Does anyone here know where the pygopherd mailing list lives now? I tried
gopher-request at complete.org and it bounced back. I'm trying to figure out
how to make it such that the entire filename is shown, extension included.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Hi David,
> The best (and probably the only effective) way to prevent distribution
> of forged images are signing them with GnuPG, or providing a list of
> SHA-1 (or better, MD5 can be forged too easily) checksums of known
> good images. Otherwise, anyone can tamper with images, even with a
> simple hex editor.
>
Yes, that's something that's on the list for some time now. The official lib will come with the hashes for all 4,000 releases "out in the wild", new ones will be signed. Back in the day simply keeping it closed was easier, quicker, and also did the job. I understand that being open has to do with trust, hence the lib was opened as promised.
>
> In this field of data preservation, the only way we'll actually be
> able to get things done successfully and actually preserve the most
> history is by working together. Sure this might cut into the profits
> of some, but if the goal is profits (or even amassing a large private
> collection), then you're in the wrong business.
>
To give you a brief sum up of what has happened since 2001: The project / org was founded by a programmer (Istv?n F?bi?n) that was so upset about only pirated, obfuscated copies of his games being in circulation that he tried to submit the games to some project that would care about storing true and unmodified original mastering data. There was none, so CAPS (The Classic Amiga Preservation Society) was born. F?bi?n developed a toolchain that would allow for using an Amiga 1200 (which has a special floppy controller; actually none) as the ingestion device. This data would then be processed and stored as IPF files. Over the years the toolchain and the number games preserved grew. The project was renamed to SPS (The Software Preservation Society) as it became evident that other platforms had the same (no mastering data being preserved) problem. It also became evident that the Amiga as the ingestion device won't be around forever. It is a dying platform. Hence other technology was inspected but no solution satisfied our needs (capturing unprocessed flux changes as delivered by the drive). By 2008 the project had spent more than EUR 50.000 on buying games; most of this money was donated by project members. Please consider: There are a few games you care about personally, but you pretty quickly reach the point where you have acquired all games that matter to you?
In 2009 we picked up the Cyclone20 project by Rich Aplin. Rich and me worked for Cachet back in the day and Rich was the inventor of the original Cyclone (a duplication tool that would force feed data read to the target drive). Rich had lost interest so we decided to develop the proof of concept to something usable. It took us about 1,5 years to redesign everything and to move from prototype to production status. Just for the record? until then we only had gotten very few donations for SPS which were spent on - you might have guessed it - buying and preserving games. The digital assets produced are given to libraries, museums and back to the original contributors. Some of these also share the images. Something we can't do ourselves without jeopardising the project.
When KryoFlux was ready we decided to sell it trough a company, to protect ourselves (things can go wrong, people can try to sue, etc. - you don't want to risk your personal life for a hobby) and to give this thing a legal basis to build upon. When you sell hundreds of boards, regardless of your margin, you better are registered for electronics recycling and you better pay tax. The money earned is intended to pay for the expenses, but also help establish SPS as an NPO, and of course? help buying more games. In Japan, gamepres, run by one of our members, was already accepted as an NPO.
Because of this, KryoFlux was never made because we thought it was a cool thing to sell, it was and still is the tool we needed and we made it happen after several others said they could / would, but never did.
I have no idea when I really spent an evening on playing a classic game?
> Concerning SPS, I think the fact that only game dumps are accepting is
> rather telling. There is a load of software, for Amiga and other
> platforms, which is at least as important to preserve. The other day I
> talked to a former Amiga game developer, who mentioned that Digi-Paint
> was used heavily in game development. I managed to locate a copy, but
> it appears that software like this, which may be important to play
> around with art assets included in games, does not fall into the kind
> of materials that SPS is interested in.
>
It for sure does. But when you are a group of five or less, you have to focus on something. Games came with high profile protection techniques. These can't be stored by standard sector dumps. It was therefore decided to focus on the most precious stuff and hope that others would do the more easy part. But we always took dumps of apps when we could get them, and we still do. We e.g. have various versions of DPaint. A quick look in the archive shows we have 2-5, physically and digitally.
> I may be wrong about this, but in regards to preserving this stuff,
> personally I'd trust an open, helpful group like BitSavers much more
> than a private group interested in selling their products.
Maybe the above helps explain things? It's odd, but things become really complicated once money is in the game.
I love the TIL-311's. I used them to make a display for a microcode ROM
dump fixture for Wang 700-series calculators.
Having the latch, decoder, and LED display all in one package made the
whole thing a lot easier to build. Plus, the display just look cool.
Desktop electronic calculators used just about every kind of display
technology there was beginning with the Burroughs (and licensees) Nixie
tube.
Here I list some of them, and some examples (some of which can be found
on the Old Calculator Museum website, http://oldcalculatormuseum.com).
Nixie tubes were extremely popular in the early days, beginning with the
first electronic calculator (Sumlock/Anita Mk 7 & 8), and lasting into
the mid-1970's. The SCM Marchant-I "handheld" electronic calculator
used Nixie tubes...the only "portable" electronic calculator that I know
of that did this. There were also the unusual Nixie-like displays,
where a number of digits worth of Nixies were combined into a single
tube (Lago Calc LC-816).
Small vector CRT displays were used on some early desktop calculators
(like Friden 130/132, Friden 1160-series, SCM Cogito 240SR, Victor
14-32x series, and HP 9100A/B, with a few others) , and were very cool.
Canon's early electronic calculators (Canon 130, 161, 130S) used
edge-lit plastic panels with grain-of-wheat incandescent lamps to light
the plastic panel from the edge. The panels had dots etched into them
in the shape of digits to catch the light and project it out as numerals
to the user. These were abandoned when Canon switched to Nixie tubes,
as the edge-lit panel displays were simply too expensive, and tedious to
repair when the lamps burned out.
As Nixies started to wane in favor of less-expensive display
technologies, lots of manufactures went to Burroughs Panaplex panels,
which were less expensive, and easier to interface. Lots of machines
(of few of which are Wang 600, Commodore US*1/US*8/US*10, Victor
1800-series, Friden 1203) used these panels.
A few machines also used tube-type versions of 7-segment gas-discharge
displays, such as the Passport CA-850(clone of APF Mark I), and
Sperry-made multi-digit gas-discharge modules (Commodore US*14,
Tektronix 31).
LEDs came on board on some desktop machines (MITS 1440, HP 9800-series),
but ended up really being the display of choice for the new up-and
coming handheld machines, until VF, and later, LCD displays usurped
them. There weren't all that many desktop calculators that ended up
using LED displays.
VF-style tube displays also took over in desktop and some handheld
machines as the reign of gas-discharge tubes and panels came to an end.
There was some interesting VF tubes, most notably, the Japanese
Iseden-made Itron tubes that had a unique segment rendition to make
digits look more "handwritten". These were first used on Sharp's QT-8D
calculator, which was the second (though the first successful)
electronic calculator to use a MOS/LSI chipset for all of the
calculating logic (with the much earlier Victor 3900 actually claiming
the title of first, but there were some major problems with the machine
that led to low production figures, and many of the machines being
recalled). These displays were different enough to make them engaging.
Sharp used them on quite a number of desktop and "handheld" (EL-8,
EL-8M) machines.
Alas, the days of these displays is pretty much gone. LCD and VF panels
have replaced them all in calculators, as well as all kinds of other
stuff like kitchen appliances, gas pumps (for a long time gas pumps used
really large Beckman gas-discharge displays), instrumentation, copiers,
audio equipment, and just about everything else that needs a display.
Though not used in any calculator that I'm aware of, the Burroughs
"Self-Scan" displays, which were gas-discharge dot-matrix displays that
used fancy manufacturing techniques to build the shift register that
held the state of the dots into the display elements themselves
(essentially a planar version of an old Dekatron tube). Data would be
clocked into the display and it automatically shifted as the dots were
being shifted in, and when static, no refreshing was required. These
were used for in displays for early electronic point-of-sale cash
registers that would display information about the item as well as the
price. They were also used a lot in some early portable data terminals
(with a few lines of perhaps 20 characters each). They were also quite
popular in Computer Numerical Control (CNC) controllers for displays
showing the status of the machine. They significantly reduced the
complexity of making a device with a flexible alphanumeric (or even
simple graphic) display. These, too, met their end when VF and later,
LCD dot matrix displays replaced them.
Displays have always been an interest for me, and dovetails well into my
calculator fixation.
Rick Bensene
>> What about the Panaplex 7-segemnt gas discharge displays?
>>
>> Or the gas discharge dot-matrix displays that include their own 'sift
>> register)? You know how you can step a discharge round a dekatron tub,
>
> I liked the mechanical project-type display, where a stepping
> arrangement moved a strip of film. Probably a bit large for an Elf,
> though.
My faves:
Flip-dots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-disc_display
Edge illuminated numeric displays (link shows a modern version... the old ones used grain of wheat lamps): http://blog.makezine.com/2012/02/18/edge-lit-led-nixie-tube-display/
Hi,
with all this talking about the COSMAC and the gizmo from STG,
I went searching through my boxes for some TIL311 displays.
My rusty memory has still some good spots :-)
I have 8 TIL311 displays which I can list on eBay, but I offer them
here first, so I know they land in a good home.
Asking $35 (for all 8) plus shipping (from The Netherlands).
First responder to pa8pdp AT amsat DOT org gets them.
I only have 8 of them.
- Henk.
Can anyone identify this board? I got it with a bunch of old TRS-80
hardware, but it's not necessarily related. It says "Designed by the
Blacksburg Group Copyright 1979 TYCHON". Any ideas?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wheagy/6977334853/in/photostream
Thanks, Win
> So you're making the claim that the file formats are fully open,
> fully documented, and anyone can extract the data at any time,
> regardless of the status of KryoFlux Ltd?
Hi Dave,
yes - that was the intention of putting the source up there. The old licence will be tidied up more and more, but again, to make something available now, the IPF source was released with a very short and permissive licence.
I would also like to point out that there's a very informative third-party website around that's run by Jean Louis-Guerin. He's helping with seeing things from the user side. You tend to become blind for the obvious when you do things for a long time.
http://info-coach.fr/atari/hardware/devices/kryoflux.php
There's much free info there, and it also has another document on the STREAM format produced by KryoFlux. Someone mentioned he'd regard the file format as documentation (which would then be covered by the licence), so here's an independent source:
http://info-coach.fr/atari/hardware/devices/kryoflux/kryoflux_stream_protoc…
You might want to take note of the fact that this is independent stuff and we've encouraged Jean to release whatever he wants to release.
Does anyone have a spare 13232C (02640-60059) cable to sell? I can
build one, but thought I'd check here, first.
Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/
> No, the problem is the redefinition of Derivative Works to include any
> images produced by the device using the KF binary software
> distribution. Since the binary blob falls under this license, this
> means all IPFs (and STREAM dumps too) that were dumped with the KF.
Although not intentional, this is the heritage of the library when there was nothing else to be covered. We don't claim ownership in any data dumped with KryoFlux, and this will be addressed in the next release. For now all I can offer is that people in doubt will get written (email) confirmation. This applies to all data ever read with the unit.
Thanks for pointing this out.
> If all you wanted to do is prevent compilation CDs of IPFs,
> prohibiting the IPF library from being redistributed should have been
> enough. Such a prohibition is in the licenses. I don't see why such a
> redefinition of derivative works, and restriction on what you can do
> with these "derivative works", was ever necessary.
>
There was a time when such companies would just feed whatever they could into extended ADFs, which would have caused more trouble than fun. Again, this was when the Amiga was still in the commercial marketplace and the idea was to stop people from forging things.
Ok, let's try this again. Nothing is easy....
Can anyone identify this board? I got it with a bunch of old TRS-80
hardware, but it's not necessarily related. It says "Designed by the
Blacksburg Group Copyright 1979 TYCHON". Any ideas?
http://i.imgur.com/cDncC.jpg
Thanks,
Win
