Sorry for the deveopment downtime everyone.

I have recently begun a major rework of the admin script which requires some additional programs on the backend of the system.  This will necessitate a new ISO to be released.

The design phase is about 30% done at the moment.

Primary focus has been placed on the below listed points.

• The admin script should run in both the X window system and at the text console
  • In theory this will allow the customization of the cabinet while using the arcade monitor (will need testers)
• The admin script should have a backup function to allow any or All of the following:
  • Basic system configuration
    • Machine name
    • Network Configuration
  • Emulators
    • Configuration
    • Application
    • Data files
  • Monitor
    • Configuration
      • Refresh Rates
      • Xorg config
      • Custom Modelines
  • Menu Systems
    • Configuration
    • Application
    • Data Files
• The Current Config should be easily visible from the admin script
• There should be a restore to Defaults setting for each section of the system
• The Import Emulators Should (finally) allow for Internet installation of new Emulators
• A New Import Menu Systems will be created for the possible addition of different Menu programs
• The Import Roms Section will be revamped to try to improve the way Roms are handled
  • This will include the ability of the Imported Emulator to include scripts to process and validate imported ROM files.
• All Configuration data will be stored in an easliy searchable datastore
  • As of this writing, SQLite3 will be used to manage this.

Quite a bit going on I know.  The eventual goal for me in doing this is to support SDLMame in it's most current version.  While still allowing for the use of AdvMAME.

Thank you all for your patience.

John

After beeing now for 2 months in KL, I am almost settled down. My office is usable, internet is working and my cab got a place in my living room. In other words, now I will continue working on this project. Luckily we have JIcemanL, who answered many many question in our forum and kept developing the admin and setup script.
I am looking forward to have a new version of Lincade with some improvements very soon.
Before I moved, I bought the domain lincade.org. Now I have created a forwarding to our lincade forum, when visiting www.lincade.org. Nothing special, I just thought the project, which is basically just a part of pc2jamma.org, became so big that it deserves its own domain.

We arrived in KL und now already 10 days here. Just finished my first work week and on this weekend we will continue looking for a new home.

If everything runs fine, our furniture arrives on the 23. of december and I will be back at the project early in January.

We are here in the last preperations for the move to Malaysia. All contracts are cancelled, both cars and my motorcycle are sold. Got rid of a lot of stuff with the help of ebay. I even sold some parts of my Commodore collection.

The countdown is running now. Just a few days left until the 25th of November when we are leaving germany.

I hope to be back at the project around the end of december!

I created a german blog about our move: www.banko-kl.com. So if you are interested what we are doing, you will get an idea on that website.

This is a reason to party. We have today exactly 500 Lincade 0.040 downloads. When I started the project I wouldn't mind that so many people will using it.

Good news for all users, there is a new release planned within the next weeks.

A week ago i stumbled over the Nokia 770 Internet tablet on ebay. More than a year ago I have read some news around this device. But it was with 379,- Euro quite expensive. Nokia already released a successor (N800) with more RAM and a little bit faster CPU. So the price now was lowered to 159,- Euro and the device is still available. The lowered price made it very interesting to me.

The Nokia 770 is equipped with a 800x480 pixel display, WLAN, Bluetooth and (the most important part) it runs on Linux. The operating system is a Debian derivate and the GUI was built with GTK+.  Its easy to port applications because there is a real X-Server running. This is a big advanagte in my eyes compared to the Zarus, where Qtopias was running.

In the last 6 weeks all my attention went to a not computer related topic. We plan to move from Germany to Malaysia. I got a job offer and applied successfully. It was a lot of work to get all the paperworks done, which are necessary to request for a work permit. Its still unsure if we move or not., because we dont know if I will get the permit or not. We hope to get this information on the 26th.

If we really move be sure, that all my arcade stuff will go together with me to Kuala Lumpur. The project is still alive but there won't be much progress in the next two months then...

I plan to use this here in the near future (including the next weeks) more as a personal blog that everybody will be able to get an idea, when I will be back in business.

The last weeks I invested some freetime to get my C64DTV upgraded. The biggest thing I did was adding a SD-Card based Floppy emulation. This nice thing is driven by a microcontroller and called MMC2IEC. Another thing which I have planned for my DTV was, to change the Commodore standard kernal to a patched one and to modify the bootup behavior. There are some useful tools like dtvboot  from Daniel Kahlin which will make an "interactive" startup process possible. For that you have to re-flash the DTV and mine was equipped with an unsupported flash chip. But I had luck, Daniel was just working on that and supplied me with a first pre-alpha version of his updated DTV-Flash, capable to deal with SST-Flash chips. I tried it and it worked perfect for me. Now my DTV comes pretty close to a real Commodore 64.


I also added a color fix, you have to solder some additional resistors onto the board of your DTV because the video output is really terrible without.

After that I started to get bored and thought using the 80 column mode on my Commodore 128 is something which is really essential to me. Unfortunately I own a Commodore 1084S-D2 which is not equipped with the capability of working with digital RGB. I hav to solder a special cable with some resistors and diodes which will "convert" the digital signal to an analog one. I was surprised how well this is working. After years of abstinence I was able to boot CP/M again. This was a kind of MS-Dos feeling using it, because it looks pretty similar. Many of you know, that Microsoft took a lot of "inspiration" for MS-Dos from CP/M. Time for me to get some cp/m software and start programming in Turbo Pascal 3.0 again. I love this retro feeling.