Ian Hanschen
@furan
Here for hardware hobby stuff. Microsoft, Intel alum.
Picked up a couple used 19" EIZO 4:3 monitors to wall-mount above my test bench for my retro engineering work. Nice picture but the power LED is really indicative of the early 2000's. High-efficiency blue LEDs were novel enough to use as power indicators - a novelty that faded quickly.
I have assembled something with two triangular plates very similar to this one
Catalyst TA-700 PCI bus analyzer/exerciser on loan from MarshallH (UltraHDMI, Analogue). Super useful.
Today I made a 1080p HDMI framebuffer core - the FPGA acts as an HDMI receiver, storing frames as 8bpp HPCR-encoded data and decoding them on the fly. The DDR SDRAM used is only fast enough to sustain 1080p60 with HPCR. Here you can see it switch between the raw and decoded data. Switch as HDMI src.
Last year I built this 23BPP framebuffer with an 8BPP backing store. It uses spatial dithering with the precision of the color channels encoded in the dither. The “decode” is edge aware smoothing. It is a reimplementation of HP Color Recovery - I will eventually release it with a full nonAI writeup.
All Thinking Machines has to do is call their next model the Connection Machine. Maybe put a version number after it like CM-1, to maximally confuse HPC old hands.
Windows 3.1 is snappy with the MCGA+ core but there’s something wrong with the palette so I’m debugging that this morning. The attribute address and internal palette registers of the attribute controller are present and working in test bench, but not on the hardware.
Because the Graphics Gremlin HDMI’s digital video output is hardwired 2 bits per channel, digital output of the color modes is off the table - but it’s still sufficient for simultaneous MDA. The MCGA+ core is multiple cards in one just like the quirkiest early boards. Mah Jongg VGA and FastDoom MDA
My MCGA+ core for the Graphics Gremlin HDMI may as well have the kitchen sink because in addition to the MCGA modes, it has enough of the VGA for modes 12h, “X” and “Y” as well as an isolated MDA on the hardwired 2 bits per channel HDMI. Releasing soon.
dad introduced me to a lot of great things from his childhood, one of those was the abbott and costello films. they had a tv show and it's great, but the canned laugh track used this early laugh-synth called the "laff box" - repetetive, but very neat
For years, the technique I’ve used to reverse engineer FPGA boards: locate JTAG, find a toggling FPGA clock input, and create and program a core that instantiates a UART for every output-capable pin, repeating the FPGA pin/ball number in ASCII. Then probe the board one component leg at a time:
I appreciate boards that have I/O coming from the FPGA to peripheral chips with 0 ohm straps like this. I’m sure it makes for easier board bringup but it also means I can easily free up FPGA I/O when repurposing it. I needed to find 4 LVDS TX pairs for HW SERDES DVI. For reasons.
Reading about the Radius SCSI cards: "The Aura Scuzzygraph, Radius PowerView, and Radius SuperView external SCSI graphics cards for Apple Macintosh computers are based on the TMS34010." But the PowerView seems to have an Analog Devices ADSP-2100 series DSP near the VGA connector.
Years ago, I reverse-engineered a Sony Blu-ray emulation host PCI card built around a Stratix FPGA with 32-bit SDRAM. I had used it for an overly complicated VGA palette display. Now it hosts the MiSTer PSX GPU, with enough glue logic to run the software for the Sony DTL-H201A Graphics Artist Board.
I'm releasing my port of libdlo for tinyusb on its own so other folks can use it. both of these run on a pico 1. the one on the left displays a separate mystify-ish screensaver on every device, the other is a tv typewriter (telnet on pico w). github link in replies.
A friend flew right into my garage while I was soldering. It’s hopping across the rafters. I turned out the lights to make the exits visible.
ENGINEER (the jp company that makes awesome PCB flush cutters) has a solder sucker with flexible heat-resistant silicone tubing at the end - in effect you can heat the component lead and maintain a vacuum around it at the same time. Very effective.
Imagine being tasked with creating a map that spans online services, consoles, cooperatives, and the original internet backbone. CGW ‘93
Wrote a daemon for hyprland that applies color transform matrices like grayscale/green/red/amber/yellow on hotkey and it's very good for night use.
I'd tell you exactly why I have to keep each version of quartus but I wouldn't want to cause an eye-rolling injury.
It reminds me of Package on Package memory - what if it existed back then? Imagine a 68040 with a socket on top instead of those pins. Maybe you can stack CPUs for some weird SMP negotiated over some weird sideband bus. Or maybe there's just some weird RAM you stack right on top.
Thanks for sharing that. I really want to do a socketed interposer that supports different voltages (IBM 486BL is 3.6V while maintaining 5v TTL tolerant I/O). I got some sockets from Japan specifically for this, they support the hard-to-source .635mm pitch.
if you have a labmate with an ln2 dewar, it will call to you until you try it
