Posts by deanb01 36 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2014
The retro community are brilliant at reverse engineering hardware, scanning schematics and preserving software. Stories like this are often not that well known. I've often felt we need to get better at recording details like this now - none of my generation are getting any younger, and they may soon be lost forever. They may seem inconsequential, but they do give context.
Yep, our org had the same problem on Friday. I was the first to notice it / unlucky to get the definitions installed, so my laptop was used as the guinea pig. Thankfully I'd noticed that Defender had been popping up more notifications than usual, so we quickly isolated the problem, the offending rule was disabled, and I was then left with the task of fixing up my shortcuts. Sigh.
Worked for a UK based fruit machine manufacturer a few years ago (Barcrest) that was purchased by a US gaming company (IGT). I was the sole developer on a project to put some more interesting aesthetics on their frankly dull one armed bandits. This involved replacing the neon-tube light box above the game with one that had its own CPU. The Barcrest code was a mixture of Forth and 6809, so plenty of voodoo involved.
Got ushered into my bosses office at a later date with regards to my source code. Apparently the Nevada Gaming Commission took a dim view of some of the comments in my code, for example:
; Entering Bodge City in a bus with no brakes
In my defence, I wasn't told my source code would be submitted.
Ah that takes me back. I was part of the team responsible for those units. The company in question went bust around 4 years ago, and I've moved on from designing digital-out-of-door screen systems.
It originally shipped with a PC running a cut-down Linux distro (desktop stripped out, etc) for the big screens. Later versions ditched PCs altogether and ran custom playout software on a Raspberri Pi. One of the reasons for that decision was to avoid this scenario. The other was cost.
I decided not to back this first time around given the Vega debacle, and kicked myself afterwards. The Next is a very capable machine; not just an enhanced Spectrum that can run Spectrum software and most peripherals, but can also masquerade as other machines, such as the BBC, CPC, and even arcade boards by flashing the FPGA with an appropriate core.
Credit to the Next team for pulling this off, despite the bad tax advice and having to top up the funds to achieve the initial launch out of their own pockets.
Needless to say, I've back this second round, and will look forward to receiving mine next year.
I ran the IT department of a small marketing company 'back-in-the-day'. We had a call from a member of staff who was struggling with a sluggish company laptop. So my PFY called him and remoted onto his desktop. Part of the process involved clearing out the trash; clear cache files, delete tmp files, and so on. The PFY opened up the wastebin and it was set to display the folder as thumbnails. The pictures were, well, quite hardcore porn. The PFY took it in his stride and, whilst talking to the user, said "I think we'll close that, shall we?". After a lot of mind-bleach, we raised it with the directors, who took a dim view, and fired the chap on the spot.
BT seem to half-complete jobs, then move onto the next technology. I'm still waiting for FTTC on our street, in a suburb close to Manchester. The exchange is digital, and half the estates streets have been converted. Seems BT reached some internal target to state that our village is now 'Digital' and moved on. I'm a homeworker stuck on ADSL+ - refuse to get Virgin, the only other option, as neighbours report theirs going down on a regular basis, and their modems suck. Seriously considering 5G when it reaches us - heck, even a 4G connection would be better than what we've got at the moment.
Back in the day, when you got a mono MW/LW radio thrown in as a luxury item on Vauxhall Nova's standard equipment I noted on mine that there was a connector between the HT leads and the spark plugs. According to my dad (who was a Vauxhall mechanic) this was a choke to reduce radio interference from the HT wiring.
Cut my programming teeth on a ZX-81. Despite it's basic configuration it was a great little micro. The literature in the early 80s was fantastic, and the hardware was simple, so it was quite easy for your average 10-12 year old to pick up a little bit of assembly language or indeed a basic knowledge of digital electronics (the ZX-81 was also available in kit form for the more adventurous).
The manuals for the ZX-81 and Spectrum still hold up as being an example on how to write a technical manual for the layperson.
I remember it being a bit of a pain to write assembly language on it - there being no facilities to store or reserve memory for the code. The solution was to store the code in a REM statement at the top of the code. I must have worn out the tips of my fingers creating REM statements with sufficient characters in to store my code.
Thankfully, by the time I came to do serious coding (games) the Spectrum had come along, and you could reserve the top of memory for code.
1K was a challenge - 16K seemed like an absolute luxury at the time. I still write code with memory and efficiency in mind, despite the best efforts of bloatware runtimes.
Still got my ZX-81 and fire it up occasionally for old times sake.
So our exchange is FTTC yet less than 50% of the cabinets in the surrounding estates have not been converted. BT / Openreach seem to have a thing for counting a town as 'converted' once they've done the exchange, regardless of whether any of the population can get the service. It's all ballcocks.
Back in the day, a new guy was being introduced around the company I worked for. All was going well, until he arrived in the developers room. He was introduced by the boss, and one of my colleagues started laughing so hard he nearly choked on his coffee. He only told us why after the guy had left the room.
The new guy's name was Phil Ching.
According to this press release https://www.btplc.com/News/Articles/Showarticle.cfm?ArticleID=D6BA16C8-6876-4735-B571-C1DAD61512A0 I should have FTTC Superfast Broadband. Oh wait, they only appear to have converted less half of Gatley's cabinets...
We're hardly out in the sticks, less than 10 miles from the centre of Manchester and 3 from Stockport.
Similar story when fitting out remote offices for work. More than half are only served by ADSL. Broadband in this country is a mess.
Purely a practical choice for me.
I've got a late 2013 15" Macbook Pro I purchased from Apple's Refurbished store. Got last years model and saved my company £340. At that point it was cheaper than the equivalent Windows PC.
It spend 90% of it's time booted in Windows 7 with occasional forays into OSX. I'm a software developer working on a mixture of Windows and Linux systems with some multimedia work & app development mixed in. It has its quirks, but so far has been the best laptop I've owned, mainly down to the screen resolution.
Shame Openreach can't get FTTC broadband to our estate in Gatley, South Manchester. I get a faster Internet connection through my mobile phone. Also this year I've set up 7 regional offices in Preston, Norwich, Blackpool, Stockport, Wilmslow, Carlisle & Birmingham and Openreach can only serve "Superfast Broadband" to 2 of those. Not seeing much of a broadband revolution in the UK at the moment.
Unable to get fibre broadband on the A6 in Stockport to a new satellite office my company is setting up and my home in Gatley, despite the exchange being capable of it, is not fibre broadband ready as BT have only put cabinets on half our estate.
About time BT/OpenReach/Gov pulled their finger out IMHO.
I worked at Software Creations during that era and developed the Amstrad CPC version of Ghouls n Ghosts. A beggar to program on 8 bit hardware and not my finest work. My colleague, Mike Follin, programmed a technically excellent scroll routine on the Speccy version, derived from earlier work on Bubble Bobble & LED Storm, that "chased the raster' to run at 25fps and draw sprites and backgrounds on alternate frames without flicker.
The Speccy version of Ghosts n Goblins was a great game for the time & really pushed the Spectrum to its limits.
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