Indeed, on both points. I never use batteries on mine any more, just straight into the power adapter. There are very good home brew games coming out too.
Nope, and I explain it in the article, it's because of the weird behaviour you get with canvas and alpha channel. If somehow a value of 0 made it to the alpha channel, all of red, green and blue channels were reset to zero as well. It was a bit annoying to deal with and a total pain to change my code. Originally I was using all 4 channels.