Monday Links from the Non-Lockdown vol. DCXII

[NickFitz]

Thanks Nick! We used the Tatung Einstein for our cross assembly at Ocean... Back in the day ;-)

By around 1988 our 8-bit developers were using a PC (Amstrad PC-1512, natch) with a special board (plus whatever cable would connect to the 8-bit machine's bus) and some fancy software that did cross-assembly and could also set breakpoints and single-step the processor in the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC-464, C64, or whatever it was. Very cool, and better than anything I had for working on the ST and Amiga

[DoctorStrangelove]

I took electronics very seriously unfortunately the salaries were a joke!

Nonsense. I was getting £6/hr when I was fixing slot machines back in the day.

[Zigenare]

Thanks Nick! We used the Tatung Einstein for our cross assembly at Ocean... Back in the day ;-)

[vetran]

I love the blogs like this. The effort going in to a simple enter press of the calculator alone etc. Every time I read these reverse engineering articles I desperately wish I'd taken my electronics and programming courses a bit more seriously. I got in to it to do this type of stuff but women and beer ruined it all for me. It's just so cool. I know Ken is top of his game but just to be able to understand and appreciate the blog to the level he does would be very satisfying.

If I could do it all over again I'd definitely go down this route and spend a bit more time and effort on it.

I took electronics very seriously unfortunately the salaries were a joke!

There are a few other ones out there worth a look I'll prime Nick.

Just for a start have a peek at hackaday.

[northernladuk]

Ken Sheriff is amazing. Amusing his latest tear down is a PSU and the control IC is many times more complex than the calculators.

I love the blogs like this. The effort going in to a simple enter press of the calculator alone etc. Every time I read these reverse engineering articles I desperately wish I'd taken my electronics and programming courses a bit more seriously. I got in to it to do this type of stuff but women and beer ruined it all for me. It's just so cool. I know Ken is top of his game but just to be able to understand and appreciate the blog to the level he does would be very satisfying.

If I could do it all over again I'd definitely go down this route and spend a bit more time and effort on it.

[vetran]

The gambling one was interesting! ta

[vetran]

Ken Sheriff is amazing. Amusing his latest tear down is a PSU and the control IC is many times more complex than the calculators.

[NickFitz]

The gig is up at the end of the month, meaning things are really busy; so you'll have to read this lot for me

• A Casino Card Shark’s First Time Getting Caught - ”I had just placed another $100 bet when the man in a dark suit, flanked by two larger men in darker suits, approached me from behind. I pretended not to see them coming… It was my third month as a professional card counter, and I was about to be kicked out of a casino for the first time.” Remember folks, the house always wins
• Dairying enabled Early Bronze Age Yamnaya steppe expansions - ”During the Early Bronze Age, populations of the western Eurasian steppe expanded across an immense area of northern Eurasia. Combined archaeological and genetic evidence supports widespread Early Bronze Age population movements out of the Pontic–Caspian steppe that resulted in gene flow across vast distances… We draw on proteomic analysis of dental calculus from individuals from the western Eurasian steppe to demonstrate a major transition in dairying at the start of the Bronze Age.” HT to veteran for this interesting study establishing an important factor in the spread of people to far too many places.
• This Supernova Will Make a Ghostly Reappearance in 2037 - Nice work, gravitational lensing: ”A chance celestial alignment is allowing astronomers to witness a distant star’s explosive death, again and again.”
• 'Why didn’t we think of it?' Queensland cyclists trial bird deterrent tape to ward off magpies - ”A piece of silver tape, costing just a few dollars from the local hardware store, has become the latest accessory for magpie-wary cyclists in south-east Queensland.” Don't tell Alfred Hitchcock or he'll have no film left.
• Bloom: 28,000 Potted Flowers Installed at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center - ”How does one memorialize a building impossibly rich with a history of both hope and sadness, and do it in a way that reflects not only the past but also the future?… To answer these questions artist Anna Schuleit was commissioned to do the impossible. After an initial tour of the facility she was struck not with what she saw but with what she didn’t see: the presence of life and color.” So she filled the place with flowers
  
  
• It’s all in the ink: Vinland Map is definitely a fake, new analysis finds - ”Scholars have questioned the authenticity of a purported 15th-century map housed in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library since it was first unveiled to the public in 1965… The latest scientific analysis has definitively put an end to the controversy once and for all: the inks used to draw the map are of modern origin.” Though there is other evidence that Vikings made it over there
• Rain Boots, Turning Tides, and the Search for a Missing Boy - ”Last year in Nova Scotia, after 3-year-old Dylan Ehler vanished, online sleuths descended on Facebook groups to help find him. Then they lost their way.” Further proof that however tragic the event, Facebook can make it worse
• Thread: Shahid Kamal Ahmad - ”1982: I wrote Alien Attack, my first game, on an Atari 400, in BASIC. It had a custom character set for the alien (one at a time) and your spaceship. I advertised it in the Popular Computing Weekly classifieds for £5, for a week. Not much of a campaign. I sold zero copies.” Not that I'm going to make a point of including Twitter threads here, but this is a truly phenomenal one: Shahid Kamal Ahmad on how he got into the computer games industry in the early 1980s and eventually ended up doing the port of Jet Set Willy to C64 in just over three weeks - along with much more about his life at that time.
• Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35 - Ken Shirriff takes on Sir Clive Sinclair's scientific calculator: ”In a hotel room in Texas, Clive Sinclair had a big problem. He wanted to sell a cheap scientific calculator that would grab the market from expensive calculators such as the popular HP-35. Hewlett-Packard had taken two years, 20 engineers, and a million dollars to design the HP-35, which used 5 complex chips and sold for $39… Now Texas Instruments offered him an inexpensive calculator chip that could barely do four-function math. Could he use this chip to build a $100 scientific calculator?”
• Astronomy Photographer of the Year 13 - From the Royal Museums Greenwich: ”From amazing aurorae to glittering galaxies, each year Astronomy Photographer of the Year celebrates the world's greatest space photography.” Shuchang Dong won with this shot of an annular solar eclipse, taken in Tibet
  
  

Happy invoicing!