91–100 of 151 posts
i have difficulty imagining what kind of creature would ask all of us kind and well-meaning folk for help with this kind of elaborate "it was not me!" scheme. must have been for a girl. was it worth it? a lot of us actually love SFC and pulling our heartstrings like this and so transparently is turning my stomach. does it really take 13 years to develop an emulator? and these days, with actual cartridge hardware? the…
One thing
>Although I can't afford to host this content (it weighs in at hundreds of gigabytes)
I really urge you to get in contact with Jason Scott about getting a copy of your archive to the Internet Archive. These scans and dumps could be priceless and it makes sense to have as many backups of it as you can.
At any rate, thank you very much for all your hard work, time and expense in doing what it is you do byuu.
Why didn't you send the dumping hardware to the PAL donor? This makes me think of another idea to avoid shipping the cartridges themselves around: an interface that allows eventually accessing them over TCP/IP. It could be exposed as a block device or a custom protocol, it doesn't matter as long as you can essentially send an address and get some bytes back, allowing to read the entire address space.
A lot of the pain comes from cleaning every single cartridge. Many old games look like this: http://i.imgur.com/sdRqyl.jpg And you need them to look like this: http://i.imgur.com/GbxMxl.jpg That takes about a half hour's work. Then you get to open the cart and clean the contacts, another five minutes. Then once it's connected to an SNES and powered on, you have to wait 5-10 minutes to dump it, and then move on to the…
Are there pictures of this setup that I can see ?
Would physically visiting the facility in Jersey City help at all? I don't know how far byuu lives from there, but perhaps he could send a surrogate in his place to try to get information face to face. That might be grasping at straws (theoretically they should have location information available over the phone), but it might be worth a thought.
The problem typically lies with the drivers and the sorting phase (getting onto a truck). Sometimes the workers will cut corners and forget to scan the package. It's faster to throw it on the truck than individually scan every box. As you can imagine some barcodes are messed up so they have to type it in manually. I've had packages show up for with an initial scan at the point of delivery location. I will say it's gotten a lot better these days, but it varies depending on facility.
So back to the problem... if they don't scan it from the sorting to the truck phase. The driver could just "lose" it on the truck or during the route. Sometimes it's accidentally and falls in a crevice somewhere. I've had a package show up a year letter. Other times it's blatant tampering.
I was shipping out an used iPhone, stupidly use the same Apple shipping box my new one came in, and it was MIA on the tracking for two days. The tracker just stated "enroute", then the package magically started moving again. A one day shipment took four days to complete. When my customer received the item, the phone was gone, but everything else was intact. I mean there was no doubt that the driver had stolen the phone. Resolution? None. USPS called me and said they would look into it. Never really learned what happened, but I'm guessing the driver is still out there somewhere plucking away at packages.
I've lost my fair share of packages with USPS. If I've learned anything, it's to ship with UPS if you really want to make sure it arrives at the destination. If you look at the shipping rates, USPS is the cheapest, followed by FedEx, then UPS.
> I've already maxed out my 401K loans on the Japanese game set, and it will probably be 2-3 years before I finish dumping and scanning all of those games to sell them for money. I always feel a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I read things like this. Is any labour of love worth your potential future? As much as I admire his dedication, it's not a choice I'd make... :( Maybe it's just because I'm a bit…
I'm only 33, and the 401K loan automatically takes money out of each paycheck until it's repaid. I believe it was a 72 month loan? Might've been shorter. So, pretty sure it won't be a problem before I retire. Of course, if an exigent circumstance comes up, and I can prove it (medical emergency, bankruptcy), it's possible to borrow the other half of the 401K. But if I'm short on the mortgage, it's not going to help me…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're throwing in the recycle bin is what's called "bulk mail" and its what helps keep postal rates low for first class parcels.
Not if you ask USPS. They aren't supposed to cross-subsidize using services they have a monopoly on (first class and standard mail which includes bulk advertising). Awhile back UPS, FedEx, and others asked the Postal Regulatory Commission to look into whether or not they are doing that. I'm not sure if anything ever came of it.
Why didn't you send the dumping hardware to the PAL donor? This makes me think of another idea to avoid shipping the cartridges themselves around: an interface that allows eventually accessing them over TCP/IP. It could be exposed as a block device or a custom protocol, it doesn't matter as long as you can essentially send an address and get some bytes back, allowing to read the entire address space.
A lot of the pain comes from cleaning every single cartridge. Many old games look like this: http://i.imgur.com/sdRqyl.jpg And you need them to look like this: http://i.imgur.com/GbxMxl.jpg That takes about a half hour's work. Then you get to open the cart and clean the contacts, another five minutes. Then once it's connected to an SNES and powered on, you have to wait 5-10 minutes to dump it, and then move on to the…
On a side note, has anyone gone to the Jersey City facility? Is that even possible?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, this. And given that he states twice in his spiel that he "had no reason to suspect the package would be lost" it is almost laughable. Has any single person in history sent a package and said "Well I expect this will get lost in transit!" ?
Why would it matter what he expected? It was the sender that failed to insure it properly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
USPS is quite remarkable given their costs. Based on the volume of mail handled there are many horror stories, but their actual error rates are very good. It does sound like you're in a particularly bad location. If you want better you'll have to pay more. Shipping within the US is awesome. Living in any other country is very enlightening. https://about.usps.com/what-we-are-doing/service-performance...
> Living in any other country is very enlightening. I lived in Japan for several years and found the postal service there to be fantastic compared to what I experienced with USPS. Perhaps if I lived in yet another country this would be different?