Improving A Kodak Film Digitizer

August 23, 2023 by 12 Comments

Despite the near-complete collapse of its ecosystem in the face of portable videocassette camcorders in the 1980s, somehow the 8 mm format, smallest of the movie films, has survived the decades. There’s a special aura around an 8 mm image which electronic recordings don’t replicate, plus for film makers there’s an attraction to working with real film. Unsurprisingly almost all of the devices used with 8 mm film have ceased to be manufactured, but a few items escaped the cut. It’s still possible to buy an 8 mm digitizer for example, and it’s one of these with a Kodak brand that [Mac84] has. Unsatisfied with its image quality, he’s set about tinkering with its firmware to give it some video adjustment possibilities and remove its artifact-prone artificial sharpening.

Helped by the device having a handy EEPROM from which to extract the code, he was able to recover the firmware intact. From here on he was in luck, because the digitizer’s Novatek CPU is shared with some dash cams and this had spawned a hacker scene. From there he was able to find the relevant area and adjust those settings, and after a few false starts, re-flash it to the device.

The results can be seen in the video below the break, and perhaps reveal much about what we expect from an image in the digital age. The sharpened images look good, until we see untampered versions which are closer to the original.

If you don’t have a Kodak scanner you can always build one yourself, and meanwhile like many people we are still wondering what happened to that new Super 8 camera they announced in 2018 but never released.

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Decompiling Sonic Runners

August 22, 2023 by 7 Comments

Usually, when you hear about games being decompiled and rebuilt, the games are often decades-old relics, loving and saved from the ravages of time. [MattKC] recently set out to decompile the 2015 game Sonic Runners.

The game was a 2D endless runner released on mobile platforms. Despite getting praise for the gameplay, it received mixed reviews for the pop-up ads and pay-to-play elements. A little over a year later, the game was discontinued. However, the game required a constant online connection, so once the servers were offline, it rendered the over five million downloads unplayable.

A team of developers worked to reverse engineer the server, and with a little bit of binary hacking, the client could be patched to connect to a community-hosted server instead. However, as phones with notched displays came out and suggestions for improvements stacked up, the community realized a new client would bring immense benefits. Compared to many decompilation projects, Sonic Runners was pretty easy as it uses Unity, which means most of the code is in C#. Unfortunately, the build of Unity used by the game is from 2012, meaning many of the tools designed for much later versions of Unity were inoperable.

However, one native code library called UnmanagedProcess was designed to confuse reverse engineering efforts. The library handled AES encryption and communication with the server. Luckily, the library was a later addition, and earlier versions of its functions still lingered in the C# code. Since an open source server already existed, it was trivial to validate the changes. Additionally, all the shaders were in OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL), which meant rewriting them in High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) and checking that they matched the original GLSL when building for Android.

Now the client has new game modes, no ads, and a proper offline mode. The community continues adding new features and refining the game, which is very satisfying. If you’re curious about reverse engineering, [Matthew Alt] can help you get started.

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Random Access Memory From A Rotating Drum In A Bendix G15

August 22, 2023 by 28 Comments

When it’s the 1950s and you are tasked to design a computer system that features not only CPU registers but also a certain amount of RAM, you do not have a lot of options. At this point in time, discrete logic was the rule, and magnetic core memory still fairly new and rather expensive. This is where the rotating drum comes in, which is somewhat like a cross between an old-style cylinder record and a hard drive. In a recent [Usagi Electric] video, a 1950s Bendix G15 system is demonstrated, which features such a rotating drum device, alongside both tube-based circuits and newfangled diode-based circuitry.

Simplified diagram of a rotating drum random access memory unit, showing the read-erase-write process as the drum spins.
Simplified diagram of a rotating drum random access memory unit, showing the read-erase-write process as the drum spins.

This particular unit was borrowed from the System Source museum, with the intent to restore it to a working condition. Part of this process involved figuring out the circuitry, which was made easy by the circuit schematic drawings that came with the original machine. According to the official brochure by the manufacturer, the ‘short lines’ that are intended for the CPU registers, the access time was less than 1 millisecond, which is pretty darn fast considering the era and the discrete CPU’s clock speed.

For the drum itself, however, popping the cover off the unit showed that it had suffered some damage that had resulted in the multiple heads contacting the surface. Despite this disappointment, it’s not the end of the restoration, however. The museum has one more Bendix G15 standing around, with a rotating drum unit that looks to be in mint condition. The damaged magnetic coating on the other rotating drum may conceivably be resurfaced, which if successful could provide new hope to a lot of retro systems out there that also use magnetic media, whether in drum or disk format.

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Debian Buzz (1.1) running under Bochs. (Credit: Thomas Stewart)

Looking Back On 30 Years Of Debian

August 21, 2023 by 18 Comments

The early history of Linux is a rather murky period to most, long before the era of glitzy marketing and proclamations of ‘the Linux desktop’ being the next hot thing. This was also the era when the first Linux distributions were born, as the Linux kernel never came as a whole OS package – unlike the BSDs – which necessitated others to package it with the elements that make up kernel and user space, such as the GNU tools.

One of these original distributions was Debian, which this month celebrates its 30th birthday. Its entire history, starting with the initial 0.01 release is covered in great detail on the Debian website. After the first release of the Linux kernel in 1991, it would take until August of 1993 when [Ian Murdock] embarked on the Debian project, sponsored by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. This was a pretty rough period, with much of 1994 spent figuring out the basics of the system, the package manager and establishing a release system. Continue reading “Looking Back On 30 Years Of Debian” →

A Soyuz-2.1b rocket booster with a Fregat upper stage and the Luna 25 lunar lander blasts off from a launchpad at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia.

Luna 25’s Demise: Raising Fundamental Questions About Russia’s Space Program

August 21, 2023 by 79 Comments

The recent news that Russia’s Luna 25 Moon lander had made an unexpected lithobraking detour into the Moon’s surface, rather than the expected soft touchdown was met by a variety of responses, ranging from dismay to outright glee, much of it on account of current geopolitical considerations. Yet politics aside, the failure of this mission casts another shadow on the prospects of Russia’s attempts to revive the Soviet space program after a string of failures, including its ill-fated Mars 96 and Fobos-Grunt Mars missions, the latter of which also destroyed China’s first Mars orbiter (Yinghuo-1) and ignited China’s independent Mars program.

To this day, only three nations have managed to land on the Moon in a controlled fashion: the US, China, and the Soviet Union. India may soon join this illustrious list if its Chandrayaan-3 mission’s Vikram lander dodges the many pitfalls of soft touchdowns on the Moon’s surface. While Roscosmos has already started internal investigation, it does cast significant doubt on the viability of the Russian Luna-Glob (‘Lunar Sphere’) lunar exploration program.

Will Russia manage to pick up where the Soviet Union left off in 1976 with the Luna 24 lunar sample return mission?

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Resin Printer Temperature Mods And Continuous IPA Filtration

August 21, 2023 by 33 Comments

Two essential parts to producing successful resin 3D prints: keeping resin at its optimal temperature and lots and lots of IPA to clean the printed parts with after printing. Unfortunately, most consumer MSLA printers do not come with a resin tray heater, and tossing out IPA after every cleaning session because of some resin contamination is both wasteful and somewhat expensive. These are two things that can be fixed in a number of ways, with [Nick Wilson] going for the ‘crank it to 11’ option, using a high-tech, fully integrated solution for both problems.

The vat with IPA is kept clean through the use of a diaphragm pump that circulates the alcohol through two filter stages, one for larger — up to 5 micrometer — particulates and one for smaller 0.5-micrometer junk. A 405 nm LED lighting section before the filters is intended to cure any resin in the IPA, theoretically leaving the IPA squeaky clean by the time it’s returned to the vat.

For the resin tray heater, a more straightforward 12V 150 Watt silicone heater strip is stuck to the outside edge of the metal resin tray, along with a temperature-controlled relay that toggles the heater strip on and off until the resin reaches the desired temperature. None of these are necessarily expensive solutions, but they can be incredibly useful if you do a fair amount of resin printing.

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The Clathrate Gun Hypothesis: Unearthing Puzzles Of Warming Events Past

August 21, 2023 by 36 Comments

As the Earth continues to warm at a worrying rate, scientists continue to work to understand the processes and mechanisms at play. Amidst the myriad of climate-related theories and discussions, the clathrate gun hypothesis stands out not only for its intriguing name but for the profound implications it might have on our understanding of global warming events.

Delving into this hypothesis is akin to reading a detective novel written by Mother Earth, with clues hidden deep beneath the ocean and Arctic ice. It’s a great example of how scientists attempt to predict the future by unpicking the mysteries of the past.

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