Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.314 : Easter Egg !

Written by cafealpha no comments
That's a bit late for Easter, but did someone noticed the one hidden in Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.314 ?

Easter Egg in Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.314

This can be triggered by a key combo from Pseudo Saturn Kai main menu and ODE image selection menu. It's available in both lite and full versions of the firmware and can also be triggered from RmenuKai too.
Keys sequence was changed after taking the video above, so don't try to guess it from there ! Unsurprisingly, keys sequence is more complex in Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.314


Why such kind of technical demo in Pseudo Saturn Kai ? Simply because it was fun to implement
Additionally, this is also a small wink to the good old times I was daily using a TI-89 calculator : this Easter egg was ported from Voxel2Space demo by Kai Kostack.

I still keep using my TI-89, but way less more than when I was a student. It's actually quite handy to do quick math or binary to (hexa)decimal conversions at work : the more Windows evolves, the more horrible its builtin calculator becomes (seriously, my eyes are about to bleed each time I see the Windows 10 calculator ), so it's good to have a physical calculator at reach of hands




Let's play a game with this Easter egg : the first one to find the correct keys combo will be rewarded by a Gamer's Cartridge from my own collection !

During the last years, I was gathering Gamer's Cartridges with custom 3D printed shells and PCBs from various production batches and different times of the development of the cartridge.
Rather than just putting on sale, theses are kept for good occasions, and finding this keys combo is one of such kind of good occasions
Custom cartridge shell .
Thanks to zone66x for designing
and printing them


Rules :
 - Post the correct keys combo in the comments of this article.
 - This is limited to one Gamer's Cartridge, for one lucky Pseudo Saturn Kai user.
 - Don't forget to indicate an email address where you can be contacted !
   This is necessary for offering the reward.
 - Choice of the Gamer's Cartridge shell color etc is at my own discretion.
 - Application will end in December 31st, 2019 : if nobody find the key combo until that time, I shall re-use this Gamer's Cartridge for similar kind of games with my Saturn projects.

Read more Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.314 : Easter Egg !

Long time without using my TI89

Written by cafealpha no comments
Classified in : etc, Mylife Tags : ti89, software, bug
Today was a nostalgia day : I uploaded program to my good old TI-89 via "$4 parallel link cable" I made around 15 years ago, when I was high school student

data/images/20150317_ti89_parallel_link.tb.jpg
My TI-89 and its "$4 parallel cable", still working

First, I wanted to use my 7 years old desktop PC with parallel printer port available ... but it stopped to work after 2 minutes of usage. However heavy washing of CPU fan (yeah, "washing" : I put it in the water, then used my hair dryer to dry it) solved this
I then tried to install TILP program, but I was lost in installing GTK (), and link related DLLs ... a real nightmare, and it didn't worked too ... (Sorry Lionel and other TILP authors ! Your soft is great, but its installer is a real piece of crap)

So I tried even older W32Tran8x, a program made under Win9x era.
Except DlPortIo that needed to be updated to work under Windows7, everything worked fine !!!
data/images/20150306_w32tran.png
W32Tran8x, with its good old nearly wintage Win3.x-like file browser
The simpler the better 
I will try to keep this way of thinking when creating Saturn programs or cartridges

Edit : I successfully installed GTC, an oncalc C compiler. Thank you Pollux (GTC author) for your great work 
It's funny to program on a machine where sizeof(int) equals 2.

Read more Long time without using my TI89

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