u/Scoth42

Yeah, Wall Street Kid is definitely an odd case. I can't imagine too many kids who would be excited to play the stock market, and I think it might be a little too silly to interest adults who might be into things like that.

Another one that comes to mind is Aerobiz, a business simulation about airlines and airports. It was also on computers where I could see that making some sense, but I can't imagine there was a lot of draw on the SNES or Genesis/MD. I still managed to find a copy cheap in the wild awhile back so it's not unobtainium or anything.

You're in luck as it looks like the Commodore 116 uses a regular 9VDC input and not the collection of odd voltages and both AC and DC of the C64/128 and such.

You're almost always going to be better off using a modern replacement PSU, especially for DC. Older ones had various failure states with some of them (like the Atari 8-bit "Ingot" supply) notorious for overvolting and blowing computers up. Simple AC to AC adapters tended to be a bit more robust.

At any rate, I don't know much about shipping to your area but somewhere like https://en.retrogamesupply.com/products/power-supply-for-commodore-16 ships to Europe, at least, and has ready to go power supplies. Something to note, though, is it looks like it's center negative. This is backwards of the majority of plugs, so if you want to try to reuse one you already have, make very sure either it's center negative or you rewire it. 9VDC itself is reasonably common so you may already have something that can work if the plug fits and it's center negative or easy to convert.

For video, it looks like it uses the same DIN plug the rest of the Commodore line used to provide at least composite out available at that place above and several other sellers, and standard RF via RCA out. Some "modern" TVs might still support the old composite input or even analog RF input, but those have been disappearing over the last decade or so and I'm not sure that any in the last few years still have it. If yours doesn't, you'll have to look into converters. There are cheap ones that convert to HDMI on Amazon and similar that are kind of crap, but would work well enough to play around with if that's your goal. From there you could go onward to full on scalers and frame doublers and such to get actually good results from at a cost.

Seems they missed a slash, https://www.dansnoscoeurs.fr/suzy-couget/4348730 works.

It's probably "real" but badly refurbished. I got a similar one for my T430 that had similar issues. They're usually sprayed with some kind of texturizer that hides wear and feels kind of junky, and will wear off in ugly spots very quickly. If you lightly scratch a keycap with a fingernail and it comes off easily then it probably has it. Real keycaps shouldn't scratch off like paint (not saying to dig in, don't want to damage it, just it should be easy to tell if it has something sprayed on it). It also can interfere with the buttons, and mine had some of spongy crappy replacement trackpoint too. And on top of all that, it clearly had a couple of its keycaps replaced with the non-backlit versions (or maybe third party ones) which left them much darker with the backlight on, like what you're saying.

I put in a claim with eBay (since it was listed as New and clearly wasn't) and the seller refunded me without question and told me to keep it. So I'm assuming they knew what they did and didn't want to mess with it. With some elbow grease with 99% IPA to get the gunk mostly off, a replacement legit trackpoint nub, and some time the buttons have "loosened" up a bit and feel good enough to use, but I'd have returned it if they wanted me to because I paid for a new one and it wasn't.

They've been back and forth and squirrely on it. After some initial Sims 5 discussion they pretty much confirmed there will be no Sims 5 (at least in the immediate future) while working on "Project Rene". From there, Project Rene shifted to a "mobile first" project, which made it a little uncertain what it meant for the non-mobile game as it seems like it's set to be a mobile spinoff rather than a direct sequel/remake/whatever.

Since then they've talked about a "Project Lotus" being put on hold (which may or may not be Rene, it's all rumors at this point) and a focus on "Project Evergreen", which also is a bit vague.

Sorry, I could have been more clear that I meant EA/Electronic Arts. They released a bunch of games for Atari 8-bit (and other 8-bit platforms), though mostly publishing them than direct development themselves outside of a handful.

You are correct that Westwood mostly did ports of existing 8-bit stuff to 16-bit platforms but they did a handful of 8-bit stuff too late in the C64/A]['s lifespan.

It mostly comes down to what responsibility, if any, AI agents and their companies have to follow instructions, rules, and guidelines.

If I give a credit card to someone and say "Go buy me a cheap hammer from the hardware store" (whether it's a personal credit card and trusted friend or corporate credit card and an employee) and they run off and buy a $20k of stuff for themselves, they're still going to get charged with theft/embezzlement/etc even if I gave them access to the card. And I don't think it'd hold up in court if, as you handed them the card, they said "Okay, but I'm not responsible and can't be held accountable if I spend $20k instead of just buying a hammer."

Or likewise if I maybe have an IT fulfillment company that I have handle my purchases for me, I tell them I need two Macbook Pros for two new devs in my company. If the human working that ticket screws up and charges me and ships me two pallets of Macbook Pros, the company would almost certainly take responsibility for that and correct it assuming there's a good paper trail and documentation of me specifically asking for two individual Macbooks and not two pallets. Plus they'd likely know I'm a small company of 20 people who has never bought more than a machine or two at a time and thus unlikely to need five pallets of the things, which a human working it ought to be able to catch. I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure they'd have problems trying to indemnify themselves for mistakes like that in any contract or terms of service as well.

So the question is how does that apply to AI agents and their companies, if at all? If I connect an AI agent to my bank account and specifically tell it to schedule me a haircut at my favorite salon (which I expect to run me $40-$60) and order me some specific average tires for my car and schedule an appointment at my favorite tire shop (maybe $1000 if they're fancyish tires), and then a $20k tire mounting and balancing machine shows up at the shop instead of tires because it screwed up, is that my fault for giving it access? Is it the agent's fault for screwing it up? Does the agent's company take responsibility for that because they ultimately created the agent and were working on the request? I'm not sure there's good answers for that (legally).

I don't think Nintendo will able to do much against the AI companies directly. Even governments and much larger companies are struggling with what to do with AI companies and their training/outputs/etc. If there was ever a full-on industry-wide pushback where companies actually banded together to push back, then I could see them joining in on that.

There's plenty of precedent of Nintendo going after people releasing code and assets directly ripped from or unauthorized use of things, whether the keys and piracy details from the Switch emu to the various fangames like that Metroid 2 remake. If the people doing it are smart they'll make sure to distribute only the new/provably not Nintendo stuff like the Ship of Harkinian people where they're distributing nothing copyrighted and require people to bring along their own Completely Legally Dumped From Their Own Cartridges roms. Nintendo has plenty of practice going after the rulebreakers and I don't think it'll stop anytime soon.

I do wonder if we'll start seeing attempts at AI-resistant stuff that makes decompiling and all that harder, but once you have the unencrypted binary in-hand the game is pretty much already lost.

Best case scenario - they sell the franchise and IP to a new studio that is able to continue it as-is (and maybe roll back some of the recent terrible changes, stabilize the code base, or maybe give us a Sims 5.)

Worst case scenario - They rip out pretty much any and all inclusivity, leaving players with a husk of a game strictly enforcing gender and "traditional" roles.

Secondary worst case - They cancel the whole thing as too far gone to fix, especially if they actually start losing enough sales and profit from the latter.

In general, sci fi often reflects and comments on current events and situations through a lens of the future, often with allegory and metaphor. Star Trek did it more blatantly than Mass Effect generally did, but still. There was some of it (I'll admit I haven't played ME3 and maybe 2/3 of ME2 and it's been awhile, but I have the Legendary Collection in my backlog to pick up at some point...)

But more to the point, why shouldn't it exist? There are heraldry/coat of arms that are still in use (either fairly directly or derivations of) now after 800-1000ish years. There are flags of some countries still in use dating back hundreds of years too. So it's not beyond belief that current symbols might still be in use far into the future.

The pride/et al flags are also a little different since most flags tend to represent nationalities, family lines, maybe individual states/cities/etc. Just because we haven't seen one in-game (I don't think?) doesn't mean there isn't a United North American States flag that incorporates elements of the US, Canadian, and Mexican flags somehow. But someone who wasn't born there, maybe has never been to Earth, and has no particular connection to it may not care enough to fly one even if they may feel connected to it ideologically. But flags like the pride flags represent people specifically and can be used by anyone in or supporting the cause without any connection to land, families etc. Plus space is Big. Really, Really Big. There could be tons of contemporary flags and/or derivative symbols in use in places that we just haven't seen.

Of course, the counterpoint is that the Pride flags aren't the only examples of that, and thus why them, which I don't really have a particularly good answer for other than pointing back at the sci fi/future stuff being a window into current times and events. With that being a big part of current commentary. Whether it's good representation or corporate pandering/virtue signaling is another question all together and above my paygrade, especially considering it's EA, but in any case there's no particular reason pride flags couldn't exist.

I still have a bunch of the "album cover" releases for their Atari 8-bit games that highlighted the game, the developers, gave blurbs about the devs and the game, maybe even anecdotes about it. And basically every single one of their games (whether directly developed or chosen and published) were somewhere between at least decent to excellent. I miss those days.

Sure, but the vast majority of mainstream console games were at least fully functional games that could be played beginning to end without issues even if they may have some bugs and glitches. It was very rare, even by the time of the Master System/NES/etc, for a mainstream game to have an actual gamebreaking bug that made it uncompletable. A few arcade ports or style games that were endless like their arcade counterparts did end up with similar killscreens for similar reasons, though plenty others did just endlessly continue with the score potentially overflowing or wrapping back to zero. And let's not talk about unlicensed junk like Action 52...

And most of the computer games with issues like that (that one RoboCop game on (I think) C64 comes to mind) tended to be budget titles to begin with released on short schedules for low prices. Most of the bigger titles from more established devs/publishers even by the early 80s also worked fine end to end even if they too may have some glitches or issues now and then. It was rare enough that the few exceptions are so notable that they come up repeatedly like the aforementioned RoboCop, the MS-DOS port of TMNT with the impossible jump, etc.

You don't. Arcade games at the time didn't have an ending. You played until you died, and competed for high score. Typically they looped through the levels or hit a ceiling of difficulty.

It's just some people got so good at them that the game died first, which I guess counts as "beating" the game but not "finishing" it.

It wasn't really until home consoles became a thing that games started shifting to have actual endings, because they no longer needed to eat quarters. Since then there's been some arcade games that actually do have full endings too, but they tend to be very unfair and difficult to get to since again the goal is to eat as many quarters as possible.

I mean, that was just sort of how 80s and into the 90s cartoon themes worked. Nearly all of them consisted of the name repeated in one way or another.

It wasn't a choice, it was a quirk of how the program worked when the developers didn't expect people to get that far and things broke for various reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSlPHLAGWHA talks about the Donkey Kong one.

You get what you pay for with converters/scalers. It takes a decent amount of computing power to do it well, which is why they tend to start at moderately expensive and work their way up to hundreds of dollars. The super-cheap Amazon Specials are almost all going to be terrible. I recently picked up the new RetroTink 6X CE and have been very happy with it.

I don't know whether the AX3 vs. AX3s are much different but this auction has bunch of pictures of one:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/186163532007

Liquor stores have been the classic place to get boxes for a long time. They typically have a fairly constant supply coming in, they're usually pretty sturdy and may even come with handy dividers, and sometimes they'll even be grateful for you taking them so they don't have to flatten them/deal with them.

I remember years ago the church I was going to got a new pastor and he moved into his new office with a bunch of liquor boxes, and it looked kind of hilarious.

I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with it, it just tends to be poorly done in Mary Sue/Marty Stu sort of ways, or maybe barely disguised writer's kinks that are shoehorned in in ways that don't make sense.

I wish we could ban this source. Every single one of them are these stupid meaningless clickbait things.

I think Goldship is the name of the shop rather than the case, i've seen several variations on it including some pretty much identical ones with different names. Some links like this one suggest they were custom, but it's hadr to be sure. https://www.instagram.com/p/DerpryVFODc

OG Kirk wasn't really reckless or a cowboy at all. He was described as by-the-book and even a bit of a stick in the mud several times. It wasn't really until the mid and later movies that we saw Kirk really do much remotely cowboyish, and it was still not especially reckless and for the greater good. Spock was the one criticized for his "Cowboy Diplomacy."

Abramsverse Kirk, yeah, sure, but ya know.

To answer your question - I think Jake Sisko would have grown into a good captain had he pursued Starfleet. He handled a few times of crises well, did decently under pressure, and would have had the guidance of his father's upbringing to mold him. Along with the experience of interacting with lots of different people and cultures on the station, seeing war and what it does, and all that.

I think it's a little tricky to judge Harry Kim from what we saw. Voyager was his first assignment as a new and untested Ensign. We saw him grow over a few years, but basically everyone else on the ship had more experience than him.

He also was valedictorian of his class, requested Voyager, and was assigned as senior staff operations officer right out of the academy on what would have been among the newest and shiniest ships, so clearly he's not a nobody.

It varies by area and specifics, but in a lot developing countries and areas it's way easier and more reliable to throw up a cell tower than it is to build out land-based internet connections. Places like the remote parts of Africa, maybe India for example.

There's only a couple straightforward ways to do it - one is to use something like an old version of WindowBlinds that supports Win98 and hope there's a Win3.x skin. This should be able to fully skin it. Alternatively, you can replace the shell= line is system.ini with progman.exe to get Program Manager back, but it's still not going to quite work and look like Win3.x since all that's embedded deeply in the core system files.

I suppose you could perhaps hack the resources of the shell files to replace the bits and locations with more 3.x-style stuff but that's a pretty big undertaking.