Game Cartridges And The Technology To Make Data Last Forever

Game cartridges are perhaps the hardiest of all common storage schemes. Short of blunt traumatic force or application of electrical surges to the cartridge’s edge connectors, damaging a game cartridge is hard to do by accident. The same is also true for the data on them, whether one talks about …read more

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Hackaday Links: August 4, 2019

Is the hacking community facing a HOPEless future? It may well be, if this report from 2600 Magazine is any indication. The biennial “Hackers On Planet Earth” conference is in serious financial jeopardy after the venue that’s hosted it for years, the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan, announced a three-fold increase …read more

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Vintage Terminal Converted For Galactic Use In Time For May The Fourth

“Not as clumsy or random as Windows. An elegant terminal, for a more civilized age.” [Ben Kenobi] might well have said that about the Hewlett-Packard 264x-series of serial terminals, in use starting at just about the time the original installment of the Star Wars franchise was released.  With their wide-screen …read more

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Blast From the Past with Space Station PROM Reader

The Ursa Major Space Station SST282 is a dinosaur of a digital reverb.  Okay, so maybe 1978 isn’t ancient yet, but it is getting to the point where one has to worry about the possibility of component failure.  At least that’s what [Obsoletetechnology] thought when they created a backup of its memory contents.

As can be seen from some of Hackaday’s previous articles, a part does not have to be an older one to fail.  However, there is no such thing as being too paranoid when it comes to older parts reaching their lifetime.  Especially when there is valuable …read more

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Weird CPU

How many instructions does [agp.cooper’s] computer have? Just one. How many strip boards does it use? Apparently, 41. While being one shy from the answer to life, it is still a lot of boards for a single instruction. The high board count is due to the use of 1970’s vintage ICs including TTL parts, 2114 RAM chips, and 24S571 PROMs.

There are several different architectures for single instruction computers and [agp’s] uses what is technically at TTA (transfer-triggered architecture). That is, the one instruction is a move and the destination or source of the move determines the operation. For example, …read more

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