Friday, March 23, 2018

Atari Flashback 8 Gold with wired joystick

I got an atari Flashback 8 Gold at a thrift store but without the wireless joystick controllers that have the reset buttons on them. How do you get back to the menu?

I tried everything I could think of, but couldn't figure it out without finding a manual on the internet.





You hold down on the joystick and press the SELECT button on the console.

I guess it would've been too hard to add another button on the console itself. 8-)

My only complaint now is that they don't have auto-repeat in the selection menu. I hate having to waggle the joystick right a bunch of times to get to the end of the list. (It's a pretty long list).

Other than that, it's sweet.

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Legion of Doom or Artful Aardvark background

I've been using 17.10 Artful Aardvark for a while now and I couldn't figure out what that picture on the background was supposed to be.

I kept thinking, what is this thing that looks like the Legion of Doom headquarters?

I realized that it's supposed to be an Aardvark.

Friday, March 2, 2018

Pausing with sleep for 1/100 of a second

So I wanted have a script pause for 1/100 of a second using sleep, but it seemed to have a bit of overhead.

A little bash script to test it says that I should sleep for about 0.0084 seconds to get an effective 0.01 second delay.

It's a little tricky to get those bash one-liners right with ifs and having to put semicolons in just the right places to parse correctly.


This is with Ubuntu 17.10.


Also, why don't we measure how much overhead there actually is for a "sleep 0" command.

A lua5.3 one-liner is:


and why don't we try it with bash with a sleep 0: