Coleco owners actually had the option to run both Atari and INTV games thanks to a cartridge adapter. My hick town's rich kid had that thing and essentially the full library of games for all three platforms. I have no idea how much the adapter cost, only that he could switch from Adventure for Atari to Space Battle to the Coleco version of Donkey Kong if he wanted. Coleco also had a refined version of the INTV gamepad, although IIRC it didn't support Mattel's overlays.

INTV had parallax scrolling and a hardware speech synthesis addon, as well as greater cartridge memory. You could also use both controllers as a single player for at least some titles, and each controller had a numeric keypad for vastly greater input capability.

As far as "good" games, I'd look at Space Armada, Space Battle, Discs of Tron, Beauty and the Beast, Neurosurgeon, Utopia, Dungeons and Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin and its sports titles, which were sort of universally regarded as better than the ones on the 2600. Some INTV games also had additional stages compared to the Atari versions, although I never had a access to a 2600 long enough to recognize which.

Samsung Care in the US is something that can be purchased within a month after retail sale on any new Samsung phone or tablet, or at time of purchase with direct sale from Samsung. In the USA, Samsung's repair partners are (were?) Best Buy and iBreakUFix.

My S23 was killed by, of all things, getting splashed with salt water by a dolphin, but my Samsung Care policy includes accidental damage because I am NOT trying to fix a device that's glass on all sides in the best of cases.

What I found out in the aftermath of this was that 1. Almost no Best Buy can actually repair Samsung phones. I visited nine of them before somebody leveled with me to say that the people qualified to do the repairs don't stick around and in any case they don't keep the parts on hand as a matter of policy. You have to find a store that is currently employing a qualified tech AND willing to order the parts for you. This is a very unlikely confluence of circumstances, and Best Buy will basically tell you to go away if you pull out a clearly broken Samsung device.

ibreakufix locations aren't nearly as easy to come by but they are apparently the only authorized repair provider that will consistently work on Samsung devices. In my case, I just needed someone to verify my phone was completely inoperable in a way that's not worth fixing so I could get trade-in value on a new S24. The closest location to me was about an hour's drive, but I'd spent an entire day driving between Best Buy locations before somebody finally told me the deal with it.

All of this is intensely frustrating. I used to be able to fix my own goddamned phone. LG phones prior to the G8 could be fully disassembled to discrete parts in under a minute with an eyeglass-sized screwdriver. I just don't want to mess with delaminating the glass off the back of newer devices.

One of my ~20 year old students is big on retro-computing. I gave him a Sparc 20 to play with and I've been helping him with his personal project, which is to get a fully stable dual CPU 486DX/50 working. There's a lot of experimentation with it because finding parts from that time period that will tolerate the 50MHz system bus has not been easy. I'm not sure it would've been easy even in the mid-90s.

At last, I will finally know what all the Brazilian femboys on pornhub are saying!

Its sad, dac/amps make headphones sound so much better. The LG phones had them, but LG is discontinued. Think the Sony and Asus gamer phones have them. Samsung tablets don't have headphone jacks anymore. But entry level samsung and motorola do. So the high end and low end users use wired headphones, but the middle class will gladly buy bluetooth?

Its strange, I can understand replacing sdcards since they could include a TB internally, but most are still cheaping out on internal storage.

But dac/amps are still light years better than bluetooth. I use one in my car to hook up my phone, its louder and better than bluetooth.

For a world with needs/options, removing a simple headphone jack seems very insulting to users.

Prob not a bad idea to keep AM around, since many rural communities still have AM.
Even better include HD Radio for AM, for better quality.

https://hdradio.com/all-digita...

As for cost, that doesnt really make sense, as they build everything in bulk for their car lines.
Its bad enough many cars dont include AUX jacks anymore.

Removing simple things that people use, to save a few pennies is kinda absurd.

I use IRC!

Apple is allergic to proper cooling on Apple silicon in the first place, at least based on the Macbook Airs I've had to deal with. The graph of CPU activity winds up looking like a saw blade, with the CPU ramping up and immediately dropping once it hits its thermal threshold, if you give it something taxing to chew on, like Prime95.

I understand the limitations of Apple's SoC and the reasoning for not allowing RAM and storage upgrades, but IMO at the very least they should offer the option for some sort of high speed caching tier, lest the low spec versions of its hardware turn in to e-waste years before the higher end versions.

It just sucks to see that on $1000+ computers.

Recording Engineers generally try to master separately for vinyl if they are allowed to do so, but whether or not that is actually done depends on the record label and artist's wishes. Most of the time, the label wants to do the thing that costs the least. Given the opportunity, those same engineers will also create separate mixes for mono and stereo and possibly some flavors of multichannel (e.g. Atmos) as well.

I don't like the way vinyl sounds and I hate the idea of a medium that degrades every time it's used, but my much-younger partner generally thinks of vinyl as decorative anyway. It's the only physical audio media she owns and we definitely don't have a turntable, either.

Panasonic definitely wins for video features overall but someone used to shooting on a contemporary hybrid mirrorless camera from another manufacturer will definitely have a "WTF is this?" moment for dealing with its contrast-based autofocus system.

I've never seen a Blackmagic camera in the wild, but I do have a couple Panasonic MFT cameras and every time I use one, I'm reminded that I have to be so much more deliberate in my shooting compared to the "point in vaguely the right direction" of my newer gear.

As I understand it, the best you'll get out of a prosumer body like a Sony a1 or Canon R5 is 14 stops of dynamic range, while the state of the art for cine cameras is more like 18 stops. 14 stops is still pretty insane, but cine cameras have continued to improve as well.

You also have to consider that the big boys use sensors that deliver uncompressed 444 chroma subsampling while consumer mirrorless cameras generally only offer 422.

Even a "crappy" secondhand $10000 Arri Alexa FHD camera is going to have that output advantage in terms of color data, plus all the inputs and outputs for secondary monitoring, timing sync, zoom-by-wire et al that more or less aren't seen on prosumer cameras.

Fuji and Hasselblad have "medium format" sensors that aren't crazy-exotic. You can get a 100MP GFX100 with a 44x33 sensor for about $6500, although it's primarily a still camera.

Beyond that, you really have to look at Arri, Sony and Red cine cameras for large format digital. Even then the digital output will be 4.5k to 8k, something you can also get on pretty mainstream Canon (R5), Sony (a1) and Nikon (z9) cameras.

This got labelled a troll but Nikon buys all its sensors from Sony and has third-rate subject detection compared to Canon and Sony, which trade back and forth for superiority in that area. It's basically a lens company that hasn't given up on camera bodies yet in the way that Sigma has. There is some validity to the idea that it's a very pedestrian company. Maybe buying Red is its trip back to full relevancy, but I know a lot of enthusiasts who migrated to Sony or Canon when they went mirrorless and the only people I know are still on Nikon bodies have done so because Nikon is the system with the best overall selection of long zooms for wildlife photography or are still shooting on older SLR bodies.

European-like typing detected.

Rail travel in the USA is extremely limiting outside the northeastern USA. Boston to Washington DC, OK, fine. Do you want to go west of that? I hope you wanted to go through Chicago or New Orleans.

There are some states in the continental USA that are barely or not served at all by Amtrak (Kentucky, Idaho, Kentucky, (east) Tennessee, South Dakota and Wyoming) and there may not be any rail services that connect to metropolitan local light rail. In some place, such as Las Vegas, the "Amtrak Stop" is a bus depot that takes travelers to a completely different state before they get on a train.

I lbought an ORD to LGA round trip flight for $60, inclusive of fees, yesterday. The flight takes an hour and a half. Amtrak wants ~$170 and needs 19 hours to go one way. If I were to try to take Amtrak from relatively close South Bend, Indiana and Kalamazoo, Michigan, I'd need more than 12 hours for what is at most a 90 minute drive.

The USA screwed up by not prioritizing rail as a way to travel. I'd love to take trains more places. But trains tend not to go places Americans need them or on anything like a desirable schedule.