I bought a Discman, the cheapest in the series (Don´t know the brand any more)
So it didn´t had all the functions of his bigger brother. Like fast forward and some other things i can´t remember. Opened it up and checked the chips on the board.
Soldering some wires (on smd chips! .. so very small) and some buttons, i’ve got the extra functions! While adding these functions, i had an idea. How to connect this Discman to my Amiga!
I’ll post more info when i find these! I found some binaries and source: cdplay.s – source
Binaries for following functions: fwd mem pause play remain repeat rev stop
Years later i removed the cover completely and made a floating disc player. (The lid had a magnetic part which could hold the disc in place. So i ended up having only a PCB motor and a magnet to hold the disc attached to the motor.
The word ‘piobaireachd’ literally means pipe playing or pipe music, but is now used to describe the classical music of the Great Highland Bagpipe. Another name for it is ‘ceòl mór’ meaning the’big music’, which separates piobaireachd from all other forms of pipe music (marches, reels, jigs etc. ) which are referred to as ‘ceòl beag’ – the little music.
To describe a piobaireachd is not easy. It consists of a theme or ‘ground’ with variations (which vary in number and complexity) that follow the theme. The theme is often very slow, and the general effect of the whole piece of music is slow – slowness being a characteristic of Highland music, though not, obviously, the dance music.
Funny to see old lists again, software you used to have.
MS-DOS Softwarelijst:
M.G. Aanstoot en H.M.Aanstoot
DISKTYPE
1 3.5 720k
2 3.5 1.4M
3 5.25 360k
4 5.25 1.2M
SYSTEEMDISKS
3 H MS-DOS 3.3 (org.)
3 H MS-DOS utilities (org.)
3 H GW-Basic (org.)
3 H First Step (org.)
3 H MS-DOS instructie (org.)
3 M Genius Menu Maker & Menu Library V.7 (org.)
3 H 4DOS.ZIP
TEKENPROGRAMMA'S
3 H/M Dr. Halo III (2 disks)
3 M Draw
1 M Paintbrush
1 M 3D-Grafieken
1 M TheDraw
BASIC
3 M Basicprogramma's (2 disks)
3 M Turbo Basic
3 M Quick Basic (2 disks)
3 H Quick Basic Compiler
PRINTPROGRAMMA'S
3 M Printshop
3 M Newsroom (5 disks)
3 M Printmaster + (2 disks)
1 M News Master
DATABASES
3 M NS Reisplan '91/'92
3 H PC-Globe (5 disks)
1 M Netnummers
ASSEMBLERS
3 H MASM
3 H Linkers + TASM
DATADISKS
3 H Pictures
3 H Martin's Proggy Disk
EMULATORS
3 H C64 Emulator
3 H 8085 Emulator
3 H Z80 Emulator, Tollfree, Connector.txt
3 H Sidekick voor NANO
3 H 6800
PROGRAMMEERTALEN
3 H PLM Data
3 H Pascal Progs
3 H Graphics + Tools
3 H Turbo Pascal 3.0
3 H Turbo Pascal 5.0 Pro (8 disks)
ELECTRONICA PROGRAMMA'S
3 H Ultiboard Demo Disk
3 H Slave
3 H MicroCap (3 disks)
3 H Logic Master
3 H Orcad (10 disks)
COMMUNICATIE PROGRAMMA'S
3 H Anywhere + PROG dir.
3 H Procomm Laplink
COVOX
3 M Simpson2 module
3 M Moduleplayers
3 M Me So Horny Sample
1 M COVOX Player + Samples
1 M Samples #1
1 M Samples #2
1 M Samples #3
1 M Samples #4
1 M Samples #5
TEKSTVERWERKERS EN DTP
1 M Word-Perfect 5.0 (7 disks)
1 M/H Word-Perfect 5.1 (6 disks)
3 M Ventura Publisher 2.0 (19 disks)
3 M Volkswriter de Luxe (org.)
3 M Brown Bag Word Processor
3 M Brown Bag Speller
3 M Wordstar Pro 4.00
3 M Wordstar
3 M TXT 236
UTILITIES
3 M Norton 4.0 (2 disks)
3 M Zuid-Afrikaans PC-Tools (by Sepp)
1 M Virus Scanner, Helers, Prevent
3 H Norton Guide Maker
DISK MONITORS
3 H Speedstore
3 H Diskmanager
3 H Diskbase
3 H Fixed Disk Organiser
NETWERK/SYSTEM-APLIC.PROG.
3 H Lantastic
3 H Mainstream Demo Disk
3 H Ariadne
3 H Manager Disk
MISCELLEANOUS
3 H PC-Intern 2.0
3 H ARC. Programma's (5 disks)
3 H PCM Tools
3 H Herc. + CGA Simulators
3 M Automake
3 M Genetic's
3 M DBase III+ (2 disks)
3 M Show Partner Graphic Editor
3 M Showtime & Visuals
3 M Full Screen Definition 3.2
3 M Slide
3 M Font Maker
3 M VPG (2 disks)
3 M System F (2 disks)
3 M Demo + Help + Printer
3 M F&A Faktureren
3 M Letrix
3 M Optiks
3 M Uptime
3 M PC-File
3 M PC-Calc
3 M PC-Type
1 M Planoort
3 M PC-Deskmate
3 M Allmac + Calc + Cursur
3 M Sideways
1 M Ability Plus V1.0 (2 disks)
1 M Fontasy (4 disks)
1 M Convertible, Diskdupe, Dosedit, Smartkey, Zaplabel
DEMO
1 M Mig29 Demo (covox-module)
1 M Megademo (covox-module)
1 M Dragon's Lair Demo (covox-module)
3 M Draw Demo (CGA)
3 H HOT-Boot I
GAMES
3 M Defender Of The Crown
3 M Stunt Car Racer
3 M Grand Prix |2de disk?
3 M Airborne Ranger
3 M Mach 3
3 M Xenon II (2 disks) |2de disk?
3 M Heavy Metal
3 M Grandprix Cycles (2 disks)
3 M Carmen Interpol
3 M Up Periscope
3 M Space Harrier (2 disks)
3 M Space Racer
3 M Hard Ball
3 M Dambusters (copied with amiga)
3 M Into The Eagles Nest
3 M Tomahawk
3 M California Games
3 M Test Drive I
3 M Test Drive II |2/3de disk?
3 M Super Pinball
3 M 688 Attack Sub
3 M Ninja
3 M Falcon
3 M Blockout
3 M Tetris
3 M Empire
3 M Chess
1 M Mean Streat (3 disks)
1 M Operation Wolf
1 M Lombard Rally
1 M Gauntlet II
1 M Outrun
1 M Simcity
1 M Speedball II
1 M Skweek
GAME PACKS
1 M Games, Utilities
3 M Pitstop II, Bushido
3 M Tennis, Cat, Hunt For Red October (simple ver.)
1 M Arkanoid, Ballistics
1 M Barbarian, Indiana Jones
1 M Larry I, Heliplus
1 M Fire Power, Fire And Forget
3 M Moonit, Mahjongg
ADVENTURES
1 M Police Quest II (3 disks)
1 M Space Quest III (3 disks)
1 M Larry II (3 disks)
1 M Larry III (4 disks)
SIMULATORS
3 M Ford Simulator
3 M Chuck's Flightsimulator
3 M Gato
1 M Flightsimulator III
Somewhere in 1992 i got hold of a Oscilloscope, probably borrowed from someone. I don’t know what happend to it. I got the idea to generate drawings on the scope, because it had two inputs with you could switch to x and y inputs.
Example oscilloscope
My friend Sepp got into it also, we both wrote some software to do funky stuff with this. I found some software today (20220516), and having bought a old skool scope 2 years ago …
So i found source machine code, no executables. Now i needed to get a assembler running again.
Sidenote: I recently fixed a Amiga 500 and got a disk switch installed on the even cia.
Disk df0 df1 switch print at the center of the image
Booting some old seka disks and starting MasterSeka again in a looong time.
ESC - open editor
r (read file)
v (directory)
a + enter + enter (no options assemble)
g (go running the program)
FIrst part of machine code .. at the bottom part are arrays of coordinates to draw things
Some programs on the disk: (some are made by Sepp, who is a far better coder than i am)
Funny triangles
Lissajous figures
Moving square
House
House with door
Draw with mouse
Lissajous figures are simple sine and cosine functions to get:
So how does this work, well a amiga has stereo outputs. These are controlled by two DAC outputs on the 8364 (Paula) chip. (DAC – Digital Analog Convertor) ( Paula has 4 DMA controlled DACs !! )
Looking at the schematics of the audio part, we see a lot going on concering audio filters. The tests i’ve done today (2022) are on a amiga with unmodified audio filters. (Low on my prio list) So frequencies are not direct what you get directly converted from digital values. Besides that, syncronisation between left and right channel, even using DMA can be an issue. (DMA – Direct Memory Access, this means that it can be controlled without using the CPU)
Running the house draw code:
A little house
Note: Due to different hardware not a good working example .. yet
More examples .. hard to capture a still image
I tried a few years after we did this, to modify a generic monitor to display things using two inputs, not using scanlines. But to no avail. Only flipping the screen and colors using relais (more on this later)
Bonus part: Above did remind me of a Vectrex, a game console which utilises same display technic. So no raster lines and pixels, but line drawing by controlling the beam.
Two games on a borrowed Vectrex – You can see the continuous line – faint to see, even harder IRLMovie from 2017 .. Vectrex was made in 1982-1983
While attending school, we had to come up with a computer related project.
I had access to a military grade laser (i think it was for aiming), so i went for a drawing-animations-with-a-laser project.
I started off by myself, but soon after my teacher was interested in the project. He knew someone at the University of Twente. So he made an appointment for me. I don’t know which teacher and guy at the Uni but it was really interesting. Laser microscopes!
Image from https://physics.emory.edu/faculty/weeks/confocal/
I was using speakers with mirrors on it, and glued tiny mirrors on stepper motors. But these are far too slow. The Uni guy gave me some tiny mirrors which can be controlled by putting power on the little coils. But even these lightweight mirrors from a video disc player are “slow”. At least for making sharp corner turns.
Kindda dusty
So i was given an electronic schematic also. This was an amplifier with sensors, which would give a power boost when needed.
Amplifier with light sensors (click me)Light breaking glasses
In 2022 I found some information about this on my fileserver.
Setup
Above a schematic about the feedback amplifier
Writing software and experimenting with coordinates to send to the laser mirrors.
A few years later this laser was used in my computer dungeon using a smoke machine from my friend Marco who used this machine for his mobile disco. We closed all doors and windows, making it as dark as possible. Let the smoke machine run for a long long time, and played with this laser setup. Next day when the room was aired, all computers had a fatty substance on it, so I spent the rest of the day cleaning everything.
I got a free mainframe, when i was about 17. It was a huge Pdp-11/34 which a had to get from Enschede to Holten using a trailer.
PDP-11/34
It was a 19inch rack (loads of metal)
2x 8inch floppy drives
2x 20MB harddisk drives (with cardridge) each 34KG!
multiple (3?) Decwriter III printers
loads of VT100 terminals
2.5 meter of manuals
cables
disks (8 inch) and harddisk cartridges
I converted the power to a generic 230V connector. When booting the machine all the lights in the house dimmed.
I didn’t know anything about mainframes, but i got things working. Sometimes i would play with it, but after a while it didn’t run anymore.
I’ve kept some of the parts of the machine. Terminals we used for a long time to connect to a linux server. ( The VT100 where later switched for more modern Wyse terminals )
One of the two drives (34kg) (not my picture)
Some parts i’ve kept
20MB cartriges for above driveMagentic core memory!16K x 12
VT100 serial terminal (gave this one to a colleage) Postit says: Could you install Windows on this for me??
Wyse 50 TerminalStallion Card to connect 8 terminals
Serial printer
Last Decwriter i’ve got, also gone now.
These printer we used for generic printing, and just for fun. They made a lot of noise, and even they are serial printers they are fast!
So i resourced ms-dos into assembly and printed that, that was a sh*tload of paper. We even made a racing game. (Can’t find the source, but i’ve recreated a lookalike in linux-bash)
Object of the game was to keep your car O character on the road. The printer printed the lines, and you could use the keyboard to move your car, which also got printed.
Below the build-in-5-minutes bash lookalike. ( z left, x straight and c right) Original had more intricate road, and probably the road was drawn using two lines, to speedup printing (Decwriter III could print at 180 characters per second bidirectional!)
Looked more like this i think
#!/bin/bash
i=0
j=0
car=8
while true ; do
no=$(awk "BEGIN{print sin($i*atan2(0,-1)/180)*40+40}" | cut -f1 -d.)
way=$(awk "BEGIN{print sin($j*atan2(0,-1)/180)*10+13}" | cut -f1 -d.)
#echo $way
if [ $car -lt 0 ] ; then echo "boom" ; exit ; fi
if [ $car -gt $way ] ; then echo "boom" ; exit ; fi
carr=$car
rest=$((140-$no-$way))
i=$(($i + 1))
j=$(($j + 5))
while [ $no -gt 0 ] ; do
echo -n " "
no=$(($no - 1))
done
echo -n "#"
while [ $way -gt 0 ] ; do
echo -n " "
if [ $carr -eq 0 ] ; then
echo -n "O"
fi
way=$(($way - 1))
carr=$(($carr - 1))
done
echo -n "#"
while [ $rest -gt 0 ] ; do
echo -n " "
rest=$(($rest - 1))
done
echo ""
read -r -t 0.1 -n 1 -s key
if [ "$key" == "z" ] ; then
car=$((car - 1 ))
fi
if [ "$key" == "x" ] ; then
car=$((car - 1 ))
fi
if [ "$key" == "c" ] ; then
car=$((car + 1 ))
fi
done
Fifty-one is a card game where the aim is to stay under 51 points.
Fifty-one only uses the so-called picket cards; the seven through the ace. The distribution of points is as follows;
Card Points
7
7 points
8
8 points
9
0 points
10
+10 or -10 points
Jack
2 points
Queen
3 points
King
4 points
Ace
1 or 11 points
The ‘suit’ (hearts/diamonds/clubs/spades) is not important.
At the start of the game, the cards are shuffled, the dealer deals three cards at random to each player and places the remaining cards face down on the table. The person after the dealer now plays a (high) card face up on the table, announces the number of points and takes a new card from the face down pile. The following players now play another card and add the number of points played to the number on the table and take a new card, for example: the first player plays an 8 and says ‘8’, second player plays a 7 and says ’15 ‘, the next player plays a king and says ’19’, the next plays an ace and says ’30’ (or ’20’) etc.
As soon as the point total gets close to 51, players should start playing cards like 9 or (-)10 to prevent the point total from going over 50. The first player who can no longer do this loses the round. After this, the game starts again, the loser usually acts as the new dealer.
If a player manages to collect three identical cards in the course of a round, he can pass. He then places the cards face down on the table, says pass, and stops playing. He can then no longer lose that round. (*)
After playing a card, if a player forgets to take a new card from the stock before the next player has played a card, he must continue playing with the remaining (two) cards.
When the deck of face-down cards is exhausted, the face-up cards are shuffled, placed face-down again, and play continues.
The game is played with 3 or 4 players. With more players there is no opportunity to collect favorable cards. (**)
I’ve played this a lot while traveling with bands on the bus. So what did I change:
(*) I skipped this rule (**) When changing to the rules below we could play with 6-7 or maybe 8?
I used two decks of cards. Same as above, but I added two sixes, one (or 2) 5 and a 4.
6 Change the direction of playing, so you could be facing another turn when you just played a card!
5 Change hands, in opposite direction of playing (all players)
4 Drop you cards and get 3 new ones OR exchange with another player
3 ? be experimental!
We sometimes just played around with these rules. Just get the rules you are playing with clear at the start of the game
Funny story about learning machinelanguage at school.
It was around 1989, and was attending a class Microcomputer Programming in Machine Language.
We where given a problem we had to solve using 8085 machine code. The machine we had to program this on was a Intel SDK-85, much like below example.
Intel SDK-85
Note it only had a hex keyboard and 7segmented display. You had to punch in the machinecode into memory slots yourself.
Problem we where given was something like searching for certain data in memory.
Normal procedure was :
Draw a flow of instructions (Flowchart)
Write the machine languages codes
Convert those assembly statements into Opcodes the machine could understand
Punch in those numbers, run and verify
Most of us knew a lot of opcodes by heart, but some knew all opcodes. And how many bytes where needed. besides that we had to remember jump and return addresses.
So our teacher presented the problem, when he stopped talking, my friend Martin and I when up to our machines … punching buttons.
” Guys .. you can’t expect it to work without writing the program down first!
A few minutes later .. we pressed enter .. and it worked.
A program like above looked like: 01 2E 2B 21 00 00 79 BE C2 1F C0 CD 19 C0 CA 1E C0 78 BE C2 06 C0 C3 25 C0 2C C2 1E C0 24 C9 CD 19 C0 C3 06 C0 C9
Cut into opcodes:
01 2E 2B 21 00 00 79 BE C2 1F C0 CD 19 C0 CA 1E C0 78 BE C2 06 C0 C3 25 C0 2C C2 1E C0 24 C9 CD 19 C0 C3 06 C0 C9
Some opcodes used 1 byte, others 2 or 3. C2 1F C0 – means Jump to address C01F when not zero C9 – means return, go back to a previous CALL statement
Example of machine language which is translated into above
Somewhere this year i got a subscription on HackTic a dutch hacker magazine.
Honestly most of the things i didn’t understand ( i was not into Unix at that time.)
I still got most of the magazines, except for some i lend to others and never got back.
In number 8 (1990) there was a schematic for copying magnetic strip cards. It took a while to build this, but i got it working in the end. I managed to get a working bank card copied onto my Film rental store card. And we managed to copy magnetic cards which would hold information about how many copies you could make at the school xerosmachines. So we copied a full card and when it was empty rewrote information on it to fill it again.
At the MTS in Hengelo we also had a hidden switch for the payphone to get our money back.
"If something is worth doing, it's worth overdoing."
