Monday, November 4, 2024
Sunday, November 3, 2024
Friday, November 1, 2024
History Brought to Life with Ai Magic Vol.1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_A5wwX52EY
First of all, it is astonishing what can be accomplished with AI.
At three minutes we see the future queen of England. She earned my respect by being a truck driver and auto mechanic during World War II.
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Thursday, October 3, 2024
Amazon.com: MINISFORUM Venus UM790 Pro Mini PC AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS up to 5.2 GHz 32 GB DDR5 1TB SSD with AMD Radeon 780M, 4X USB3.2, 2X USB4, 2xHDMI 2.1, 2X PCIe4.0, Wi-Fi 6E/BT5.3, RJ45 2.5 G : Electronics
I just happened to see this on Amazon. This is the same computer I bought on sale a year ago. I normally see it listed at $700. Now it is $70 cheaper than what I paid for it. (I don't know if an Amazon Prime membership is required.)
I can attest that this little computer is a beast. It is about twice as fast as the Apple M chips unless you get the Pro or Max versions. I wanted a powerful computer for chess analysis. It can also play games.
it is slightly cheaper on their website:
If it ships from China, it can take five weeks.
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Friday, September 20, 2024
The Jetsons - 1950s Super Panavision 70
What you can generate with AI these days, is just astonishing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZOnC8hdX8k
@frankpoperowitzmusic 2 days ago
I could watch two straight hours of Jane just strolling around the apartment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZOnC8hdX8k
@frankpoperowitzmusic 2 days ago
I could watch two straight hours of Jane just strolling around the apartment.
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
Disney Plus: You paying more for less is their brilliant business strategy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DppIlEH3GaU
Good video!
A Google search shows that Disney+ is offering three months for $1.99 per month. This is the version with ads.
Last year on Black Friday I got a combination of Disney+ and Hulu for a year for $3 per month.
There was a similar offer on HBO Max, now just called Max. It is my favorite streaming service.
Years ago, I got the Disney+ pre-start discount where I was paying around $4 per month by paying for three years in advance. The problem is that I didn't see a ton of new content that I wanted to watch. I had already seen most of the stuff worth watching.
Good video!
A Google search shows that Disney+ is offering three months for $1.99 per month. This is the version with ads.
Last year on Black Friday I got a combination of Disney+ and Hulu for a year for $3 per month.
There was a similar offer on HBO Max, now just called Max. It is my favorite streaming service.
Years ago, I got the Disney+ pre-start discount where I was paying around $4 per month by paying for three years in advance. The problem is that I didn't see a ton of new content that I wanted to watch. I had already seen most of the stuff worth watching.
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Sunday, September 15, 2024
How do Video Game Graphics Work?
I knew the basics, but most of this is quite advanced.
The computational power required is enormous. Graphics cards use hundreds of watts of power. (My mini-computer has a processor with a TDP of only 55 watts.)
In the 1980s, I tried to do simple 3D graphics on 8-bit and 16-bit computers. Since I had at most 16 colors to work with, no advanced shading was possible.
On the Timex Sinclair 1000, which was an 8-bit 16K back-and-white computer, I managed to create a low-res black-and-white 3D rotating object stored in the computer's memory. I then could display the rotating object. It was an impressive effect for such a simple machine.
I accomplished similar effects on the more advanced Timex Sinclair 2068 color computer. I also did some simple 3D effects on the Atari ST computer.
The 8-bit machines were capable of about 500 floating point calculations per second. The Xbox Series X console is capable of 12 trillion per second. The advanced graphics card featured in the video is capable of 33 trillion.
Friday, September 6, 2024
Thursday, August 29, 2024
Why Don't We Have 128 Bit CPUs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKbNOmysJQo
This is something I wondered about.
The fact is that 64 bits is large enough to hold almost any number we would need. Even 32 bits is adequate. There might be special cases in science where a higher level of precision is required, for example, if you need to calculate a flight path to Pluto. Still, current 64-bit computers can do 128-bit computations if needed but less efficiently than a 128-bit processor.
With the extra circuitry required for a 128-bit processor, the space on the CPU die is better spent having more processors. So there is no reason for general-purpose CPUs to ever be 128-bit.
Graphics cards, which do a massive number of calculations every millisecond, can have processors that use more than 64 bits so that they can move data to and from memory in larger chunks. This is a special case.
Sunday, August 18, 2024
Saturday, August 10, 2024
Beyond The Mind's Eye (Complete Film)
Back in the early 1990s, a series of films called "Beyond the Mind's Eye" featured the latest in stunning computer graphics. Although it is dated today, I was impressed enough to buy the videotape. The sequence from 13:55 to 15:49 impressed the hell out of me.
Friday, August 9, 2024
This New Super Nintendo Game Changes EVERYTHING For Retro Games...
https://youtu.be/8lor1zFo6e4?si=AwGtaneNHGsx7kIw
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
Friday, June 21, 2024
Saturday, June 15, 2024
Saturday, May 25, 2024
Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Sunday, May 12, 2024
The FREE ‘Never Obsolete’ PC from 2000! eMachines eTower 566ir
My mother had an E Machines computer. I wasn't impressed by it, but at the time it was adequate for accessing the Internet. However, if a person still has one of these old machines, there are many old video games that can be played on it.
The state of computers around the year 2000 was interesting. People were buying their first computers to access the Internet. Before this, I had abandoned my Frankenstein computer I had built up a piece at a time and purchased a 400 Mhz computer, which quickly became obsolete. In the early 2000's I purchased a roughly 2 GHz single-core computer which seemed amazingly powerful at the time. In 2005, I upgraded to a dual-core computer 2.4 GHz computer which also seemed like a big step up.
I purchased an i7 iMac in 2010 for around $2,000. This was one of the more powerful computers on the market but it would seem sluggish by today's standards. It had only slightly better performance than my old outdated laptop. A couple of years ago I gave the almost dead computer to a repair shop for parts.
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
M4 iPad Pro Impressions: Well This is Awkward
The M4 iPad display has a 1000 NIT brightness that can go up to 1600 NITS.
Considering that my computer monitor is plenty bright at 350 NITS, this seems like overkill. It would be useful if you wanted to read the iPad in direct sunlight, but how many people need that feature? My iPhone 10R is rated at around 600 NITS and it is reportedly readable in direct sunlight.
Plus it has a processor more powerful than all but a few desktop computers. Overkill, which is why Apple wants to charge a thousand dollars for this thing.
The iPad is not a very useful device. It is more limited than a computer, and less convenient than a smartphone.
If I want a tablet I can get a lower-end iPad for around $300, and less on Black Friday. I bought a Fire Tablet on Black Friday for around $80, and even though it is not a very powerful tablet, it can do basic internet tasks, stream video, and play games.
Re: Rare Golden Ship Galaga Glitch
Jeff,
1. There is a bug in the original arcade Galaga where a player can get the "bees" to stop firing missiles. Although this is part of the game, apparently it is considered a "cheat" and disallowed in high score records. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtYQB3JOFoc
If the player kills all the bees except for two on the left side and then doesn't kill them for 7 to 20 minutes, usually around 20 minutes, then all the bees will stop firing for the remainder of the game. I have been able to reproduce this on my Arcade1up and my PC.
This works because there is a table in memory for all the missiles. There might only be 8 entries in this table. The table size limits how many missiles can be on the screen simultaneously.
A horizontal value of zero in the table means the missile is inactive. The way the coordinates work in the game is that a horizontal value of zero is slightly off the left edge of the screen.
If you don't shoot the bees for 20 minutes, they will fire a bunch of missiles, and occasionally a few missiles will be created with a random horizontal coordinate of zero. Even though these missiles are "active", the code ignores them. Eventually, the table fills up with missiles that the code ignores.
I think that I heard that later versions of Galaga fixed this bug, although I am not sure. I wish that they had kept it in. It is a nice easter egg.
2. Galaga has a method of doubling your firepower by letting your ship be captured and then rescuing it. I usually avoid this because it at least doubles the vulnerability of losing a ship. However, I just watched some YouTube videos where people going for a high score get double ships. The way they survive and not lose one of their ships is to shoot most of the bees as they enter the screen. The small number of bees that survive are easier to deal with.
3. The video hardware has a large number of sprites that can be displayed on the screen simultaneously. This was impressive for its time. However, the number of sprites still has a limit.
The game allows the player with double ships to fire up to four missiles at a time, but reportedly this was too many sprites. So the game uses a single sprite to display two missiles, and four missiles are displayed with just two sprites.
As a former video game programmer, I find this interesting because I am not sure what happens if just one of the two missiles in a single sprite hits an enemy. Do both missiles disappear, or do both missiles keep going up the screen, or does the game switch to a sprite with just one missile? It is hard to tell by watching the game because the usual case is that both missiles hit an enemy. I am going to test this.
4. I am also wondering how the NES port was able to display so many sprites. The NES has a limit of 8 sprites on the same horizontal line, so if it exceeds this there might be some sprite flicker. I am going to test this as well.
On Mon, May 6, 2024 at 11:03 PM Jeff Wires wrote:
I love Galaga and never knew this! This is just giving me more to talk about on the show!Appreciate it!-JeffOn Sat, May 4, 2024 at 4:13 PM John Coffey wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_58poXHxOg&t=877sThe golden ship reemerges when the game switches back to the second player.The enemy ship switched to the wrong characters for that sprite but kept the same color palette. If we assume that ship type is a single byte value, then that byte was somehow overwritten with a bad value, hypothetically a zero or a one which could be the value for the player ship. Errors like this could be caused by a memory overflow where a value was written outside the bounds of a table or the limited stack memory was exceeded.I learned that if Player 1 exceeds 999,999 points, it will not display the millions in the score. It is not clear if the player's score still counts as being over a million, or if it goes back to zero. However, the second player does not have this problem and his score can reach 8 digits.
Saturday, May 4, 2024
Rare Golden Ship Galaga Glitch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_58poXHxOg&t=877s
The golden ship reemerges when the game switches back to the second player.
The enemy ship switched to the wrong characters for that sprite but kept the same color palette. If we assume that ship type is a single byte value, then that byte was somehow overwritten with a bad value, hypothetically a zero or a one which could be the value for the player ship. Errors like this could be caused by a memory overflow where a value was written outside the bounds of a table or the limited stack memory was exceeded.
I learned that if Player 1 exceeds 999,999 points, it will not display the millions in the score. It is not clear if the player's score still counts as being over a million, or if it goes back to zero. However, the second player does not have this problem and his score can reach 8 digits.
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
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