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
- Stuff to play with and then review from DIY Chris came today. Gal PLA, 4146 RAM tester, flash-able Kernal/BASIC/character rom chip and an adapter for these types of chips for my 866 programmer.
- My 128 trouble maker is on the mend. I’m short two 4146s to test completely but mail should bring them soon. Socketed now and even recapped a lot of the Ceramics too. Lower checks out anyway :)
- Turns out serial cable was attached to a Keyspan. Double win and it only took me a half hour to find. Now who’s gonna clean up this mess?
- Desoldering 16 memory chips with 16 pins each is NOT something one should do when feeling impatient. I got them all without a single lifted pad. This 128 will live to fight another day.
- Making and breaking Ciphers on the Commodore 64 Part 7 – Pseudo Random with Linear Congruential Generators · imapenguin
- The next two parts of the Cipher series are on Symmetrical Encryption and the algorithms take quite a long time to run at 1Mhz. Having a portable rig has been really nice.
- After listening to an episode of @GUp80s with @DarrenFoulds and @8BitShowAndTell I've gotten back into one of my favorite games: Mastermind. So simple, but it's a good conference call thing. There's a great port of the IBM version to the 64.
- My childhood best friend has never really been on social media and checks email every other week. I asked his wife the best way to chat with him. He overheard the conversation on the phone and sarcastically said “mail me a floppy”. I thought, well okay, 3.5 or 5.25? #thatwaseasy
- 10 Minute lunchtime progress: My 6502 experiment board is fully working. Love the way this turned out. #commodore
- Well... this is new. Sigh
- I haven’t done HAM radio stuff in a couple years now, but this combination may rekindle this interest. My call sign is N4LNX #commodore #c64 #hamradio
- Making and Breaking Ciphers with a Commodore 64 – Part 6: XOR is Magical – Data recovery · imapenguin
- Off on a pre workout tangent this morning. Decided to dump the SID output for 16Mb to look for evidence of that 23 bit LFSR. I can't actually find repeats at all and this should be 24 bits. #commodore #c64
- 10 minute evening progress: This is moved over from the breadboard onto a compact (and neat) PCB. Last thing is the Arduino HAT daughterboard, but I'm thrilled with this at the moment. How it started, how it's going. It's got #commodore bones anyway ;-) 6502 is my favorite.
- I’ve owned many many many laptops over the years. The one is my favorite.
- 10 minute lunchtime progress: Making headway in Cipher Series Part 6 where we talk about the magic of XOR in data integrity and then encryption. #commodore #c64 #retro #security
- Strange flickering after I installed the JiffyDOS mod on my 128. Quite uncharacteristic of me, I did not inspect this switch carefully. Something seems off… :)
- It just occurred to me that Choose Your Own Adventure is CYOA. Huh.
- Almost finished with the 6502 board while listening to @GUp80s read choose your own adventure stories. Missing a latch switch. Where’s a Radio Shack when you need one?
- The c0pperdragon mod has a default pallet that's just not my cuppa… luckily it's editable. How it started vs how it's going. MUCH better.