I haven’t updated my diary in over a month.

The blue car didn’t pass smog anymore, and it was not economically viable to keep repairing it. It’s a shame, the interior was beautiful, it was like driving a Laz-E-Boy recliner. Sorry, no whistle tips. I ended up giving it up at what a single hubcap would cost to replace, but at least I know who bought it will take care of it – it’s his 9th Cutlass!

Things have been amazingly busy for me; I’m searching for work, and am having less luck whist trying to find longer-term employment. I know something will come through, but I am getting a bit depressed over the whole ordeal.

As well, my poor ‘old’ laptop is getting testy – my OS X ports are beginning to become a bit crusty, as are the applications themselves, it seems.

I had to downgrade my gallery to ver 1.3.2-b31, because 1.3.4b11 is entirely broken, whist 1.3.3 had a few odd issues – it was more trivial to backport the security patch with my changes than to fix 1.3.4. Sigh.

Atop of that, this evening while wishing for a bit of leisure time, I found that every single one of my IntelliVision consoles has died for one reason or another… in less than two months since I last used, well, one.

I tore them all apart and found that one was working, but the controllers were both dead (WTF?), so I swapped them with one of the other’s controllers, tested. Works. YAY!

Whilst having them apart, I opted to open the third. Here comes the tricky part – the main logic board is trapped between two metal shrouds to comply with the 1979 FCC regulations. Hot welded together. CRAP! I ended up prying one apart, my soldering iron too weak. The other one had been repaired prior, and I was able to take the rosin core right off.

So, on a whim, I replaced the 2k RO-3-9502 ROM which holds half of the IntelliVision’s ‘kernel’ with that of the other unit. I plugged in the power and my makeshift RCA cable (stripped and taped to a 75Ohm on the back of an ancient TV), and lo, behold, the FROGGER theme came up! Yaaay!

I ended up putting the two working units back together, and the third, with the bad ROM and two dead controllers. Oh well. At least I still have spare parts – I really wish I had the tools to test segment $1000 to $1FFFF – I fail to see why it tanked like it did.

So, now here I sit, too tired to play nostalgic games, and covered in 24 year old dustbunnies. I’m having a wash and going to bed. ;)