11 Jan
2007
11 Jan
'07
2:48 a.m.
Toward the end of their corprorate life, Beehive was
open to doing
lots of bizarre things, including loading their own terminals with
custom firmware and rebadging them.
Reminds me of something I did with a TeleVideo 955 once. Turns out
that model has a custom-firmware ROM socket, with an escape sequence in
the stock firmware to execute it. I disassembled enough of the various
pieces to work out much of the interface to the hardware, and wrote a
small video game to run in the custom firmware ROM as a
proof-of-concept exercise. This promptly started a friend asking me
when I would release NetBSD/tvi955....
(Yes, he was joking. The tvi955 is far too computron-poor to run
anything even vaguely like a Unix variant. A few KB of RAM at most,
and a G65SC802 - a slightly improved 6502 - as CPU...only way I can
think of to do it would be to run an emulator for something beefier,
with remote storage accessed via serial line. Never mind "run", never
mind even "walk"; "crawl" would be too fast a word for it.)
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