Engineers should garb up to fuck with people. Lab coat, welding goggles, pocket protector, the whole schmeer. Show up to work at BigWebCo looking like Dr. Horrible just before he murdered the entire Evil League of Evil.

This stuff here? It's delicious, but I think they used some kind of indigestible pigment for the black colour, because it has died my shite coal black. (Yes, I know that black shite is also a sign of upper GI bleed -- but what are the odds that three otherwise healthy adults would develop simultaneous upper GI bleeds immediately after eating the same breakfast cereal?)

It can be held back no more. I'm still staring at this. It's so simple. Just ROM, RAM, CPU, and VERA. Some I/O, a little bit of storage. Simple enough that it should be actually affordable, powerful enough for legit Amiga-level retrogames to be made for it. And it's open hardware. I did that. I made a thing. It's real. It's happening. The new prototypes are literally in production at the fab house in Shenzhen. Once any last-minute bugs get worked out, I'll be able to take orders for the first round of actual production -- assuming I can get hold of reliable supply of the CPU, of course. That's tomorrow's problem, though. Today's problem is containing my excitement. What you get: W65C816S-compatible CPU at ~1.8MHz or 8MHz 512KB SRAM 512KB flash ROM iCE40UP5K FPGA running the VERA bitstream, with 128 sprites, two tiles layers, adn 16 channel PSG sound Two SNES-compatible control ports Full expansion bus port Target price: USD$149, case not included.

Hey, check out my latest retro donation, this time from @npub1wwdr...h8qz. It's an Apple Newton eMate 300! This beauty of 90s retro is basically a Newton PDA in laptop form factor. It's neat as hell, and seems to work perfectly! Thanks!

Which RS-232 wifi modem emulator do you recommend, and why?

Unbelievable. So, I went back to basic troubleshooting. Washed all the boards in isopropyl, went over them with my microscope to check for bad solder joints, the whole nine yards. Long story short, my work was fine, but it turns out that VersaTerm's TTL serial input does not like what the Z180 spits out. However I am the owner of a TTL-to-RC232 adapter and a straight through DE-9 cable -- and that combination, plus disabling hardware flow control[1] in ROMWBW got it working. My Z180 build lives! I don't need to spend a bunch of money! I'm now in a much better mood. [1] I will be acquiring a TTL-to-RS232 adapter that supports RTS/CTS flow control next month.

Back from the sleep clinic. Diagnosis: Severe obstructive sleep apnea. Fuck.

Debian is the moose of Linux distros: It dates from the fucking ice age, and it comes to us almost unchanged, because it hasn't needed to evolve.

"DisplayPort VGA Adapter Dongle Squid isn't real and can't hurt you..."

So you just bought a Sentinel 65X. What did your money buy you? First and foremost, you get a W65C265S CPU, a 65C816-based almost-system-on-chip, running at 32KHz, ~1.8MHz, or 8MHz. Most of the time 8MHz. You also get 512KB each of ROM and RAM. And you get the VERA audio and video chipset. You have two SNES-compatible gamepad ports, which will support the SNES mouse and a keyboard adapter we're working on for later. It has VGA output for video, and a stereo miniplug for audio. MicroSD for storage, USB-C for power. Right now, there's not much of any software for it -- but that's why you bought it, presumably, so you could make software for an open source games console. You get 16 channels of PSG sound, two tiles layers, 128 sprites, 256 colours from a 12-bit RGB palette, 80x30 text mode, and hardware scrolling.