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Come Play BlogShares [Archived]

Come Play BlogShares [Archived]

[Blogshares has since shut down, but keeping this page around in its memory[

Hey guys and gals, I just wanted to let you know about an online fantasy stock-market called BlogShares. It lists tons of blogs and values them by various means like incoming/outgoing links, etc.

Players can buy and sell shares of various blogs (they don’t convey actual ownership in blogs, just in the game), ideas (think of them as intellectual property), and chips (the ‘social’ currency, chips are awarded for various actions such as reporting dead blogs, categorizing blogs, etc). There are many other aspects to BlogShares, such as making and using artefacts, which can be used to do things such as hype or lower a stock, perform a hostile takeover, a blog restructuring, etc.

There are many ways to make money, chips, fortune and fame on BlogShares, and not everyone focuses on the same thing. In other words, there’s always room for one more player. If you have a blog, it may or may not already be listed and increasing in B$ value (a fake, in-game currency). Click Here or go to blogshares.com to check it out.

:thumbsup:

C64 DTV Guts

C64 DTV Guts

Here is the main PCB of the C64 DTV, along with the On/Off switch and Fire buttons, which have their own PCBs.

The positioning of the PCB is, of course, upside-down and backwards, but that’s OK.

The V+ and V- wires came from the V+ and V- connectors from the battery box on the lower portion of the joystick case. There is a large version available for your viewing pleasure by clicking the link below marked “original”.

For more great, high-res pictures of the various innards and assemblies, click out the VICUG Photo Gallery

C64 Direct-to-TV Joystick

C64 Direct-to-TV Joystick

This is my new, snazzy Commodore 64 Direct-to-TV 30-in-1-games joystick. I ran it, played some games, now it’s time to hack it up!

The C64 Direct-to-TV, called C64DTV for short, is a single-chip implementation of the Commodore 64 computer, contained in a joystick with 30 built-in games. The design is similar to the Atari Classics 10-in-1 TV Game.

Tulip Computers (which had acquired the Commodore brand name in 1997) licensed the rights to Ironstone Partners, which cooperated with DC Studios, Mammoth Toys, and The Toy:Lobster Company in the development and marketing of the unit. [1] QVC purchased the entire first production run of 250,000 units and sold 70,000 of them the first day they were offered. Coincidentally, QVC’s West Chester, Pennsylvania Studio Park headquarters once were Commodore’s offices.

The circuitry of the C64DTV was designed by Jeri Ellsworth, a self-taught computer chip designer who had formerly designed the C-One.

Wikipedia.org

Specifications:

The C64DTV runs on four AA batteries. It has two fire buttons, four function buttons, and composite video and monaural audio outputs. The internal hardware is a clone of the C64 and thus has the same features and limitations, but it lacks the keyboard and I/O ports. The internal circuit board has exposed solder points for floppy-drive and keyboard ports, and detailed instructions for adding them are available.

There are two versions of the C64DTV. The first appeared in late 2004 for the American market (NTSC television type), and has these features over the original C64:

  • The palette is reprogrammable, with 4 bits of luma and 4 bits of chroma
  • There is 128 KiB of RAM, and a 2 MiB ROM for the built-in games
  • It has DMA engine that can be used to copy data between system RAM and the game ROM and extra RAM

Wikipedia.org