No not the game Black and White (although it was a good game), I’m talking black and white TV, the next evolution of my console. I’d give it a name but it’s currently too close (almost identical ) to the Pico to warrant it. Besides, choosing a name can be a difficult business, I’ll probably just not give it a seconds thought and pick anything, how about the “me”, the “you”, the “them”, the “we”… Wii thats the ticket. Wait what do you mean its already taken? Yes I know the joke has passed, but I couldn’t resist. Besides, I’m quite looking forward to it

I spent the better part of last weekend reading up on nodal analysis to be able to calculate the voltage at each junction of the R-2R ladder that I’ve added. The calculations themselves are simple, just an application of Ohms law. Simplifying the network however took most of the time, at least until the method finally clicked.

The Pico uses an R-2R ladder to convert the digital signal of the SX28 into an analogue signal ready for sending to a TV. Four pins on the SX28 allow 16 different voltages to be transmitted to the TV. The voltage levels are interpreted as intensity, however since the signal the TV uses 0.0v to sync on and 0.3v as black, that leaves around 10 voltage levels to play with.

Since the previous blog entry, I’ve reshuffled the layout with the power regulator on its own in the top left of the image. Partially cut off is the main power switch (currently taped down :P).

Looking at the main part of the image to the right of the SX28 you can see the R-2R resistor network used to convert the 4 bit digital signal into an analogue voltage which is adjusted to a 0-1.4v range via the bottom red potentiometer. Above the SX28 is the main external oscillator socket, the 80MHz oscillator is currently in the XGS. Just to the right of this, taped to the breadboard is a switch to select between the external oscillator and the 4 pin SX-Key header.

The hardware above is still almost identical to the Pico, however it won’t remain like this for long. The first divergance is probably going to come with the addition of joystick hardware. The Pico only supports a single joystick which is connected directly to the SX28. I’d like to have two ports (pong is two player afterall :P) so will be adding a serial interface for the joysticks.

The second area is either going to be interfacing with an SRAM chip or adding extra graphics hardware to take some pressure off of the SX28. I’m not sure which way to go with that yet, nor how problematic the pin count may be

To test the new hardware I created a quick test program that outputs a white bar at the top and bottom of the screen. The code used for signal generation is the “GID j - pixel in a day” code with the colour burst generation stripped out. Nothing fancy, but at least it’s working

Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 otherwise known as Comet 73P is on perhaps its final voyage around the sun. A recent hubble image shows the disitrigration quite clearly

With a good clear night on Monday, I took the opportunity to take a photograph of the comet. Yes I know, its not quite up to hubble standards

Considering how little experience I have imaging, I’m quite happy with how this image turned out. I’m sure someone with more experience (read - any experience) at image reduction could improve on this.

In hindsight, I should have taken a lot more exposures for stacking and perhaps used a longer exposures time to help cut down on light pollution.

For anyone that cares, here are the image details:

• Exposure Time: 5 x 1.0s stacked
• Date: 2006-05-10 02:19:44 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 5 x 1s median combined

I also managed to get an image of M57. 10×10s exposures stacked with 4 median combined dark frames. Comparing the image to my star charts, I’ve accounted for most of the brighter and dimmer stars but there’s one star that shows quite brightly that isn’t listed on my star chart, if anyone knows what it is please let me know.

The biggest problem I’m currently facing is the lack of accurate focus. I’m probably going to invest in a zero image shift microfocuser to help improve on that. I also think my scopes collimation is off, something to double check next time I get a clear sky. Fingers crossed I don’t spend all night on it only to make it worse

Hopefully with more practice I’ll get a little closer to getting the most out of the scope. In the hands of an experienced user, the LX90 and MX716 are capable of much much better images.

BBC News today mentioned that Warner Brothers are going to start selling movies via bit torrent, good news? Or is it? Lets look at the disadvantages they’re adding

“Pricing for a feature film will be about the same as the DVD release”

First off we’ll be getting a movie without any form of box. That’s a bit of a none issue except in this case you’re paying almost the same price. Surly there should be quite a cost saving by cutting out the company that presses DVDs, manufactures boxes, delivery and retailers? Does the bandwidth cost really amount to the same? Well, no it can’t, especially if they’re using bit torrent for distribution since its the consumers bandwidth that will be used to distribute the film.

That however isn’t the biggest problem.

“it will only play on the initial computer used to make the download”

So, not only are we getting “less” of a product for almost the same money, you are even more restricted in your usage. You can’t take the movie downstairs to watch with family or round to your friends house because it will be locked to your PC.

There is also no mention of quality, anyone get the feeling this won’t be a full DVD sized download, but more along the lines of a 1gig encoded version?

They believe movie fans will prefer to pay a reasonable price for a legal downloaded movie rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film

Movie fans are already BUYING DVDs in shops. These people will not switch to using a harder method of accessing the films if the access is going to have A LOT more restrictions on usage.

Those that already illegally download movies are not suddenly going to start buying movies at the same price as the DVD can be bought in shops just because the same technology for downloading is been used.

The move to distribution via bit torrent is clearly an attempt to win over those that illegally download movies, I don’t see it having any effect. The restrictions are simply too great. Although it won’t be long after release that people find a way around the restrictions.

The only reason I would shift to on-line movie downloads rather than buying the DVD and ripping it to put on my movie center film server would be if the cost of the film was LESS than buying it in the shops. Also you would need to have no restrictions on usage, EG if I want to burn the film to a DVD to watch in my DVD player or the lounge player or take it round to a friends house I should be able to. Finally, the quality MUST be the same, if I decide to encode to a lower format once I’ve got the download to save server space but keep the original full quality version on DVD I should be able to.

Do the above and you may start to see people downloading movies rather than using retail shops. If not, I’ll stick to nipping down to the supermarket for DVDs that don’t impose restrictions on my usage. Either way I doubt even the above changes would convince pirates to switch.

One question that springs to mind is why Warner Brothers haven’t looked at the success of iTunes and the way iTunes work. Or, if they did, why they’ve come up with such a flawed alternative model?

iTunes has DRM on the downloads which limits your choice of players and needs to be bypassed to work with certain portable players (inc mine) BUT iTunes allows you to burn your tracks to a CD to listen to them in the car, at a mates house etc (plus you can then re-rip them to use with players that don’t support DRM). In essence they allow you the same usage as you’d have buying a CD in the shops, but then extend that usage by allowing you to use it on a portable player.

Same usage rights, cheaper cost, immediate access via download, no queues in the shops I can see why people use iTunes for music. None of those advantages apply to what has been reported on movie downloads though.

I just fail to understand why they think people will adopt this new form of distribution. Now if we were talking about a monthly subscription (of a reasonable amount) with access to watch ANY DVD film on demand (I’d even accept DRM restrictions on this as you can use your account from any PC although limited to one concurrent access, and I’m positive we’d see dedicated hardware to avoid using the PC in the future) then perhaps. Of course thats assuming the company that set this up managed to wrangle deals to provide films from all the major DVD publishers.