I was an intern at Fisher Price when they introduced the Pixter Color. I did QA on some of the games, the Dora one comes to mind. You can imagine the torture playing a level over and over.
The games were developed overseas (India I think?). I would send them bug reports in Mantis and overnight they would send a new build. Sometimes they would even fix the bugs. I would burn the builds on to EEPROMs and verify them the next day. The EEPROMS had a little round window so they could be erased in a UV box before programming.
Fisher Price used a video codec from Actimagine to fit video clips onto the game cartridges. That's how I learned about Virtualdub. I remember editing clips from a show called Winx.
The big competition was the Leapster LeapPad and they were trouncing us.
One fun thing the engineers did periodically was a toy teardown to see how competitors saved on cost. Cost was critical. They told me how Walmart basically dictates toy cost because they controlled the shelf space.
I have an upcoming article on Pixter itself which includes giving them a LOT of credit for cost cutting. There are some quite clever things there. I also worked out how to dump games (not easy with those damn melody chips, or what did you call them?) and will release an archive of all games and working emulators.
Nice work Dmitry, looking forward to read your next article.
The later model Pixter Multimedia had the full memory space accessible via JTAG, which is how some carts and even boot ROM got dumped a while ago [1], is it the same deal with Pixter Color?
That OpenOCD script was a bit flaky, and sometimes the boot ROM would be already unloaded before reading, maybe you have some insights in how to make it more robust.
btw, have you looked into the original Pixter? The cart connector seems to have a very narrow bus, so it doesn't look like those carts have code, and probably can only be dumped with a decap.
That only dumps the data. That’s the easy part. None of that dumps the melodies.
The pin outs that page links to are also not quite accurate. I need to finish editing my other article on this.
I have indeed looked into the original Pixter. Deeply: I have decoded the bus, documented the device, dumped games, and produced a working emulator.
The cartridges do contain memory. Most of them are about 1 MB in size, split between code (the maximum for which is 32 kB) and audio effects + images which occupy the rest of the space. If you are very, very curious and don’t want to wait for me to finish my editing, email me and I can explain how it works.
At least as of a few years ago, it was indeed still true.
Walmart is huge in online shopping as well. They use this position to essentially tell vendors what they can charge if they want the shelf space. If you don’t say “ok”, and they can reproduce your good, then they absolutely will if there’s enough demand to bother. This is one fantastic reason to hold a patent on your goods (if patentable).
Ironically, PFAS levels have been found to be higher in wealthy people. People with money own more furniture and clothing with stain resistant treatments, for example.
I think the interesting interplay with this is in "need" vs. "want".
I share the conventional wisdom that nothing, or very nearly nothing, needs these properties. But I don't think it's unreasonable that people have been looking around for things that want them.
I don't know, but I also think it's reasonable for people (who aren't me) to see if they can figure out use cases where they do want that, and actually make them work. I'm not particularly bullish on any of these projects, I just also think that thinking outside the box in this way is one of the ways that interesting things come about.
I'm personally pretty happy to be conventional and milquetoast, but I think it's fairly self defeating to be stuck in the box of "only projects that work on traditional database architecture could ever make sense", so I'm glad people are out there trying different things, even when I think they're pretty likely to fail.
PURL is in the same space as w3id.org, not perma.cc. Purl and w3id work by creating stable URLs thar can redirect to a (potentially changing) origin, perma.cc/archive.org/archivebox create WARC archives or the content at a given instant.
The games were developed overseas (India I think?). I would send them bug reports in Mantis and overnight they would send a new build. Sometimes they would even fix the bugs. I would burn the builds on to EEPROMs and verify them the next day. The EEPROMS had a little round window so they could be erased in a UV box before programming.
Fisher Price used a video codec from Actimagine to fit video clips onto the game cartridges. That's how I learned about Virtualdub. I remember editing clips from a show called Winx.
The big competition was the Leapster LeapPad and they were trouncing us.
One fun thing the engineers did periodically was a toy teardown to see how competitors saved on cost. Cost was critical. They told me how Walmart basically dictates toy cost because they controlled the shelf space.
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