Set my VIC up yesterday evening and the Princess worked as a clockwork! Absolutley no problems in having it go, and loading and running the .tap programs (which were multi-load by the way!) was easy and effortless. I confirm that an XT: statement is needed to load .tap files directly form the SD memory card.
mrr19121970 wrote:
. A bit 'amateurish' built. Poor soldering (ugly, ad unit doesn't sit straight), LEDs (size and brightness) not harmonious, Mixture of hex and cross headed screws
Frankly speaking, mrr19121970, I don't second your criticism after having had the product in my hands. Of course this accessory is "amateurish": it is made by amateurs for other amateurs!
Anyway, compared to other similar items that I see advertised on retro-computing magazines, which are mostly naked PCBs, the Princess looks to me fairly well finished. Of course a more sophisticated and enclosing case could have been designed, but with all the holes needed for buttons, knobs, connectors and LEDs it would have been a manufacturing nightmare that would have probably shot the price up to the stars. With "ugly solderings" I think you refer to the pass-through solderings of the connectors, because all others are the usual wave-solderings (or whatever technique has outdated wave-soldering in recent years...) and look shiny and perfect. I don't know if you realise that the solderings you mention are hand-made, one after the other (and this, in return, speaks for the thirfty final price of the product; by the way dont' you think that adding the postage charge to your counterings about the price was sort of a "low punch" at the folks that make it?) and from my soldering experience perspective (>30 years) they're really not so bad, as it also has to be taken in consideration that they're made intentionally thick to give some strength to the back-to-back mounted connectors. However, if you believe you have received a defective unit (mine sits perfectly upright even though the Princess was engineered more specifically for the 64 than for the VIC, so I was prepared to bear some tilt due to tolerances among different motherboards / production years) I think you can contact the folks at Manosoft and ask for a refund or a replacement unit.
The point about screws is one I would have never even noticed, hadn't you pointed it out. We're talking about a single bolt wich needed to be of a different length by all others. I bet that bolts of different lenghts BUT with the same head were not easily available locally. I happen to live in the second biggest industrial town of Italy (Torino) and I can confirm that finding
specific hardware at retail is basically a nightmare, so it is probably worse or plain impossible in smaller towns. Same goes for nuts used where a spacer would have beeen "cooler". If all this has saved some money over the final price (and again I bet it did) or was the only way to have this revision released in reasonable times, well I can definitely live with a cross-head screw and nuts instead of spacers!
Then there's the point about the LEDs... That's where we're a bit crossing over to art critique, commenting the painter's choices for an oil on canvas, aren't we?
The LEDs are easily replaced, however, should you prefer different colours for the four actions. Which colours would you choose, specifically, for each of the four? It's something that might be passed over to Manosoft, perhaps they will implement it on the next batch / revision. I thought a bit about it yesterday evening but couldn't devise any obvious colour that could suggest an obvious mental link (say:
the pink is lit so the motor is running).
GOD is REAL. Unless declared DOUBLE PRECISION.