Category Archives: nostalgia

What seemed like a silly idea

Throughout University, we had these Engineering Design courses, where we would go through a defined process to design something.

In my second year, my team submitted “A System for Maintaining Driver Alertness <link to pdf>“.

A System for Maintaining Driver Alertness
A System for Maintaining Driver Alertness

I’m not sure where we got the idea, and the solution we proposed was gimmicky, even at the time, but the exercise was more about design process – my team did fine. Imagine my surprise, when I was browsing for something else recently on AliExpress (and on Amazon), that some company builds and sells a device similar to our proposed design.

Commercial Driver Alertness Device
Commercial Driver Alertness Device – As Seen on Amazon

As automakers have added lane following systems and basic autopilots to their cars over the last ten years, they’ve also invested in systems that ensure drivers remain alert to supervise these systems and are ready to take over. Tesla’s systems have sensors to ensure hands remain on the steering wheel, Cadillac’s Supercruise has a camera that ensures the driver’s eyes are focused on the road ahead. What seemed like a silly idea is now a little industry…

Code like it’s 1981

In my primary school years, I’d read my Dad’s “Compute!” magazines. Recently, I discovered they’ve been published on Archive.org https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine , and I browsed through a few issues.

I came across this ad in a 1981 issue:

Ad for SORT, an EPROM with a sorting algorithm for Apple and Commodore PET owners.
SORT algorithm on EPROM for Apple and Commodore Pet

It’s a sorting algorithm, written in assembler, distributed on an EPROM chip, mounted on a circuit board, that you’d plug into your Commodore PET or Apple II computer and call from your BASIC program.

I few things I find interesting about this ad:

  • How big was the market in 1981, for people who were writing BASIC programs, couldn’t write a sorting algorithm, and would pay $55 per seat for one?
  • If someone were looking to sell their program that they built, they’d have to bundle in this SORT product
  • At some point, sorting libraries were built-in

I actually found documentation for this product online:
http://mikenaberezny.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/sort-installation.pdf
http://mikenaberezny.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/sort-user-instructions.pdf
http://mikenaberezny.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/sort-review-compute-dec-1981.pdf

Hiring for Potential and Building The Amiga Team

I spent a good portion of my childhood in front of a Commodore Amiga 500, an amazing home computer for the late 1980s. I purchased mine used, after having saved months of hard-earned income delivering newspapers.

When author Brian Bagnall created a Kickstarter campaign to fund Commodore: The Amiga Years, a book about the history of the Amiga in 2015, I backed it. As Kickstarter projects go, 2 years later, I received it (now you can buy it on Amazon).

The Amiga was a really neat computer with great capabilities for its price point, much of it enabled by a number of custom chips. The design of these chips was lead by Jay Miner, a former Atari Engineer. I was surprised to learn that for one of the chips, Jay Miner hired Glenn Keller, an oceanographic engineer visiting California looking for work in submarine design, with no prior experience in chip design.

From The Amiga Years:
The engineer who would end up designing the detailed logic in Portia seemed like an unlikely candidate to design a disk controller and audio engine, considering he had no prior experience with either and didn’t even use computers.

In 1971, MIT accepted his application and he embarked on a masters in ocean engineering, graduating in 1976. As an oceanic engineer, Keller hoped to design everything from submersible craft to exotic instruments used in ocean exploration. “I’m the guy that builds all those weird things that the oceanographers use, and ships, and stuff,” he says.
When the oil crisis hit in 1973, Western powers began looking for alternative sources of energy. One of those potential sources was the power of ocean waves. The project caught Keller’s eye while he was attending MIT, and in 1977 he moved to Scotland to work for Stephen Salter, the inventor of “Salter’s duck”, a bobbing device that converted wave energy into electrical power.
The British government created the UK Wave Energy program and in turn, the University of Edinburgh received funds for the program. This resulted in them hiring Keller to work for the university.
The experience allowed Keller to develop skills in areas of analog electronics (with the study of waves playing an important role), digital electronics, and working with large water tanks to experiment with waves. “That resulted in some actual power generated from ocean waves,” he says. “It was a lot of fun.”
In March 1982, with oil prices returning to normal, the UK government shut down the Wave Energy program and Keller returned to the United States ready to continue his career in oceanographic engineering. He soon landed in California, where much of the development of submersibles was occurring. “I was up in the North Bay looking for oceanography jobs and ocean engineering jobs,” he recalls.

Soon, Keller was boarding a train for what would become a life changing experience. When he exited the train he was greeted by Jay Miner, wearing one of his trademark Hawaiian T-shirts. “I go to Sunnyvale, I show up at the train station, and there is this guy in a Lincoln Continental with a little dog sticking out,” laughs Keller.

One doubt Keller had was his lack of experience in the computer industry, or with personal computers of any sort. This was 1983, after all, and millions of personal computers had already permeated homes across North America. “I had done programming but I didn’t understand the world of personal computers or indeed the world of Silicon Valley,” he explains. “I hadn’t been there.”
Once at Koll Oakmead Park, Miner brought him into the shared office space with the whiteboards and block diagrams. Although Miner hoped the proposed system would have a great impact on Keller, he failed to get it. “I didn’t really understand why the architecture was so great in a general sense, because I didn’t know that much about where computers were at that point,” says Keller.
Instead, he hoped his diverse electronics background would give him enough skills for the job. “I had done a lot of electronics but no chips,” he says. “But I liked Jay and I always liked pretty colored wires. I had done a lot of different kinds of electronics. Being in ocean engineering, you do everything: digital, analog, interfaces, all that stuff. Even software. You do the whole thing. So I had a pretty broad base even though I hadn’t done chip design.”
Decades later, Keller sounds mystified as to why Miner would hire an oceanographic engineer into a computer company. “He hired me for some reason,” he says, musing the reason might be because, “I guessed correctly the difference between a flip flop and a latch.”
Most likely, Miner knew all he needed was an engineer with a good understanding of both analog and digital electronics for Portia. He could bridge the gap of chip design by mentoring a junior engineer.

A great story about a successful hire based on an assessment of someone’s potential to learn and grow.

Incidentally, in my high school years, that Amiga 500 landed me my first part time job at Dantek Computers, a small store that assembled IBM PC clones. By this time, around 1994, the Amiga was obsolete, and parent company Commodore was bankrupt. At my interview, Dan of Dantek looked at my resume, saw “Amiga”, and said in French:
“Amiga – ça c’est un signe de bon goût “. I started the next Thursday at 4 PM – I worked there after school for 2 years, and saved enough to pay for a good chunk of my engineering degree.

Building SIO2Arduino to enable an Atari 800XL to use SD Cards

Last winter, I built an SIO2Arduino circuit – it is an adapter, that enables the Atari to use disk images loaded on to a regular SD card.

My build of the SIO2Arduino SD Card Adapter
My build of the SIO2Arduino SD Card Adapter

To the Atari, the SD card works just like a floppy drive.  It’s was built following the instructions found here:
http://whizzosoftware.com/sio2arduino/

With a program called SDRIVE, I can select a disk image on the SD card, and then load it:

Selecting an Atari image on the SD card using the SDRIVE program
Selecting an Atari image on the SD card using the SDRIVE program

I never did get the adapter working perfectly – I can load certain disk images, such as ballblazer, but not others, like Karateka.  I think it would take a lot more investigation, and perhaps digging into code, to figure out how to fix this issue.

ballblazer running on Atari from SD Card
ballblazer running on Atari from SD Card

Until I get a suitable TV, this is likely as far as I’m taking this particular project.

Playing around with an Atari 800XL

My “RetroPie” days of emulating old games on the Raspberry Pi are over – from now on, I can play the real thing.

I was given a friend’s old family computer, an Atari 800XL in 2011.  They still had all the parts, except the custom molded cable that connects the floppy drive to the unit.

Receiving an Atari 800XL in 2011Receiving an Atari 800XL in 2011

5 years to the month, I finally got around to ordering a cable from a company in California that still has pretty much everything Atari ever made in stock: http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/

I picked up a Donkey Kong cartridge (pictured) along with my cable order (the available, never released Bruce Lee prototype cartridges exceeded my budget).

As I don’t have a TV, I connected it to a PC with a Hauppage TV card.  As I don’t have the correct cables, I only get a black and white picture (I don’t have a composite cable, and the brightness and colour signals are split).  Also, Donkey Kong is unplayable with this setup, as the TV card adds a significant lag (eg: Mario jumps half a second after you jump).

Donkey Kong on an Atari 800XL
Donkey Kong on an Atari 800XL

In another post, I’ll write up how I hacked up one of the floppy cables and built an Atari floppy emulator with an Arduino, so that I can download Atari software from the Internet and load it off an SD card:

Old Video Games

Does anyone recognize this?

Wico Boss Joystick
Wico Boss Joystick

 

Whenever someone asks me if I play video games, I like to say that I stopped playing video games when they started taking up more than 2 floppy disks.  I think I was only a very casual gamer, and as games got bigger, one had to put more time and effort in to them to get more enjoyment out of them.

In any case, there are many emulators out there that allow one to play video games from all of the early game systems.  I had been using a Logitech game pad to play them, which, of course works great.  But when I saw this Wico Boss for sale at a thrift store a number of years ago, I just had to pick it up.  This particular joystick has an Atari style interface/connector, and will not plug into a modern PC.  One can build custom interfaces – there are many designs published on the Internet.  I built a parallel port adapter some time ago, and it worked great in Windows using the PPJoy driver.

I decided I wanted a USB interface such that the Boss would just appear like a regular joystick to a PC.  My initial plan was to gut a USB game pad, and use it to put together my own interface.  In the end, I decided to just pick up a pre-made Atari to USB adapter from raphnet.net.

Atari to USB Adapter from Raphnet
Atari to USB Adapter from Raphnet

I’ve been playing with it for a few days now – it’s a great way to re-visit games like Dig Dug.  While digging around for background on this and other joysticks, I came across the history of Wico.