I write about the past, present, and future of technology across three sites. imapenguin.com explores retro computing and programming fundamentals, milkcrunch.com covers modern software development and engineering culture, and evadot.com examines commercial spaceflight and the new space movement.
Posts
- One of the many “don’t forget to teach your kids how to” things.
- A little Friday night VIC-20 VIC chip replacement fun. Finally getting around to NTSC. My test bench looks right for the clocks I need to generate. Wild and crazy around here on Friday nights ;)
- These ROMs have 8 switchable ROM images on them. And by using a rotary switch to select them, you can play Russian roulette. Which ROM did we get this time, Dad?
- Safety third.
- Sometimes, I've just got to step away. Went to build my FPGA test bench, and now GTKWave on my Mac needs an obsolete module from an ancient Perl version to launch via the command line. I give up for today. The VIC-20 video test will have to wait. Sigh.
- Anyone else need to do something with their hands during meetings?
- I’ve decided to start theming the years.
- When I sit and think about WHY I'm building a VIC chip drop-in, I sometimes lose sight of the goal. But just today, one of the CIAs on my Commodore 128 died. So happy for products like the J-CIA. This 128 has many drop-in replacement parts and is a good motivator.
- A donated 1541 with nice VIC colors. It does work but the fuse holder is broken and there’s a scorch mark next to it. Might replace it with modernish power supply after I thoroughly clean it. Cool to have a long board variant.
- Designed a simple demo in Logisim, which worked great. But it's not nearly as satisfying as making it for real. So... out comes the breadboard. I wonder if I can make the wires neat... probably not. Happy Friday!
- These are a few of my favorite things
- Just found this in a box. We RAN home from school to catch this at 4pm on weekdays.
- Out of all the gates, XOR is my favorite. Happy Wednesday!
- Commodore AND keyword
- The Mechboard64 does not work out of the box with a KeyRah v3. I did figure out a workaround so I’m going to write up some detailed instructions in case anyone else wants to put these two things together. VIC-20 colored keycaps for me of course.
- ChatGPT is like a terrible junior engineer
- Another impressive SwissMicros replica.
- Looking forward to when those new keycaps will be available again. I CANNOT bring myself to cannibalize a perfectly working original C64 keyboard for this.
- Working on myself
- I love these things but it took a long time to get here. Going in a Breadbin tonight in time for some holiday tunes.