jhamby

https://chaos.social/@jhamby

Social media is a degrading mechanism of social control. You should abandon it, like I have.

GitHub: https://github.com/jhamby

Public Key

npub17qjwcdn3ss4t4kzn6anc0l53zl4p9t5qtf96tsdgwakznzg4s57q7c5ajl

NIP-05 Address

jhamby_at_chaos.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0qf8vxeccg246mpfaweu8l6g306sj46q95ja9cx58wmpf3y2c20qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsymkwkz

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub17qjwcdn3ss4t4kzn6anc0l53zl4p9t5qtf96tsdgwakznzg4s57q7c5ajl

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Last Notes

2025-02-07 04:42:26 UTC

The whole thing about having a President with dementia being puppeted by grotesque oil, military, and banking interests with a fascist philosophy is that I remember the Reagan years.
#uspol

2025-02-06 23:30:44 UTC

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So they've upgraded the "Congress Created Dust Bowl" signs, then?
https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/96228/who-is-behind-those-water-signs-on-the-i-5

2025-02-06 04:33:19 UTC

“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
― Henry Kissinger
https://mstdn.social/@knittingknots2/113955038355657045
#Trump #TrumpCoup #DOGE #Treasury

2025-01-31 02:50:08 UTC

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I worked on the #Android team from 2010 to 2014, and I had a real crisis of hating what I saw Android had become. But #Meta actually pushes the envelope as far as being creepy even more than #Google ever has.
Meta was caught downloading people's SMS and call logs. On Android only.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-facebook-was-able-to-collect-android-phone-and-text-logs/
Android has extremely granular permissions, which is great if you're a nerd, but in this case it allows apps like FB Messenger to do all sorts of creepy stuff like scan Wi-Fi and BT devices.

2025-01-31 02:45:15 UTC

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So there's a part halfway through the video where she pastes in a TikTok video of a guy warning against using Facebook Messenger because it's basically a spying device, scanning all your Wi-Fi networks for devices and that sort of thing.
I thought to myself, "he must be talking about the Android version of the app". Indeed, if you're on Android, yikes, I wouldn't install it:
https://crambler.com/truth-about-facebook-messenger-app-privacy/#facebook-messenger-permissions
The iPhone does block companies like Meta and Google from vacuuming up too much of your data.

2025-01-31 02:23:45 UTC

When A Greedy Oligarch Tries To Be Hip...
Kat Blaque
https://youtu.be/rEZa4gnqHrE?si=E6N6O4vvIcnd6Vjk
Excellent analysis.
#Facebook #capitalism #JoeRogan #Zuckerberg

2025-01-29 19:27:33 UTC

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Did you watch [@TechConnectify](https://mas.to/@TechConnectify ) 's videos on how an old Wurlitzer jukebox works? Old jukeboxes are an electromechanical computing marvel.
https://youtu.be/NmGaXEmfTIo?si=NIkS523DTn96jTv8
https://youtu.be/o1qRzKuskK0?si=Cg7Kf4U8iTmiBnZS

2025-01-18 20:50:59 UTC

Congress Did NOT Realize How Much the TikTok Ban Would RADICALIZE Young People
The Humanist Report
https://youtu.be/ZAbzL1sjGsQ?si=Lj92j30YLSdfbDHA
#uspol #censorship #TikTokBan #genocide

2025-01-18 00:25:33 UTC

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You're allowed to use devices with rechargeable batteries and carry them onboard planes, but you can't put them in checked luggage and there are restrictions around cargo flights carrying them. The flight crews are drilled on how to immediately grab someone's laptop or music device or whatever in the event it catches on fire and shove it into a fire-suppressing bag specifically for this purpose. If that doesn't work, they use Halon extinguishers, ozone layer be damned.

2025-01-18 00:23:09 UTC

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This sort of accident tends to be the subject of future US Chemical Safety Board videos. I bet it turns out that someone followed a procedure incorrectly, or the procedure was incorrect, or the equipment was faulty.
One would hope that employees aren't playing with fireworks or smoking anything around lithium-ion batteries, but it could be carelessness. I doubt sabotage, just because lithium-ion fires are no joke. A fire onboard an airplane is the crew's worst fear.

2025-01-17 02:17:53 UTC

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I think my favorite aerospace company name is Aerojet Rocketdyne. Each name on its own is extremely "Jet Age", and then you put them together like that and it's like being back in 1967.

2025-01-17 02:15:40 UTC

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There are in fact a ton of aerospace companies in El Segundo, enough to have an annual Aerospace Summer Games which for some reason my employer, Teledyne Controls, didn't participate in last year.
https://easyreadernews.com/aerospace-summer-games-moves-to-el-camino-college/

2025-01-17 02:12:13 UTC

Let me just say that I have never in my life heard anyone call El Segundo "The 'Gundo" outside of that Vanity Fair article with the tech bros working at military-themed startups and enjoying MAGA things like smoking, drinking beer, and pretending to be Christian.
https://archive.is/lzMwj

2025-01-11 02:41:35 UTC

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Especially since Google already has a problem with too many malicious extensions in their web store.

2025-01-11 02:16:29 UTC

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So would I. While Google has had their share of privacy violations as a cloud service, I don't think they've ever done anything remotely shady as far as the open source code. There are no secret backdoors for Google to spy on you in Chromium or AOSP (open-source Android).
The only problem I see with Google is they push back against enabling extensions that users like but compromise their ad revenue, like effective ad and tracker blocking, downloading videos, or whatever.

2025-01-11 02:03:18 UTC

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I agree. I doubt it will "broaden the ecosystem" beyond the half-dozen large players who depend on Chromium now, most of them mentioned in the announcement, those players need somewhere to coordinate technical direction and approve proposals as a group that's somewhat open, even though Google will still hold the keys to the upstream Chromium codebase.

2025-01-09 20:17:43 UTC

Whoever wrote this bootloader file I'm looking at must be French because they've numbered some steps in comments: Step 3, Step 3bis, Step 4 … Step 9, Step 9bis.
Analog modem users may remember standards like V.22bis and V.32bis.
"bis" means encore or sequel.

2025-01-04 23:40:58 UTC

I wonder if we can add the people Elliot Rodger killed to a tally of people killed by the book / DVD **The Secret**. (any hope of Markdown italics? no?)
Elliot Rodger's delusion was that he was going to / deserved to win the lottery and then would have enough money to buy himself sex with a woman. And that in the meantime by wandering around he'd magically run into a single woman who'd throw herself at him.
After a year he gave up on The Secret but was still trying to manifest a girlfriend.

2025-01-04 23:30:10 UTC

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Now that I think about it, the one common factor with any sort of violent crime including abducting kids to traffic and abuse them is young men with high levels of psychopathy and sadism and no gainful employment.
But the UK public would rather look at the Muslimness and South Asianness of the people accused of doing these crimes now. What was already wrong with British culture that immigrants would think they could get away with abusing kids, and succeed at it (allegedly)?

2025-01-04 23:23:08 UTC

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If your right-wing media is calling something "grooming gangs", it's going to sound like a hysteria.
My point is the UK cops have been terrible about investigating CSA against children for forever no matter who the perpetrator. Like the unsavory child pimps Savile was hanging out with as a DJ in Northern England before he got on the TV and radio.
It's only in my lifetime that Americans cared about this stuff. Universities taught that incest was extremely rare. They were wrong.

2025-01-04 17:41:23 UTC

So the UK police were covering up "grooming gangs" of predominantly Pakistani men snatching predominantly white British girls off the streets and subjecting them to horrific sexual abuse.
Then the police are ordered not to investigate the crimes because they don't want to be lambasted as racist by the politically powerful representatives of the community committing the crimes.
US immigration history has always been the exact inverse: accusing lots of innocent people wrongly.

2025-01-04 17:19:02 UTC

"In April 2024, NASA radar spotted an abandoned city under ice in Greenland. Camp Century, built by the U.S. military in the late 1950s, was, among other things, a storehouse for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Now it’s the problematic site of an enormous quantity of chemical and radioactive waste"
https://www.thetravel.com/a-secret-underground-us-military-base-is-now-consumed-by-chemical-radioactive-waste/
The USA abandoned the site in 1967 and didn't clean up because they didn't think the ice sheet would start melting. At the rate it's melting, it may be exposed by 2090.

2024-12-30 02:49:40 UTC

TWISTED: The dramatic history of twisted-pair #Ethernet https://youtu.be/f8PP5IHsL8Y?si=JDeTAPZsIe4Ap7lM

2024-12-29 00:49:45 UTC

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You can't just add memory protection to AmigaOS because the architecture assumes user programs can share pointers with each other to chunks of RAM owned by each other.
Consequently, AmigaOS doesn't even attempt to compact regions of user-allocated memory because it has no idea where all the pointers might be within messages in transit, as well as in programs own memory.
I don't remember too many fragmentation issues. Running out of limited chip RAM, yes. Running out of total free RAM, yes.

2024-12-29 00:47:28 UTC

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As with classic Mac OS, the IIGS wants to be able to hand you chunks of RAM through a manager that it can then relocate at whim to defragment the RAM because there's no MMU to create contiguous virtual address spaces. So you have to do things through handles (pointers to pointers) and lock RAM in place at times to make sure it doesn't get moved.
Amiga OS was very fast because it had a tiny microkernel to pass messages that contained pointers to the areas of memory to manipulate to R/W directly.

2024-12-29 00:44:41 UTC

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If you're an Apple IIe / IIGS developer working at the bare metal, e.g. for a game or the demoscene, Apple's manuals provide you with the ROM entrypoints for 16-bit ProDOS, SANE math libs, ADB I/O (keyboard/mouse, same as pre-USB Macs), and other libraries independently of GS/OS (the GUI).
I suppose the whole package is "GS/OS", and a lot of it is in ROM, at least for the later IIGS models that doubled the ROM from 128 KB to 256 KB.
Writing GUI apps is eerily like early Mac OS, e.g. QuickDraw.

2024-12-29 00:38:48 UTC

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In the 8-bit world, the Apple II series and the Commodore 8-bits share a large chunk of code licensed from Microsoft in the form of the BASIC interpreter. Microsoft 8K ROM BASIC uses their own custom FP routines and 5-byte variables (1-bit sign, 32-bit mantissa, 8-bit exponent). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Binary_Format
It's not a bad set of math routines, AFAICT, but it is single-precision. The BASICs for x86 PCs, like GW-BASIC & QuickBASIC, as well as Acorn's BBC BASIC, also supported double-precision floats.

2024-12-29 00:34:48 UTC

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ARM had a wacky byte-swapped original floating point format and then an FP accelerator (in the Acorn days) called FPA that used that format. At some point, the ARM community switched to standard IEEE FP, and then they added the VFP FPUs that we use today. Neon is the SIMD extension added later.
RISC OS has a version of BBC BASIC compiled for software ARM FP format, another for the rare Archimedes with the FPA accelerator, and a third version using the VFP and IEEE that you see on modern ARM.

2024-12-29 00:31:31 UTC

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SANE (Standard Apple Numerics Environment) is a fast IEEE-754-compliant math library written in 6502/65C816/68000 assembly language.
The Amiga came with IEEE software FP plus a second math library using Motorola's Fast Floating Point (FFP) format. Later 680x0 CPUs had optional IEEE-754-compliant FPUs, then the 68040 had an integrated FPU but slightly cut down from the external 68881/68882 FPUs. Transcendental routines such as trig functions requiring lookup tables removed, things like that.

2024-12-29 00:27:29 UTC

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It's weird to be reading about an Apple IIGS natively-hosted C compiler with C17 language support. GitHub says they're working on C23 features now.
I presume/hope the '816 code generation is good. WDC has their own C compiler and tools, but they only run on Windows and I don't like not having source code to the build tools I'm using.
tbqh, one area of the native OS design I want to have is that I need open-source equivalents to code packages Apple supplied for their devs, like SANE math libs.

2024-12-29 00:23:36 UTC

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I found the #AppleIIGS disk images and docs I'd downloaded last year, so I'm going to mess around with the GSplus emulator and check out the ORCA compilers which I purchased via Byteworks because they're still making new updates to the C compiler! You have to buy the latest full version to install the updated releases on the GitHub page. https://github.com/byteworksinc/ORCA-C/releases
I bought the package with all the source code as well. IIRC, the name comes from the macro assembler ORCA/M (macro spelled backwards).

2024-12-29 00:19:03 UTC

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I realized Ada is both unloved and becomes tedious after a while because it's so verbose. The C style with { } is overwhelmingly more popular than Pascal style begin / end, and Ada is even wordier than Pascal. The other annoyance is having up-to-date Ada bindings to any C libraries you want to use.
I think I should take the work I've done so far and convert it to #Rustlang before continuing, and extend it to Apple IIGS compatibility so I can then port that code to run on the RP2350 in my SBC.

2024-12-29 00:15:52 UTC

My interest in building my own WDC 65C816-based PC-on-a-card that could emulate an #AppleIIGS started a year ago, when I was looking for a job in the embedded systems space and wanted to practice writing something in Ada 2012 as a hobby project. I came up with the idea of an Apple IIe emulator since I figured it'd be much simpler than a #commodore64. Little did I reckon with the bizarre memory bank switching of different-sized segments for 80-column text (and "double hi-res" graphics).

2024-12-28 20:34:00 UTC

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The workaround that the 8-bit software industry came up with for the C64 was to include "fastloader" routines in their games (along with the on-disk copy protection, typically) to bypass Commodore's I/O routines and upload a small I/O routine into the minuscule 2KB RAM on the 1541 to transfer data using a custom protocol, often using 2 bits at a time instead of 1, with careful timing loops in assembly language on each end to write the data and hope the other end is reading bits in sync with you.

2024-12-28 20:31:02 UTC

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IIRC, the preceding VIC-20 was also intended to have much faster disk I/O routines than it shipped with, but in that case the VIA I/O chip had some internal defect that made the serial feature unusable. I do know the later versions of the 6522 VIA, including WDC's CMOS W65C22, work fine and were used for I/O in early Macintoshes and later Apple II's.

2024-12-28 20:28:08 UTC

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Apparently the first batch of the C64 motherboards from the factory in Japan had some misrouted traces because someone looked over the PCB design and didn't realize what the intended use for those lines was and removed them from the layout, and because Commodore didn't want to spend the money to scrap those boards and print a new batch that could use the fast I/O lines, they instead made the ROM engineer rewrite the I/O routines to use the CPU and transfer at even slower than VIC-20 speeds.

2024-12-28 20:26:05 UTC

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The most ridiculous thing about the C64 was the super-slow disk drive interface. There's a saga about that because it was supposed to be interrupt-driven using the serial interface in the CIA I/O chip to transfer data over Commodore's cut-down serial version of HP's IEEE-488 aka GPIB aka HPIB interface. The PET used GPIB for its disk drives and they were fast, but those cables are thick and expensive. The "IEC bus" with its daisy-chained DIN cables is much cheaper and better for a home PC.

2024-12-28 20:21:42 UTC

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I was a little kid so I didn't know any better, as far as the word processor and spreadsheet not being very good. Neither the C64 nor Plus/4 had an 80-column text mode, unlike an Apple IIe with 80-column card or IIc/IIGS. The C128 added 80-column text with a new proprietary CGA knockoff chip that didn't have the sprites of the C64 VIC-II and didn't address the same RAM as the CPU.
The C128 had a near-perfect C64 mode, but then they bolted on a few features for C128 mode that weren't integrated.

2024-12-28 20:19:04 UTC

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Commodore had already failed in 1984 with an incompatible model with the Plus/4 (which my parents got me for Christmas as my first computer, since they didn't know any better and the Plus/4 was the "new" thing).
The Plus/4 at least took the same peripherals as the C64, so I was able to buy a C64 a few years later and preserve much of the investment. The Plus/4 wasn't bad, but its graphics and sound were worse than the C64. It had an office suite bundled in ROM that wasn't very well-regarded.

2024-12-28 20:16:08 UTC

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It would've required boldness, and instead the downsides of what they were building and the too-small number of people on the C65 project just had it limping along until it had to be killed.
In theory, building a 3.5" disk drive into the C65 case, like the Amiga 500, was a great way to detract from the incompatibilities they were seeing with copy-protected game software on 5.25" disks. They knew they were designing something that wasn't 100% backwards compatible to C64, and then were surprised.

2024-12-28 20:13:33 UTC

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I recently read the final book in Brian Bagnall's trilogy on Commodore's rise and fall. It was good to get closure on the Amiga days, as well as some more insight into the unreleased C65.
If Commodore had wanted to seriously compete in the 8-bit space, and had shipped a version of the C65 before 1990, that would've been very interesting. They could've kept game publishers interested and competed with Nintendo and Sega for game consoles. They could've even had a game console version of the C65.

2024-12-28 20:07:02 UTC

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So you get 16 MB total address space, the same as an original 68000, but instead of just loading/saving a 32-bit value for the memory address, you have a 16-bit offset and an 8-bit bank. The Apple IIGS and WDC C compilers use 32-bit pointers, but they have a notion of "memory model" similar to 16-bit x86.
The one big win of 65C816 is that 8086/88 overlaps its 16-bit segment and 16-bit offset so much a 32-bit long pointer only addresses 1 MB of RAM. The '816 bank+offset has no overlapping bits.

2024-12-28 20:03:07 UTC

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If you put the 65C816 into emulation mode, it looks just like a 65C02, but there's a way to flip it back into native mode. So it gets constrained to 8-bit registers and math, 64K of RAM, etc..
On the plus side, by adding modes, the existing 8-bit opcodes are all extended to 16-bit sizes, and it's very compact if you can write code (or your compiler can generate it) that doesn't have to switch modes often.
For RAM access, they had to use bank switching. 256 x 64K segments. 8-bit bank registers.

2024-12-28 20:00:23 UTC

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65C816 is highly elegant because it fills up nearly all 256 single-byte opcodes with something useful, and since there are so few registers, everything is very orthogonal. It has a great mix of addressing modes as well. Most importantly, the return stack can now be up to 64K, not limited to 256 bytes starting at 0x0100. You can move around "zero page" as well.
But it's very "modal". There's a bit for 8-bit or 16-bit accumulator, a bit for 8 or 16-bit X and Y registers, and for 24-bit addresses.

2024-12-28 19:57:50 UTC

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I think that forcing the code to run on a 16-bit CPU with few registers and an 8-bit data bus bottleneck is a way to challenge people writing code for this board, while making the challenge worthwhile and fun, rather than frustrating or tedious. That's a tricky balance to get right. I also want to make the programming interface look realistically like something you could imagine as a 1993-era Apple IIGS in an alternate universe where the 68000 and Mac didn't exist.
65C816 is moderately tedious.

2024-12-28 19:52:56 UTC

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In theory you need to run the '816 at 5V to use 20 MHz, while 3.3V is supported up to 14 MHz, and you get the greatest power savings running at the lowest speeds and voltages. For my purposes, if I can do everything at 3.3V and avoid the use of power regulators and level translators between the 65C816 and the RP2350 GPIO lines, I will be happy.
Why not just emulate the 65C816 on the RP2350? That would take some fun out of it, and this way I know I can provide a working 6502/816 bus externally.

2024-12-28 19:49:52 UTC

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There's this myth that the Apple IIGS was so relatively slow at 2.8 MHz because Apple was intentionally trying to prevent it from outshining or even embarrassing the Mac. That's not why it's slow.
From what I've read from both people who were there and looking at the state of the art in 1986, the Apple IIGS designers were limited by the speed of available DRAM and the max speed of the 65C816 chips that WDC could deliver (claimed 8 MHz then).
There's a speed/voltage curve in the '816 datasheet.

2024-12-28 19:44:31 UTC

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The Apple IIGS got incredibly good Apple IIe compatibility, including precise timing for Disk II and other hardware interfacing, by hardcoding all the bank switching and Apple II stuff that Woz originally implemented in 74-series logic chips, in a single Apple II ASIC, with another ASIC for the bus management, and it had logic to drop down to 1 MHz whenever accessing the original 2 x 64K banks of a 128K Apple IIe or the I/O or ROM space in those address ranges.
The other 64K banks are "fast".

2024-12-28 19:42:08 UTC

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The 65C816 also signals whenever it's reading the address of an interrupt vector, so you can swap in a different address for the interrupt handler instead of reading the vector from ROM/RAM as usual.
Basically I want to implement from the ARM side an MMU that can emulate the complex bank-switched RAM, ROM, and I/O address space of an Apple IIGS, as well as provide a slightly nicer native mode with memory protection and multitasking, but nothing that won't fit in 8MB RAM and ~20MB of eMMC / SD.

2024-12-28 19:36:40 UTC

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FreeRTOS has SMP support (I checked), and I don't need much in the way of an OS to output HDMI video and audio, interface the USB, PSRAM (self-refreshing DRAM using OSPI), SD card slot, probably an onboard eMMC, etc..
What intrigues me about the 65C816 is that it outputs signals so an external MMU can see why it's requesting to read a byte of memory. It tells you if it's reading an opcode, so you can easily swap in a BRK or similar if you want to change the behavior of e.g. illegal opcodes.

2024-12-28 19:34:14 UTC

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You can switch in dual RISC-V cores in place of the dual ARM cores if you're feeling adventurous, but I think I'll stay with the better-known and presumably better-performing ARM cores.
Anyway, there are a whole lot of useful realtime I/O features in the RP2350 that should enable me to wire up a portion of the GPIOs to all the non-voltage pins of the 65C816 and have it provide the entire address space and emulate an Apple IIGS or anything else I want, in 32-bit ARM code, running on FreeRTOS.

2024-12-28 19:32:22 UTC

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I recorded the progress of my ideas on a Patreon page that I set up, but I've recently figured out a much simpler approach than my original thinking, which would have involved a SPI-bus-based USB host controller chip, an audio controller, a custom VGA controller, and other stuff that would have made for a too-expensive final product with less-than-desirable specs.
Then I found out about the RP2350 chip in the Pi Pico 2. It has dual 32-bit ARM Cortex-M cores @ 150 MHz (or dual RISC-V cores).

2024-12-28 19:30:08 UTC

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That's a big set of goals, and I have no experience with FPGA design, which is the key to the retro designs of Stefany Allaire and so many others.
WDC still licenses and supports the 65C816, both as a standalone "hard core" and as a core that can be licensed for ASIC or FPGA-based designs. So they have a 65C816 + I/O chips + hardware integer multiply/divide and other things you'd want from a microcontroller, in an Intel MAX10 10M16 (16k LEs).
But I don't want to use their memory mapping.

2024-12-28 19:27:21 UTC

So back in January, while I was off social media, I came up with an idea to build a new retro 8/16-bit computer with a Raspberry Pi form factor and the same 40-pin edge connector. I wanted to use the 65C816 @ 14-20 MHz and incorporate the ability to emulate an Apple IIGS, along with native mode with a simple OS with a command-line like MS-DOS but with memory protection and multitasking (I'm thinking FreeDOS, SeaBIOS, and FreeRTOS could all be ported/compiled with a 65C816 assembler/C compiler).

2024-12-27 04:03:26 UTC

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hey there Kate, nice to see you again

2024-12-27 02:27:47 UTC

I deleted my X account back when it was still officially called Twitter about a year and a half ago, and I really enjoyed my sabbatical from this form of social media.
Now that I've gotten a little better at time management, and especially with the popularity of Bluesky, I thought it'd be a good idea to reconnect here to see if anyone I know was still following me, and to follow other interesting people.