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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • whoa whoa, I would not recommend a cheap AliExpress USB enclosure at all. As others have already pointed out there’s a whole ever-growing blacklist of partially incompatible enclosures that basically flake out whenever they feel like it. Worse yet, not every device is on the list so you frequently have to research and add devices yourself.

    The last generic Inland m.2 enclosure I bought worked fine… for 1 hour. Then it disconnected and reconnected. I thought it was just random chance, until it happened again and again and again. Did the deep-dive research, found the chipset was partially incompatible and I had to return it.

    DO NOT BUY CHEAP ENCLOSURES FOR EXTERNAL MEDIA ON RPI


  • I personally don’t think that would have worked. We’ve seen repeatedly from multiple companies that selling anything as an “addon” just results in failure because developers can’t assume that people will have it. You have to bake the function in the lowest SKU or it ends up a novelty.

    Perhaps if they rolled out the canceled Neptune as the half-step between Mega Drive and a delayed Saturn. It would have been the an excellent base SKU developers could target, with cheaper CD media as a bonus… but I just don’t see an enhanced Sega CD/32X going up against the PS1 and coming out any better than the Saturn did. I guess they wouldn’t have hemorrhaged all that money on wasted hardware though.


  • Oh, Sega was limping along well before the Saturn’s failure let Sony finish them off. They completely fractured their market when they botched both the (expensive to manufacture) 32X and SegaCD, canceled the integrated (cheaper) Neptune, then failed to showcase the Saturn as their next generation while simultaneously making it too hard to develop for.

    Even when Dreamcast finally became a clean-slate for Sega, it was far too late to serve as a 5th chance.



  • MisterFPGA has a real image problem. It just exudes “complicated”. Visit the homepage and witness exposed boards and adapters shooting everywhere, along with constant talk about loading cores and updates.

    SuperNT/MegaSG and RetroUSB’s AVS are popular because they remove that barrier for entry. This one promises to do that, but obviously people are skeptical. The fact they want to launch without full Dreamcast capabilities and say it’ll be updated later means they already put up a barrier for entry.









  • Two of the best call centers I’ve ever worked with would be Google Fiber and Intel. Both of which are probably terrible now.

    (2015) Google Fiber actually had people who understood networking, understood my personal setup, and understood what tests I had already performed to diagnose that my issue with their equipment. No faffing about with a script, I gave them my test results and got an appointment for a replacement line in like, 15 minutes, and an immediate credit on the account.

    (2009) Back when Intel made rock-solid vanilla motherboards I did a dumb and accidentally disabled legacy USB on my board, which meant that I couldn’t press F2/DEL to get back into BIOS. I called Intel, gave them the troubleshooting steps I already ran (including jumper BIOS reset), and the call center forwarded me to the engineer who designed the motherboard. He whipped up and sent a bootable CD-ROM image to update the BIOS back to default and then updated all future revisions to avoid my issue.

    I wish every call center was that good.