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
- Since we seem to be on an early 80s book kick, my favorite from this time period is “Once Upon Atari”. Fascinating story and better writing than most small run books, most which could REALLY use an editors red pen.
- Installing the elevator pulleys this morning. It’s a measure twice cut once kinda deal. Really not something I want to have misaligned. It was more like a measure 2^8 and cut once kinda deal. The other one is inside and upside down and required some gymnastics on my part.
- Pre dawn tail work. Questioning my decision to be on a ladder before sunrise ;)
- Waiting for my date to be ready gave me a few minutes on the PET. If you take two @8BitShowAndTell videos and mash them together... (this is Robin's game, not mine)
- Finished @BilHerd’s book in one sitting. Very cool to see many of these stories in one place.
- This such a flawed and also beautiful piece of hardware. I love everything about it
- Turns out direct sunlight works. This is before and after on the Plus/4 Keyboard after 4 hours. AirPods for color comparison with an actual white.
- On the left is a flawed but decent product I’ve used every day for three years. On the right is the worst product “upgrade” I’ve ever purchased. I can’t believe how they made it so dramatically worse in every way.
- I have bitten off more than I can chew with this Maze article I've been working on for a week. It's stopped being fun which means it's time to shelve it. This morning, it's a blank slate for me.
- Ported the Maze code to the CERBERUS 2080. Just like the Commodore Assembly version the maze is created instantly and the ball is too fast to see. Have to waste some cycles for the final article on this so we can see it. No SID here, so had to do an LFSR for random numbers ;-)
- Ported the maze program to assembly this morning (you know, learn something every day). It's slightly faster, as in the screen capture device isn't even picking up the ball flying around ;-)
- On today's episode of "Stupid races between old computery things" we have a Commodore PET vs an Atari 400 doing the maze program from Compute! December 1981. The program was written for these machines, so it's a fair "fight".
- I’m channeling my inner @8BitShowAndTell and fixing a bug in a listing in Compute! from Dec 1981. Atari version does not work as listed in the mag. My fix is on line 1020 here
- The MiniPET does pretty well with the screen capture. I originally wrote this for the VIC-20 because you know, VIC cipher on a VIC... but I like using my own software for testing. A lot of people ask about the "chicklet" keyboard and I actually kinda like it
- Weekend side project is learning Atari 8 bit disk stuff with my new SDrive.
- I needed a change of scenery today. Was getting grumpy in my “office”
- When you don’t have a spare DIN connector to test out a board sometimes improvisation is more fun.
- New to me Atari 800XL. It was listed "untested", which to me means "cheap and almost certainly repairable".
- Today’s learn something new every day is a deep dive into cellular automaton.
- Steak and eggs for dinner, killer workout, and recapped/reassembled the Atari 400. Not too shabby.