Silent Q

Posted By azog on January 24, 2012

I just finished reading Commodore: a Company on the Edge, and wanted to post about it.

The book is the history of Commodore from their early days until the departure of Jack Tramiel in 1984, at the same time they announced the Plus/4. A sequel is promised which will follow Commodore from Tramiel’s departure until the ultimate closure of Commodore in 1994.

This book doesn’t cover things like the C128, the near-mythological C65, Q-Link, and etc. Those are all from the post-Tramiel era. My own personal interest in Commodore ends with the death of their 8-bits, having no interest in the Amiga, then or now. But Tramiel was also involved with the early phases of the Amiga, so I hope the second book will follow him, at least incidentally, on his next venture.

When I migrated off my C128D, I had full intentions of moving to the Amiga, but for some reason, I never quite got there. I think in some ways it was the mentality of the Amiga crowd that turned me off, in the same way that I find Apple fans distasteful. When the time came for me to move to a 16-bit computer, happenstance would have me opting for an Atari ST, and I followed Atari thru the Falcon and the Jag, until their own death. It took me about 10 years to learn that I was unknowingly still following Tramiel’s ventures.

I think it is important to remember these histories and I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in this era of history. The Apple-centric mentality of today would try to erase the history of Commodore. The book details various incidents of this type of revisionist history, where it is more important to feed a companies PR image rather than document reality. A short while ago, I was in Target looking for TVs with an S-Video input, and the college-aged salesperson asked me why. When I mentioned the Commodore 64, she said, “what is that?”. I was saddened.

But the book is more than just the history of Commodore, it’s also the history of the early days of personal computing, when a handful of people with vision and drive created an industry that previously didn’t exist. It was not the kind of industry like today, driven by salespeople saying “you need this”, trying to fulfill a need that doesn’t exist. Just the opposite, it was an industry built by people who saw a need that wasn’t being met, and designed products to meet those needs.

The book also illustrates that success in business is not always just drive and vision, but sometimes just pure luck. The best example given is that of VisiCalc, which was written on the Apple II, simply because the PETs were being used, while the Apple II sat idle. The PET version of VisiCalc came along later, but by that point, VisiCalc on an Apple II was the “killer app”.

Our current tech society clamors for new tech every six months, and products which over a year old are considered antiquated. But the 6502 drove a viable industry for more than 10 years, and it was not just Commodore that used it, Apple, Atari, Nintendo, and others also used the 6502.

If you look back on the 6502 today, you might scoff at its simplicity, but these people designed it _by hand_. I am not sure there are many of us today who can start at point zero, design a processor, and see that design thru all points of production until millions or perhaps even billions of them were produced. FPGAs and softcores don’t count for this exercise.

Lest you think this book is just a simpering adulation of Commodore, it is quite candid, discussing both their successes as well as their problems. I think my favorite quote from the book is, “The only people happy with Commodore were their end customers.”

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By azog on December 28, 2011

The VIC-20 was the first computer I owned. I had used Apple II’s in the computer lab at school, but they were over $1,000, and simply unaffordable. So my parents got me a VIC-20 for Christmas one year.

So here are some pictures. There’s lots. Since the VIC-20 is special to me, I decided to do a video, too, which I’ll add at the end, but it basically repeats what I say here.

This has a “newer” style power supply, one with a round DIN connector. My original, long since lost, had one of the 2 prong AC bricks.

This is the user guide. This was a pack-in, and was pretty much an “intro to BASIC”.

My favorite feature of the users guide was VICMan, who appeared in various places.

The users guide shows the old style power input. I don’t know if there was a newer version of the users guide showing the respective power input. I acquired this users guide separately.

Later, they came out with the VIC-20 Programmers Reference Guide. It wasn’t as comprehensive as the Compute! “Mapping” series, but still it was extremely useful.

What made the Commodore Reference Guides special was their inclusion of a schematic. I know the Commodore 64 had a schematic, but I don’t recall if the Commodore 128 version did. I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t, as the C128 was significantly more complex.

And this schematic is also geared towards the old power supply. Again, I don’t know if a new version was released, but you can see the power supply is simply a 9VAC input. Rectifying was done on-board, and the fuse was actually in the brick, not on the board. The later versions were rectified in the brick, and the fuse was on-board. Almost the opposite.

When I received my VIC-20 for Christmas oh so many years ago, I also received a tape cassette drive. This is what I refer t as a “PET style” tape, since it was the same style that was sold on the PETs.

Later, the C64 style came out.

The different tape drives shared the same part number, the C2N. They’re functionally the same, but depending on your goal, you might want a PET style, or a C64 style tape cassette. There was also a charcoal grey version of the tape drive, but these were ONLY for the Plus/4, and incompatible with the rest of the line.

On every tape is a ground strap, which is useless on everything except a PET, since only the PET has a metal chassis. Don’t know why they continued to have it. Just cut it off…

Finally, to “complete” the set, I acquired a copy of Radar Ratrace!

And finally, a video of everything I talked about above, plus a short play session on Radar Ratrace.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By azog on December 9, 2011

This is a Commodore MPS-803. Not sure why I got this, but I think I was going more towards “completeness” than anything. And not sure why I’m even posting, altho I do have an ulterior motive.

I acquired it for two specific reasons: first, it is the original C64 beige, where later versions of the MPS-803 are charcoal grey to match the C-16. It also has the optional tractor feed.

Unfortunately, the tractor feed is slightly broken. I don’t know how well the below will show, but the clip that grips the platen axle is partially broken, so it doesn’t grab very well, which may affect paper feed.

It arrived with one ribbon installed, and an extra ribbon.

The ribbon is dated 1996, so even if the ribbon fabric is OK, I’m sure it’s dry as a desert by now. But I was surprised that the installed ribbon did actually have some life left in it.

Pay no attention to the over-printing. That was me moving the paper around. You can see the left margin moving when I shifted the paper.

The back of the printer is equally uninspiring. Just an LPI (lines per inch) switch and a device select switch.

I was curious to see whether this was a Commodore engineered printer or an OEM model, so I opened it up to see if I could identify any parts.

Can’t really tell much because the carriage is blocking the logic board. So I took the carriage up to get at the board.

Pretty simplistic, but based on the CPU, I am going to guess that this is not something Commodore engineered.

That is a Z80 variant in what is known as a “quad inline” package, or zigzag. The lack of a ROM chip would indicate it’s a package with onboard ROM, probably OTP.

If it was a Commodore engineered printer, I would expect them to use a 6502 variant. They DID have their own fabhouse after all, and they did use 6502 variants in almost every every other peripheral. There’s no markings inside to identify it, and it doesn’t look visually similar to other contemporary printers.

I found some references to a ROM upgrade, but could not find an actual ROM image. The board does support some kind of ROM upgrade.

I used to work at a shop repairing printers, down to the component levels. This was back in the day when it was cost effective to repair printers. Nowadays, printers are cheap enough that if one breaks, you can just toss it and buy a new one. But I did see a lot of different printers, so you got used to seeing what the “real” printer was underneath the branding. For instance, the Commodore MPS-1250 is an Epson LX-80.

Commodore printers aren’t the epitome of collectability. If you ask around on the right forums, some people will just give them away. I think this is because Commodore was not able to compete with the more comprehensive printers available at the time, and there were plenty that were either directly Commodore compatible, or you could just get a Centronics interface and use a “real” printer. I had an Okidata 120, which was basically an Okidata 182 with a Commodore interface. There were other popular printers such as Star and Seikosha.

In reality, I was more interested in an MPS-1250, but of the few I’ve seen listed on ebay, they tend to demand a higher price than the MPS-803, which doesn’t surprise me. The MPS-1250 is a “real” printer.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By azog on November 8, 2011

Not sure how I was able to win this auction on eBay, but I did. Considering that I’ve seen these go for well over $100, that I won the bid at $40 was interesting. It was either the fact that it’s a re-branded CBM 4040, or that it was listed in a category that collectors don’t really pay attention to. Either way…

As I mentioned, it’s a 4040 re-branded as “Coherent Medical Division”. I’m assuming there was a PET of similar re-branding involved at some point in the past. The branding is only on the front. The rear is clearly identifying it as to what it is.

The seller did the infamous “power on test”, so I didn’t have my hopes up very high. But I did want a 4040 over the 8050 I previously acquired, so I plugged it in, and gave it a whirl.

Well, what do you know, it works. With some caveats. One, or both, of the drives are out alignment. I can easily format disks, and read them on the same drive, but when I format a disk in drive 1, drive 0 does not read it, throwing a DOS read error. The power LED doesn’t seem to want to stay illuminated, altho when it threw an error, it did go solid.

But any way you cut it, $60 ($40 for the bid, $20 for shipping) is nothing to sneeze at. I’ll need to figure out what to do with the 8050. I offered it on VC, but nobody seems interested in a non-working 8050. You can see the 8060 in the rear in the below picture, as well as one of the disk read errors.

Category: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Tags:

Posted By azog on October 14, 2011

Diddling around with the Coby LCD TV from the last post. Was trying to see if there is a way to make it default to video in, rather than RF. I had previously opened the enclosure, which revealed an RS-232 port, but all the interesting parts were on the other side of the board, which required removal of the antenna (soldered to the board) to access.

I didn’t feel like doing that originally, but I should have done so. It turns out the MCU is a “Myson MTV230″. It was easy to find datasheets for it. It is an 8051 variant, which would explain the RS-232 port. I guess that’s the programming header.

I didn’t look at the datasheet other than the pinout, to trace the button to pin #35, Port P5.2, so I don’t know if it has lockbits. Even if it doesn’t, I don’t have programming software to dump the firmware. You can download Myson’s ISP software, but you have to register. Not. Since it’s a relatively generic 8051, I wonder if other non-Myson software would work.

I did try a heavy-handed kludge. It’s just a general IO pin, and it’s connected to a momentary pushbutton switch which goes to ground. So I just grounded it. Now as soon as you turn it on, it still defaults to RF input, but immediately switches to video input. At this point, any button press (volume, menu, etc), triggers it back to RF input. I guess they probably used an edge-triggered interrupt.

I don’t need those buttons for my purpose. Back to pondering…

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By azog on October 13, 2011

I’m still playing around with trying to get an LCD VGA monitor on my C128D. The most recent post I made about this turned out to be a dud, and I’m not sure why.

It appears there were two issues: one, lots of noise in the wires I bridged between the two converters and the other is an inadvertent “ut oh” in that the vertical lines in 80 column mode should not be there.

Comparing two images side-by-side, one when I first tested the ACV-011 all by itself, and this picture, reveals that these columns were not present. The “ut oh” would have been two-fold. A flub on my part, either introducing static electricity somewhere, or again, noisy signals. I know VGA cables are generally shielded, and since my kludge was not shielded, I’m putting it down to noise. When I tried to remove these cables, I ended up lifting traces which were too difficult to manually patch, so that would be part two of the “ut oh”.

So back to the drawing board and I’m waiting to hear back from someone about an interesting project he is working on.

But it had me thinking of my SX-64. The CRT display on that was not the best. I guess a 30 year old CRT is bound to lose some of its definition. But what about if I were to place a small 5 inch LCD in place of the CRT? The LCD screen for the PSOne is 5 inch, and they’ve been hacked and modded every which way to Sunday. But they’re going for a premium on ebay right now. I’ll still keep my eye out, but in the meanwhile…

I picked up a Coby TF-TV505, which is a 5 inch LCD screen for over-the-air SDTV, meaning it’s got a 4:3 ratio like the original CRT and can accept composite input. Outdated technology, to be sure, so generally not useful for average consumer consumption.

I’d like to ultimately use S-Video, but I can’t find out if the Coby supports S-Video, and from what I can tell, only the PAL version of the PSOne LCD supports S-Video. So it’s on to using composite input on the Coby.

Testing it on the SX-64 showed marginally better video than the CRT. If nothing, it’ll reduce the weight. The CRT is on top, and the LCD is at the bottom. The picture is poor, but it didn’t look as bad in the flesh. I’m just a lousy photographer.

Also, the Coby LCD defaulted to antenna as the input, and you have to press a button to change it to “video input”. It does not seem to save that as default. That might be a make-or-break if I pursue this idea. I’d like to just turn the SX-64, and have the LCD already set for video.

So the next step is to peek inside, see if I can strip out most of the non-useful parts and somehow cram it into the SX-64 and see if there is any way to make it default to video input. Two interesting features struck me.

First, there appears to be an RS-232 interface inside the Coby:

It measures 5v DC. I’ll have to get a 5v USB TTL RS-232 cable, and try to open a serial console to see what it does. The only USB cable I have is a TTL-232R-3v3, for 3.3v.

The second interesting feature is what appears to be an i2c interface.

I’ll have to find my Bus Pirate and see if I can see anything interesting happening, but I don’t really grok i2c.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve not been able to find tech manuals or schematics for the Coby LCD TV.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By azog on September 28, 2011

This is something I’ve been messing with off and on, and everything finally came into place. But first, credit where credit is due. None of this is original. I found the discussion about using VGA monitors on this forum, and the results were posted here. I’m simply following where others have gone before.

A screen shot of GEOS 128 (80 column) on a VGA LCD panel:

And GEOS 64:

Since the 128 has two different video outputs, RGB and composite, you need two solutions to convert them both.

So far, I haven’t seen any custom designed solution, and I wish someone would build one. But I suspect it would involve FPGAs and an understanding of video signals, neither of which I have any clue about. I wouldn’t even know where to start to learn about doing something like this in an FPGA.

For the RGB output, I used something called an ACV-011, which you can find on ebay fairly regularly. It seems to be popular with people who want to convert arcade displays to modern LCD panels.

The composite output is converted using something called the GeniaTech V2VPRO, which I found on Amazon.

The basic idea is simple. You connect the RGB output of the C128 to the RGB input of the ACV-011. Connect the composite output of the C128 to the composite input of the V2VPRO. Then connect a VGA monitor to either the RGB converter output, or the composite converter output.

To make things easy, the ACV-011 has a VGA input and a bypass switch, so you can turn off the RGB input, and it’ll just display whatever is on the VGA input. So connect the VGA output of the V2VPRO to the VGA input of the ACV-011.

I wanted to make things nice and neat, and put everything in an enclosure, but that required a bit of modification of both converters.

The ACV-011 is on the left, the V2VPRO is on the right. Since they both used similar power supplies, I removed the power input from the V2VPRO, and jumpered it over to the power input of the ACV-011. Those are the two green and one red wire at the upper left of the V2VPRO.

Rather than having a VGA cable running between the two, I removed the VGA input of the ACV-011 and the VGA output of the V2VPRO and jumpered them together. That’s the thick rope of red cables between the two.

To make switching between RGB and composite input, I moved the bypass switch to the front panel, and also put a power switch and power LED. You can see the power switch and LED on the left, and the bypass switch in the middle.

The ribbon cable on the left connects to the RGB input of the ACV-011, with special attention to the intensity pin modification discussed in the forum link I posted above. I mounted a male DB-9 connector on the front panel, and then just use a standard all-pins-wired 9 pin serial cable out from the C128 to the input.

I moved the composite video (and audio) jacks off the V2VPRO to the front panel as well.

This is what the front panel looks like.

The rear panel just contains the VGA output and power input. My measurements were wrong, so the panel cuts look bad.

Turn on the C128 first, and then turn on the converter box. I don’t know why, but the original forum mentioned this very thing, and if I turn on the converter box first, it doesn’t seem to sync correct.

Now I can connect the RGB and composite outputs, and just use the switch in the middle when I want to switch between modes.

Yes, the pictures for the composite video look blurry, because they are. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is that the connecting wires I used are not shielded, and there is noise. Perhaps it’s something else. Since I put this box together specifically for the C128D, I might actually pick up another V2VPRO (they’re like $30), because I have other things I wish to use, such as a VIC-20 and an Atari 800. Altho there is no reason I can’t use it for everything.

The audio output is not dealt with, altho I did provide both left and right composite inputs on the front panel. The V2VPRO has a 1/8″ jack audio output (the green block), and I pondered salvaging a PC speaker which has a built-in amplifier, but I sort of ran out of room inside the case. I’m not sure what, if anything, I’ll do about the audio.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By azog on September 25, 2011

A few years ago, some people reverse engineered the communications behind Q-Link. It was pretty exciting. But interest waned, and the original project died. But not too long ago, one of the persons who worked on the first reboot recently brought a new server online. The web page identifies the last update as of 13 days ago from this blog posting, so hopefully he’ll keep it going, and it will (re)generate interest in the project. I wish I could help, but I know about as much about Java programming as I do piloting the space shuttle. Which is to say, I’m clueless.

Well, anyways, it’s fairly easy to connect to this with VICE, but I wanted to try it with actual Commodore hardware. The first step was to download a fresh Q-Link disk image, and try loading that from the SD card. It didn’t go well. I guess the Q-Link fastloader doesn’t work well unless it’s an actual 1541 drive. I do recall even when Q-Link was alive, it wouldn’t work with a 1581 either. So I created a physical disk from the image.

Next is acquire some new toys.

First is an Aprotek RS-232 interface:

“Interface” is kind of a misnomer. It’s basically some level-shifters that use the Commodore Kernal RS-232 drivers, which don’t work above 2400 baud. It uses 1488/1489 pairs. Nowadays, you’d use a single MAX232. Or even better, nowadays, you’d use a real RS-232 interface, one that has a hardware UART.

Then comes an RS-232 to Ethernet bridge. It’s a modem emulator. It allows me to connect RS-232 devices to my Internet router and emulates a subset of the Hayes AT command set. You “dial” remote sites with commands like ATDT xx.xx.xx.xx/yy where the xx’s are the IP address, and the yy is the port number. It doesn’t do DNS, so you have to dial with IP addresses, which meant doing an nslookup of the IP address of the Q-Link server.

Plug this mess into the user port, give it an Ethernet connection and give everything power. Set the Q-Link configuration for a manual dial modem. During the connection process, it prompts you to enter the modem commands, at which point you just type ATDT etc to connect. If all goes well, the “modem” will respond with a CONNECT string, and you can continue logging in to Q-Link.

This is start of the activation process. You won’t get this far until you have a live connection to the server.

This has applications beyond Q-Link. There are a number of Commodore telnet BBS’s available. Now to find a C64 term program.

As a final note, there are other solutions for internet connectivity, such as the Comet64 modem, or the IDE64, which also has an Ethernet option.

Category: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Tags:

Posted By azog on September 16, 2011

The uIEC changes everything in terms of data storage. Not just having unimaginably large storage, but being able to mount/dismount images and so on. Coupled with that, here are some tools which I’ve found so far which make data management even easier.

If you’ve not heard of WinVICE, it’s something you should look at. It emulates practically every 8-bit Commodore and drive. Even if you’re running hardware and not emulation, it’s still highly useful.

Style’s DirMaster lets you manage every imaginable file you’ll run into. Disk images, such as d64 and d81; archives like lynx; even converted GEOS files (cvt). You can drag files in and out of disk images, and it’ll convert them (if possible, such as a text file). Sometimes you run into people who’ve posted PRG files, you can drop them into a new or existing image.

CBM-CMD is a native 8 bit file manager application. It runs in every Commodore 8 bit from the VIC onwards (anything that uses the serial bus). In 128 mode, it runs in fast (2MHz) mode. You can convert physical disks into images, or images into physical disks. The built in DOS wedge allows you to send commands directly to the command channel, i.e., to move between directories to select images. It’s also very slow. It took an hour to write a d81 image of CP/M to a diskette. If you don’t have an XE-1541 (et.al.), this is one of the only ways I’ve found to make a disk out of an image. Heck, even if you do have an XE-1541, I bet you it would still be useful.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By azog on September 13, 2011

Holy crap. This is something I hadn’t expected to ever see again…

GEOS 2.0, 128 mode on 80 columns. Yea, sorry for the lousy picture quality. Next to impossible to get a good photo of a CRT.

I don’t know if it was necessary to change the GEOS drive to drive #8, but since I wanted to see if you could change the device ID of the uIEC, it was a good test. It turns out you CAN set the device ID of the uIEC drive, so I made the SD drive #8, and set the internal 128D to drive 9, and booted GEOS off the SD card now at drive #8.

Actually I’m a little ambivalent towards GEOS, using this mostly as run thru to see what the uIEC is capable of, and it seems quite capable. Unfortunately, I don’t think CP/M mode will ever be an option, since the disk format is not in any native Commodore DOS format, and the uIEC appears to only emulate that filesystem.

Category: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tags: