Man, you guys must have had tortillas coming out of your ears while you were testing out your modifications! No wonder your wife is in a good mood, seeing it go
We had sometimes 400 pounds of hot slop, and sometimes 4,000 tortillas. Unless we did it consistenly, we didn't get good results.
One of the guys helping with the move said that we probably never had properly cooked corn because the tank was meant for about a thousand pounds and we were only cooking one or two hundred pounds at a time. The corn would cool off too quickly during steeping. I think he was right, because I always had to add more water than seemed reasonable into the grinder.
Wow.
Reminds me of when we moved our pcb assembly plant. The thru hole solder line was 40 ft long. We unassembled at the mid point and the movers put a half on each semi. Was hairy watching a few forklifts lift in unison to put onto the semi, and off again at the other end.
Disassembled Thursday night, reassembled over w/e and back in full operation Tuesday. That included the SMT lines - we had 4 pick n place units too.
We had sometimes 400 pounds of hot slop, and sometimes 4,000 tortillas. Unless we did it consistenly, we didn't get good results.
One of the guys helping with the move said that we probably never had properly cooked corn because the tank was meant for about a thousand pounds and we were only cooking one or two hundred pounds at a time. The corn would cool off too quickly during steeping. I think he was right, because I always had to add more water than seemed reasonable into the grinder.
Good advice that guy has brought to the pot. Pity he wasn't at the crew, when the equipment has arrived at Red Bluff, for the first time.
Seeing it by the good side; possibly your wife wouldn't be that happy as she is, with the "Bye Bye, far away" scene and all the like!
During my seven marriages, a thing I've learned by myself (not without some pain...): Wives love when we let things go by.
Back in 1989 (during my second marriage), I was using about 150 square meters of space, only to accomodate my electronics shack contents. Now, being at the seventh one, I'm restricted to 12 square meters, and my present wife still complains...
Yanomani, 150 square meters .... that's about what I have in my barn (about 170m^2) ... Only I split half of it with my wife. The rule is that my electronics hobby has to pay for itself in order for me to keep all of the ... ahem ... "stuff". So far I am clearing about $2k a month in electronic related sales. .... So for now the wife is happy.
I can assure you that the tortilla thing was very serious.
Two year ago I was honored to be invited to Red Bluff. There I saw the barn and even the inner sanctum where P2 development was going on. The tortilla area was a very clean and professional installation that looked like it was all set to go into production.
Sadly, though I got some pictures inside the barn, tractors, machines, tools, stacks of wood like a typical barn, I did not get shots of the tortilla factory.
When it comes to wives and downsizing, I think you guys are still doing well. Just now I have been reduced to about 6 square meters for my desk, computers, and project pile. It's lucky that electronics is so small now a days.
Sadly, being single means that I have my whole house to fill with whatever I want. Like pinball machines, robots, tools, and lego star wars kits.
Of course, it means I am single.
But then it was overrun by children and now they think the own the place
I have half of my basement but a year or so ago I also got a desk in our family room. That happened because we had a very old dog who could no longer handle the steps into the basement so my wife asked me to work in the family room for the dog's sake. The dog is now gone but my family room desk is still there and that is now where I work. It isn't a large space but it's nice to be in the main part of the house where my wife is as well.
Sadly, being single means that I have my whole house to fill with whatever I want. Like pinball machines, robots, tools, and lego star wars kits.
Of course, it means I am single.
Single, but never alone, just don't fix those Bladerunner toys...
My younger brother has a Last Action Hero pinball machine that I would love to convert & control from a Prop someday, but of course that would wreck the under-the-hood retroness of it. In fact I had a lot of experience with fixing pinball and arcade machines in my teenage years and I was fascinated by some of the first microprocessor based video games at the time when many pinball machines were still relay based, I was always cleaning the contacts! But then I designed a pcb that took the guts of an Atari pong game so that it could be integrated into a pong table. Then all those microprocessor eval boards started to become available and that was another story.
@"David Betz" - are you saying that instead of sitting in the the family room for an old dog's sake, that you are now sitting in it for your wife's sake?
Peter,
One of my pinball machines has a prop in it for doing sound and the dot matrix display. America's Most Haunted by Ben Heck. I even helped him a bit with the prop software for sounds.
Last Action Hero probably has a 6809 based CPU in it running at like 1-2Mhz maybe. The prop can run circles around it for computations.
Sadly, being single means that I have my whole house to fill with whatever I want. Like pinball machines, robots, tools, and lego star wars kits.
Of course, it means I am single.
Single, but never alone, just don't fix those Bladerunner toys...
My younger brother has a Last Action Hero pinball machine that I would love to convert & control from a Prop someday, but of course that would wreck the under-the-hood retroness of it. In fact I had a lot of experience with fixing pinball and arcade machines in my teenage years and I was fascinated by some of the first microprocessor based video games at the time when many pinball machines were still relay based, I was always cleaning the contacts! But then I designed a pcb that took the guts of an Atari pong game so that it could be integrated into a pong table. Then all those microprocessor eval boards started to become available and that was another story.
@"David Betz" - are you saying that instead of sitting in the the family room for an old dog's sake, that you are now sitting in it for your wife's sake?
No, I'm sitting there for my own sake. It's nice to have someone around while I'm working.
Peter,
One of my pinball machines has a prop in it for doing sound and the dot matrix display. America's Most Haunted by Ben Heck. I even helped him a bit with the prop software for sounds.
Last Action Hero probably has a 6809 based CPU in it running at like 1-2Mhz maybe. The prop can run circles around it for computations.
Isn't it a 6808 CPU? Essentially a B grade 6802 with internal RAM disabled. Either way I could easily plug into that socket for a quick interface.
EDIT: seems to be a 68B09 according to the pcb overlay but the schematic says 6808? Ok, a 6809 for the sound and a 6808 for main so it seems.
Peter,
Yeah older machines used 6802s and 6808s, then later machines started using 6809 variants. The newer machines from Stern (last 5-10 years) use arm variants.
Roy, it seems from the schematics that it uses a 6808 for the main CPU, a 68B09 for the sound, and a 68B09 for the display! I suppose I could use a Prop for each but it seems tempting to run the from one Prop but replace the 64 lamps with a string of WS2812s and maybe a little PIC for the 56 way switch matrix just so it continually sends out the data serially. Then there are what looks like 20 solenoid drivers and 3 magnet drives that I could replace easily with solenoid drive capable shift registers. Of course the sound and display would be a cinch with the Prop. Perhaps I could make base this on P2 instead as a fun project. "P2, the Last Action Hero" (thus keeping these OT posts on topic )
All this talk of old video game machines reminded me of something (this might have been brought up here before)....
In the old days of CRT's, the scanline interaction was often instantaneous between the processor and the display. This made games really snappy, right up to the limits of human reflex.
Nowadays, these flat-panel displays may have 200ms of latency, since they buffer mutiple refreshes of data to do edge-smoothing and motion effects. This totally undermines the old experience. I notice on my 4k TV "monitors", there is a "game mode" that maybe reduces latency by foregoing effects.
It's kind of sad to think that those snappy interactions are now the exception, and not the rule.
Chip,
Most computer monitors these days have very low latency, many in the 5-6 ms range or even faster. But displays aimed at being TVs, on the other hand, are like you say with all that image processing and motion smoothing. Luckily most of them will allow you to turn off most of those features (and I usually do on mine).
It mainly impacts console gaming on TVs, it's to the point that music games (like rock band) have settings to account for the delay. They allow you to sync up the music with what you see on the screen, and then they account for that on the guitar input.
Yanomani, 150 square meters .... that's about what I have in my barn (about 170m^2) ... Only I split half of it with my wife. The rule is that my electronics hobby has to pay for itself in order for me to keep all of the ... ahem ... "stuff". So far I am clearing about $2k a month in electronic related sales. .... So for now the wife is happy.
The place was, in fact, the house of my paternal grandparents, on the top floor of the wholesale and retail company that the family has until now, founded by my paternal grandfather in 1928, in another nearby address, and which was reinstalled there, since 1934.
I set up my own company, the 150 square meters, in 1992, after my father decided to end the activities of a children's clothing factory in which we worked together. The factory occupied 450 square meters, so we redistributed the space, and we rented the remaining 300 meters to tenants already occupying other buildings, which were interconnected in a central block.
Game addicts know every detail of the games, and they develop muscular memory and almost perfect timing with the action that takes place in the game environment.
They can anticipate and plan the next steps, aware of the effect that every decision they make will have on the development of the ongoing action.
For this reason, games need to evolve continually, with new scenarios and more challenging versions, or fans will lose interest and seek new titles, and new challenges.
Viewers, those who watch the evolution of all the action through the video screens, the mouths partially open, stand in suspense for the result, and celebrate the achievements.
It is the endless war: the cat runs after the mouse, the dog chases the cat, the woman climbs in the chair, terrified. The hero comes on the scene, kills the mouse and throws the corpse into the bin, puts an end to the dog-cat fight by sending the dog to the backyard where he will dig a bone. The lady, already safe and secure, grabs the cat in her lap, who purrs with satisfaction. The hero gets a kiss on the cheek, blushing.
Happy ending.
Another round is started at the game. A new adventure begins.
Sadly, being single means that I have my whole house to fill with whatever I want. Like pinball machines, robots, tools, and lego star wars kits.
Of course, it means I am single.
Single, but never alone, just don't fix those Bladerunner toys...
My younger brother has a Last Action Hero pinball machine that I would love to convert & control from a Prop someday, but of course that would wreck the under-the-hood retroness of it. In fact I had a lot of experience with fixing pinball and arcade machines in my teenage years and I was fascinated by some of the first microprocessor based video games at the time when many pinball machines were still relay based, I was always cleaning the contacts! But then I designed a pcb that took the guts of an Atari pong game so that it could be integrated into a pong table. Then all those microprocessor eval boards started to become available and that was another story.
@"David Betz" - are you saying that instead of sitting in the the family room for an old dog's sake, that you are now sitting in it for your wife's sake?
No, I'm sitting there for my own sake. It's nice to have someone around while I'm working.
Don't you mean...
You were sitting there for the old dog's sake, and now your the "old dog" sitting there
Sadly, being single means that I have my whole house to fill with whatever I want. Like pinball machines, robots, tools, and lego star wars kits.
Of course, it means I am single.
Single, but never alone, just don't fix those Bladerunner toys...
My younger brother has a Last Action Hero pinball machine that I would love to convert & control from a Prop someday, but of course that would wreck the under-the-hood retroness of it. In fact I had a lot of experience with fixing pinball and arcade machines in my teenage years and I was fascinated by some of the first microprocessor based video games at the time when many pinball machines were still relay based, I was always cleaning the contacts! But then I designed a pcb that took the guts of an Atari pong game so that it could be integrated into a pong table. Then all those microprocessor eval boards started to become available and that was another story.
@"David Betz" - are you saying that instead of sitting in the the family room for an old dog's sake, that you are now sitting in it for your wife's sake?
No, I'm sitting there for my own sake. It's nice to have someone around while I'm working.
Don't you mean...
You were sitting there for the old dog's sake, and now your the "old dog" sitting there
All this talk of old video game machines reminded me of something (this might have been brought up here before)....
In the old days of CRT's, the scanline interaction was often instantaneous between the processor and the display. This made games really snappy, right up to the limits of human reflex.
Nowadays, these flat-panel displays may have 200ms of latency, since they buffer mutiple refreshes of data to do edge-smoothing and motion effects. This totally undermines the old experience. I notice on my 4k TV "monitors", there is a "game mode" that maybe reduces latency by foregoing effects.
It's kind of sad to think that those snappy interactions are now the exception, and not the rule.
Yes!
One reason I keep a couple nice CRT's.
I will say my plasma TV can be fast. It's video processor runs fast enough to deliver 120hz refresh, and in game mode, just blasts the pixels to the screen. For a while, there were "3D TV's" and I got one.
Figured it had to be fast to do 3D, and it is. (uses LCD shutter glasses, 60hz / eye)
A side effect is I can do mechanical CAD in full 3D. (cool, but tiresome actually) Anyway, that TV can do twitch games pretty well. It's capable of a new frame every 1/60 sec from either an analog input, or HDMI. Kind of big, and was expensive. In it's FAST mode, or game mode, there is a one frame @ 120hz delay. Not bad. It's not a CRT, obviously, but about as nice as these displays get for home gamers.
And, it's still a TUBE! Just a weird one. In it's fast mode, there is very little processing, and I've coded signals on the prop to abuse it a little. That abuse shows in fast mode, gets changed in normal processing mode. It's likely possible to make a demo that has invisible images in processed mode, viewable in fast or game mode. I never tried.
One abuse was making really quick pixels. Say it's an SD display mode, 480i or 240p. A P1 does these easily. Clock the prop higher, so that quick pixels are possible. (quadruple things up to mimic the slower timing) A CRT will just mix those together, or they won't be visible at all, depending on the bandwidth of the CRT circuits. Getting more grey scales, or colors works this way on analog displays, depending on their bandwidth.
The TV in fast mode will either ignore them, or change the nearest pixel by some amount, color or intensity. In normal mode, with the processors running, there is latency, but it may just show the pixel anyway, or it's completely ignored. Other strange things happen, like the pixels being present some of the time. Also, turning on the noise reduction processing can actually eliminate some pixels entirely. A lot is going on.
A big contrast can be seen comparing over the air HD broadcasts and what you might get over cable. We have one station here transmitting a full 1080p HD signal. It looks fantastic, and that's true in either mode. The same thing over cable looks very good when processed, and is a pixelated mess in fast, or game mode. Sometimes, without the processing, one can see the square regions where compression is too high. An explosion in an action film is one usually presenting these artifacts. The processors hide a ton of that. Cost is time, a few frames.
Since plasma TV's are no longer made, I am not sure what replaces them for speed. LCD displays do not hold up. Not fast enough. The newer Oled, etc... types likely are, but I don't know. I only look at new TV's every so often, and tend to get a great one, then hope it lasts so I don't have to do all that again.
A great game to test all this on is KABOOM, for the old VCS. That one does go right to human limits, and on a latency ridden display becomes something like being drunk as an experience.
Here is an interesting look at latency, from keypress to character on the screen:
Comments
One of the guys helping with the move said that we probably never had properly cooked corn because the tank was meant for about a thousand pounds and we were only cooking one or two hundred pounds at a time. The corn would cool off too quickly during steeping. I think he was right, because I always had to add more water than seemed reasonable into the grinder.
Reminds me of when we moved our pcb assembly plant. The thru hole solder line was 40 ft long. We unassembled at the mid point and the movers put a half on each semi. Was hairy watching a few forklifts lift in unison to put onto the semi, and off again at the other end.
Disassembled Thursday night, reassembled over w/e and back in full operation Tuesday. That included the SMT lines - we had 4 pick n place units too.
Good advice that guy has brought to the pot. Pity he wasn't at the crew, when the equipment has arrived at Red Bluff, for the first time.
Seeing it by the good side; possibly your wife wouldn't be that happy as she is, with the "Bye Bye, far away" scene and all the like!
During my seven marriages, a thing I've learned by myself (not without some pain...): Wives love when we let things go by.
Back in 1989 (during my second marriage), I was using about 150 square meters of space, only to accomodate my electronics shack contents. Now, being at the seventh one, I'm restricted to 12 square meters, and my present wife still complains...
Who understands them (women)?
Henrique
Tortilla - TaQOz
:thumb:
Bean
I can assure you that the tortilla thing was very serious.
Two year ago I was honored to be invited to Red Bluff. There I saw the barn and even the inner sanctum where P2 development was going on. The tortilla area was a very clean and professional installation that looked like it was all set to go into production.
Sadly, though I got some pictures inside the barn, tractors, machines, tools, stacks of wood like a typical barn, I did not get shots of the tortilla factory.
When it comes to wives and downsizing, I think you guys are still doing well. Just now I have been reduced to about 6 square meters for my desk, computers, and project pile. It's lucky that electronics is so small now a days.
But then it was overrun by children and now they think the own the place
Of course, it means I am single.
My younger brother has a Last Action Hero pinball machine that I would love to convert & control from a Prop someday, but of course that would wreck the under-the-hood retroness of it. In fact I had a lot of experience with fixing pinball and arcade machines in my teenage years and I was fascinated by some of the first microprocessor based video games at the time when many pinball machines were still relay based, I was always cleaning the contacts! But then I designed a pcb that took the guts of an Atari pong game so that it could be integrated into a pong table. Then all those microprocessor eval boards started to become available and that was another story.
@"David Betz" - are you saying that instead of sitting in the the family room for an old dog's sake, that you are now sitting in it for your wife's sake?
One of my pinball machines has a prop in it for doing sound and the dot matrix display. America's Most Haunted by Ben Heck. I even helped him a bit with the prop software for sounds.
Last Action Hero probably has a 6809 based CPU in it running at like 1-2Mhz maybe. The prop can run circles around it for computations.
Isn't it a 6808 CPU? Essentially a B grade 6802 with internal RAM disabled. Either way I could easily plug into that socket for a quick interface.
EDIT: seems to be a 68B09 according to the pcb overlay but the schematic says 6808? Ok, a 6809 for the sound and a 6808 for main so it seems.
Yeah older machines used 6802s and 6808s, then later machines started using 6809 variants. The newer machines from Stern (last 5-10 years) use arm variants.
In the old days of CRT's, the scanline interaction was often instantaneous between the processor and the display. This made games really snappy, right up to the limits of human reflex.
Nowadays, these flat-panel displays may have 200ms of latency, since they buffer mutiple refreshes of data to do edge-smoothing and motion effects. This totally undermines the old experience. I notice on my 4k TV "monitors", there is a "game mode" that maybe reduces latency by foregoing effects.
It's kind of sad to think that those snappy interactions are now the exception, and not the rule.
Most computer monitors these days have very low latency, many in the 5-6 ms range or even faster. But displays aimed at being TVs, on the other hand, are like you say with all that image processing and motion smoothing. Luckily most of them will allow you to turn off most of those features (and I usually do on mine).
It mainly impacts console gaming on TVs, it's to the point that music games (like rock band) have settings to account for the delay. They allow you to sync up the music with what you see on the screen, and then they account for that on the guitar input.
The place was, in fact, the house of my paternal grandparents, on the top floor of the wholesale and retail company that the family has until now, founded by my paternal grandfather in 1928, in another nearby address, and which was reinstalled there, since 1934.
I set up my own company, the 150 square meters, in 1992, after my father decided to end the activities of a children's clothing factory in which we worked together. The factory occupied 450 square meters, so we redistributed the space, and we rented the remaining 300 meters to tenants already occupying other buildings, which were interconnected in a central block.
Game addicts know every detail of the games, and they develop muscular memory and almost perfect timing with the action that takes place in the game environment.
They can anticipate and plan the next steps, aware of the effect that every decision they make will have on the development of the ongoing action.
For this reason, games need to evolve continually, with new scenarios and more challenging versions, or fans will lose interest and seek new titles, and new challenges.
Viewers, those who watch the evolution of all the action through the video screens, the mouths partially open, stand in suspense for the result, and celebrate the achievements.
It is the endless war: the cat runs after the mouse, the dog chases the cat, the woman climbs in the chair, terrified. The hero comes on the scene, kills the mouse and throws the corpse into the bin, puts an end to the dog-cat fight by sending the dog to the backyard where he will dig a bone. The lady, already safe and secure, grabs the cat in her lap, who purrs with satisfaction. The hero gets a kiss on the cheek, blushing.
Happy ending.
Another round is started at the game. A new adventure begins.
You were sitting there for the old dog's sake, and now your the "old dog" sitting there
<ducks for cover>
Yes!
One reason I keep a couple nice CRT's.
I will say my plasma TV can be fast. It's video processor runs fast enough to deliver 120hz refresh, and in game mode, just blasts the pixels to the screen. For a while, there were "3D TV's" and I got one.
Figured it had to be fast to do 3D, and it is. (uses LCD shutter glasses, 60hz / eye)
A side effect is I can do mechanical CAD in full 3D. (cool, but tiresome actually) Anyway, that TV can do twitch games pretty well. It's capable of a new frame every 1/60 sec from either an analog input, or HDMI. Kind of big, and was expensive. In it's FAST mode, or game mode, there is a one frame @ 120hz delay. Not bad. It's not a CRT, obviously, but about as nice as these displays get for home gamers.
And, it's still a TUBE! Just a weird one. In it's fast mode, there is very little processing, and I've coded signals on the prop to abuse it a little. That abuse shows in fast mode, gets changed in normal processing mode. It's likely possible to make a demo that has invisible images in processed mode, viewable in fast or game mode. I never tried.
One abuse was making really quick pixels. Say it's an SD display mode, 480i or 240p. A P1 does these easily. Clock the prop higher, so that quick pixels are possible. (quadruple things up to mimic the slower timing) A CRT will just mix those together, or they won't be visible at all, depending on the bandwidth of the CRT circuits. Getting more grey scales, or colors works this way on analog displays, depending on their bandwidth.
The TV in fast mode will either ignore them, or change the nearest pixel by some amount, color or intensity. In normal mode, with the processors running, there is latency, but it may just show the pixel anyway, or it's completely ignored. Other strange things happen, like the pixels being present some of the time. Also, turning on the noise reduction processing can actually eliminate some pixels entirely. A lot is going on.
A big contrast can be seen comparing over the air HD broadcasts and what you might get over cable. We have one station here transmitting a full 1080p HD signal. It looks fantastic, and that's true in either mode. The same thing over cable looks very good when processed, and is a pixelated mess in fast, or game mode. Sometimes, without the processing, one can see the square regions where compression is too high. An explosion in an action film is one usually presenting these artifacts. The processors hide a ton of that. Cost is time, a few frames.
Since plasma TV's are no longer made, I am not sure what replaces them for speed. LCD displays do not hold up. Not fast enough. The newer Oled, etc... types likely are, but I don't know. I only look at new TV's every so often, and tend to get a great one, then hope it lasts so I don't have to do all that again.
A great game to test all this on is KABOOM, for the old VCS. That one does go right to human limits, and on a latency ridden display becomes something like being drunk as an experience.
Here is an interesting look at latency, from keypress to character on the screen:
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computers-struggle-match-input-latency-apple-iie
It's not all in the display these days.
Should we do it right, and use a capable display, the P2 should land right where the Apple //e does. Could anyway. Maybe we don't care.
Side note, most 8 bit machines could have latency as low as 16ms, if not needing to scan a keyboard.
I think I am going to have to just build a shed, or something. Getting tired of not having much room.
Just joking.