Old Man Yells at Code decided to write an upscaler for old Sierra games like Kings Quest and Space Quest. Upscaling old pixel art is not as simple as you would expect since the old Sierra games used vector art. He does a great job discussing the tradeoffs and making a working version – even if some of the charm of those old games is the pixelization artifacts.
Finding sound cards for your retro PC setup is hard. Used sound cards can easily run you more than $100.
PicoGUS is an 8-bit ISA sound card and CD-ROM drive emulation on the Raspberry Pi Pico’s RP2040 microcontroller. PicoGUS can emulate a wide variety of sound cards as connect your old IDE CD-ROM drives:
It’s not quite perfect (see the compatibility list), but
Available at Joe’s Computer Museum Shop for $50
Retro computing has a hardware problem. Physical cdrom and hard drives wear out and die every year – with no replacements on the horizon as most manufacturers have quit making them decades ago.
Enter PicoIDE from the creator of the retro sound card PicoGUS (emulates Gravis UltraSound, Sound Blaster 16 (OPL3) / Sound Blaster Pro 2 (OPL3) / AdLib (OPL2), CMS/Game Blaster and Tandy 3-Voice, and supports MIDI output with MPU-401 intelligent mode emulation). PicoIDE is an IDE/ATAPI drive emulator for retro PC’s. It lets you load and run hard drive images as well as perfectly emulates CDROM drives with full redbook audio support. You run them all from a microSD card you load with images. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
Pre-Order Here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/polpotronics/picoide
ASCII Express lets you load programs into your old Apple II (or any computer with an analog cassette port). You simply use your smart phone (or any computer’s out audio jack) plugged into the audio jack to load it into the system.
They even include a program that will take image files and via a simple basic program, accept the incoming data and then write it to one of the floppy disks – similar to ADTPro. No need for expensive drive emulation hardware.
Despite the drawbacks and impractical nature of this device, space science researcher @dyd_Nao created a USB drive made of magnetic core memory – a technology that was used a lot in space technology of the 1950’s and 60’s.
It’s really awesome – despite the fact it only holds 128 bytes of data and is the size of a small dinner plate.
Ah, the good old days of using INT 10h, AH=0x00 graphics modes to write directly to video memory at 0xA0000/0xB0000/0xB8000 (depending on the mode).
Nir Lichtman walks us through some of the things I was teaching myself in middle school – writing VGA graphics in assembly (often using the great book Programmer’s Guide to the EGA and VGA Cards by Ferraro, Richard F.
I even wrote my own (terrible) little paint program that would then save the buffer into a file and reload it. What good times!
Giulioz gives a sequel to last year’s talk “Proprietary silicon ICs and dubious marketing claims? Let’s fight those with a microscope!“, where he showed how he reverse engineered a pretty old device by looking at microscope silicon pics alone, with manual tracing and some custom tools.
Fast forward, he shows how he reverse engineered a much modern chip: the custom Roland/Toshiba TC170C140 ESP chip (1995). Completing this task required a different approach, as doing it manually would have required too much time. He used a guided, automated approach that combines clever microscopy with computer vision to automatically classify standard cells in the chip, saving us most of the manual work.
They then sped things up even further by directly probing the chip: by exploiting test routines and sending random data to the chip he figured out how the internal registers worked to create a bit-accurate emulator. He even gives the source code out on github so you can emulate the devices yourself.
Listen to the result at 32:19 where they play Darude Sandstorm.
Links:
Inkbox decides everything in computing since sending man to the moon was a bad idea. Even operating systems and programming languages!
He sets out to write a complete clone of Zaxxon in assembly language with no operating system. He handles display, keyboard, mouse input, booting the system himself – and walks us through it all.
This kind of coding is exactly what got me into computer science as a kid. Watching demo scene videos and learning to program right to the display buffer with assembly was an era we don’t see much anymore. Still, I did get to make a graphics app that directly booted the display controller on recent hardware for an embedded platform (but that’s a story for another time).
How does it go? Awesome! Open Source Project on GitHub: https://github.com/InkboxSoftware/spacegamex64/
Apple II copy protection was a really interesting thing. While floppy controllers were partly hardware/firmware devices, Apple II floppy disk controller was incredibly simple and most of the work of reading/writing was done in software. This meant that copy protection schemes for the Apple II could utilize a LOT more clever and difficult tricks such as custom data encoding, half tracks, empty tracks, bad crcs, bad addressing headers, etc.
As time has gone on, original Apple II disks are becoming more and more scarce. Even worse early cracking efforts often hacked the games in ways that got around disk protection, but also removed or broke things. Unfortunately, that meant removing opening cut scenes or other game-altering changes.
The 4am Archive on the Internet Archive is an attempt to back up those original copy protected games as they were. So far there are 1673 Apple II titles safely imaged.
4am has even been interviewed by Paeleotronic on how and why he went about this. He even provides some of his tools like Passport.
Definitely give the interview a read and also check out some of the games on the archive. Many of his images (like Maniac Mansion for Apple II) come with a text file that gives all the details about what protection was found and how he worked around it.
Inkbox decides to program without an OS. Back in the day, we used to do this by programming directly to the system or to BIOS with interrupts for things like disk, device, and display access.
Fast forward, and if you want to do this today, one doesn’t talk to BIOS – they need to program via UEFI services. Inkbox walks us through doing multi-core bare metal programming of the old game Zaxxon. It’s excellent work and fun walkthrough.