Berkeley System's After Dark

Years ago, in the Windows 3.1 & 95 era there was a company called Berkeley Systems that had a screen saver.  Their most famous one was the Flying Toasters.  I personally liked the Looney Tune ones.  I had a few of their separate packages, Star Trek TNG, Simpsons, Games and others that I can't remember.

I did create a couple of AD modules but nothing super exciting.

One thing I'd really like to be able to do is strip the graphics out of the modules, however, I still haven't been able to find a way to do it.  The resource pullers that I've tried just don't seem to be able to identify them... one of these days I will try to dig though the programs again.

Every once in a while I'd poke at the install zip files but always found they were protected with a password.  I was never able to find one on the internet and I didn't have a zip password cracker so I just ignored it for a while.  I had a copy of my old "install" folder so I always just used that to poke around when I felt like it

Yesterday, I decided to poke some more and as I was browsing one the of install files (install.ins) I noticed text near the list of zip files that said "striketeam" and I thought, that's an odd phrase to be in there.  So I tried that as the password on one of the zip files and it worked.  Cool!

I am having an issue finding my other install disks, however, I did find the Simpsons install disks and it used the same password.

Now if I could just figure out how to pull the graphics... and sound would be nice too.  When poking through the module files, I see "CSTM" in multiple places like various resource files.  I would swear that was some kind of music / sound format but I can't find anything online that really talks about it much and I just can't remember that far back (almost 30 years!).

Ah well... at least I figured out the zip password, give me hope that I'll figure out the other stuff too.  

It Lives!

If you look back, you will notice that I found instructions on how to build an LED cube 9 full years ago (May 4th, 2011!).  I ordered the parts in early September of that year and started building soon after.  I finished the boards sometime around April of 2012 but wasn't confident enough in my work to try and turn it on.  For the last 8 years it has been sitting on & under my desk.

This past week I decided it was time to actually try to make it work.  I reviewed the boards and found a couple of broken wires to fix, found 2 solder traces that were wrong but over all everything looked good.

I hooked it up to the USBTiny programmer which was hooked to a Raspberry Pi (wanted Linux), sent the 'test' program to it and PRESTO it worked.  I was floored.  I did find a couple of columns didn't light appropriately which turned up a couple broken solder joints that I didn't notice.  Got those fixed and it works perfect.

Next up is to get the main program working correctly... I suspect I have a solder trace wrong somewhere but not sure yet, haven't dug into it that much yet.

Here is a short video of the test program running.

https://vimeo.com/419409567

Coding

I love to code. Its as simple as that. If I had a job where I couldn't code, I probably wouldn't stay in that job very long.

I don't especially care what the language is because I can figure it out (with my pal Google). I've coded in a lot of different languages. I'm sure there are more than this but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head: Basic, Assembly, Pascal / Delphi, Today, Progress, Cobol, dBase, Hibol, C, C++, C#, VB, VBScript, VB.Net, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PowerShell, PHP, Various other "shell" batch languages

I loved doing Assembly when I was deep into it (many, many moons ago). The system was there for all to see and I was tweaking the heck out of it. I doubt that I would know where to begin on a 'modern' system.

I'm not sure that I have a favorite language. If I'm going to do something web based then I would probably choose PHP (with lots of JavaScript). If I'm going to do something Windows based then its probably going to be C#. If I just need a script then most likely it will be PowerShell or Bash (depending on the OS :)).

My advice to you, learn all you can and follow your passion. The more you know, the more valuable you are and the more hire-able you will be.

Psycho Chat

Years ago, a friend wrote an automated help chat program that the users would use to solve basic computer questions. He wrote it in Pascal (circa 1985). When I was running a BBS, he thought it would be cool to use his program to answer basic BBS questions, I agreed.

So I took his program, ran it through a Pascal to C converter and 'fixed' it and made a BBS door called Psycho Chat out of it. I hooked it to the Page Sysop feature of the BBS (circa 1992 running Wildcat!) and the transcripts were hilarious.

Years later (circa 2002), just for fun, I hand converted it to Delphi (which is based on Pascal... funny how the program came full circle). It worked OK but just wasn't the same.

On and off for the past 15 years I've been thinking of making it a web page using PHP and Ajax. My friend had the same idea yesterday so I decided it was time to actually do something about it. Took me a couple hours to hand convert the Delphi program to Javascript / jQuery / PHP but now its working. Still using the response files from the BBS.

It was a fun project and I don't know why I waited so long to do it.

This version doesn't record what is being said... hmmm... maybe I should add that just for fun :)

Cool AppleSoft Emulator

I've posted about this one before (7 years ago!) but I've been feeling nostalgic lately so I revisited it... The site is at http://www.calormen.com/Applesoft/ and is an AppleSoft Basic interpreter written in JavaScript. Joshua Bell did a great job with it. I've sent him several programs (4 recently) and he included them in his Samples list. He is a really great guy. You should try the emulator out... be sure to check my programs :)

Parts arrived

Ordered tons of different parts.  Working on a mod for my RFM... will try to finish that up tomorrow so I can make a vid for my pal...

Need to figure out a better parts storage :)

More Parts

Just ordered some more parts.

A couple different SD Card slots so I can fix one of my Raspberry PIs.  Got more than one because I wanted a backup solution... especially in case another one breaks.

Bought the PI NOIR camera just for fun.

Bought some connectors to finish customizing my DWP.

Should be fun.

Aaaaaannnnndddd.... we're back...

Wow.... what a long time to have left this alone.  So much has happened in the last 2 years that I can't even begin to write it all down.

Personal: We got our Black Belts in both Open Hand and Kobudo.  Soon to have our 2nd in Open Hand.  Have been teaching a lot.  Built some shelves for my oldest.  Put in new windows and blinds all around.  Changed hosts and in the process lost the CNAME for this site... forgot to fix that with the new host and finally figured out how to do it.

Work: They got rid of my group, pushed me onto another, and I finally moved to a third of my own free will.  Get to travel to the corp offices soon.  My bud started working with me then left for greener pastures.  Another bud retired.  The company is in the process of being purchased.

All in all a very entertaining 2 years.  The future still looks bright with God and my girl and family by my side.

Lets hope I remember to update this some. :)

Joooooy

Got the RPi working with XBMC nicely.  Even works with my wireless keyboard & mouse.

Took me a bit to get it to talk to my file share, I had to reset the password in Samba rather than on the system itself (doh, I knew that).

Working GREAT... very happy with it.  Now to put it in its case, paper for now :)

Da Cube

I started on the other board and as I was putting the pieces on, I found that I forgot to order a few parts :(

I will continue to work on the board as much as I can until the new parts arrive (2 - 3 weeks).  Ah well...  at least I found a new supplier that had less expensive parts :)  (http://www.taydaelectronics.com/)

Cube Progress

I've been ignoring the cube for quite awhile now because I hit a part that just kept confusing me every time I looked at it.  So I brought it to work and had one of my coworkers glance at it and he helped me get past my confusion.

I've now got the first board completed (I think).  I ran through a bunch of the connections for continuity and the ones that should work do.  I did have to fix a couple of broken wires but overall everything went well.

I will be starting on the second board shortly so hopefully I'll be able to get it up and running before April.

Book Database

Well, my book database is moving right along.  I found that the barcode on the back of the book isn't very reliable so I've moved to the ISBN number on the inside cover and this barcode seems to give me good data consistently.  The problem is that those barcodes are only included on books made after 1986.

I scanned about 50 books with my Symbol CS1504 barcode scanner and when I went to pull them in with my program I only got 19 records... WTH?  In trouble shooting the code (C#), I found that if I paused 750 miliseconds after each 'batch' read from the scanner that I would get the correct number of barcodes.  Very strange.  My current theory is that the code is just too fast for the serial comm to keep up.

So I have those codes stored in a database and now I am working on the program that pulls the data from Amazon (PHP).  I've got it pulling the data and putting into my book object, now I just need to write the code to store that data into the database.

After that I will work on the code to view / search / edit the data (PHP).

Old but still great code

I decided to resurrect some old 3D dot rotation code (1993). It was in C so I converted it to C# (not a big stretch) and it works pretty good. The key was double buffering.

Right now I am working on a whole 'font' that will allow me to rotate just about any string.

(these are predefined elsewhere but thought I would include them so you could see how the are created)
offScreenBmp = new Bitmap(this.Width, this.Height);
offScreenDC = Graphics.FromImage(offScreenBmp);
backBrush = new SolidBrush(Color.Lime); // i set the form transparency key to this
this.TopMost = true;

the 'display' code looks like this (I will be cleaning it up later):

private void DoDotAnimation()
{
while (! ClosingIt)
{
MoveDots(); // never guess what this does...
Graphics clientDC = this.CreateGraphics();

offScreenDC.FillRectangle(backBrush, 0, 0, this.Width, this.Height);

Color newColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red;

for (i = 0; i < PointsN; i++) // run through the dots array and draw them { if ((TheNewDots[i, 0] > -1) && (TheNewDots[i, 1] > -1))
offScreenDC.DrawEllipse(new Pen(newColor, 2), TheNewDots[i, 0], TheNewDots[i, 1], dotSize, dotSize);
}
clientDC.DrawImage(offScreenBmp, 0, 0);

Application.DoEvents();
}
}

Assembly is Fun!

It has been a LONG time since I seriously wrote any 6502 Assembly code, but I used to do it all the time.  I would write it out on paper first then type it in once I had it where I thought I wanted it.  Paper made it alot easier to see everything all at once (due to the tiny screens in the old days).  I think I still have a page or two of hand written code.  If I find it I'll scan and post it just for fun.

So, I was playing with this site: http://www.6502asm.com/

And decided to take an old Apple ][ Assembly program I wrote EONS ago and adapt it to work on that site.  Got it to work pretty well and even submitted it for their examples page.  I do have a Game Of Life I wrote once that I want to try and adapt, but not today :)

If you write anything cool, let me know.