1) Snes’s DMA is 2.68 Mbps, whereas Genesis’s DMA is 3.35 Mbps

2) Snes can’t DMA during active display at all, whereas Genesis can, only at a slower pace.

3) Snes’s sprite pattern table is only 16-kB of the 64kB v-ram. Genesis can store sprite patterns ANYWHERE in it’s 64kB of v-ram just as long as you leave room for everything else. Snes is forced to DMA sprites more often, despite having the slower DMA.

4) A 16×16 sprite on the Genesis is stored with it’s bottom 2 8×8 tiles stored directly after the first. On the Snes a sprite patterns are stored in two tables that are both 16 tiles x 16 tiles with tiles being 8×8 pixels, and a 16×16 sprite is stored with the top half in one row of tile patterns, and the bottom half in the row underneath. Thus 2 dma fills are required on Snes, compared to 1 on the Genesis.

And I’d have to say, from where I and my husband are sitting now, what you’ve accomplished is pretty damn amazing. ( :

Completely :)

“Still, in my head, it stings.” I know the feeling, and experience it daily. I did very well in school, but these days “just surviving is a noble fight.” I can’t really point to many accomplishments of mine that have changed the world in obvious, earth-shattering ways, but I do think some of my achievements have had a subtle ninja-like effect on the people that matter most to me. Ideas may be the fuel of modern times, but I’d rather say less and mean more than vice-versa. I also think that there’s plenty more to come, and that what I’ve achieved by the age of 38 doesn’t define me. So it should be no surprise that I don’t think I’ll attend my 2011 20-year reunion either.

This morning I ran across this page (http://www.arachnoid.com/careware/index.html) which reminded me that: “We have so much, and yet we manage to:

* Overlook great examples of beauty around us,
* Miss our most important opportunities,
* Manage to make ourselves miserable by expecting something even better to come along.

Every time we whine about how tough we have it, apart from the fact that we look ridiculous, we make it harder for people around us to appreciate how much we have. We encourage people to overlook the things we do have, the gifts of man and nature. We provide a context to dismiss everything as not good enough, to be miserable in the midst of plenty.”

You have an amazing family, a dedicated set of friends, and always work to better yourself. Isn’t that enough? :)

Trier + XT = TriXTer

Frankly, I think both had an important influence on you, and I’m glad you are who you are. :)

I was trying to be accepted by everyone I personally knew, usually failing at the same time.

your older, wiser, classmates may be more accepting now than they were then… and it sounds like they are doing some genuinely interesting things.

* Met up with a girl who I’d completely forgotten about but who was, as I remembered, a real fun influence on me and my personality. I met her husband and found out about her life.

* Chatted with a classmate I’d never interacted with, but who has since moved to Singapore with her husband and we talked about living in that country and the weirdness of having a staff (which she does, the house is huge)

* Traded info with a couple people I’d not been able to find any other way (really).

* Ate some great food and enjoyed seeing how people were doing.

Now if only I could get my old group together from College…

Hitting thermal meltdown on an Atom would be a prize-worthy trick!

Was amazing to think what we could do back then, eh? My favorite tricks involve displaying GIFs and JPEGs as they downloaded, or using BIMODEM to send and receive at the same time.

Indeed I come to the results just by casualty.

Long time ago I bought a blu-ray writer and a couple of 4x BD-R disks.

My machine is a Core 2 Duo with 4Gb DDR800 RAM, gigabit ethernet (cabling, switches and brother machines the same), the bluray writer and 20x dvd writer via sata2, dual sata2 500Gb hdds with 16Mb of cache.

I had installed in the machine Windows XP Professional SP3 plus Nero 9 in one hard disk (NTFS) and Mac OS X 10.5 plus Toast 10 in the other one.

The first BD-R I burnt was from data on the XP’s disk, using Nero, and got a suckinly slow speed of 1.5X (bluray rating).
EVERYTHING was closed, the only visible processes were Nero and Explorer.
I moved another couple of 23Gibibytes to the hard disk to burnt out the second disk but had to made some things on Mac OS so I rebooted, and decided that as the burning was so slow I should start it and do the things alongside.

So then, I opened Toast, Mail, Safari, Messenger, a couple of SSH terminals, and when I took care of how the burning was going, it was going at 4X!!!!
The data was being read from the NTFS disk using a CACHE-LESS driver! (NTFS-3G).

So what the hell was going on? Surely the Mac OS kernel handles things way better than the XP one, as the same machine got four times the speed.
I also do not remember any 16X DVD being written at that speed in Windows while in Mac I’ve even written 8X disks at 16X!

Also I discovered that the SMB stack is slow by definition.
The same data from the same Linux server tooks between 3 and 10 times the speed to be transfered via SMB (no matter if XP or Mac client) than via Apple Filing Protocol (of course, only Mac client!).
And the same speed goes when the server is XP.

Now, I moved the XP hard disk to another machine, uninstalled all by the games, and doing everything else on the Mac.

It was not like the time Mac were PowerPC and PCs were x86 that comparisons were not so fair, now you can install both on same hardware and see, really, Mac OS X is an improvement.

And that alleviates me a lot, because I need to dump about 50 blurays monthly!

Could be that his broadband wasn’t very good. I remember the dark days where you would sometimes be lucky to see treble figures if you were on cheap ADSL, which is the point at which a well-serviced dial-up with server-side compression can be pretty much transparent. Our own first brush with broadband (on some kind of awful Cyrix 266 that was soon ditched for a K6/2-450 in order to actually be able to PLAY divx videos instead of only hearing them) was luckily a HALF-meg dedicated cable line, which seemed pretty fast vs the modem and the cheaper suppliers.

That’s since been serially upgraded and I’m not even sure what we have – somewhere in the zone between 4 and 10mbit. It’s easily “enough” that I’m rarely waiting around enough for transfers to be bothered testing the rate.

Somewhere along the line I got an old pentium laptop dirt-cheap to use as a basic portable typing tool (stony broke and needed something better than my old 8mb palmpilot and folding keyboard). De-rated it from 120 to 60mhz to save the battery (Office ran exactly the same). Eventually lobbed in a cheap 802.11b PCMCIA card in order to have basic web and email access at home. Worked surprisingly well – the limiting factor was not so much transfer and rendering speed, even in the best that Win95 had to offer (IE5, i think?)… but the screen rez (VGA! again, word doesn’t need more than that). Getting anything serious done involved plugging in a monitor, by which point I may as well have started surfing on my desktop, only piping the data back to the laptop over the wifi at the end of the sesh.

Could also be the era in which he was testing it. The actual interweb wasn’t THAT data heavy at the turn of the millenium. You could still get by alright with dial up (my dad had to for some years after, living in the sticks), it was just slow. Broadband was something of a waste if you were just getting email and looking at the occasional shopping or information site. BB was for MEDIA. P2P or…. hehe… legal (what, really? well, there were some news sites sticking out 200k+ realmedias I guess). What had been a rather painful and sometimes heart rending Napster / Direct Connect / mIRC experience, trying and failing once again to get that episode of a near-forgotten and in no way yet released on VHS/DVD (had to wait til 2008 for my personal grail to do that!) kids tv show, or some rare album of unreleased awesomeness from a small time band, before the line dropped, or the peer/server turned off for the night, or just plain had enough of you leeching at an uncertain 6-7k and kicked you off so the big broadband guys could have a turn… turned into a rich and FMV filled wonderland where it was all for the taking. And CPU speed almost certainly didn’t matter even at that point, at least for the machine you downloaded on. 512kbit is only 64kbyte/sec, or about 1/3rd CDROM transfer rate. And a 486-33 will happily record CD quality audio if you give it a bit of breathing space.

So…. yeah.

I can completely dig the ACPI (fans etc) problem though. Certain pathological loads or poorly made heavyweight programs (this months example: Sun’s “Virtualbox” attempting to run a modern version of Linux inside of XP and 1Gb RAM) can interfere with my laptop’s system monitoring and fan control, particularly when I have a little Speedfan-like util called Notebook Hardware Control running (99.99% of the time, awesome for tweaking fan trigger temperatures and speeds, CPU multiplier, voltage, showing battery and HD details, etc). Pootling away at fairly low load, temperature in the low to mid 40s, fan hardly turning… then the heavy program kicks in… knackers the ACPI almost immediately, and before the CPU temperature has ramped up/the system monitor sensor has time to notice it. So the chip’s rattling along at maximum speed and 100% load, but the fan’s not kicking in.

Luckily it’s a laptop, and I can feel the heat starting to come thru the heatsink that’s seperated from my body by just a thin skin of plastic, and wafting gently out of the vents.
As luck would have it, there’s a portable fan-heater by my feet. Grab, set it to run the fan without heat, and direct straight inside the vent ports. By this point NHC has managed to grab a few vital cycles of CPU time and is squawking a “CPU OVER TEMPERATURE, >80′C!” message at me. With the aid of the suddenly very ironic “heater”, I manage to control this into the high 60s (still a point where I’d usually be panicking, but I know it’s survivable) until I can kill Virtualbox…. find out that the fan is now “permanently” locked to low speed because of whatever it did… restart the system, resetting ACPI on the way… and changing NHC’s settings so that the fan is running at maximum blast BEFORE restarting my doomed virtualisation attempt.

Not the first time it’s happened either… last time I had no recourse but to yank the power lead and drop the battery out. Nasty that the glitch occurs just at the point where you’re going to need it most. I’m kinda paranoid about temperatures over 60′c because a cousins laptop died, as far as I can tell, because the CPU temperature was continually up in the 60-70 celcius range (a much cheaper, crappier device running some modern equivalent of the Duron, which was hot for even a desktop chip when I had it in my old midi tower; it was very uncomfortable to use on your actual lap). I know there should be thermal trips in the hardware that will throttle, then suspend, and finally (up around 105′c) kill all power to the CPU to stop it briefly becoming a short circuit conductor (and ignition source) when the silicon’s semiconductivity is thermally broken….. but if the fan control can be taken off line in this way, I can’t trust that the other ones aren’t subvertible in some way – demonstrative video from AnandTech or otherwise.

First person to make a virus capable of causing this kind of breakdown on a global scale wins massive noteriety. Better make it quick though – the tech behind Intel’s Turbo Boost feature in the i7 is supposedly a bomb proof variant of the thermal switch.

Nine times.

2 – There have got to be some options. Don’t give up. I am definitely willing to donate to whatever option that ends up being.

It’s a shame about the BDCMF thing – oh well, live and learn. It’s still way too difficult and expensive for independent producers to make replicate-ready Blu-rays. Thanks, Hollywood. Maybe Adobe will finally get it right with CS5. :P