Hackaday Links: January 22, 2017

January 22, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

What is a 1971 Ford Torino worth? It depends, but even a 2-door in terrible condition should fetch about $7 or $8k. What is a 1971 Ford Torino covered in 3D printed crap worth? $5500. This is the first ‘3D printed car’ on an auction block. It looks terrible and saying ‘Klaatu Varada Nikto’ unlocks the doors.

Old Apple IIs had a DB19 connector for external floppy drives. Some old macs, pre-PowerPC at least, also had a DB19 connector for external floppy drives. These drives are incompatible with each other for reasons. [Dandu] has a few old macs and one old Apple II 3.5″ external floppy drive. This drive can be hacked so it works with a Mac Classic. The hack is simply disconnecting one of the boards in the drive, and it only reads 400 and 800kB disks, but it does work.

The US Army is working on a hoverbike. Actually, it’s not a hoverbike, because it doesn’t have a saddle or a seat, but it could carry 300 pounds at 60 mph. That’s 136,000 grams at 135 meters per second for the rest of the world out there. This ‘hoverbike’ will be used for very quick resupply, and hopefully a futuristic form of jousting.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a few new microcontrollers built around the RISC-V core. The first is the HiFive1, a RISC-V on an Arduino-shaped board. The Open-V is another RISC-V based microcontroller, and now it too supports the Arduino IDE. That may not seem like much, but trust me: setting up the HiFive1 toolchain takes at least half an hour.

The NAMM show has been going on for the last few days, which means new electronic musical gear, effects pedals, and drum machines. This is cool, but somewhat outside our editorial prerogative. This isn’t. It’s a recording studio using a Rasberry Pi. Tracktion is working on a high-quality digital audio input and output add-on for the Pi 3. This is really cool, and you only need to look back at MPCs and gigantic Akai samplers from 15 years ago to see why.

Hey LA peeps. Sparklecon is next weekend. What’s Sparklecon? The 23B hackerspace pulls out the grill, someone brings a gigantic Tesla coil, we play hammer Jenga, and a bunch of dorks dork around. Go to Sparklecon! Superliminal advertising! Anyone up for a trip to the Northrop ham meetup next Saturday?

Fixing Bugs In A 37 Year Old Apple II Game

January 15, 2017 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

Emulators are a great way to reminisce about games and software from yesteryear. [Jorj Bauer] found himself doing just that back in 2002, when they decided to boot up Three Mile Island for the Apple II. It played well enough, but for some reason, crashed instantly if you happened to press the ‘7’ key. This was a problem — the game takes hours to play, and ‘7’ is the key for saving and restoring your progress. In 2002, [Jorj] was content to put up with this. But finally, enough was enough – [Jorj] set out to fix the bug in Three Mile Island once and for all.

The project is written up in three parts — the history of how [Jorj] came to play Three Mile Island and learn about Apple IIs in the first place, the problem with the game, and finally the approach to finding a solution. After first discovering the problem, [Jorj] searched online to see if it was just a bad disk image causing the problem. But every copy they found was the same. There was nothing left for it to be but problem in the binary.

Continue reading “Fixing Bugs In A 37 Year Old Apple II Game” →

Portal Ported To The Apple II

January 12, 2017 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

[deater] readily admits they’re a little behind on what’s new in gaming – only having just gotten around to Valve’s 2007 release of Portal. It’s a popular game, but [deater] didn’t want anyone to miss out on the fun – so set about porting Portal to the Apple II.

The port uses the “hires” mode of the Apple II for the flashy graphics that were state of the art around 1980 or so. It’s not a copy of the full game – only the first and last levels, combined with Jonathan Coulton’s now-classic ending theme, Still Alive. As is to be expected, it’s not a wild, fast paced gaming experience, but a cool use of BASIC to put together a fun tribute to a popular franchise.

It’s a little different to the original – portals can be placed anywhere, for example – but it rings true to the original. Source code and a disk image is provided, so you can try it for yourself – even in this online emulator.

We’re looking forward to the sequel so we can use the post title “Portal 2 Ported To The Apple II, Too”, but until then, check out [deater]’s Apple II web server, also in Applesoft BASIC. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Portal Ported To The Apple II” →

Portable Apple II On An AVR

December 19, 2016 by Rich Hawkes 36 Comments

The Apple II was one of the first home computers. Designed by Steve “Woz” Wozniak, it used the MOS technologies 6502 processor, an 8-bit processor running at about 1 MHz. [Maxstaunch] wrote his bachelor thesis about emulating the 6502 in software on an AVR1284 and came up with a handheld prototype Apple II with screen and keyboard.

Originally, [maxstrauch] wanted to build an NES, which uses the same 6502 processor, but he calculated the NES’s Picture Processing Unit would be too complicated for the AVR, so he started on emulating the Apple II instead. It’s not quite there – it can only reference 12K of memory instead of the 64K on the original, so hi-res graphic mode, and therefore, many games, won’t work, but lo-res mode works as well as BASIC (both Integer BASIC and Applesoft BASIC.)

[Maxstrauch] details the 6502 in his thesis and, in a separate document, he gives an overview of the project. A third document has the schematic he used to build his emulator. His thesis goes into great detail about the 6502 and how he maps it to the AVR microcontroller. The build itself is pretty impressive, too. Done on veroboard, the build has a display, keyboard and a small speaker as well as a micro SD card for reading and storing data. For more 6502 projects, check out the Dis-Integrated 6502 and also, this guide to building a homebrew 6502.

Continue reading “Portable Apple II On An AVR” →

Apple II Web Server Written In BASIC

December 17, 2016 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

The Apple II was the machine that many say launched Apple as a company. As with many popular computers of the 1980s, the Apple II maintains a steady following to this day who continue to develop new hardware and software to keep the platform alive.

[deater] had scored an Uthernet II Ethernet interface for his Apple IIe, based off the venerable W5100 chipset. He decided to have some fun and wrote a webserver for the Apple II in BASIC. The program sets up the Ethernet card with a series of PEEKs and POKEs, and then listens out for incoming packets before responding with the requisite data loaded from floppy disk.

The server can deal with HTML, text, and even JPEG and PNG images. It’s even compliant with RFC 2324. It does suffer from some limitations however — the disk format used can only hold 140 kB, it can only serve an 8kB file at a time, and due to using a lot of string manipulation in the code, is painstakingly slow.

Before you get too excited, the machine is running on a local network only, so you can’t check it out from here. However, [deater] has kindly released the source code if you wish to run it for yourself.

If you’re thirsty for more 8-bit action, check out this Apple II playing animated GIFs.

Building Your Bots The 1980s Way

November 25, 2016 by Jenny List 29 Comments

There are many kits available to today’s hobbyists who wish to try their hand at producing simple computer-controlled robots. Small concoctions of servos and laser-cut acrylic, to which boards such as the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or Beaglebone can easily be fitted.

In the 1980s though this was a market that was yet to be adequately served. The sheer size of the many 8-bit machines of the day meant they could not be incorporated in your robot, and interfacing to them was a bit more challenging than the easy-to-use GPIOs of their modern counterparts. Then the mechanical hardware of a small robot was something that had not been easily and cheaply packaged for the constructor, making building a physical robotic platform a significant task in itself.

[Jeffery Brace] and [Evan Koblentz] write for IEEE Spectrum about their work at New York City’s World Maker Faire back in October, making a pair of small robots using only components and computers available in the 1980s.

Charlie the robot

[Charlie] is a robot based on the Capsela construction system, a toy consisting of interlocking plastic spheres containing different functions of shafts, gears, and motors. There was a Robotic Workshop kit for Capsella that featured a Commodore 64 interface, and it is through this means that [Charlie]’s three motors are controlled. It includes a ROM that extends Commodore BASIC with extra commands, which allow the robot to be easily controlled.

Artie the robot, with Dacta box in foreground

Meanwhile [Artie] is a Lego robot, using the Dacta TC Logo, a kit sold for the educational market and available at the time with interfaces for the PC and the Apple II. They had a Dacta control box but not the Apple II card to go with it, so had to make do with a functional replica built on a prototyping card. As the name suggests, this was programmed using Logo, and came with the appropriate interpreter software.

Both robots are reported to have been a success in terms of working in the first place, then demonstrating the 1980s technology and providing entertainment and engagement with the faire’s visitors.

We have covered numerous Lego robots over the years, as a search of our site will confirm. But this is only the second time we’ve featured a Capsela project, the first being this Arduino rover from 2011. [Mike] mused why we don’t see Capsela more often, and the same sentiment is true today. Do you have a Capsela set gathering dust somewhere that could make a robotic project?

Via Hacker News.

A New OS For Apple II Computers

September 16, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

Although this sort of work is usually reserved for KansasFest and other forums for highly technical and very skilled Apple enthusiasts, [John Brooks]’s release of a new version of the ProDOS operating system is no less important. It is, without a doubt, the greatest release the Apple II platform will see for the next few years. This swan song of the Apple II platform is simply ProDOS 2.4, an update to the last version of Apple’s ProDOS, last released in 1993.

For a bit of historical context, ProDOS was not the operating system that shipped with the Apple ][ in 1977. That OS was simply called DOS. ProDOS, released in 1983, included support for the new 3.5″ floppy drives, allowed for hierarchical directories, supported hardware interrupts, and kept the Apple ][ line going well into the 90s. Despite these improvements, not all Apple ][ systems were supported. The original ][ and ][+ were out in the cold. Now, with the ability to add Compact Flash and USB devices to an Apple ][, even the latest version of ProDOS is horribly out of date.

[John]’s release of ProDOS 2.4 fixes all of this. This release is the most important development in the Apple ][ ecosystem in recent memory, and will remain so for at least a decade. The only person who still uses an Apple ][ as a daily driver agrees, and ProDOS 2.4 is now enshrined in The Archive for all eternity.

New features abound, although most of them are geared toward the now thirty-year-old Apple IIGS. These features include enhanced utility in GS/OS – the Apple equivalent of the Commodore GEOS – slot remapping, and an OS that is both smaller and loads faster. Older machines aren’t left out, and ProDOS includes the usual features and improvements found in ProDOS 2.x that weren’t available in the Apple ][, Apple ][+ and un-enhanced Apple //e.

The killer feature and one more thing of this release is the BitsyBye utility, a small ($300!) system program that allows you to boot various Apple II devices and programs. Think of this as the Norton Commander of the Apple II ecosystem, allowing slots to be selected, booting the most recently used ProDOS device, and basic file system exploration. BitsyBye also includes an easter egg. A few utilities are also included on the ProDOS 2.4 disk image including ADTPro, Shrinkit archive expander, and disk utilities.

A 140k ProDOS 2.4 disk image is available on [John]’s site and on Archive.org. Since you’re probably not downloading directly to an Apple II disk, grab ADTPro and load it over audio.