General Stuff(tm)

[stephen_usher]

Everything's arrived and works.

I had issues with the controller pak as it showed up as "Unknown peripheral" until I cleaned the edge connector thoroughly.

I can't actually see any real difference in video quality between the HDMI adapter and composite video directly into the TV actually.
I may remove the composite output bodge so as to make it look nicer, but I may not.

So, the console has:

Expansion Pak
Controller Pak
2x controllers
HDMI adapter
Summer Cart 64

[PhilC]

That should make it a good little console Stephen.

I really should use mine more.

[stephen_usher]

Well, one issue with the HDMI converter. When it switches to PAL60 mode the chroma is delayed by about a 10th of the screen width, so NTSC games have coloured ghosts to the right of the items that should be coloured.

At first I thought it may be ghosting due to the phono socket mod, so I removed them, but that didn't change anything.

Never mind.

[mrbombermillzy]

Yesterday the expansion pack arrived. It works fine and gives a lot of games some extra capabilities. Some get higher resolution, some just have more bells and whistles.

That sounds interesting. What is it exactly?

[stephen_usher]

It just doubles the memory. It's effectively just an RDRAM chip on a PCB in a case which plugs into a port on the top.

[stephen_usher]

Seeing as I'm planning on taking the TT to CL5 and showing off the UNIX/Linux systems I can boot I thought I'd do a quick benchmark on starting processes from a shell.

So, I created this shell script:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
echo Testing speed of process creation.
echo Running /bin/echo 100 times

date

for i in \
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 \
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 \
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 \
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 \
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 \
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 \
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 \
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 \
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 \
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 
do
	/bin/echo > /dev/null
done

date

I knew that NetBSD was slow but... time to run each command:

Atari UNIX: 0.08 seconds.
Debian Linux (Etch): 0.14 seconds.
NetBSD 10: 0.42 seconds.

No wonder it takes an absolute age for NetBSD to boot if each line in the boot shell script takes about half a second to start up!

[stephen_usher]

Out of interest I thought I'd try the same test under MiNT.... 0.05 seconds.

P.S. Miscalculated, should be 0.2 seconds.

[stephen_usher]

Seeing as CL5 is on the horizon, the Camputers Lynx 128K doesn't run games and the feeling that I need to solder something I decided to try to build the Lynx 96K PCB I have to get that working.

So, I've spent the day soldering sockets, resistors, diodes, transistors and ceramic caps. Unfortunately I ran out of 470R, 1K and 4.7K resistors so I've had to put in an order with Amazon for those.

Still, good progress. A quick power test showed that I had two of the diodes the wrong way around, helped by the thermal camera. That's fixed now and no harm done.

IMG_5405.jpeg (261.28 KiB) Viewed 14 times

Tomorrow I can fit more decoupling caps, though I don't think that I have enough to complete but should be good enough to get going. I can also fit the header pins and electrolytic caps. I can also get on with the video RAM board.

[rubber_jonnie]

You've got as many projects on the go as me!!!

[HigashiJun]

You've got as many projects on the go as me!!!

Nobody has more projects on the go than rubber_jonnie...