Post by henrik51 on Nov 8, 2005 18:36:51 GMT -5
Tip #1: Don't go to an expo on 5 hours of sleep. It causes you to do things like talk with Jeri Ellsworth for 15 minutes and walk away having no clue who she is until she later says, "When are you going to get Qlink running on the DTV?" She is quite fascinating to talk to, especially when she starts talking about her work reversing the SuperCPU and how it triggers fake RAM writes. What bothered me is that I acutally understood why the trick would work.
Tip #2: Lots and lots of printed material. It's possible to tell everyone what you did, but it gets very hard on the throat.
Tip #3: Take an expendable lackey. They are very useful. Especially when circuit breakers start tripping one by one.
That aside, people were VERY impressed. Assistants #1 and #2 were roving around the room and heard lots of people talking about "The QuantumLink guys".
Formal recognition was:
Third place in class for recreation
And two special awards I can't seem to remember at work.
So, it went very well.
One of the judges said to me after the show, "You guys may not realize what a big thing you have done." People are impressed, and there is lots of hard work by several people here that were needed to make this happen.
Had an interesting encounter with a person who works for the licensing division of Time Warner. He was amused at how much checking we had done on the legalities, but he gave a very interesting point of information. "Don't force them to notice you. Don't even ask for permission, as they will probably have to say no."
Jeri was very interested in what we were doing, and gave me some tips on how the hummer game might be modded to support qlink. She was not able to expose !FLAG2, so the built in RS232 driver may not work. The system only supports a generic NMI. RJs will definately not work. The autoloader would have to be patched to generate a valid colorburst (that's what I think is going on in B/W mode, as people are calling it). I can, and do intend, to write a program to extract the files from a qlink .d64 and turn them into normal commie loadable programs. Then it's just a matter of rewriting DSC to issue standard load commands. Then maybe we can look at putting qlink into the flash. Jeri said, something to the degree of, "If you get it working, I'd use it!"
This would also let us begin exploring the software in earnest, writing wifi (Jeri's suggestion here, again) and other such drivers. That may need to happen if the built in RS232 routine is too pedantic. Once all the files are just loadable commie programs, we can easily upgrade the software.
Another mad idea I had is to work around all these issues by acutally making our own console, buying the needed cores from Jeri, and making a portable qlink system. Of course, that takes massive investment. But as she pointed out, "It's really up to the manufacturer what the chip does." But, if we prove the idea feasable, how many people would buy a c64 dtv preloaded with tons of public domain software, and the hidden feature to decompress and flash when you attempt to image a qlink disk with it.
Tip #2: Lots and lots of printed material. It's possible to tell everyone what you did, but it gets very hard on the throat.
Tip #3: Take an expendable lackey. They are very useful. Especially when circuit breakers start tripping one by one.
That aside, people were VERY impressed. Assistants #1 and #2 were roving around the room and heard lots of people talking about "The QuantumLink guys".
Formal recognition was:
Third place in class for recreation
And two special awards I can't seem to remember at work.
So, it went very well.
One of the judges said to me after the show, "You guys may not realize what a big thing you have done." People are impressed, and there is lots of hard work by several people here that were needed to make this happen.
Had an interesting encounter with a person who works for the licensing division of Time Warner. He was amused at how much checking we had done on the legalities, but he gave a very interesting point of information. "Don't force them to notice you. Don't even ask for permission, as they will probably have to say no."
Jeri was very interested in what we were doing, and gave me some tips on how the hummer game might be modded to support qlink. She was not able to expose !FLAG2, so the built in RS232 driver may not work. The system only supports a generic NMI. RJs will definately not work. The autoloader would have to be patched to generate a valid colorburst (that's what I think is going on in B/W mode, as people are calling it). I can, and do intend, to write a program to extract the files from a qlink .d64 and turn them into normal commie loadable programs. Then it's just a matter of rewriting DSC to issue standard load commands. Then maybe we can look at putting qlink into the flash. Jeri said, something to the degree of, "If you get it working, I'd use it!"
This would also let us begin exploring the software in earnest, writing wifi (Jeri's suggestion here, again) and other such drivers. That may need to happen if the built in RS232 routine is too pedantic. Once all the files are just loadable commie programs, we can easily upgrade the software.
Another mad idea I had is to work around all these issues by acutally making our own console, buying the needed cores from Jeri, and making a portable qlink system. Of course, that takes massive investment. But as she pointed out, "It's really up to the manufacturer what the chip does." But, if we prove the idea feasable, how many people would buy a c64 dtv preloaded with tons of public domain software, and the hidden feature to decompress and flash when you attempt to image a qlink disk with it.