They’d be a good fit for more normal cash register POSes though. High rez isn’t as important so long as you can fit readable labels onto the buttons, the colours have to be bold but not quite primary, and it’s beneficial to have a decent amount of local memory and some kind of rudimentary networking (such as you can do over MIDI…) without necessarily any more local backing store than can fit on a single sided floppy… or indeed, a 128k, bootable ROMcart.

Just wonder how they implemented the touch interface? Serial port and custom decoder routines?

Most people … no use for it. But it was required by certain graphics, word processor and DTP packages, most of which would include a copy somewhere on one of the setup discs. Basically anyone who didn’t have a HDD didn’t miss it

I think the more basic Degas Elite art package also used some part of it to provide additional fonts (bitmap or vector? Not sure, as I never got that bit to work, as there was no documentation with my copy), but that’s about it.

Any IDE hard disk or SD card is likely to be miles faster than the available interface bandwidth, let alone what actual ST hard disks could achieve, so pop one of those in, fill it with an old 1Gb card from that digital camera in the back of your closet, and you’re laughing.

If one doesn’t exist I’ll be exceptionally surprised because you can get them for basically every 8-bit machine ever, most consoles, and the Amiga to boot.

Even if not IDE or SD, there should be a CF card adaptor, and although they’re typically more expensive than SD, a 1Gb one will cost buttons these days. Certainly a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to get hold of an Amiga-compatible 1 or 2Mb SRAM card!

The first one is just a minor filesystem stack size and sanity checking/error trapping oversight with potentially massive consequences, the latter is an inherent issue in using only the FAT12 filesystem (intended mainly for floppies and ancient 5 to 10mb Winchester drives) across your entire OS, rather than also cramming in support for FAT16 (with its then unimaginably massive 2Gb – or even 4Gb – limit). It’s annoying and stops you working with truly large files unless you come up with a trick method of splitting them across partitions, but at least it doesn’t cause lossage all by itself.

And they’re both presumably symptoms of both the crushed timescale and budget, unhealthy management culture, and strange choice to go for 192k of ROM (why not 256? I know it’s relatively expensive, but 192 is a strange number, and there was 12MB of unused address space that the CPU could use but the RAM system couldn’t…)

Quite why the screen modes always stayed limited at 4-bit even in the STe is a bit of a mystery to me, though. The Amiga used presumably exactly the same spec RAM, or even slightly slower (140 vs 120ns as a minimum…) but was able to support 4-bit at 720 pixels width, not just 320, and its 6-bit overall limitation, including the HAM weirdness, was down to space for hardware palette registers (32 of em plus the halfbrite trick) and coming with 256k as standard more than anything else. On a fixed-line-rate raster based system like most TV-compatible computers, the horizontal resolution vs colour depth formula has a fixed maximum value based on the memory bandwidth. Somehow, in the Miggy, the graphics memory bandwidth was more than double that of the ST (roughly 7.14Mb/s vs decidedly less than 4Mb/s), without actually slowing the CPU *way* down? Hmm.

Imagine if by some leap of imagination they’d managed to cram in a 256-colour mode (maybe a chunky 4-8-4 / 6-6-6 RGB or HSL direct colour one to avoid having to make up a monster ASIC with 256 colour registers), even if only at 256 horizontal resolution… but preferably at up to 384 (and who knows, perhaps even a planar, 224~320-rez 9-bit mode). Even without any other alterations, and only limited practical use, that still could have been a game changer, so to speak. Plus it would have allowed 16 colours in medrez (adding in an _official_ Amiga style interlace mode wouldn’t have been much trouble on top) for proper ANSI compatibility, and four greys in hirez, which would have extended its DTP / photo retouch lifespan. The Mac and PC crowd would have justifiably shat themselves, and the Amiga would have had to wave the Copper flag pretty hard.

One of those things you’d like to go back and hit people around the face with a fish to try and convince them to implement, these days… would probably have been a relatively minor change to implement, with a big impact. It’s not like adding a sprite engine or the like.

(Also take them to one side and go … for the love of christ, swap the endian-ness of your master colour palette attributes, don’t cut the corner that means your sound, floppy, printer and hard disk ports all run through the same chip, put the single sided drive’s head on the right way up, and have a quick root through the HDD code to see if you’ve accidentally left in some limitations that are meaningless in a floppy disk environment but crippling for mass storage… My ST was TOS v1.0 right to the end, and it was remarkably bug free and well-featured, we never really ran into any issues or felt short changed because of it… and in fact I sort of felt it took until W95 for the PCs to “catch up” – but those other bits were well known problems for many people, and especially for converting between ST and STe)

And… gah, I really should stop now

RIP Mike

Based on my few years at pediatric cancer hospice helping my volunteering ex, I can honestly tell that cut and prescribe medicine knows nuttin about healing cancer. They might mitigate symptoms by cutting/nuking/chemoing affected areas out.

Cancer, as any other disease, is a sign of immune system that is for some reason sub-par by self-inflicted physical and emotional over-taxing. More or less, a direct result of a wild goose chase, instead of having healthy chain of self-love mentioned above and letting go of what is damaging both physically and emotionally. Keep in mind, human body defeats cancer on daily basis – we have something like 20 cancer cells per month or per year, that our body naturally handles. Once you give your immune system half of chance of restoring and healing, it will do “wonders” for you. Having fun and hugs instead of chasing self-inflicted obligations also helps a lot
http://pleasanthacking.com/2012/02/28/vegan-views-on-cancer/
http://pleasanthacking.com/positive-plant-based-promos/

Ask on any vegan forum, when did anyone had a flu, or just a cold. You will get responses like “i forgot what it is” or “6 years ago before i went vegan” or “last week, but i did really stupid things by spreading myself too thin”
http://pcrm.org/kickstartHome/forum/messages.cfm?threadid=C0A19E87-D495-C0C8-F4A1E38956DE46D6