Monthly Archives: January 2015

Retro Arcade Repairs

Posted on January 31, 2015 by e8johan

A friend of mine, kralleman, is crazy about retro games and their hardware. I mean properly crazy. Crazy enough to appear on national TV, as well as having three episodes of a local retro gaming show dedicated to his own … Continue reading →

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Tickless idle in FreeRTOS

Posted on January 29, 2015 by e8johan

As things become more and more mobile, portable, or even wearable, power consumption becomes important. FreeRTOS moves in this direction by supporting a tickless idle process. But first, what is really the problem? When a system has nothing to do, … Continue reading →

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Impressive 6502 Home Computer

Posted on January 27, 2015 by e8johan

Dirk Grappendorf has been working on a serious looking MOS 6502 based computer. Over at his site, you can follow his development diary. The computer was developed between September 2014 and January 2015. Quite impressive, given the outcome! The entire … Continue reading →

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Raspberry Pi as an Amiga Floppy Drive

Posted on January 21, 2015 by e8johan

As you probably know, the combination of retro computing and tinkering with embedded platforms tickles the mind of us here at DigitalFanatics. Someone who really hit that spot is Maurizio Ramondo and his Amiga Drive project. Basically, it is about … Continue reading →

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x86 timeline

Posted on January 18, 2015 by e8johan

Computer World has a nice timeline of the x86 processor family.

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FreeRTOS 8.2.0 Released

Posted on January 17, 2015 by e8johan

Version 8.2.0 of FreeRTOS, the open source, embedded RTOS has been released. The changelog reveals all the details. Some of the details are: The new task notification feature, providing a fast, lightweight mechanism for inter-process exchange of limited data. Following … Continue reading →

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Emulator Preventing Tricks

Posted on January 16, 2015 by e8johan

One application of reverse engineering is the creation of emulators of old systems. This is often done to preserve the technology and to address the lack of access to functioning hardware. One such system is the Game Boy Advance. Produced between … Continue reading →

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Debug witout printf

Posted on January 14, 2015 by e8johan

The use of printf for debugging purposes is sometimes regarded as bad practice. However, sometimes even that is a luxury. Mark Seaborn has written a piece on this.

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KeySweeper – Sweeping away Microsoft keyboards

Posted on January 14, 2015 by e8johan

Samy Kamkar has an interesting post on the security implementation in the Microsoft wireless keyboard. Using some smart heuristics, the scanning period to find and get access to the key presses of a wireless Microsoft keyboard is only 40s. In … Continue reading →

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Reverser Engineering an IR Protocol

Posted on January 12, 2015 by e8johan

Reverse engineering is always an interesting technical challenge. Vincent and Mathieu from France used the AnalysIR equipment. This challenge was not only about understanding the protocols, but learning to generate checksums and how the various frames relate to each other. The … Continue reading →

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