And if you are saddled with the man, goodluck trying to make it through a meal without some dithering from him about the available meal and drink selections. Or someone loosing their cool.
From what a friend related to me about where he had gone along to a resturaunt meal to provide some "morale support" for the couple billeting RMS, RMS has managed to combine "picky" with "indecision"...
A: Do you like lemonade?
RMS: I think so.
A: Here's a glass of lemonade.
RMS: No, I don't like that.
*sigh* poor guy, poor us...
They use 2.5 inch platters...
Well, at least the 73GB 15krmp Ultra3 Disk I saw opened up had a platter much smaller than I expected. Certainly not most of the width of the drive, it was about 2/3 the width...
All that was needed was to define the physical form factor (weel, the connector used) of the 2.5 inch SCSI drives, and slow the disks back down to reduce power consumption.
Virtually every video consoles' game timing is tied to the screen refresh i.e. the game carries out the operations required to move sprites, update the background, update the sound being played etc, based the "vertical" refresh rate. There's no point in trying to update any faster, as that's a waste of time, since the changes will not be seen at best, or you get some "tearing" at worst.
Of course, if you insist on programming in BASIC, instead of assembler like a real programmer (ducks), you deserve to have you game made unplayable:D
<RAMBLE>
However, some games which rely on the CPU timing of the console to be a certain number of clock cycles per scan line may get messed up, if that timing is used do things like display a sprite in multiple places on a single scanline.
Those of you who have seen/programmed C64 demos with the entire screen in use (no borders) will know about that - that required careful synchronisation with the scanline to fool the Video chip into not turning the border on at the end of the scanline - or simply moving the sprites "down" the scan field so that they are redisplayed. This allowed the 8 sprites the Video chip provided to be used over and over again, so long as the code didn't try to no display more than 8 sprites on a single scan line - extras would go missing - one thing that the game "Commando" violated - it didn't have a very good sprite management system to prevent this occuring. But that never caused it to crash thankfully.
</RAMBLE>
Re:This is not the best idea
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 1
If anyone trys to sell you a upgrade chip for a Toyota ECU, tell them were to stick it. Toyota use a CPU with an onboard ROM - so you can't readily read out the MAP values or code, and furthernmore, can't adjust the MAP Valules. TOMS do/did a ECU "piggy back" board which replaced the CPU a board with separate CPU and EPROM.
Yup, gotta love the old carburettors, BUT keep in mind the big drive toward EFI was reduced emissions - the EGO closed-loop operation which keeps the fuel mixture as close as possible to ideal as possible is not easily done with a carb. And have you ever tried picking the right mixture needle for the comination of throttle, carb, manifold and engine? Definitely one of the Dark Arts of Automotive Engineering!
Re:Well, for what reason
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The reasons are to protect the internals of the engine - so that they last the (at least) 60,000 miles expected of a production, road going car, not the 1 mile needed for a Methanol fueled drag car.
For instance, Turbo cars run reasonably rich (down to about 10.5:1) under "wide open throttle", to reduce the temparture of the fuel-air mix to prevent or at least reduce knocking or pre-detination, and to lower the combustion temperature. This is a good thing for the engine - but results in lots of hydrocarbons going out the tail pipe - which is why you have a catalytic converter... Without those, you can end up with blown head gaskets, melted pistons (they are only made of aluminium), bent/broken conrods or even holes in the engine block from con rods making a rapid exit after breaking.
Re:Quality Control of hacked code?
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Generally speaking with regard to modded ECU's, what is usually being changed is the Open-loop fuel delivery and ignition maps. No programming changes, just tweaking a few values to better match the particular car when accelerating. When you car is cruising, the fuel and ignition map values are adjusted by feedback from the EGO (Exhaust Gas Oxygen) and knock sensors, to have the engine run at near stoichiometric.
Even the aftermarket ECUs have fixed programming code, just adjustable maps and feature triggers (e.g. water injection, VVTi Cam control, turbo waste gate control, traction control igntion or fuel cut). But tuning the fuel and ignition maps does take a lot of time.
I had a 486 with the Win95B OS and Apps on SCSI disks, the IDE bus not being used. I found that in conjuction with the pluggable drive cages, I could hot swap buy following this procedure:
1. In Device Manager, disable the IDE Controller (single channel machine... yes, it's that old...) 2. Plug in the drive 3. In device Manager, enable the IDE controller
And the plugged disk became available. Note that the disk had to be previously partitioned and formatted for this to work.
To swap, just follow the procedure again, but swap the drives at step 2.
Note that this was using the Origianl OEM release of Windows 95B.
You may be able to do this under Win2K so long as the disks to be swapped are on a different controller than the OS disks, and the Controller driver can be stopped and started without rebooting. You may be able to have this happen by changing the startup type of the device driver using a Registry Hack (from "boot" to "automatic" - can' remember the numbers to use...) to have this work.
HP ProLiant BL10 e-Class Server? A File Server??? oh, puhleezz! It's equivalent to high-end laptop from two years ago. However, it's very useful for things like web servers, terminal servers i.e. scale-out applications.
Go look at the product page here (hp.com) and decide for youselves.
The 40GB drive is a laptop Hard drive, admittedly the faster 5400rpm variety. Not a 7200rpm desktop ATA or 15KRPM SCSI, let alone an array of them that I would expect to find in a file server.
There's a company already supplying water injection for forced induction cars which takes advantage of the cooling effect that the water provides, to lower the cylinder temperatures to prevent detenotation so more boost can be used:)
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And if you are saddled with the man, goodluck trying to make it through a meal without some dithering from him about the available meal and drink selections. Or someone loosing their cool. From what a friend related to me about where he had gone along to a resturaunt meal to provide some "morale support" for the couple billeting RMS, RMS has managed to combine "picky" with "indecision"... A: Do you like lemonade? RMS: I think so. A: Here's a glass of lemonade. RMS: No, I don't like that. *sigh* poor guy, poor us...
Then you get into the problem of what books children find in the library, or school library.
Heaven forbid, they could find books on magic (i.e. Harry Potter), or other unsavoury topics.
In NZ, "Fungus the Bogyman" got removed from school libraries becuase a Member of Parliament's child brought it home from the school library...
NZ Parliament - equivalent to the USA House of Representatives. Or maybe Congress. We've only got the one House.
They use 2.5 inch platters... Well, at least the 73GB 15krmp Ultra3 Disk I saw opened up had a platter much smaller than I expected. Certainly not most of the width of the drive, it was about 2/3 the width... All that was needed was to define the physical form factor (weel, the connector used) of the 2.5 inch SCSI drives, and slow the disks back down to reduce power consumption.
Hush now Britney, we already know you wait on every one of Dubya's words.
Does it have a built in camera and vibrator? :D
Of course, if you insist on programming in BASIC, instead of assembler like a real programmer (ducks), you deserve to have you game made unplayable :D
<RAMBLE>
However, some games which rely on the CPU timing of the console to be a certain number of clock cycles per scan line may get messed up, if that timing is used do things like display a sprite in multiple places on a single scanline. Those of you who have seen/programmed C64 demos with the entire screen in use (no borders) will know about that - that required careful synchronisation with the scanline to fool the Video chip into not turning the border on at the end of the scanline - or simply moving the sprites "down" the scan field so that they are redisplayed. This allowed the 8 sprites the Video chip provided to be used over and over again, so long as the code didn't try to no display more than 8 sprites on a single scan line - extras would go missing - one thing that the game "Commando" violated - it didn't have a very good sprite management system to prevent this occuring. But that never caused it to crash thankfully.
</RAMBLE>
If anyone trys to sell you a upgrade chip for a Toyota ECU, tell them were to stick it. Toyota use a CPU with an onboard ROM - so you can't readily read out the MAP values or code, and furthernmore, can't adjust the MAP Valules. TOMS do/did a ECU "piggy back" board which replaced the CPU a board with separate CPU and EPROM.
Yup, gotta love the old carburettors, BUT keep in mind the big drive toward EFI was reduced emissions - the EGO closed-loop operation which keeps the fuel mixture as close as possible to ideal as possible is not easily done with a carb. And have you ever tried picking the right mixture needle for the comination of throttle, carb, manifold and engine? Definitely one of the Dark Arts of Automotive Engineering!
The reasons are to protect the internals of the engine - so that they last the (at least) 60,000 miles expected of a production, road going car, not the 1 mile needed for a Methanol fueled drag car. For instance, Turbo cars run reasonably rich (down to about 10.5:1) under "wide open throttle", to reduce the temparture of the fuel-air mix to prevent or at least reduce knocking or pre-detination, and to lower the combustion temperature. This is a good thing for the engine - but results in lots of hydrocarbons going out the tail pipe - which is why you have a catalytic converter... Without those, you can end up with blown head gaskets, melted pistons (they are only made of aluminium), bent/broken conrods or even holes in the engine block from con rods making a rapid exit after breaking.
Generally speaking with regard to modded ECU's, what is usually being changed is the Open-loop fuel delivery and ignition maps. No programming changes, just tweaking a few values to better match the particular car when accelerating. When you car is cruising, the fuel and ignition map values are adjusted by feedback from the EGO (Exhaust Gas Oxygen) and knock sensors, to have the engine run at near stoichiometric. Even the aftermarket ECUs have fixed programming code, just adjustable maps and feature triggers (e.g. water injection, VVTi Cam control, turbo waste gate control, traction control igntion or fuel cut). But tuning the fuel and ignition maps does take a lot of time.
I had a 486 with the Win95B OS and Apps on SCSI disks, the IDE bus not being used. I found that in conjuction with the pluggable drive cages, I could hot swap buy following this procedure:
1. In Device Manager, disable the IDE Controller (single channel machine... yes, it's that old...)
2. Plug in the drive
3. In device Manager, enable the IDE controller
And the plugged disk became available. Note that the disk had to be previously partitioned and formatted for this to work.
To swap, just follow the procedure again, but swap the drives at step 2.
Note that this was using the Origianl OEM release of Windows 95B.
You may be able to do this under Win2K so long as the disks to be swapped are on a different controller than the OS disks, and the Controller driver can be stopped and started without rebooting. You may be able to have this happen by changing the startup type of the device driver using a Registry Hack (from "boot" to "automatic" - can' remember the numbers to use...) to have this work.
COOL! Now, where's my pool chemicals...
HP ProLiant BL10 e-Class Server? A File Server??? oh, puhleezz! It's equivalent to high-end laptop from two years ago. However, it's very useful for things like web servers, terminal servers i.e. scale-out applications. Go look at the product page here (hp.com) and decide for youselves. The 40GB drive is a laptop Hard drive, admittedly the faster 5400rpm variety. Not a 7200rpm desktop ATA or 15KRPM SCSI, let alone an array of them that I would expect to find in a file server.
There's a company already supplying water injection for forced induction cars which takes advantage of the cooling effect that the water provides, to lower the cylinder temperatures to prevent detenotation so more boost can be used :)