Rubenerd

Commodore/MOS chips from the early 1980s often contained easter eggs in the form of the designer’s initials. Thomas ‘skoe’ Giesel’s C64 PLA Dissected paper included this example on page 29:

But why did they disappear? Thomas included this fun story on page 45:

People who worked on reverse engineering CSG chips noticed that older chips usually have the initials of their engineers written on it. Later revisions do not have these nice signatures anymore. A certain incident was the reason.

In about 1984 or 1985 several chips were redrawn for the HMOS2 process to reduce cost. Bret Raymis worked on a shrink of the SID chip from 6 to 5 micron. He recalls, “I almost got fired for putting my initials on the chip with it appearing in 3 spots across the die with ‘Dave [DiOrio’s] Bar and Grill’. The SID had three identical large blocks with a hole in the middle.” Dave DiOrio confirms this story, “It actually got fab’ed and the mask shop went berserk.”

Bret’s intention was to make a joke, “But the president of Commodore did not think it was funny. Fortunately Mike [Angelina] took the heat and I did not get fired.” The chip in question was the 8580 R1 most likely. Unfortunately only later revisions have been seen up to now, which do not carry this Easter egg anymore.

James Redfield concludes, “And from that day on we were no longer permitted to include our initials on the chips.”

The Register ran a poll about whether the word hacker should be used as a pejorative. The majority voted no, preferring to retain the meaning of someone hacking on a problem.

I empathise, but that ship has sailed. The public thinks hacking is malicious, just as it was during Jack the Ripper’s time. We can wish it weren’t so, but that’s been the reality for years. The fact we’re even having this debate is evidence.

Effective communication isn’t just accuracy, it’s about being understood. A term requiring a qualifier is useless. Which is why I’m sidestepping the issue and simply not using the term hacker anymore. It frustrates technical people like you and I, and confuses the public. I think that’s the only winning strategy.

(It’s also why we can’t abbreviate cryptography to crypto anymore, based on non-technical speculators who think we weren’t heating the planet fast enough).

Talk about cassettes and floppy disks today, and you’ll get people saying they were everything from unreliable to just plain junk. Casettes would get caught in players and unspool, necessitating a pencil to wind it back or worse. Floppy disks would encounter bad sectors, make unsettling noises, and die.

I long assumed this was because people weren’t thinking about the devices in historical context. Why would I use tapes today when I can throw artists I care about a pittance on a streaming platform, or store data on floppies when I can have syncing issues with a remote server? I kid, but while modern hard drives, SSDs, and cloud storage come with their own problems, you could argue that they’re more reliable, at least per gigabyte. But it’s a different story when compared to the alternatives at the time, if they even existed.

I often wonder whether I even exist. Wait, what?

People’s most recent exposure to these formats were also in their twilight years, when the drives and media had been in use for decades or more. A worn tape or badly maintained disk drive will never be as reliable as a new one, assuming they were even still in production. And as Michael Dexter one quipped in the context of file systems, all it takes is one data loss event to lose trust forever.

Except, neither of these tell the whole story. Tapes and disks seemed less reliable immediately before going out of production because they were. Inevitable cost-cutting and loss of their former premium status meant there was little motivation for manufacturers to build them at the same standard and quality they did before. The conspiratorial sectors of my brain almost like to think this was intentional to sell people on the reliability of new formats, though it’s not necessary here to attribute business reality to malice. People weren’t buying this media anymore in the face of devices with higher storage capacities and speed.

The 8-bit Guy discussed this on his video about floppy disks:

Those drives and disks were actually extremely reliable back in the 1970s and 1980s. Of course, they also used to be expensive. In the 1990s they started making them cheaper and cheaper and reliability suffered. And by the 2000s when the last batches were being produced, they were total junk.

I think that because floppy drives and the disks had become so unreliable towards the end of the era, I think a lot of people remember them that way, even though they were actually pretty darn reliable back in their heyday. In fact I have plenty of disks that are more than 35 years old and they still work just fine.

Matt from Techmoan also discussed cassettes in their historical context:

No, [tapes weren’t terrible]. In fact, they could be pretty good!

The reason most people bought cassettes as opposed to CDs was because they were a heck of a lot cheaper. [..] But however cheap something is, people won’t go back and buy it again unless they’re happy with it. Obviously they were happy with cassettes because it was the best selling format for the best part of ten years.

However, because most of the people buying cassettes were on a restricted budget, they were also listening to them on budget equipment, and therefore never hearing the best of what you could get out of a cassette.

We all have horror stories about drive and disk failures. Ironically a failure now can feel so much worse given how much denser they are, even if statistically they’re more reliable.

I mostly had Zip disks and CDs as a kid, but I can speak from experience that almost all my disks and cassettes still work. I can’t say that about some of the other consumer tech I bought in the last few years, let alone decades. 💾

I had a oddly-specific dream last night, this time about a bizarre, recurring encounter from a holiday when my sister and I were kids.

Every year or so my dad’s company would pay for a holiday back to Australia, so we could visit friends and relatives we left behind when we moved to Singapore. Usually we stayed with our favourite family friends up in Normanhurst, but sometimes we’d stay at the Novotel near the airport.

One early morning, exhausted from a late flight, we were jolted from sleep by the sound of a shrill person bashing on our door:

KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK
GOOD MORNING… MINIBAR
KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK

My roller bed was closest to the door, so I bore the full brunt of her assertiveness. I blinked a few times, rolled over, and tried to go back to sleep.

KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK
GOOD MORNING… MINIBAR
KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK

I might not have fully woken up by this point, but through a fog of anxiety and irritation I started wondering why this crazed person was bashing on our door, wishing our minibar a good morning. I wasn’t about to; the minibar was expensive and tempting even while I was awake and in full control of my faculties, let alone when I was half asleep and wanting a snack.

After the third MINIBAR, I saw my dad trudging out from the bedroom in his hotel gown and slippers, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He opened the door.

GOOD MORNING SIR, DO YOU NEED ANYTHING REPLACED IN YOUR MINIBAR?

His blank, slightly confused expression should have been enough, but he also almost strung together a cohesive response.

I, um… good, I’m, no I’m, thanks.

He closed the door, caught my eye and raised his eyebrows. He trudged back to bed, though I think neither of us got any more sleep.

The next morning around 07:00:

KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK
GOOD MORNING… MINIBAR
KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK

It was the same person from the day before, with the same double knock and forceful but flat voice. This time my dad bolted out of bed and stormed to the door with a determined gate. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but paraphrasing:

Is respecting the DO NOT DISTRUB sign optional? Please don’t come back.

And of course, she did, the next day. This time I opened the door, and replied with a meek “no”, then closed the door before she could get a word in edgewise.

That night we went to the office space downstairs and took some paper to write “PLEASE NO MINIBAR”, which we affixed to our door. It worked; we never heard from MS MINIBAR again.

My mind is still full of questions even after two decades. Why did management think it was appropriate to bash on people’s doors that early? The Novotel chain is primarily catered to business travellers, so surely some of them would have arrived on redeye flights. Even if they hadn’t, why even ask in the first place? Surely housekeeping could just do it. Were their margins so thin, and the minibars so profitable, that they factored in its needs over their own patrons?

I’m going to start using the term minibarring for when I have a work requirement that sounds necessary and logical (restocking a minibar when it’s low) that has a user-hostile implementation (asking guests loudly at 07:00).

Today’s Music Monday discusses the musical style I’m currently obsessed with again. I like to think Chick Corea is responsible. Wait, isn’t it Tuesday already?

The first is from the Crash Test Dummies. For those unfamiliar with this band’s fascinatingly esoteric tunes, “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” was their biggest chart topper. Their 1993 album God Shuffled His Feet also included this beautiful hidden ballad at the end, the style of which you wouldn’t expect after hearing the other tracks! It’s in my top ten acoustic piano tunes of all time.

And on the Whole Wheat Radio stream yesterday we had Emile Pendolfi’s album Believe. His YouTube channel lists CDBaby which unfortunately no longer exists. I’ll need to figure out where to buy this.

I explained this on The Bird Site recently, but I don’t think I did it justice. I’ll attempt to explain it better here.

My mind is a narrator. It maintains a running commentary on everything I do and see, regardless of whether I’m sitting in a chair or walking outside. It’s like there’s another person living within me, planting thoughts in my head. I think I’ve done this my whole life, though it took meditation to realise just how frequently they appear, and how vivid they are.

Some of these thoughts are harmless, and can occasionally be delightful. Those flowers are nice. That dad giving his daughter a piggy back ride is adorable. Wow this coffee is good, it must be from Costa Rica. It has cherry notes, or is that some other fruit? How do you think it compares…? On good days its like my mind is a photographer composing a scene, without the camera.

But most of these thoughts, perhaps unsurprisingly, feed anxiety. My mind plays through scenarios about every interaction and experience, usually with a bad outcome. What if they get my order wrong? What if the conductor can’t scan my valid train ticket? What if this lift stops? These enter a feedback loop that amplify those feelings of personal FUD.

Anxiety is complicated; there’s never a singular cause. But I’ve found that identifying when I’m having those unhelpful thoughts already helps. It’s even better when I can stop, think about how my mind concocted this entirely artificial idea, and laugh it off. Oh brain, get better script writers! The least you could have done is involve Godzilla.

Regular readers among you wouldn’t be surprised to know that I use Apple kit. I’ve had Macs since my gorgeous blueberry iMac DV in primary school, but it was Mac OS X that made me love the platform. Here was a well-designed UNIX workstation with Wi-Fi and graphics drivers that just worked. Trawl through my archive here and you’ll see my excitement and joy at upgrading and installing my favourite desktop OS.

Truthfully though, I’ve been wary of the direction the company’s devices have been going for a while. Despite finally firing on all cylinders again with their desktop and phone CPUs outperforming everything in their class, the company’s other priorities haven’t aligned with mine for a few years now. These are the two latest examples:

• macOS’s Big Sur UI represents all the shallow excess the company is stereotyped with. It’s something I’d expect from the Windows Aero era of Microsoft.

• The latest iPhones are unusable for those of us with OLED sensitivity.

For a company so lauded for accessibility and usability, it blows me away that these are the reasons. My prevailing attitude that “I use them because everything else is worse” is starting not to hold, either. People are catching up, and filling in the gaps that for years Apple have either pretended don’t exist, or haven’t shown an interest in. Which is their right of course, but it’s not for me.

I’m probably better placed than most long-term Mac users. I’ve always had side PCs and servers running either Linux or FreeBSD. I’ve been deliberate with my choices to avoid Mac-specific software wherever I can. I need Microsoft Office for work, and I do like a few specific Mac tools like Alfred, but I’m sure those could be worked around.

Which leads us to pull factors. I’m not sure if you’ve checked out the betas of FreeBSD 13, but it’s slick. The team have done an incredible job with polish and driver support with this release. Dare I say it, but I also want to spend more money on vintage tech as well, which I’m really getting back into.

So where to from here? Right now, nowhere. I have a 16-inch MacBook Pro that works, and I’ll keep it on Catalina as long as I can get updates for it. My iPhone 8 still runs fine with a bright LCD, TouchID, and no notch. The most affordable thing to do right now is stay put, especially during These Uncertain Times.

But I’m keeping my eyes open. A refurb or second-hand 15-inch HiDPI ThinkPad would be great; maybe a T-series over the Carbons because I miss having a numeric keypad. Android is more of a jump considering I dislike the company that makes it, and there are so many mediocre handsets with poor track records of security updates; but maybe I can find a decent LCD one that still runs the software I need. Have I talked about how much I miss Palm and webOS this week?

If all of this sounds silly and self-absorbed, it’s because it is. But it feels like a big decision for someone who spends their lives tinkering and working with this stuff.

Last Friday I joked that I had a LiveJournal without knowing it. Hales of Halestrom.net emailed to say that his posts aren’t being scraped, and that he’s disappoint.

Could it be LJ filters out high-quality content, so I slip under the radar? Or maybe they can’t parse Atom, which would be pretty funny :).

As an aside, I’m not sure I’ve spruiked his site properly before. If you’ve been interested in my Commodore 128 posts, you’d love reading about his electronics projects. Unlike me, Hales knows what he’s doing. You can read on his site, or subscribe to his feed.

Among the many unique features of the Commodore 128 was that it had two separate video systems! It’s 40-column mode was used when running in C128 and C64 compatibility mode, but a separate 80-column display could be invoked with a toggle keyswitch or the use of a GRAPHIC5 BASIC command.

Unlike the RF and composite video inherited from the C64, the C128’s native 80-column mode was broadly similar to IBM CGA. It achieved this with a separate RGBI output and MOS 8563 VDC chip. The connector looks superficially like VGA, but look closer and it only has two sets of pins, like a classic serial DB9 plug. The photo below shows the RF RCA connector and composite barrel plug for the C64-style 40 column, and the RGBI:

The 80-column mode was fantastic for BBSs, text adventures, and business software, and along with the Z80 CPU let the C128 run CP/M. But its lack of hardware sprites and separate, limited memory space prevented its use in the sorts of games people expected from Commodore systems. DesTerm128 was the most widely-used 80-column mode program, from what I can tell.

This is a screenshot I took in VICE of what the modes are supposed to look like:

Which leads me to my C128! I’ve been so happy with the crisp, cheerful colours of her 40-column mode over a high quality composite cable and VGA converter (for a future post!), but I’ve never been able to get 80-columns working. I mostly live in text not games, so last month I decided to finally figure out why.

The MGA2VGA converter box

I got an MGA2VGA converter box preassembled that takes the digital RGBI signals and convert them via a framebuffer to VGA, with the correct signals that VGA hardware recognise. LGR had tremendous success with his, so I figured it was worth a try. Wiring it up is straight forward:

1. RGBI connector → Serial cable
2. Serial cable → MGA2VGA box
3. VGA cable → Monitor

But it didn’t work for me. I swapped out each cable, used my multimeter to confirm I wasn’t using null modem serial cables by accident, and used four separate monitors and TVs. None detected a signal.

The seller assured me that he’d tested it before sending, but without any native CGA hardware I still couldn’t rule it out as being the faulty link.

Composite monochrome on the RGBI

But then I learned something, which is always dangerous. Dave’s Retro Desktop on YouTube uncovered documentation in a LoadStar 128 cart that showed that the RGBI connector also includes a monochrome composite signal on pin 7. He was using it as his primary monitor input, but I thought it’d be useful to troubleshoot by bypassing the converter box:

Clara and I went to Jaycar, and I spent an evening soldering a RCA cable with a serial connector on one side. I chopped off the female RCA plug, soldered pin 1 to the shielding of the cable for ground, and pin 7 to the core cable. It was actually my first time soldering anything, so that was an entire learning experience :).

It wasn’t the best job, but I used my multimeter and confirmed that I had continuity for the signal and ground, and that I hadn’t accidently bridged two of the pins. I crossed my fingers, plugged the cable into the TV and the RGBI connector on the C128, and invoked 80-column mode.

Would it surprise you that it still didn’t work. The good news was I was able to confirm that the MGA2VGA box wasn’t the root cause.

Opening the C128

I was wanting to avoid opening the C128 enclosure again, because I’d just added fresh thermal grease to the RF shield. I’m thinking of replacing it with proper heatsinks on each IC, but for now it works.

I opened up the case, popped off the separate metal shield that enclosed the C128’s two separate video systems, and noticed something I didn’t before. The MOS 8563 video chip that drives the 80-column mode was riding higher in its socket than the VIC-II, almost to the point where you could see the slender pins poking out. I was excited to think that all I’d need to do was reseat the IC to make it work.

But just as I was about to push it back in, I noticed one of the pins was bent out of alignment, and a darker colour than the others. I was worried that if I pushed the chip back in, that pin would snap.

I gingerly used my IC extractor tool, and the tiny pin almost disintegrated into a powder. I’m not sure whether it was corrosion or it had electrical damage, but the good news was the socket itself looked shiny and clean.

(As an aside, I really need to get better at documenting these steps. You can barely see the missing pin below!)

A colleague who’s into retro hi-fi equipment had a few helpful suggestions about how to patch this pin, but being an ameateur I didn’t want to risk what has now become one of my favourite computers of all time! Fortunately, these MOS 8563 chips aren’t anywhere near as rare and/or expensive as those legendary SID chips, and I was able to find a replacement for less than $30 on eBay.

Conclusions

Thus far, there isn’t one! Consider this part one. I’m actually happy that I found the root cause, though I might take out the multimeter and run through some more tests from the official Commodore diagnostic guide to make sure I have the correct voltages everywhere in the meantime.

I was catching up on podcasts yesterday and realised that Benedict Reuschling and Allan Jude had discussed my follow-up post about FreeBSD jails on episode 391! Better still, I made them both laugh, so mission accomplished :).

Allan mentioned that in addition to what I described, ZFS feature flags can be enabled for specific jails. I’ve been dealing with an issue where extended attributes aren’t being passed to Mac guests from a jail running Samba, but on the host they do. This might be an avenue of inquiry to check out.

They gentleman also read how I used jails first and foremost for package management, with security being a useful side effect. Allan reminded us that this was the original use case for jails, which I didn’t know!

It was a bittersweet moment hearing Allan say we missed out on meeting again in Tokyo for AsiaBSDCon for the second year in a row. Our chats over breakfast and in the hallways at that conference were among the highlights of my life; hopefully as the world slowly starts to open up again we can grab a beer and talk servers again. I still would love to go to Canada and Europe for events there as well!

For those unfamiliar, BSDNow is a weekly programme where two of the nicest, most knowledgable people in FreeBSD read and discuss the current hot topics in the BSD operation system community. If you’re familiar with Linux or commercial UNIX, they also do a great job making the topics approachable and relatable.