Your Surface RT Can Become Useful Again, With Raspberry Pi OS

February 2, 2024 by 18 Comments

Over the years there have been so many times when Microsoft came up with a product that so nearly got it right, but which tanked in the market because the folks at Redmond had more of an eye to what fitted their strategy than what the customer wanted. The Surface RT was one of these: while the hardware was at least as good if not better than Apple’s iPad, its ARM CPU and an ill-advised signed-apps-only policy meant the tablet couldn’t access the huge existing library of Windows software.

Consumers didn’t want a tablet with next-to-no apps, so it failed miserably. Never mind though, because [Michael MJD] has a video showing how an RT can be given a new life from an unlikely source, with the installation of Raspberry Pi OS.

The video pretty closely follows this guide, and involves creating a Raspberry Pi OS install medium modified with RT-specific kernel modules and device tree. It’s possible because the 32-bit ARM architecture is one of those which Raspberry Pi OS targets, and while a few things such as graphics acceleration don’t work, it’s still successful (if a little slow).

Oddly this is a technique not unlike one from the earliest days of the Raspberry Pi, when we remember people in Raspberry Pi Jams showing off the ancestor of the modern OS running on cheap ARM-based netbooks. In those cases the hack relied on transplanting the Pi userland over the device’s existing kernel, we’d be interested in an explanation of how the RT can use the Pi kernel without the famous Broadcom BLOB intended for the Pi.

We have a soft spot for the RT, as we said a good product held back by a very bad software decision. Seeing it take a new life years later is thus pleasing to us.

Continue reading “Your Surface RT Can Become Useful Again, With Raspberry Pi OS” →

Book8088 Slows Down To Join The Demoscene

September 12, 2023 by 9 Comments

As obsolete as the original IBM Model 5150 PC may appear, it’s pretty much the proverbial giant’s shoulders upon which we all stand today. That makes the machine worth celebrating, so much so that we now have machines like the Book8088, a diminutive clamshell-style machine made from period-correct PC chips; sort of a “netbook that never was.”

But the Book8088 only approximates the original specs of the IBM PC, making some clever hardware hacks necessary to run some of the more specialized software that has since been developed to really stretch the limits of the architecture. [GloriousCow]’s first steps were to replace the Book8088’s CPU, an NEC V20, with an actual 8088, and the display controller with a CGA-accurate Motorola MC6845. Neither of these quite did the trick, though, at least not on the demanding 8088MPH demo, which makes assumptions about CPU speed based on the quirky DRAM refresh scheme used in the original IBM PC.

Knowing this, [GloriousCow] embarked on a bodge-fest aimed at convincing the demo that the slightly overclocked Book8088 was really just a 4.77-MHz machine with a CGA adapter. This involved cutting a trace on the DMA controller and reconnecting it to the machine’s PIO timer chip, with the help of a 74LS74 flip-flop, a chip that made an appearance in the 5150 but was omitted from the Book8088. Thankfully, the netbook has plenty of room for these mods, and with the addition of a little bit of assembly code, the netbook was able to convince 8088MPH that it was running on the correct hardware.

We thoroughly enjoyed this trip down the DMA/DRAM rabbit hole. The work isn’t finished yet, though — the throttled netbook still won’t run the Area 5150 demo yet. Given [GloriousCow]’s recent Rust-based cycle-accurate PC emulation, we feel pretty good that this will come to pass soon enough.

Your IPhone Can’t Do What This WinCE Device Can!

June 16, 2023 by 44 Comments

Most of us probably now have a smartphone, an extremely capable pocket computer — even if sometimes its abilities are disguised a little by its manufacturer. There are many contenders to the crown of first smartphone, but in that discussion it’s often forgotten that the first generally available such devices weren’t phones at all, but PDAs, or Personal Digital Assistants. The fancier ones blurred the line between PDA and laptop and were the forerunner devices to netbooks, and it’s one of these that [Remy] is putting through its paces. He makes the bold claim that it can do things the iPhone can’t, and while the two devices are in no way comparable he’s right on one point. His HP Journada 720 can host a development environment, while the iPhone can’t.

The HP was something of a turn-of-the-millennium object of desire, being a palmtop computer with a half-decent keyboard a 640×240 pixel TFT display, and 32 MB of RAM alongside its 206 MHz Intel StrongARM CPU. Its Windows CE OS wasn’t quite the desktop Windows of the day, but it was close enough to be appealing for the ’90s exec who had everything. Astoundingly it has more than one Linux distro that can run on it with some level of modernity, which is where he’s able to make the claim about the iPhone being inferior.

We remember the Journada clamshell series from back in the day, though by our recollection the battery life would plummet if any attempt was made to use the PCMCIA slot. It was only one of several similar platforms offering a mini-laptop experience, and we feel it’s sad that there are so few similar machines today. Perhaps we’ll keep an eye out for one and relive the ’90s ourselves.

IBM Made A MIPS Laptop. Will It Make You WinCE?

September 29, 2022 by 26 Comments

We’re used to our laptop computers here in 2022 being ultra-portable, super-powerful, and with impressively long battery lives. It’s easy to forget then that there was a time when from those three features the laptop user could usually expect only one of them in their device. Powerful laptops were the size of paving slabs and had battery lives measured in minutes, while anything small usually had disappointing performance or yet again a minuscule power budget.

In the late 1990s manufacturers saw a way out of this in Microsoft’s Windows CE, which would run on modest hardware without drinking power. Several devices made it to market, among them one from IBM which [OldVCR] has taken a look at. It makes for an interesting trip down one of those dead-end side roads in computing history.

In the box bought through an online auction is a tiny laptop that screams IBM, we’d identify it as a ThinkPad immediately if it wasn’t for that brand being absent. This is an IBM WorkPad, a baby sibling of the ThinkPad line intended as a companion device. This one has a reduced spec screen and an NEC MIPS processor, with Windows CE on a ROM SODIMM accessible through a cover on the underside. For us in 2022 MIPS processors based on the open-sourced MIPS ISA are found in low-end webcams and routers, but back then it was a real contender. The article goes into some detail on the various families of chips from that time, which is worth a read in itself.

We remember these laptops, and while the IBM one was unaffordable there was a COMPAQ competitor which did seem tempting for on-the-road work. They failed to make an impact due to being marketed as a high-end executive’s toy rather than a mass-market computer, and they were seen off as “real” laptops became more affordable. A second-hand HP Omnibook 800 did the ultra-portable job on this bench instead.

The industry had various attempts at cracking this market, most notably with the netbooks which appeared a few years after the WorkPad was produced. It was left to Google to reinvent the ultra-portable non-Intel laptop as an internet appliance with their Chromebooks before they would become a mass-market device, but the WorkPad remains a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been.

Windows CE occasionally makes an appearance here, and yes, it runs DOOM.

Future Brings CPU Modules, And The Future Is Now

September 14, 2022 by 36 Comments

Modularity is a fun topic for us. There’s something satisfying about seeing a complex system split into parts and these parts made replaceable. We often want some parts of our devices swapped, after all – for repair or upgrade purposes, and often, it’s just fun to scour eBay for laptop parts, equipping your Thinkpad with the combination of parts that fits you best. Having always been fascinated by modularity, I believe that hackers deserve to know what’s been happening on the CPU module front over the past decade.

A Youtube thumbnail showing a Thinpad in the background with "Not Garbage" written over its keyboard, and one more keyboard overlaid onto the picture with "garbage" written on that one.
This “swap your Thinkpad keyboard” video thumbnail captures a modularity-enabled sentiment many can relate to.

We’ve gotten used to swapping components in desktop PCs, given their unparalleled modularity, and it’s big news when someone tries to split a yet-monolithic concept like a phone or a laptop into modules. Sometimes, the CPU itself is put into a module. From the grandiose idea of Project Ara, to Intel’s Compute Card, to Framework laptop’s standardized motherboards, companies have been trying to capitalize on what CPU module standardization can bring them.

There’s some hobbyist-driven and hobbyist-friendly modular standards, too – the kind you can already use to wrangle a powerful layout-demanding CPU and RAM combo and place it on your simple self-designed board. I’d like to tell you about a few notable modular CPU concepts – their ideas, complexities, constraints and stories. As you work on that one ambitious project of yours – you know, the one, – it’s likely you will benefit a lot from such a standard. Or, perhaps, you’ll find it necessary to design the next standard for others to use – after all, we all know there’s never too few standards! Continue reading “Future Brings CPU Modules, And The Future Is Now” →

Computer Vision Extracts Lightning From Footage

July 1, 2022 by 16 Comments

Lightning is one of the more mysterious and fascinating phenomenon on the planet. Extremely powerful, but each strike on average only has enough energy to power an incandescent bulb for an hour. The exact mechanism that starts a lightning strike is still not well understood. Yet it happens 45 times per second somewhere on the planet. While we may not gain a deeper scientific appreciation of lightning anytime soon, but we can capture it in various photography thanks to this project which leverages computer vision machine learning to pull out the best frames of lightning.

The project’s creator, [Liam], built this as a tool for stormchasers and photographers so that they can film large amounts of time and not have to go back through their footage manually to pull out the frames with lightning strikes. The project borrows from a similar project, but this one adds Python 3 capabilities and runs on a tiny netbook for more easy field deployment. It uses OpenCV for object recognition, using video files as the source data, and features different modes to recognize different types of lightning.

The software is free and open source, and releases are supported for both Windows and Linux. So far, [Liam] has been able to capture all kinds of electrical atmospheric phenomenon with it including lightning, red sprites, and elves. We don’t see too many projects involving lightning around here, partly because humans can only generate a fraction of the voltage potential needed for the average lightning strike.

render of the MNT Pocket Reform on a desk

MNT Reform Goodness, Now Even Smaller With Pocket Reform

July 1, 2022 by 12 Comments

You might have already seen the pretty pictures in pastel colors online — a small netbook-like computer with a full-size keyboard. This, while a render, is what the MNT Pocket Reform is going to look like. Reminiscent of the netbook aesthetic in all the right ways, it’s a small device with a mechanical keyboard taking as much space as possible, trackball for navigation, and we assume, exactly the kind of screen that’d be comfortable to use.

We’ve reviewed the MNT Reform a year ago, and this device inherits a lot of its good parts. The motherboard’s connectivity is likely subject to change, but on the motherboard renders, we can spot three USB-C ports, a Micro HDMI port, a microSD card slot, ix Industrial Ethernet, and M.2 B-key and M-key slots for WWAN and SSD cards respectively.

If you expected computational specs, there isn’t really a specific CPU+RAM configuration announced – for a good reason. The Pocket Reform takes advantage of the CPU card concept designed into the MNT Reform – able to take a card with an NXP i.MX8M CPU, Raspberry Pi CM4, Pine SOQuartz, a Kintex-7 FPGA, or any of the cards yet to be developed. The design files are open-source, the prototype motherboards have been ordered, mechanical usability aspects have been worked through. This is a very compelling project, and we can’t wait to see it bear fruit!