ReactOS: Dipping A Toe In A Millennium-era Open Source Dream

April 27, 2020 by Jenny List 57 Comments

Do you remember when trying a new OS meant burning a CD? Not merely downloading an ISO and mounting it on a USB drive, but taking a circle of polycarbonate and hoping you didn’t get a buffer underrun as the file you’d spent an entire day downloading was burned onto it. A couple of decades ago that was how we’d take a look at a new Linux distro, and at the time we considered it to be nothing short of incredible that such a thing was possible. One of the ISOs I remember downloading back then was an early version of ReactOS, a project with the lofty aim of creating an open-source equivalent of Windows NT. You might think that in the nearly two decades since then it would have become an irrelevance and its contributors moved on to other work, but no. ReactOS is very much still with us, and indeed has just seen a new release. Version 0.4.13 is the latest in a long line of incremental updates, and remembering those early ReactOS ISOs when I saw their announcement, I thought I’d give it a spin. The result was both a peek at the current state of the project, and a chance to think about the place of a Windows clone in 2020. Continue reading “ReactOS: Dipping A Toe In A Millennium-era Open Source Dream” →

Breadboard Computer Plays Snake On Character Display; Also In A Browser!

April 26, 2020 by Sven Gregori 4 Comments

If building a homebrew computer on a breadboard is your thing, you’re most certainly familiar with [Ben Eater], whose design of using nothing but logic gates has served as inspiration for many replicas over the years. [visrealm] took the concept and expanded upon it, even adding a 16×2 LCD that let’s you play Snake by moving a single pixel on the character display!

Making the most of tiny resolution is impressive — it’s a difficult constraint for the game field. But there are other tricks at work as well. [visrealm] uses different intensities to distinguish between the snake and its food which is kind of a dark pixel in the demo shown after the break. But what stands out most is that the breadboard build is really only half of the story. In addition, [visrealm] built an entire emulator that resembles his actual breadboard design, which can be programmed and used via browser, giving WebAssembly a whole new meaning. While that’s convenient for anyone interested to play around with these breadboard computers, but lacks the patience to build one themselves, it also functions as the real one’s programming environment. In addition, an ESP8266 is used to load a new program directly via WiFi.

All the code and some build notes are available on GitHub, and if you’re looking for a nifty LCD emulator for your web site, there’s a standalone repository for that as well. But in case you need a better display option for your own breadboard computer, how about adding a VGA connector? And if you don’t build your own yet, it’s never too late to start.

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Snakes And Ladders: Game Boy Emulator In Python

April 26, 2020 by Sven Gregori 3 Comments

If a Game Boy was a part of your childhood, you were probably more than once dreaming of spending your entire school day with it. Well, they had to wait a few more years for that, but eventually in 2015, [Asger], [baekalfen], and [troelsy] made that dream reality when they created a Game Boy emulator in Python for a university project. However, it didn’t stop there, and the emulator has since grown into a full-blown open source project, PyBoy, which just reached the version 1.0 release.

Since it started out as an academic project, the three of them had to do their research accordingly, so the background and theory about the Game Boy’s internal functionality and the emulator they wrote is summarized in a report published along with the source code. There is still some work to be done, and sadly there is no sound support implemented yet, but for the most part it’s fully functional and let’s you successfully play your own extracted cartridges, or any ROM file you happen to have in your possession.

Being an emulator, you can also inspect its inner life when run in debug mode, and watch the sprites, tiles, and data as you play, plus do cool things like play the emulation in reverse as shown in the clip below. Even more so, you can just load the instance in your own Python scripts, and start writing your own bots for your games — something’s we’ve seen in action for the NES before. And if you want to dive really deep into the world of the Game Boy, you should definitely watch the 33c3 talk about it.

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Program Guesses Your Regular Expression

April 22, 2020 by Al Williams 12 Comments

We aren’t sure how we feel about [pemistahl’s] grex program. On the one hand, we applaud a program that can take some input samples and produce a regular expression. On the other hand, it might be just as hard to gather example data that produces the correct regular expression. Still, it is an interesting piece of code.

Even the author suggests not to use this as an excuse to not learn regular expressions, since you’ll need to check the program’s output. It is certain that the results will match your test cases, but it isn’t certain that it won’t accept things you didn’t expect. Bad regular expressions have been the source of some deeply buried bugs.

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Compiling C To PowerPoint

April 6, 2020 by Al Williams 5 Comments

If you have worked for a large company — or even a small one — it might seem that you spend more time writing PowerPoint charts than programming. [Tom Widenhain’s] video asks the question: Can we compile C into PowerPoint? Watch the video below to find out the answer. Would it surprise you to know that [Tom] wanted to simulate the x86? It surprised us, too, and we had to note the video appeared on April 1. It does look workable, though, other than it is a bit unwieldy.

Instead of a Turing machine, this builds a set of clever logic gates. Unsurprisingly, [Tom] is the guy who put together a Turing machine in Excel. Surprisingly, he isn’t the first one to attempt a C to PPT compiler. The University of Chicago had a similar idea over a year ago, based on [Tom’s] earlier work and executed program using inefficient Turing machines.

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Making An Arduino Ventilator? Read This First

April 5, 2020 by Al Williams 70 Comments

Thanks to the virus crisis, lots of people are designing makeshift ventilator designs in the hopes of saving people’s lives. Many of these are based around some sort of Arduino-powered CPU. [Armstrong Subero] things that’s a great idea, but cautions that making an electronic pair of dice is a different proposition than creating a machine to breathe for someone. But he isn’t just complaining. He talks about considerations when building a real-time and safety-critical system.

[Armstrong] has a lot of good points, although we aren’t sure you need the complexity of a real-time operating system just to squeeze a bag. If anything, that seems like it might make it more susceptible to unexpected operation. However, we agree with his comments that you should have closed-loop control to make sure the device is working, alarming when the device isn’t working, and watchdog timers to guard against lockup.

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Gold Cables Really Do Work The Best

April 1, 2020 by Jenny List 88 Comments

As a writer, I have long harboured a dream that one day an editor will buy me a top-of-the-range audio analyser, and I can set up an audio test lab and write pieces debunking the spurious claims made by audiophiles, HiFi journalists, and the high-end audio industry about the quality of their products. Does that amp really lend an incisive sibilance to the broader soundstage, and can we back that up with some measurable figures rather than purple prose?

An Audio Playground You Didn’t Know You Had

An Audio Precision APx525 audio analyser. Bradp723 (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Sadly Hackaday is not an audio magazine, and if Mike bought me an Audio Precision he’d have to satisfy all the other writers’ test equipment desires too, and who knows where that would end! So there will be no Hackaday audio lab — for now. But that doesn’t mean I can’t play around with audio analysis.

Last month we carried a write-up of a Supercon talk from Kate Temkin and Michael Ossmann, in which they reminded us that we have a cracking general purpose DSP playground right under our noses; GNU Radio isn’t just for radio. Once I’d seen the talk my audio analysis horizons were opened up considerably. Maybe that audio analyser wouldn’t be mine, but I could do some of the same job with GNU Radio.

It’s important to stress at this point that anything I can do on my bench will not remotely approach the quality of a professional audio analyser. But even if I can’t measure infinitesimal differences between very high-end audio circuitry, I can still measure enough to tell a good audio product from a bad one.

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