James R Twine Blog

Author: James R. Twine

  • Ms. Pac-Man with no “Sprites” (Ghosts, Ms. Pac-Man)

    Ms. Pac-Man with no “Sprites” (Ghosts, Ms. Pac-Man)

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    James R. Twine
    in

    So, a gentleman reached out to me right before my fusion surgery asking me to have a look at his Ms. Pac-Man game. It was not showing sprites but was otherwise behaving correctly – it passed self test, and you could still see dots being eaten during attract mode, etc. Initial instinct was something wonky…

  • “Untested” Ms. Pac-Man PCB – Repaired

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    James R. Twine
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    Ordered an untested Ms. Pac-Man board off eBay for a fair price.  As an aside, remember that “untested” means the exact same thing as broken, especially when dealing with older hardware.  Older hardware (games) should be presumed to be broken unless proven otherwise, so bid/price accordingly.

  • New Pinball Trips GFCI but not a Normal Outlet

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    James R. Twine
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    So, a friend of mine had an interesting problem, he purchased a brand new pin that obviously tested and worked well before it was shipped to him, but as soon as he plugged into a GFCI socket in his garage, it tripped the GFCI outlet. They came and got the game, treated it again, said…

  • New Version of Black Inventors Image/Document

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    James R. Twine
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        There is an older image going around that lists common black inventors, but it is dated and the image quality is poor. I decided that it was time to generate new versions of it. So here you will find a PDF versions as well as PNG versions of the updated document. BlackInventors –…

  • My AI was Talking to Itself!

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    James R. Twine
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    So I was running an AI model using ollama to see what could be done with it as far as RAG and I left it sitting (supposedly) idle overnight and when I looked at it in the morning it appeared to have hallucinated a conversation, or at least prompting, by someone that was not there.…

  • Latest Version of CoinerUp!

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    James R. Twine
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    So more than a decade ago while I was in-between jobs (pay close attention to the manager red flags post) I tried my hand at a simple Arduino solution for using the Konami code in creative ways and I settled upon using it in a way to credit a game without having to add an…

  • Credit Devices for Free Play Usages

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    James R. Twine
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    So events like Free Play Florida (https://www.jrtwine.com/blog/?p=643) highlight the importance of actually having a way to play a game for free. To that end I am thinking of making available some minimally invasive button kits that can quickly be added to a game, to gain the ability to credit the game without opening it up.

  • Device Based Age Verification

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    James R. Twine
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    So Pornhub announced a couple of days ago that as of 1/1/25, Florida will be blocked from accessing the site. It has something to do with requiring Florida residents to enter their driver’s license (or NDID) numbers into the site in order to verify one’s age. So it raises the question: is it supposed to…

  • The Future of Computer Memory Architecture

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    James R. Twine

    So on Quora there is an author named Franklin Veaux.  He writes answers and comments on a lot of different topics and generally seems to have a good head on his shoulders and knows what he is talking about. One such topic that came up was the future of computer architectures with regard to system…

  • Old School, But New Log Format

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    James R. Twine
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    So I was thinking about a logging system I implemented almost 15 years ago to replace an existing one that lacked a standard way of presenting context and information.  I drew from how the VAX/VMS DCL interface returned status messages. Some examples: %DECnet-W-ZEROLEN, length of file i zero — SYS$SYSROOT:[SYSEXE]NET$CONFIG.DAT%SMP-I-CPUTRN, CPU #1 has joined the…