Anti-lameness rant

I finally got the boards, and they seem to be in OK shape. I just gotta spew my vitriol, though... the guy charged me $16 for shipping, so I figured it would go out Priority Mail. When it finally did ship, the email said it was going Parcel Post... I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, as I figured he wrapped the boards in the more expensive anti-static bubble wrap or something. Turns out, no. He wrapped them in plain bubble wrap and sent it Parcel Post which was about 1/2 the cost of his shipping (Priority was only $2.50 more). I spend almost $450 with this guy and he nickel and dimes me on the shipping. And he's a power-listing SOB. Lame.

Now I have to test the boards as best as I can without the cables. About all I can do is connect power to the CPU and see if it boots... I'm going to pull the power supply out of an old PC I got from work and use it as a bench test thing. I did that with one of my Bally MPUs that was not booting and it worked pretty well. Then I have to test out the transformer in the game and make sure it's providing the proper voltages, wait for my ribbon cables to show up, then start seeing if stuff actually works in the game.

I really have to start posting some pictures...