Sprite_tm

Note that the USB device is not a full-function software-controllable device; it provides a built-in 'serial port' and JTAG debugger only.

Oooh, I tried that, it does not make the experience better (at least in Fennec on my Android): the main column gets squeezed until it only shows one word at a time. I think I'd have to drag my websites CSS into the 21th century before I can use that.

My excuse is that the design is close to a decade old by now, and that back in the days, there were enough pixels between the two as the resolution was much lower. I don't need ads anymore, so I disabled them site-wide; that's the best way to fix the issue I figure.

Any pointers for that?

It's a good point, though, and one I heard earlier. Spritesmods used multi-page articles from the beginning (which is nigh 14 years ago now), initially because, I dunno, more of the web was like that? Later, when I needed the money, it was because I liked header ads more than long articles with interstitial ads. Now I don't quite need the money anymore, maybe I should throw out ads and either default to everything-on-one-page or at least give that as an option.

Yeah, sorry, last time the CSS got updated was 2010... what specifically makes it 'unreadable' for you?

I can. Say you want to display one 'frame', that is, one run where you display all the pixels where the pixels on average have the intensity you want them to have. Because you can only turn the pixels off and on, you need to send a certain amount of 'subframes'.

PWM works as such: you send 256 subframes at the same time interval, and if you want a pixel to be 50% dimmed, you turn it on in half of the subframes and off in the other half. When you want it at 1/255 brightness, you turn it on in only one of the 255 subframes.

BCM/BAM works as such: you send only 8 subframes, but each subframe has a specified time when they are visible: each following subframe stays on for twice as long as the previous one. For example, subframe 0 is visible for 1 ms, subframe 1 is visible for 2 ms, subframe 2 is visible for 4 ms, subframe 3 is visible for 8 ms, etc. Now, by turning on the pixels in some subframes, you can exactly specify how long they are on in the total frame: say you want to have your pixel at a dimness of 200, you'd turn it on in subframe 3, 6 and 7.

As to CPU use: because you only need to calculate and send 8 subframes instead of 256, everything takes up less CPU. Especially during the longer subframes, the CPU can context switch out and go do something more useful while waiting.

True, however, a 'normal' implementation would just the one clock signal to clock in the three data lines; to lower the clock frequency you could use the rising edges to clock in the even bits and falling edges to clock in the odd bits. That's not what they do here, though: they use the rising edge of the clock to clock in the even bits, as you'd expect, but the S1-S5 lines to clock in the odd bits. That is unexpected. Same with the existence of the S1-S5 lines all by itself: you could also have fixed that with a counter clocked by the existing clock line and a separate reset line; that'd simplify the connections between printer and cart. I'm still not sure why they didn't do that.

Ah, good point... the AI doesn't do birthday selection yet, I've manually done that for my Tamagotchis. Apart from that, the Tamas should run just fine. I'll put a remark about it in the Readme.

I have, mostly. All my code, minus the directly-applicable shadow-password-hack thing ((to thwart script kiddies, if you're a bit knowledgable ytou should be able to re-implement it yourself) can be gotten from http://spritesmods.com/hddhack/hddhack.tgz

Yeah, my database scheme was fucked up and the work mysql had to do slowed everything down. I did some quick optimization of everything, meaning a few minutes of downtime, but now mysql only takes 10% CPU instead of pegging one core to 100%.

Seems I'm better with jtag cables than with mysql queries. I just did some judicious adding of indexes and now the site should be responsive again.

It took about half a year, mostly slaving away in the evenings and my day off. That was mostly because the WD firmware is pretty complex: you gotta remember almost 20 years of ATA/SATA/... cruft is stored away in the firmware, and the firmware doesn't help you by having any strings embedded in it.