Stuffs to read before going to bed

[MooZ]

Jamis Buck's Maze Generation: Algorithm Recap.

[MooZ]

• EEPROM Programmer using an ATTiny and USBTinyISP.

[MooZ]

LZSS, LZW, Huffman, LZARI, LZHUF documentation and source code by Haruhiko Okumura (don't forget to take a look at History of Data Compression in Japan).

[MooZ]

Akihabara video tour

[MooZ]

This is totally unrelated but it may be useful : How to Make Sriracha from Scratch.

[Charles MacDonald]

This guy made a battery charger using the LM317 which is a adjustable voltage regulator.

http://www.dinamousers.net/tiki-index.p ... ry+Charger

What's cool is that he used a binary weighted ladder controlled by a DIP switch to control the adjustment, instead of using a regular potentiometer.

I think a natural extension of this would be to use a ULN2003 or 74LS07 and '574 latch in place of the DIP switch so you could vary the output voltage under software control.

Or imagine a lab power supply with a PIC, some '595 shift registers and a complementary LM337 negative regulator. Then you could dial in positive and negative voltages with buttons in very fine increments. Both LM3x7 chips go from +/-1.2V to +/-37V and can deliver up to 1.5A which is more than enough for tinkering and experiments.

[MooZ]

Machining cartridge connectors from PCI sockets
I may try this to make a pce connector!

[MooZ]

Genesis cart reader using an Arduino mega.

[MooZ]

Molding Sega SC-3000 / SG-1000 Cartridge Case

[Dr Jefyll]

Hi folks, I'm still lurking, and enjoying the Stuffs To Read before going to bed. Coupla things to mention today:

The Oral Histories mentioned by Charles and MooZ here are excellent. I read the one about the 68000, the 386, and next in line is the Z80. But can anyone tell me what "ASP" is? Apparently it pertains to economics:

it became very apparent to me that RISC as an economic entity survived because of
the high ASP's on the X86 product lines. The 386 and 486 volumes were so high that you could actually
bin out the highest performance CISC chips and they would be performance competitive with anything
that RISC could do. But the RISC guys wanted so much lower ASP that it made no business sense for
Intel to sell those products. They'd have to be selling the very highest speed products for the very lowest
prices. So the CISC performance was actually there to do the workstation business, but it made no
sense to sell it. It would have destroyed the business model. So maintaining those ASP's created an
umbrella for all the Sun's and the LSIs of the world to develop their RISC chips and come in on a costbased
model and do the workstation thing. It was kind of an interesting observation that the CISC
business model was allowing the whole RISC thing to exist.

Also, FYI I posted a drastically truncated description of my KimKlone 6502 redesign, this following a comment online that described the original article (8 pages + appendices) as "TLDR." I didn't know what TLDR meant, and I was pretty embarrassed when I found out. (Too Long; Didn't Read!)

Cheers,
Jeff

ps- Sriracha? Awesome -- I LOVE that stuff!!