Notices by Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club), page 3

Made a small difference in the world today: My several-times-daily "myGov Alert" phishing emails now point to a different URL, because I took the time to report it to the foreign domain registrar it used and they killed it. The new one has now also been reported, and the whack-a-mole continues.

(The site hides behind CloudFlare, surprise surprise, and I have zero faith in them doing anything with any reports beyond copying them verbatim to the people who run these scams, which is just stupid).

@foone I wonder if anyone ever made a gigantic light box for photography with Construx - that's going to be the first thing I build with these.

Introducing the second iteration of my #fakerbeams project. I wasn't happy with the results of emulating aluminium extrusion as-is, so this is an entirely new construction system designed from the ground up for #3Dprinting, heat-set inserts, and metric everything. Finished structures get M3-bolted together for strength, but prototyping is done with bits of 4mm doweling for speed - it took just minutes to pull apart the little cube and rebuild it into the bigger box!

@3dprinting@techhub.social @3dprinting@a.gup.pe

@foone my eyeballs feel sticky just looking at this photo

@foone I'm going to skip right past the horror of such a thing existing, and go right to pointing out that with that socket taken up by a mouse, you're also going to need to build a keyboard with a Centronics connector to match. Then, because your parallel port is taken, you just need a dot matrix printer you can hook up via PS/2 and you'll have the holy trinity of what the hell are you doing to this poor computer

@foone huh, apparently Rhino can *export* to Collada (.dae) files, but not *import* them without the help of expensive commercial converters. That might be out as an option (although it sounded promising).

Hey #3Dprinting folks, I have a file format question for you. I'm thinking about setting up a little site to act as a portfolio for my 3D designs and prints, with easily editable files alongside STLs and instructions. Do you have an opinion on what "source" file format I should include? I use Rhino 3D and my work tends to end up in .3dm files - does your modeler of choice open those? Screenshots below list every file format I can export to easily. @3dprinting@techhub.social @3dprinting@a.gup.pe

@foone how about the reverse: an analogue speedometer, and if your WPM drops below 50 a spring-loaded panel opens and an IC is ejected from its socket

@foone there's like eighty conductors in that thing - I'm terrified by the thought it could be some kind of external IDE nightmare

@foone @Loosf unsafe at any baud rate?

@foone

@foone a daughter board with IR, a gameport, and a floppy drive connector, sold as the FLOPPY BLASTER

@foone @kiwa "it abandoned Gollum, but then something happened that the disk did not intend"

@foone once again speedrunning the cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acknowledgement, I see

@foone @Variaxocellus an actual USB flash drive? 384kb? I need to know everything about this. Is it some weird special-purpose device like the HP USB Floppy Drive Key or was it actually sold as plain mass storage?

@foone ah yeah, that'd be doable. Reading from PS/2 keyboards is a solved problem, and pushing that input into an Arduino Xinput library should be easy enough. Another project on the pile, I guess.

@foone I'm not totally sure if it supports USB keyboards to any meaningful level. The hardware compatibility list is full of Xinput stuff specifically, so maybe that's where they focused support - the VS pad shows up as an Xbox 360 controller on Windows and that middle button opens the Xbox overlay.

That probably means the giant Gravis GamePad probably won't work as-is, but I'm pretty sure there's an Xinput implementation for Arduino I could reflash it with!

This week's acquisition. I'm a prolific collector of controllers, but it's rare that I actually want a game console to go with them - this is the second one I've ever bought, and the first was a second-hand MegaDrive in the 90s.

This is the EverCade Atomic Edition, and it's the only way to play the re-make of Duke Nukem 1. I won't have time to properly get into the game for a couple of weeks, but I am going to open it up and check out those gamepads, because of course I am. #retrogaming

Initial impressions: I don't mind it. That's a 3 metre cable, which lines up neatly with the intended loungeroom use, and while it's very lightweight, it feels sturdy and surprisingly wide, making it quite comfortable to hold.

The shoulder buttons are narrow and tough to reach, but feel like tactile switches. The action buttons do not - this is an unusual design choice. (There's no visible screws on the back, I suspect it's just plastic clipped together, so I'm not pulling it apart to look.)

Photo of the back. Not much going on here - you can see how flat it is. Shoulder button ridges like this often get in my way on smaller pads, but this one is vast enough that it's not an issue.

The yellow warning motif and colour are a bit cheesy, but this was made to celebrate a campy old 90s platformer, so that kind of fits.

The important question is: What does it feel like to *play* that old platformer on it? I'll let you know in half an hour or so!