Just a few months back I worked in embedded development on a project and there was a physical dongle to unlock the compiler, which was surprising during on-boarding as I've spent years doing commercial embedded work relying on GCC. :)
“The historical significance of JUMPSEAT cannot be understated,” said Dr. James Outzen, NRO director of the Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance.
I'm no native speaker but that is backwards, right? Shouldn't it be overstated if it was a success?
Native here: you’re correct it’s a weird sentence and turn of phrase in English.
That said, can/cannot is a flexible word in English and we could take it to mean “Anyone discussing the significance of JUMPSEAT [accurately] [should never] understate it.”
But I think he meant overstate in this case. Or maybe he hated JUMPSEAT, thought it sucked and put that right out there in the press release.
I love seeing new games for "retro" machines, it's awesome that people keep pouring time and love into them after all these years.
I'm not super familiar with 8-bit Atari machines, and found the designation "classic unmodified 8-bit ATARI XL/XE" a bit imprecise. Tried looking up specs on Wikipedia [1] but was unsure what to settle on. Perhaps the original 1200XL would match? Or the 800XL which seems to improve on the 1200XL even though the naming suggests the opposite ... Or the 65XE, or both then I guess since the latter is compatible with the 800XL, but in an updated case?
There are a great many modern modifications available for the 8-bit Ataris, many of them from Poland where the machines saw good sales quite late compared to the US.
Using modern electronics (FPGAs etc.), processors, and high-density memories, you can imagine the processing, graphics, and I/O improvements that can be made for relatively low cost.
Many hobbyist machines at this point are highly modified, with much new software taking advantage of the new features, so specifying "classic unmodified" pretty much means a system into which you could have slapped a ROM cartridge purchased at your local computer store back in the day. XL/XE sounds like it rules out the original 800 and 400 models.
> I love seeing new games for "retro" machines, it's awesome that people keep pouring time and love into them after all these years.
Same here, which is why I have more games to play than I care on my lifetime, without bothering with whatever subscription services, or games measured in GB/TB.
If my math is right it seems the cost in material for the printed part is around $5 which seems ridiculously cheap for a custom-designed and adapted solution like this. Nice!
I wish the author had spent a few words extra to motivate why it needs to be in PETG filament for "heat resistance", is the regular PLA limit of ~55 degrees Celsius not okay for a desktop accessory? I guess if it's in direct sunlight that might be exceeded, or perhaps if the laptop runs very hot?
To be fair, that's something you learn as soon as you start 3d printing.
Anything that experiences repeated stress and have any chance of getting over room temperature during summer should not be printed in PLA. And near a computer heating up, it sure looks like it's going to be higher than room temperature. Also pictures in a train exposed to sunlight via glasses are another reason for concern.
Compared to PLA, PETG has higher temperature resistance (by about 20°C), isn't quite as susceptible to stress, doesn't cost more and isn't any harder to print on modern printers.
Some people in the 3d printing community have totally ditched PLA and use PETG as a baseline because of that.
I use ABS as a baseline, it holds up well, is easier to sand than most other materials, and is soluble in acetone which gives you some nice methods for smoothing layer lines as well as adhering parts together. It requires a heated chamber though.
> is the regular PLA limit of ~55 degrees Celsius not okay for a desktop accessory?
Not the author, but PLA has a glass transition temperature of around 60 degrees, which in layman's terms is when it starts to melt. However, depending on the quality of the printing process, layers start separating/the print is pliable significantly lower, at around 35-40 degrees. This means that in countries where you get 30+ degree summers, PLA is not really suitable for anything which experiences any kind of stress. I would hazard a guess that the standing laptop can cause quite a bit of stress when the train starts/stops.
It should be mentioned that as far as I can tell pretty much no one is selling pure PLA filament. They all have additives, so who knows what the actual glass transition temperature is for any random given filament. This has been true for a while too. Pure PLA has some properly awful properties, among which is it having pretty much no elastic deformation. Any amount of force will introduce microscopic cracks. The various additives reduce these kinds of issues and are therefore not really optional.
I used ASA for something I intended to keep in my garage, I live in Florida so summer gets hot. ASA is way more heat resistant than both. My water boiler uses the heat within the garage as part of how it warms water so my garage doesnt get too hot but it can still feel pretty bad in there.
Glass transition temperatures are a little bit misleading, but from personal experience even leaving a PLA print in direct sunlight under even a little tension will cause it to warp in as little as 30 minutes if you aren't careful.
That sounded fascinating as a rather large difference in world view stemming only from using different languages.
It turns out that there are various models for the number of continents, and that is (phew) known in Spanish, too. See the Wikipedia page [1] (link to Spanish version) for instance. This is for European Spanish though, but I couldn't find a version of the page in es-AR.
I think this is very cool, even though I have no historical connection to the Z80 it's of course a well-regarded and firmly entrenched/popular retro CPU.
But this really is a stretch:
The Z80 Membership Card itself is a stand-alone single-board computer that can "power up" your projects, like the Parallax BASIC Stamps or Arduino microcomputers.
Both of those are very commonly called microcontrollers, not microcomputers, since they have all of those extra chips merged into the single package of the CPU.
Take a look at the Arduino Uno [1] which is a very typical (if old) example: you will see that the board is not covered in ICs from edge to edge, since all of the main functionality is in the single-chip microcontroller. I think the second big-ish package visible is for the USB, but that also disappears on more modern controllers with on-board support for USB.
It’s pretty clear that the design of the Z80 Membership Card is intentionally steered towards the micro-computer ethos. The distinction between a microcomputer and a microcontroller is a subtle one; in fact, it’s up to the use-case whether either term is applicable. Microcontrollers do, indeed, provide lots of I/O and rudimentary computation capabilities - whereas Microcomputers have computing power, of a sort, and some facility for I/O which may - or may not be - expansive.
So the stretch is not much more than a matter of semantics, imho. I’ve used Z80’s as microcontrollers, I’ve also used them as microcomputers.
Which one? I did a quick search but that didn't turn up anything so perhaps it's a partial word overlap or something.
I did find the projects "user-facing" home page [1] which was nice. I found it rather hard to find a link from that to the code on GitHub, which was surprising.
