In the thread a few prototype cards that turned up before the current ones[1] are checked and they do have 1996 dates in the dots. So at least some printers at the time did have them.
But there’s also a batch identified as “high quality” that don’t have dots on the front printing, which if genuine would point to some printers not doing it at the time.
[1] There were like, 3, and the thread has a spreadsheet showing that well over a thousand prototypes were graded in the last few months. Not sus at all.
Re Egret and Command-Power, I’m pretty sure the key combination (and the command-control-power hard reset combo) is always active, and not a Macsbug thing. ISTR you can trigger sad Macs on boot with it, which would be before Macsbug is loaded (I think), and also access the mini debugger if Macsbug isn’t loaded. At least from what I remember about my old LCII (would have to dig it out to double check though).
I’ve been trying it out a bunch lately. From what I’ve seen, machines with Egret don’t have it enabled by default, but machines with the newer Cuda do.
The original Charing Cross was at the south of the square, where the statue of Charles I is now. (The cross at the railways station nearby is a Victorian folly).
Possibly a difference in definition of lifespan, I suspect the 2600 one is using “first game released to last new game released”, whilst the NES / Famicom is “hardware available for purchase”, as Nintendo Japan didn’t officially discontinue the AV Famicom until circa 2003, even though the last new game was released around 1994.
Kinda tells us nothing, but I guess they got fed up with their supply chain leaking absolutely everything about the physical device before they could announce stuff.
I guess the direct will be interesting when they show some actually software and we can get a bit of a handle on what the device can actually do (although the MORE POWER type people are going to be disappointed, probably).
There was still some ambiguity on if it applied to physical games or only downloads. I'm all-digital on my Switch, so it doesn't affect me, but it'll be nice for the physical-only people to know with certainty.
The version of the grip that you buy as an accessory (HAC-012) can charge the joycons. However the pack in one (HAC-011) can't.
Looking around, it appears that Nintendo have also released an official "Joy-con charging stand (2-way)", suspiciously it seems they only launched it in October 2024, when various 3rd party chargers have been around for years.
There's also the official AA battery packs. Yes, really.
Hmmm, I wonder if the Nintendo charging stand will charge the NES Joy-Cons, cause the BestBuy stand I have won't (no big deal currently, the switch is usually on the dock and I charge the NES controllers on it)
There's a bit about the port as a section of a longer discussion about publisher Firebird: https://youtu.be/LWHJomIX_As?feature=shared&t=2297 . Which does state that yep, it was mostly made by playing the arcade game lots then doing the best they could. They apparently did have some documentation... in Japanese.
AFAIK "here's an arcade PCB, write this for the C64 / Speccy" wasn't an uncommon thing back then. Arcade perfect wasn't really a thing for the 8 bit micros...
Well, compared to the first wave of 68000 machines, which were generally high end workstations from the likes of Sun and Apollo, a $2500 Macintosh is cheap. Apples belief in this whole “profit margin” thing did mean it couldn’t compete on price with the Amiga and ST though…
I mostly jest. In the late early 90s the prices of 68k Macs actually dropped into the very affordable range. The II series were great machines, priced well, stable, etc. The shift to PowerPC ruined the classic Mac, IMO.
In that era I had a 486/50 running (early) Linux and my mother had a Mac LC II. I actually really enjoyed using that machine.
Just curious why do you think the shift to PPC ruined the classic Mac? I never owned a Mac before but I did buy an iBook G4 because I somehow got fascinated by the PPC machines.
The PPC architecture is fine enough. The problem was their "operating system" was written as a 68k OS with no memory protection and a weird memory model generally, and for almost a decade they ran with 68k emulation in order to make it all work.
And it crashed constantly. Very unreliable machines.
They did crash here and there in the 68k days, but overall they worked pretty good. Albeit cooperative multitasking, etc.
But in the mid-90s, with System 7.6, it was like walking through landmines. e.g. I helped admin an office with a bunch of them and you couldn't run Netscape and FileMaker at the same time because they just wrote all over each other's memory and puked.
System 8 and 9 improved things markedly but the reputation was still there.
Meanwhile they had these grandiose OS rewrite projects that all failed until they ended up buying NeXT... and then spent 5 years turning NeXTstep into OS X.
In retrospect Apple could have skipped the whole PPC era and done much better for themselves by just switching to x86 (and then ARM as they've done now) after a brief foray through ColdFire.
Or just jumped straight to ARM instead -- they were an ARM pioneer with the Newton! -- rather than betting the farm on the IBM/Motorola PowerPC alliance, which ultimately ended falling badly with power hungry chips that couldn't keep up with x86.
Thanks for sharing. I never used one before so don't know how good/bad it was. My iBook runs OS X so it is pretty good.
It's a bit embarrassing as the 68k emulation was part of the reason that I got fascinated. But I just want to learn binary translation, not really use them, anyway.
I think Apple in the early 90s threw things on the wall and hope something stuck. Bad for consumers, nightmare for admins but good for engineers who managed to make the throw.
Early 90s Apple was a bit like Google today, maybe. Big and ineffective at actually delivering, but with a history of innovation and illustrious past and a lot of smart people working there.
The problem with PowerPC was Motorola folded and IBM didn't have any real long term interest in the consumer PC CPU market.
Interesting. I wonder if their interview standard fell during that period (because many engineers may leave or refuse to join a dying company). Same for Google in the near future.
This appears to be a weekly chess column in the newspaper, and they all seem to have a chess puzzle in them[1]. I suspect in the paper it would be at the end of the column, with the answer on another page. It's perhaps a bit of an inelegant way to present it on the web version, but that's probably some sort of tradeoff with how the Guardian's website works, and if it's worth adding some sort of special case presentation for the chess column, which probably isn't exactly the most read bit of the site.
But there’s also a batch identified as “high quality” that don’t have dots on the front printing, which if genuine would point to some printers not doing it at the time.
[1] There were like, 3, and the thread has a spreadsheet showing that well over a thousand prototypes were graded in the last few months. Not sus at all.
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