Why Are Micro Center Flash Drives So Slow?

March 26, 2025 by Maya Posch 45 Comments

Every year, USB flash drives get cheaper and hold more data. Unfortunately, they don’t always get faster. The reality is, many USB 3.0 flash drives aren’t noticeably faster than their USB 2.0 cousins, as [Chase Fournier] found with the ultra-cheap specimens purchased over at his local Micro Center store.

Although these all have USB 3.0 interfaces, they transfer at less than 30 MB/s, but why exactly? After popping open a few of these drives the answer appears to be that they use the old-style Phison controller (PS2251-09-V) and NAND flash packages that you’d expect to find in a USB 2.0 drive.

Across the 32, 64, and 256 GB variants the same Phison controller is used, but the PCB has provisions for both twin TSOP packages or one BGA package. The latter package turned out to be identical to those found in the iPhone 8. Also interesting was that the two 256 GB drives [Chase] bought had different Phison chips, as in one being BGA and the other QFP. Meanwhile some flash drives use eMMC chips, which are significantly faster, as demonstrated in the video.

It would seem that you really do get what you pay for, with $3 “USB 3.0” flash drives providing the advertised storage, but you really need to budget in the extra time that you’ll be waiting for transfers.

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Teardown Of Casio Credit Card-Sized Radio

March 26, 2025 by Maya Posch 33 Comments

These days we don’t get too fussed about miniaturized electronics, not when you can put an entire processor and analog circuitry on a chip the size of a grain of sand. Things were quite different back in the 1980s, with the idea of a credit card-sized radio almost preposterous. This didn’t stop the engineers over at Casio from having a go at this and many other nutty ideas, with [Matt] from Techmoan having a go at taking one of these miniaturized marvels apart.

The Casio FM Stereo radio in happier days. (Credit: Techmoan, YouTube)

On the chopping block is the FM stereo device that was featured in a previous episode. Out of the four credit card-sized radios in that video, the one with the rechargeable battery (obviously) had ceased to work, so it was the obvious choice for a teardown. This mostly meant peeling off the glued-on top and bottom, after which the circuitry became visible.

In addition to the battery with a heavily corroded contact, the thin PCB contains a grand total of three ICs in addition to the analog circuitry. These were identified by [Spritetm] as an AM/FM tuner system IC (TA7792), an FM PLL MPX (TA7766AF) and a headphone amplifier (TA7767F), all of them manufactured by Toshiba.

Although [Matt] reckons this was a destructive teardown, we’re looking forward to the repair video where a fresh cell is soldered in and the case glued back together. Continue reading “Teardown Of Casio Credit Card-Sized Radio” →

Build Customized Raspberry Pi OS Images With Rpi-image-gen

March 26, 2025 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

Recently Raspberry Pi publicly announced the release of their new rpi-image-gen tool, which is advertised as making custom Raspberry Pi OS (i.e. Debian for specific Broadcom SoCs) images in a much more streamlined fashion than with the existing rpi-gen tool, or with third-party solutions. The general idea seems to be that the user fetches the tool from the GitHub project page, before running the build.sh script with parameters defining the configuration file and other options.

The main advantage of this tool is said to be that it uses binary packages rather than (cross-)compiling, while providing a range of profiles and configuration layers to target specific hardware & requirements. Two examples are provided in the GitHub project, one for a ‘slim’ project, the other for a ‘webkiosk‘ configuration that runs a browser in a restricted (Cage) environment, with required packages installed in the final image.

Looking at the basic ‘slim’ example, it defines the INI-style configuration in config/pi5-slim.cfg, but even when browsing through the main README it’s still somewhat obtuse. Under device it references the mypi5 subfolder which contains its own shell script, plus a cmdline.txt and fstab file. Under image it references the compact subfolder with another bunch of files in it. Although this will no doubt make a lot more sense after taking a few days to prod & poke at this, it’s clear that this is not a tool for casual users who just want to quickly put a custom image together.

This is also reflected in the Raspberry Pi blog post, which strongly insinuates that this is targeting commercial & industrial customers, rather than hobbyists.

Brazilian Modders Upgrade NVidia Geforce GTX 970 To 8 GB Of VRAM

March 25, 2025 by Maya Posch 24 Comments

Although NVidia’s current disastrous RTX 50-series is getting all the attention right now, this wasn’t the first misstep by NVidia. Back in 2014 when NVidia released the GTX 970 users were quickly dismayed to find that their ‘4 GB VRAM’ GPU had actually just 3.5 GB, with the remaining 512 MB being used in a much slower way at just 1/7th of the normal speed. Back then NVidia was subject to a $30/card settlement with disgruntled customers, but there’s a way to at least partially fix these GPUs, as demonstrated by a group of Brazilian modders (original video with horrid English auto-dub).

The mod itself is quite straightforward, with the original 512 MB, 7 Gbps GDDR5 memory modules replaced with 1 GB, 8 Gbps chips and adding a resistor on the PCB to make the GPU recognize the higher density VRAM ICs. Although this doesn’t fix the fundamental split VRAM issue of the ASIC, it does give it access to 7 GB of faster, higher-density VRAM. In benchmarks performance was massively increased, with Unigine Superposition showing nearly a doubling in the score.

In addition to giving this GTX 970 a new lease on life, it also shows just how important having more VRAM on a GPU is, which is ironic in this era where somehow GPU manufacturers deem 8 GB of VRAM to be acceptable in 2025.

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ReactOS 0.4.15 Released With Major Improvements

March 25, 2025 by Maya Posch 84 Comments

Recently the ReactOS project released the much anticipated 0.4.15 update, making it the first major release since 2020. Despite what might seem like a minor version bump from the previous 0.4.14 release, the update introduces sweeping changes to everything from the kernel to the user interface and aspects like the audio system and driver support. Those who have used the nightly builds over the past years will likely have noticed a lot of these changes already.

Japanese input with MZ-IME and CJK font (Credit: ReactOS project)

A notable change is to plug-and-play support which enables more third party drivers and booting from USB storage devices. The Microsoft FAT filesystem driver from the Windows Driver Kit can now be used courtesy of better compatibility, there is now registry healing, and caching and kernel access checks are implemented. The latter improvement means that many ReactOS modules can now work in Windows too.

On the UI side there is a much improved IME (input method editor) feature, along with native ZIP archive support and various graphical tweaks.

Meanwhile since 0.4.15 branched off the master branch six months ago, the latter has seen even more features added, including SMP improvements, UEFI support, a new NTFS driver and improvements to power management and application support. All of this accompanied by many bug fixes, which makes it totally worth it to regularly check out the nightly builds.

Next time on Star Trek: EmptyEpsilon... (Credit: EmptyEpsilon project)

Build A Starship Bridge Simulator With EmptyEpsilon

March 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

Who hasn’t dreamed of serving on the bridge of a Star Trek starship? Although the EmptyEpsilon project isn’t adorned with the Universe-famous LCARS user interface, it does provide a comprehensive simulation scenario, in a multiplayer setting. Designed as a LAN or WAN multiplayer game hosted by the server that also serves as the main screen, four to six additional devices are required to handle the non-captain tasks. These include helm, weapons, engineering, science and relay, which includes comms.

Scenarios are created by the game master, not unlike a D&D game, with the site providing a reference and various examples of how to go about this.

The free and open source game’s binaries can be obtained directly from the site, but it’s also available on Steam. The game isn’t limited to just Trek either, but scenarios can be crafted to fit whatever franchise or creative impulse feels right for that LAN party.

Obviously building the whole thing into a realistic starship bridge is optional, but it certainly looks like more fun that way.

The Mysterious Mindscape Music Board

March 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Sound cards on PC-compatible computer systems have a rather involved and convoluted history, with not only a wide diversity of proprietary standards, but also a collection of sound cards that were never advertised as such. Case in point the 1985 Mindscape Music Board, which was an add-on ISA card that came bundled with [Glen Clancy]’s Bank Street Music Writer software for IBM PC. This contrasted with the Commodore 64 version which used the Commodore SID sound chip. Recently both [Tales of Weird Stuff] and [The Oldskool PC] on YouTube both decided to cover this very rare soundcard.

Based around two General Instruments AY-3-8913 programmable sound generators, it enabled the output of six voices, mapped to six instruments in the Bank Street Music Writer software. Outside of this use this card saw no use, however, and it would fade into obscurity along with the software that it was originally bundled with. Only four cards are said to still exist, with [Tales of Weird Stuff] getting their grubby mitts on one.

As a rare slice of history, it is good to see this particular card getting some more love and attention, as it was, and still is, quite capable. [The Oldskool PC] notes that because the GI chip used is well-known and used everywhere, adding support for it in software and emulators is trivial, and efforts to reproduce the board are already underway.

Top image: Mindscape Music Board (Credit: Ian Romanick)

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