MegaDeKay

It isn't a good proxy. Couple examples: Apple sold laptops with wonky keyboards for years and still sells a mouse that charges from the bottom when the battery dies.

Comment · 20 days ago

I hear what you're saying but good written stuff takes longer to produce than a video so there's that much less of it.

What I've found pretty handy for learning FreeCAD is finding an existing model and messing around with it to see how the original creator did stuff. That's where I started with my pinball cabinet. Once you get the basics down it is much easier to pick up on new features, many of which are enhancements to existing functionality.

Comment · 20 days ago

The FreeCAD wiki is very good. The release notes for 26.3 are at https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_26.3 and those entries link to relevant sections of the wiki that go into more detail. For example, changes to the Measurement tool on that page link to https://wiki.freecad.org/Std_Measure where you'll see notes like "introduced in 26.3".

The wiki tells you what the tools do. For learning how to use those tools to model something, YouTube channels like Mango Jelly's are a better bet. The pace of FreeCAD development has definitely picked up since the 1.0 release

Comment · 21 days ago

I agree with your ordering of the various programs out there but FreeCAD 26.3 is now available as a release candidate with a wonderful collection of improvements. I'd think for many people, FreeCAD is now "good enough" for a lot of things. I'm building a virtual pinball cabinet and the whole thing is modeled in FreeCAD.

Mango Jelly's overview of some of the biggest new features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdTyFHY-5r4

Comment · 22 days ago

The IPS 800 x 480 display won't do it justice, I'm afraid.

Comment · 23 days ago

Well...

You can take a regular CRT and rewind the deflection coils on the yoke to work as a vector CRT display. Arcade Jason has a good video on how to do this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci9qiGVMF7s

Then you need a vector generator if you don't have an OG vector game. This one on Github is pretty good and can be connected to either an oscilloscope or vector monitor.

https://github.com/english1234/vstcm

If you use the vstcm to drive your rewound crt, you still have a problem. The deflection coils are very low impedance (around an ohm I think), so you need an amplifier stable at very low impedances that can generate a voltage sufficient to get deflection across the full screen in x and y. I think Arcade Jason was working on one of these too but I don't think it is out yet. ElectronAsh was working on one as well but I don't think he finished it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybGveLtlkA

https://github.com/ElectronAsh/Vector-XY-Deflection-Board

Or you could follow iz8dwf's amazing series on how he built a black and white vector monitor.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbKEoUHtoVucsrySlogDz...

Comment · 23 days ago

$199 when it was introduced in 1982. It was discounted a couple times after that after Milton Bradley bought them and got down to $100. That's a pretty decent price considering the Atari 2600 debuted in 1977 at $199.

It was basically a whole arcade machine, just a lot smaller :-)

Comment · 1 month ago

And passive SAR is a lot less accurate than active SAR.

There isn't much need for stealth in all this the same way there isn't for an optical spy satellite. The adversary knows it is there and what it is looking at. The adversary just doesn't know its exact capabilities, and there's not much they can do about it being up there that doesn't lead to a sudden military escalation of some kind.

Comment · 1 month ago

If you want something more powerful than MiSTer and have a bit of patience, there is the Replay R2 being developmed around the Agilex 5.

- Agilex 5 E-Series 043 (Replay2 phat) has 434,240 logic elements (LEs).

- Agilex 5 E-Series 013 (Replay2 lite) has 138,060 Logic Elements (LEs).

The website (https://www.fpgaarcade.com/news-2/) hasn't been updated in some time but the dev now has prototype boards that he's in the middle of bringing up. It is purpose built for arcade emulation and has tons of I/O, lots of memory (both SRAM and HyperRAM), and (on the phat) a PCI connector. One or both (can't remember which) accepts an ARM daughterboard for hybrid emulation. There's a Discord for it you can track down to follow its progress basically in real time as mikej progresses.

Comment · 1 month ago

The latter. Official MiSTer targets the DE10 nano.

Comment · 1 month ago

Check out the Superstation One [0]. Outer shell modelled after the original PS1. Optional optical disk dock. Simplified UI. Lots of outputs. Well priced.

[0] https://retroremake.co/pages/superstation%E1%B5%92%E2%81%BF%...

(Don't mind the strange characters in the URL above. That's a superscripted "one". Use https://retroremake.co/ if you feel better about that).

Comment · 1 month ago

Might the UGreen adapter mentioned in this Reddit post do the trick?

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1pkdfcm/ugree...

It was all the rage towards getting 4K 120 Hz VRR on Linux before AMD came along to contribute proper HDMI 2.1 support to the kernel. There is also mention in that thread of a CableMatters adapter that could be flashed with an alternate firmware but it wasn't as stable.