An Atari Graphics Chip, Ready For You To Build

November 10, 2019 by Jenny List 27 Comments

The most notable of the home computer and console hardware from the 8-bit golden era didn’t get their impressive sound and graphics from off-the-shelf silicon, instead they relied on secretive custom chipsets to get the edge over their competitors. Unfortunately for vintage gaming aficionados, those chips are now long out of production and in many cases there’s little information to be had about their operation.

Which makes discovery of the schematics (PDF link) for the “Tia Maria” graphics chip found in the Atari 7800 console an unusual occurrence, and one which should be of special interest to the emulation community. They can be found alongside the rest of the Atari Museum’s 7800 information.

That such a useful document is available at all is due to a lucky find in a dumpster following the demise of Atari, when a treasure trove of documents was discarded. It seems that the existence of these schematics has been known within the Atari community for some time, and we expect before long this information will find its way into FPGA implementations of the 7800; especially since the system features nearly complete backwards compatibility with the massively successful Atari 2600.

When that happens we hope we’ll be able to bring it to you, but it’s not the first time someone’s made an Atari on an FPGA.

Via RetroRGB

Header image: Bilby [CC BY 3.0]

Plan Ahead: Roaming Charges Are A Killer

November 9, 2019 by Al Williams 20 Comments

As the world gets more connected and computerized, it is easy to have an unintended consequence pop up and bite you. Especially because, so much of the time, today, things just work. The days of fretting over how to connect two computers, or how to store reasonable amounts of data are gone. Most of us never have to sift through assembly language programs finding three extra bytes to add a feature. Some Russian scientists recently found out about unintended consequences the hard way.

In the United States, the Eagle was long on the endangered species list, but apparently they have a similar problem in Russia. Scientists put a tracker on some migrating eagles in southern Russia and Kazakhstan. A few decades ago, this would have been a big technical challenge, but now you just use cellular technology and have the tracker text its location, right?

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We Are Bowled Over By The BouLED

November 8, 2019 by Richard Baguley 3 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of cubic LED creations recently, but this one takes it a bit further. The BouLED is a work-in-progress icosahedric LED display, a globe-like sphere made of 20 flat triangular LED-lit faces. When combined with sensors inside the display, it will be able to stabilize the image. In other words: you can pick it up and rotate it, but the image will stay steady. It is created as part of their degree work by [Matthias Rabault], [Lucas Lebailly] and [Hichem Ghandri] who are students at the Télécom Paris school.

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Takata Airbag Recalls Widen To Potentially Affect Other Types Of Airbag

November 7, 2019 by Lewin Day 55 Comments

The Takata airbag case has become the largest product recall in history, caused over 20 deaths, and cost many billions of dollars. Replacement efforts are still ongoing, and sadly, the body count continues to rise. Against this backdrop, further recalls have been announced affecting another type of Takata airbag.

The recall affects BMW 3 Series vehicles, produced between 1997 and 2000. Notably, it appears these cars may have been built before Takata’s fateful decision to produce airbag inflators using ammonium nitrate propellants, known for their instability. Instead, these vehicles likely used Takata’s proprietary tetrazole propellant, or Non-Azide Driver Inflators (NADI). These were developed in the 1990s, and considered a great engineering feat at the time. They were eventually phased out around 2001 for cost reasons, leading to the scandal that rolls on to this day.

As these airbags were produced before the switch to ammonium nitrate, they have thus far escaped scrutiny as part of existing recalls. Two recent incidents of airbag misdeployments in Australia led to the recall, causing a death and a serious injury. BMW Australia have advised owners not to drive affected vehicles, and are offering loan or hire cars to affected vehicles. Given the age of the affected vehicles, the company is considering a buyback program in the event that suitable replacement parts cannot be made available.

This development is foreboding, as it suggests yet more cars, originally considered safe, are now at risk of injuring or killing occupants in the event of a crash. It’s not yet clear exactly which makes are effected by this recall, but expect the numbers of vehicles to continue to climb.

[via Sydney Morning Herald]

RPi4: Now Overclocked, Net-Booted, And Power-Sipping

October 30, 2019 by Jenny List 58 Comments

It has now been a few months since the launch of the Raspberry Pi 4, and it would only be fair to describe the launch as “rocky”. While significantly faster than the Pi 3 on paper, its propensity for overheating would end up throttling down the CPU clock even with the plethora of aftermarket heatsinks and fans. The Raspberry Pi folks have been working on solutions to these teething troubles, and they have now released a bunch of updates in the form of a new bootloader, that lets the Pi 4 live up to its promise. (UPDATE: Here’s the download page and release notes)

The real meat of the update comes in an implementation of a low power mode for the USB hub. It turns out that the main source of heat on the SoC wasn’t the CPU, but the USB. Fixing the USB power consumption means that you can run the processor cool at stock speeds, and it can even be overclocked now.

There is also a new tool for updating the Pi bootloader, rpi-eeprom, that allows automatic updates for Pi 4 owners. The big change is that booting the Pi 4 over the network or an attached USB device is now a possibility, which is a must if you’re installing the Pi permanently. There are some fixes that caused problems with certain HATs, in which the Pi 4’s 3.3 V line was cycled during a reboot.

With a device as complex as a Raspberry Pi it comes as no surprise that it might ship with a few teething troubles. We’ve already covered some surrounding the USB-C power, for example. And the overheating. Where the Pi people consistently deliver though is in terms of support, both official and from the community, and we’re very pleased to see them come through in this case too.

Unix Tell All Book From Kernighan Hits The Shelves

October 29, 2019 by Al Williams 56 Comments

When you think of the Unix and C revolution that grew out of Bell Labs, there are a few famous names. Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan come to mind. After all, the K in both K&R C and in AWK stand for Kernighan. While Kernighan is no stranger to book authorship — he’s written several classics including “the white book” for C and Unix — he has a new book out that is part historical record and part memoir about the birth of Unix.

Usually, when a famous person writes a retrospective like this, it is full of salacious details, but we don’t expect much of that here. The book talks about Bell Labs and Multics, of course. There’s serious coverage of the first, sixth, and seventh editions with biographies of people integral to those releases.

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Hacking Mars: InSight Mole Is On The Move Again

October 28, 2019 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

Your job might be tough, but spare a thought for any of the engineers involved in the Mars InSight lander mission when they learned that one of the flagship instruments aboard the lander, indeed the very instrument for which the entire mission was named, appeared to be a dud. That’s a bad day at work by anyone’s standards, and it happened over the summer when it was reported that the Mars Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport lander’s Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP³), commonly known as “The Mole”, was not drilling itself into the Martian regolith as planned.

But now, after months of brainstorming and painstaking testing on Earth and on Mars, it looks as if the mole is working again. NASA has announced that, with a little help from the lander’s backhoe bucket, the HP³ penetrator has dug itself 2 cm into the soil. It’s a far cry from the 5-meter planned depth for its heat-transfer experiments, but it’s progress, and the clever hack that got the probe that far might just go on to salvage a huge chunk of the science planned for the $828 million program.

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