Been making some things. Figure they should go on the blag.

as per usual, you can grab it from the wordpress plugin page or autoupdate through your wp dashboard. have fun out there.

• fixes issues with spam comment notifications slipping by, even when akismet catches them
• fixes issues with WordPress MU not being able to save options (i think)

if you test it, you’ve gotta let me know. thems the rules!

get the zip out of WordPress SVN. You’ll have to do a manual install since this is the beta.

Anyhow, my Twin Famicom came with Super Mario Brothers 2 (known as the Lost Worlds outside of Japan) which works perfectly, but the game on the back (some sort of Tennis game) wouldn’t ever work. I didn’t think much of it, until both of my new games didn’t work either. I would receive an Err.21 or Err.22 message each time I attempted to load the games. The drive would attempt to read, come to a full stop (note: this is important!) and then attempt to read again, shortly before throwing the error message.

So, my Twin Famicom came with a broken belt, which is very common, and the seller shipped the system with a new belt that would have to be installed. This part went swell, but apparently there’s more to be done. There’s a lot of random forum posts out there, telling you to adjust the potentiometer on the motor to adjust the drive speed, or the read head on the disk drive. Adjusting the pot was simple, but didn’t give me any results, and the read head is factory set (and thoroughly waxed/glued in) and seemed a little too dangerous to adjust, so I didn’t want to try.

I found a lot of passing mentions to aligning the spindle, but no real good information on how to do so, until I came across this forum post by “Zach”:

The tough part (for me, at least) comes when you have to phyiscally align the drive. The first time I replaced a belt, the drive worked (without any alignment) for most of my games, but not some others.
[...]
So what you have to do is reach in from the front of the drive, loosen the SMALL black allen head set screw that holds the grey metal block to the spindle, then rotate the big gear with the belt slot around until it clicks (you’ll see the spring-loaded piece snap into place, dropping down a steep notch). At that point, you have to rotate the big gear another quarter turn. This is the position where you want the assembly to be when you have the little, black set screw pointing straight out the front of the drive, so line up the smal, grey metal disk pickup block (which should be free to spin around the spindle since the set screw is loose) , and tighten the set screw with your little allen wrench. Try it out and see if more disks are loading (or see if you’ve messed up the drive even more!)

I followed his instructions by performing the following:

1. Remove the FDS drive from the system, and disassemble the following:
   • Front faceplate and drive door
   • Bottom Plate
2. Look inside the drive from the front (where the drive door was), and spin the spindle (from the gear at the bottom of the drive) until the small allen screw faces you.
3. Loosen the screw, and keep the allen key in the screw to hold the spindle still.
4. Spin the drive pulley clockwise until you hear a small click (clockwise should be observed by looking at the bottom of the drive. The spindle (if you were looking straight down at the top, would be moving counter-clockwise).
5. Once you hear the small click, spin one quarter turn clockwise, and tighten down the spindle (allen screw).

I half reassembled things to see if the trick worked, and I was getting a new behavior! Now, the drive would spin up, attempt to read, and go to a black screen! The drive would continue spinning (and wouldn’t come to a full stop mid read, very important!), and then eventually the Famicom BIOS screen would return, with Err.27. I was on the way!

From here, I did the following:

1. Loosen spindle, and turn the pulley 5 degrees or so clockwise, then retighten the spindle.
2. Try a disk again.

I repeated those steps until the drive began exhibiting somewhat similar behavior as before (coming to a full stop during the read operation). Then I did the same, only moving 5 degrees counter-clockwise instead; and you know what?

IT WORKED.

Stupid thing loaded. It turns out that the systems are aware of the spindle position, and if it isn’t correct it will cause them to read the header data incorrectly, causing the games to fail. Afterwards, I reassembled the system and all of my games have been loading flawlessly.

Someday in the future maybe I’ll turn this into a guide with pretty pictures and everything, but for now hopefully this’ll help someone get their FDS working.

For reference, here’s a list of FDS Error Codes:

ERROR 01 Disk not correctly inserted. (No Disk Card)
ERROR 02 Battery error. Check power adaptor or batteries.
ERROR 03 Broken prong on disk card.
ERROR 04 Wrong gamemaker ID.
ERROR 05 Wrong game name.
ERROR 06 Wrong version name.
ERROR 07 A, B side error (eject disk, turn and insert disk again).
ERROR 08 Disk #1 wrong.
ERROR 09 Disk #2 wrong.
ERROR 10 Disk #3 wrong.
ERROR 20 screen data differs.
ERROR 21 Disk header block(NINTENDO-HVC) part is wrong.
ERROR 22 Disk header block reecognition #$01 isn’t read and cant be ignored.
ERROR 23 File recognition block #$02 can’t read for several reasons and cant be ignored.
ERROR 24 File header block recognition #$03 can’t read and cant be ignored.
ERROR 25 File data block recognition #$04 can’t read and cant be ignored.
ERROR 26 Can’t save properly to disk card.
ERROR 27 Block end mark seen and ends prematurely.
ERROR 28 The disk unit and the same period can’t take it.
ERROR 29 The disk unit and the same period can’t take it.
ERROR 30 Disk card too full to save.
ERROR 31 Data number of a disk card doesn’t match up.

Updates forthcoming:

• Not working in WP MU. Have to figure that one out. Something to do with how I’m saving options.
• People still getting spam messages? This is a weird one, because it should’ve been fixed. Will have to dig into Akismet, since apparently it’s too damn full of itself to use the standard data structures. Well excu-u-u-u-se me.

Also, new projects. Something else to do with Prowl. I’m only going to write the frontend. That is so long as the guy who wrote the backend doesn’t think I died or something.

Final thought, linkfarms? Things that aggregate posts from other sites, and then group them into inexplicable bunches on god awful websites? It’s a thing I don’t understand. Was Googling WP-Prowl to see if any nice people were saying nice things about it (some were!) but I get a bunch of goofy sites that are reposting posts that I’ve made to the WordPress forums. Useful? I fail to see how.

• Added new notification type: New Post Pending Review. (thanks djr!)
• Added delay in new posts/pages, so notifications aren’t spammed for multiple edits in a short period (not a final implementation).
• Terribly serious rewrite of Post/Page notification code.
• Makes sure plugin activation fires on manual upgrade.
• Made steps towards being ready for internationalization. Not there yet… things left to learn.

Yes it’s almost like I tried with this one. Internationalization is on it’s way, but there’s a few nuances in the WordPress localization process that I don’t quite understand yet. Anyhow, run on over to the WordPress Plugin Page and get yourself a copy, or use your auto-upgrade from your admin dashboard to install. It might be a few minutes/hours before it goes live. Let me know if you find anything wrong!

Beta 3 just implements the missing “delay” code for Page edits. This isn’t a complete implementation, however, since it’s only able to calculate from Initial Post Date to subsequent edit dates. You can see the problem pretty much right away, this works great for the initial post, but if you come back and edit again after the initial delay runs out, the same problem will be right back, and you’ll get notifications each time someone presses “Publish”. Not exactly ideal, but-t-t-t…

Well, it was the fastest to implement. Looking through all post revisions is really costly, at least through the WP API, and I’m looking into a proper way to do this. No problem, I’ll work it out, but I wanted to get something in for the 0.8.0 release. Better code will come 0.8.1 or 0.8.2, but with my new job starting, it might be a while until I get to it. I figured everyone would like a halfway implementation better than no implementation at all!

Anyhow: download, test, report bugs. I’ll love you for it!