Ethan Dicks <erd(a)infinet.com> wrote:
>Been there, done that. There's a commercial program to convert .WAV
>files of C-64 data tapes back into usable files. It also works if
>you hook a real C-64 datassete to the parallel port.
I know these programs exist. There are some for the Spectrum and ZX-81,
too. However, I could generalize and say they were all DOS-based,
written in Pascal or assembler, don't come with source code, have
poor documentation, etc. and I want to roll my own in straight portable C.
I'd rather make it general to handle old S-100 tapes, C-64 tapes, etc.
instead of just hard-coding one flavor. It should be ready in
the year 2010.
Tony Duell wrote:
>I personally think I'll have more luck finding spares for my M200 card
>reader, my Trend UDR700 paper tape reader, etc in 20 year time than
>you'll have finding parts for a quickcam.
No, my point is that it's more useful to have generic tools to help
rescue old data. Sure, QuickCams are nearly disposable now. Cheap
$1,500 PCs include them these days. Five years from now, they'll be
embedded in cheap monitors. Ten years from now, they'll be in cereal
boxes. Unless the hobby of collecting computer junk is adopted by
Hollywood stars, I humbly suggest that it will be at least *more difficult*
for you to find spares for your original equipment than it will be
for me to find something that could deliver a bitmap by looking
at my punched card. :-)
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm>
At 11:56 AM 4/19/98 +0100, you wrote:
>this is odd - we got exactly the same message chez communa. we're just
>wondering which address list they used, for sam's name to be on it as
>well as ours...
Well, you're both on the ClassicCmp list, which is echoed to a web site...
And yes, there are spambots that comb web pages looking for e-mail
addresses. I know, because I have gotten Spam on my alphapager, and I
*know* I've never posted to a usenet newsgroup from my pager. 8^)
--------------------------------------------------------------------- O-
Uncle Roger "There is pleasure pure in being mad
roger(a)sinasohn.com that none but madmen know."
Roger Louis Sinasohn & Associates
San Francisco, California http://www.sinasohn.com/
As I was saying there was no clue to who owns Commodore *-Bit technology I
received this message from the CBM-Hackers maillist:
> Subject: Copyrights Commodore
> Date: Fri, 24 Apr 98 20:47:52 GMT
> From: rbaltiss(a)worldaccess.nl
> Reply-To: cbm-hackers(a)dot.tcm.hut.fi
> To: cbm-hackers(a)dot.tcm.hut.fi (c64-maillist)
>
> Hallo allemaal,
>
> I just got some interesting news from my friend Wim. We both are members of the
> border (???) of the Commodore GG (= User Group). As largest Commodore group
> here in Holland and due to other reasons as well, we have established close
> contacts with Tulip ie. Commodore.
> Wim got an official letter of Tulip saying that they own all the rights of all
> Commodores through out of the world with exception of the Amiga. So now we know.
>
> Next question is if we can get permission to continue the activities we employ
> like placing ROMs, sourcelistings etc. on the net. I already had an unofficial
> answer ("We don't mind as long it is not commercial") but an official one would
> be better.
>
> Groetjes, ruud
So I guess there is hope for us classic computing fans after all! :)
--
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
Larry Anderson - Sysop of Silicon Realms BBS (300-2400bd) (209) 754-1363
Visit my Commodore 8-Bit web page at:
http://www.goldrush.com/~foxnhare/commodore.html
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
> From: Julian Richardson <JRichardson(a)softwright.co.uk>
> Subject: Schematics sites?
> Message-ID: <c=GB%a=_%p=SSA_Softwright%l=EXCH001-980422114123Z-2323(a)exch001.softwright.co.uk>
>
> Hi all,
>
> are there any good sites out there containing collections of schematics
> for old machines? I occasionally come across sites with a few schematics
> / info for specific machines, but has anyone collected stuff together
> for several different machines into one place?
There is a growing one for Commodre 8-bit aficionados at:
http://www.funet.fi/pub/cbm/
This FTP site has various shematics ROM Images, etc.
Copyrights seem to be a mute issue for the 8-bits, as no one seems to really
know who holds the Copyrights on the 8-bit Commodores (Escom?, Tulip?,
Visicorp?, Gateway 2000?, the former MOS Technologies?) It is a popular
thread on comp.sys.cbm.
--
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
Larry Anderson - Sysop of Silicon Realms BBS (300-2400bd) (209) 754-1363
Visit my Commodore 8-Bit web page at:
http://www.goldrush.com/~foxnhare/commodore.html
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
Tony Duell said:
>BTW, does anyone know the position on reverse-engineered schematics? >Who
owns the copyright on those?
Check out BOMARC SERVICES (http://w3.trib.com/~rollo/bomcat.htm)
Their catalog has 3,000 devices that they have reversed engineered and
sell the schematics for. They usually advertise in Nuts and Volts.
I remember when I was at Tengen in 91 or 92 and we were just getting
started on the Sega Genesis, we sent them one and they sent back the
schematics. It came in real handy, the only programming manual was
xeroxed, handwritten and translated from Japanese (badly).
=========================================
Doug Coward dcoward(a)pressstart.com
Senior Software Engineer
Press Start Inc.
Sunnyvale,CA
Curator
Museum of Personal Computing Machinery
http://www.best.com/~dcoward/museum
=========================================
<> Compared to maybe 6800 or 6502, the 8080 had 4 16bit registers (bc, de,
<> hl, sp). The z80 added a second set and IX/IY. But that was only one
<> aspect.
<
<Oh come on. The 16 bit registers in the Z80 were hardly general-purpose
<in the PDP11 or RISC sense. HL was almost a 16 bit accumulator.
My comment was to point out that most of the micros were not register
poor like the 6800 or 6502 only that they really didn't use them well.
<The ARM was developed as a 32 bit replacement for the 6502 according to
<one rumour (from Acorn, BTW). They didn't like any of the existing 16 or
<32 bit chips, so they designed their own...
I've looked briefly at that chip and it's real simple and straightforward.
Never had a chance to play with one.
<The one instruction per clock cycle definition is daft IMHO. It shouldn't
<matter whether you take a 64MHz clock and have 8 cycles per instruction
<or take an 8MHz clock and derrive other timing signals from it using gate
<delays or a delay line. The throughput is the same. And the critical
<paths have the same timing.
I agree mostly save for at the time that notion was in vogue the maximum
clock rate was circuit limited in NMOS and CMOS devices so fewer clocks
for a cycle equaled greater speed. Most of the RISC proponents of the
time were talking lower transistor counts, clock frequencies, lower
silicon cost and higher testability than their CISC counterparts for the
same overall system performance. The concept was really applicable to
microprocessors as no engineer at the time could even conceive of
injecting clock at 100mhz in to a micro at a time when gate propagation
delays at the silicon level were greater than 10ns. The concept was
appealing when z80s were hitting the wall at 6mhz and 8086s were fast at
10mhz. Of course as Hmos-III and sub 1micron CMOS started to show signs
of going much faster...
Allison
<FWIW, it's been my experience that on problems small enough to be tackle
<by the J-11, an 18MHz J-11 eats the VAX-11/780 for lunch.
The PDP-11 is no slouch. I've used the T-11 part for some things and
even using the pokey 7.5mhz clock some tasks are faster than most
anything contemporary to it like the z80/8mhz even though the numbers
say slower. It's that CISC with superior addressing modes that put it
out ahead.
I've found the same but it's task dependant and also the 780 is always
doing more than the J-11 due to OS. I did get a chance to try that
once and the 780 was running nothing more than the usual background
tasks and it was close but then both are about 1mips. Same was true in
1978 when the 11/70 was put up against the 11/780. The 2vup and faster
VAXen made it a no contest in favor of the VAX though. As soon as the
task exceeds 64k or the user/task load gets up there the differences
start to stretch out with the vax ahead. A faster PDP-11 will always
have that disadvantage.
Allison
Tony Duell wrote:
>The problem with solutions like the quickcam is that, if you're not
>careful, in 10 years time the new version will not work with the hardware
>or OS that you've chosen to run
Just to flog the horse, my point was that my C code will deal with
a bitmap. It doesn't care which technology produces the bitmap:
today's QuickCam, tomorrow's Java Ring, 2010's 3D scanner.
A friend of mine has a joke that goes something like "In ten years
we'll have a wrist computer with the horsepower of today's $5,000
workstation, voice recognition, holographic memory, etc. but there
will still be an obscure way to get back to the C: prompt."
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm>
On Apr 23, 14:31, Captain Napalm wrote:
> Subject: Re: Re[2]: Replies to various threads
> It was thus said that the Great Allison J Parent once stated:
> > Now something with a MIPS chip, ARM, sparc or some such would be a
great
> > addition of a real RISC processor.
>
> I think it's the Nintendo-64 that has a MIPS chip in it, and with the
> right peripherals, would make for one killer computer (it's basically an
SGI
> sans keyboard, harddrive and network connection).
The MIPS chip in a Nintendo is a cut-down version of the versions used in
SGI and the Nintendo is a long way from an SGI sans keyboard, harddrive,
etc. I can't remember all the differences now, but I discussed it with SGI
last year when I was looking for a fast CPU for an embedded application.
We have lots of SGIs (of different types) here, so MIPS devices were one
of the obvious things to look at. It's definitely RISC, though :-) The
eventual choice was StrongARM, though the project never got built.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
I've added some new sections to the Vintage Computer Festival Web Page:
o The Recent Acquisitions Report lists the latest additions to the VCF
Archives
o You can now receive automatic notification via e-mail whenever a new VCF
announcement is made...be automatically notified when new speakers and
exhibitors are added to the event as well as when the web page is
updated
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't blame me...I voted for Satan.
Coming in September...Vintage Computer Festival 2.0
See http://www.siconic.com/vcf for details!
[Last web page update: 04/23/98]
