Modern and retro mix

One of my favorite peices of retro clone hardware is Bob Corsham’s KIM-1 Clone. I’ve featured it many places like the 6502 speed series.

I have the latest model of this board, and he made an interesting design choice. It actually has an FTDI chip on board and you use that via USB to connect via a modern computer with an FTDI driver. This is very convenient for working with a modern computer, but then eliminates the ability to use a real serial port.

In the world of tech, including vintage tech, the lure of the blinkenlight is strong.

And if you don’t like blinkenlights, can we even be friends?

My PiDP-8 might be the ultimate in blinkenlight flexing, BUT we can probably do some other fun stuff if we use math. And science!

My friend Robin’s favorite demo is 10 print. And what’s not to love about 10 print? After all, there’s even a book about it.

My Favorite Demo

My favorite demo is more complex but still simple enough to understand. The Maze Generator, from Compute! December 1981 by Charles Bond has been a favorite of mine since it came out. In the filing cabinet of my mind, I even remember it as the “Page 54 Maze”.

Have you ever sat down at your old Olympia typewriter and felt compelled to write poetry in which each word is the same length as successive digits of Pi?

Me too!!!

This is called a Pilish:

The idea of writing a sentence (or longer piece of poetry or prose) in which the lengths of successive words represent the digits of the number π (=3.14159265358979…) has been around since the early 1900’s. - Writing in Pilish

I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month for the last two years. While I don’t have aspirations of being a fiction author, I think there is a ton of value in writing 1500 words daily. Good writing or bad, 45000 words in a month is worth the effort.

In 2021, I used a DOS 386 with Wordperfect 6.22 to complete the writing for the month and produced a pretty terrible Techno/Wilderness thriller that no one should be subjected to reading. Using a 386 Laptop was a fantastic experience, and WordPerfect for DOS remains one of the best distraction-free word processors ever created.

I built the world’s worst paper tape reader some weeks ago. It works pretty okay on anything with a USR-style port like a KIM-1 clone or a VIC-20.

It at least attempts to live up to the world’s worst name. Paper tape was (and is) an interesting medium. Sure it’s hard to work with and fragile, but it also has the advantage of being slow. I mean, what’s not to like??!!!

Can we get a little more speed from a 6502 than we did last week? Almost certainly.

The memory test we used was a general-purpose one. It’s flexible and reusable. The price is some speed. Let’s try and make it faster.

The test machine for this one

I’m going to rerun the test on a Corsham KIM-1 Clone for a couple of reasons:

• It’s still on my desk from last time
• It’s clocked at EXACTLY 1Mhz
• It has a large block of contiguous memory available if we want it without ROMs , etc. getting in the way.
• The memory expansion is connected directly to the bus, making the “expansion” the same access speed as the built-in memory
• It doesn’t compete with other devices (I’m looking at you, video chips!), so we’re just talking 6502 and memory here.

And by clocked at EXACTLY 1Mhz, assuming the frequency counter in my scope is pretty accurate:

The amazing Gregorio Naçu posted the article title graphic this week to bring attention to the venerable 6502 processor and poke fun at Apple’s M2 chip marketing slides. He’s doing probably the most ambitious single-person Commodore 64 project I know of and has a fantastic blog.

Apple claims the new M2 chip has the following specs. M2 features Image by Apple via Youtube We all know that these numbers are probably a little fluffy. Maybe a lot fluffy, and in practical applications, they are probably pretty far off. Benchmarking in a lab is fine, but the numbers rarely reflect real-world performance.

Bill Gates has been a controversial figure in the Computer World for 50 years now.

Back in 1976, he famously (infamously?) wrote a letter bemoaning what he saw as rampant piracy of BASIC. Micro Soft was selling their version of BASIC, which is quite good for a whopping $150. This was fine for a company, but to a "tinker in your garage" person, $150 ($760 or so in 2022) was pretty steep.

Dealing with large numbers in computing has been an attractive problem area for a long time. Using an average calculator might lead you to believe that it’s too tricky for most applications.

But it’s not that difficult. And to prove it, we’re going to implement this calculation on machines with 8 Bit registers (I mean, cmon, on this site, you can’t even pretend to be shocked).

Sometimes there’s an absolute joy in doing something the hard way to REALLY understand what’s happening.

I struggled (still struggle) with wrapping my mind around using the display on the KIM-1. The best way (for me anyway) to be motivated to learn something is to have an outcome in mind of what I want to see and work towards that.

Most people who started on the KIM-1 probably spent a fair amount of time in an early book called “The First Book of KIM.” There are several examples of the basics in it, including one way to show memory locations on the display.