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Category: Retro computing

Compute! (Gazette) magazine is back

Compute! (Gazette) magazine is back

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Edwin “James” Nagle decided to see who actually owned the COMPUTE! magazine trademark. It turns out, nobody did. The name and assets of COMPUTE! were traded and sold and eventually put up as collateral which when the loan failed, reverted to a company that no longer existed.

He stepped in and got the rights from the US patent and trademark office and now officially has revived the Compute! Gazette magazine – complete with type-in programs!

Here’s his excellent talk on the subject.

Oh – and he considered the old print versions of the magazine he now owns the copyrights for as ‘free and open source’.

Upscaling pixel art in old Sierra games

Upscaling pixel art in old Sierra games

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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.

Every retro sound device on an 8-bit card

Every retro sound device on an 8-bit card

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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:

  • Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) – the primary focus of PicoGUS, hence the name
  • Sound Blaster 16 (OPL3) / Sound Blaster Pro 2 (OPL3) / AdLib (OPL2)
  • MPU-401 (with intelligent mode) – outputs MIDI data on 3.5mm MIDI TRS connector
  • Tandy 3-voice
  • CMS/Game Blaster
  • Game port joystick
  • Panasonic/MKE CD-ROM

It’s not quite perfect (see the compatibility list), but

Available at Joe’s Computer Museum Shop for $50

Retro IDE replacement

Retro IDE replacement

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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.

  • Emulates ATAPI CD-ROM and IDE fixed hard drives
    • Images stored on microSD card
    • .bin/.cue or .iso image support for CD-ROM
    • .img/.hda/.vhd/.hdf for HDD, supporting LBA or CHS
  • Built-in CD audio analog output on 3.5mm jack and MPC-2 header, driven by TI PCM5100A DAC
  • Supports PIO modes 0-4 and multi-word DMA modes 0-2
  • Headers for SPI peripheral, external drive activity LED and action button

Pre-Order Here:  https://www.crowdsupply.com/polpotronics/picoide

Use your smartphone to load old programs on an Apple II

Use your smartphone to load old programs on an Apple II

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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.

Making a core memory USB drive

Making a core memory USB drive

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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.

VGA programming

VGA programming

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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!

Emulating audio IC’s – from scanning the chip with a microscope

Emulating audio IC’s – from scanning the chip with a microscope

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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:

Bare Metal Gaming!

Bare Metal Gaming!

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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/