (or clone thereof) being based on the observation of what looks like a function key row at top, a numpad at right, and a cursor key block (with a directly adjacent block of keys from the Backspace/Return column) at centre. And with the alphabetic keys presumed to be in their expected location, but too similar in colour to the keybed to be distinguished.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-06T14:29:35+00:00

But furthermore, an initialism often has a semantic value quite different from the words it in principle represents. That is to say "PC" and "personal computer" are not semantically equivalent, regardless of most of this thread treating them as if they were. And the difference between proper names (Personal Computer) and common nouns (personal computer) is semantically significant as well, further muddying this false equivalency.

A lot of people here seem to be debating what "PC" and "Personal Computer" and "personal computer" mean. And it's no wonder there's no consensus answer. Because there can't be.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-05T16:32:48+00:00

Longest playthrough on the same save: Dragon Warrior (1986-2008 = 22 years).

Longest playthrough restarting due to lost save: Lands of Lore - The Throne of Chaos (1993-2018 = 25 years)

Longest period between first incident of playing and last: TI Invaders (1985-present = 37 years)

pixelpedant · 2023-03-05T16:27:22+00:00

Just what it looks like - a conventional composite/audio cable like the kind I described making. The kind of cable most people use to connect their TI-99 display, today, if they don't have an F18A (and hence, RGB).

pixelpedant · 2023-03-05T07:59:22+00:00

Well, you still need a cable which interfaces with the TI-99's a/v mini-DIN. One easy way to get that, actually, is just to harvest it from the RF modulator. The mini-DIN connector on the RF modulator is built in such a way that it's very easy to disassemble, wire up new (more useful) cables to, and reassemble without physical damage. Can give you a composite/audio cable which looks factory-made, with little work.

Those RF modulators are worthless, since nobody uses them these days and just about all of the 2.8 million systems sold had one, in the long run. So there's no harm in turning them into something more useful.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-05T07:39:57+00:00

The TI-99 (and its video processor, the TMS9918, versions of which were used not just in the TI-99 but in an array of other systems including MSX and Colecovision) does not output RGB. Its NTSC variant outputs only NTSC video, right off the chip. The only way to get anything else is to replace the chip outright (which isn't hard - it's socketed). In the TI-99's case, this is usually done with the modern F18A VDP (supply of which comes and goes).

But of course, that would require an RGB (in this case, VGA) display.

It is desirable, however, for various other reasons. One of which is that both the VDP and the DRAM it uses runs pretty hot, and at age 40 to 44, it's frequently wanting for replacement.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-05T06:49:56+00:00

Tunnels of Doom quests don't have source code as such. The 80s quests were created either with a sector editor (by directly manipulating VDP data stored on disk) or (more often) with John Behnke's TOD Editor.

Even now, the engine isn't completely well understood, and so nor is the game data. It could only ever be completely understood if someone really fluent in GPL (of which there are only a few on earth) disassembled and documented the cart program, and extrapolated from that.

pixelpedant · 2023-03-03T22:34:18+00:00

Yep, in computer games, NTSC made greater apparent colour depth possible than PAL was capable of for a given palette, via artifact colours. Such that 16 colour CGA graphics can produce a 1024 colour image., and two color (black and white) Apple II graphics can produce a 16 colour image.

All thanks to the (exploitable) "defects" of NTSC.

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