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Steam Machine 8 months ago

Given the memory configuration it seems extremely unlikely that it's socketed. It's certainly not AM5.

The best thing about Renpy is that the text rendering actually looks good, which is true of shockingly few VN engines even today.

Especially when you increase the window size or run fullscreen, most VN engines just render the whole game at a fixed resolution and upscale it up but Renpy makes the framebuffer match the window size and renders text at the full resolution.

It's been done before. Lots of 90s bootleg consoles used clones of the Famicom/NES chips, though they weren't particularly accurate clones. The Commodore 64 Direct-To-TV of all things had a custom ASIC made for it in 2004.

I think these days FPGAs have just gotten cheap enough that the economics of making custom chips doesn't make much sense for the volumes these kinds of products tend to sell.

The actual Car Thing runs Linux on an Amlogic S905D2 (quad Cortex A53) with 512MB RAM/4GB flash and an 800x480 screen. So you could do something similar with pretty much any random cheap ARM SBC.

No die shots but the Wikipedia articles of all things on the MK61 and MK52 are surprisingly thorough including photos of the PCBs, schematics, and the External Links sections contain most of the interesting articles I'm aware of about these.

They're quite interesting and quirky machines, definitely HP-inspired but unique in a lot of ways. Especially the MK52 with the built in EEPROM (though other than the EEPROM and connector for an external ROM it is functionally identical to the MK61). They're also still readily available and cheap on eBay if you want to play with one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-61

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-52

The format is very simple, basically a square wave with different pulse widths for 1s and 0s [1]. Spectrum software was typically sold on audio cassettes and the radio broadcasts are the exact same format, typically people would record the broadcasts to cassette. The loader program in ROM just copies all the data from tape (or radio) into RAM so yes any game logic would be included in that.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum_software

OpenBSD out of the box is an extremely minimal setup compared to the default install of most Linux distros.

A lot of the security of the default install comes from minimizing the attack surface by having very few services running. So you do not need to be tech-savvy to make it secure, but you might need to be tech-savvy to turn it into a usable system for your use case.

This CR report is about the reliability of new cars over the first year of ownership. The correlation to how many issues there will be 10, 15, 20 years down the line is rather tenuous.

You can still buy house plans and bundles of parts similar to what Sears used to offer, Menards sells them.

Home Depot also has some prefab units but they're all very small.