Yet another alpha release of CASMSIM, 0.16. This one uses KML files (language developed for Emu48, with a few minor extenions) tell the simulator what ROM and graphic images to use, where the display and keys are positioned within the image, and the keycodes generated by the keys. This moves it a bit [...]

The first alpha release of the GTK+ based version of CASMSIM is now available. For now it only simulates the HP-45, but the HP-35 and HP-55 will be added back in soon.
Added a menubar, although most of the menu commands aren’t implemented yet. File/Quit and Help/About are the only ones that work at [...]

Couldn’t seep again last night, so I hacked on CASMSIM some more. I hope this doesn’t get to be a habit. I like hacking in my spare time, but I don’t normally consider the time I want to spend sleeping as spare time.

Finished reading The Amber Spyglass a few nights ago. That’s the final volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy. Highly recommended!
I recently received the DVD I’d orderd of the short animated film More. The package it arrived in is quite amusing. Looking at the box, I wasn’t [...]

I couldn’t sleep on Sunday night, so I hacked on CASMSIM a bit. That’s my microcode-level simulator for first-generation HP calculators; currently it simulates the HP-35, HP-45, and (mostly) HP-55. It’s written in C and uses Xlib for display. Dave Hicks translated the simulator to a Java applet so you can run [...]

At last night’s meeting of the PDP-1 Restoration Project, we actually used WREC to reform four capacitors out of two of the Type 728 power supplies. In the process I found and fixed a few minor bugs. I need to get a new release (0.02) together. I started compiling a ChangeLog from [...]

Started looking at adding real-time graphing to WREC. The most obvious choices appear to be the gtkplot component of the GtkExtra library, or Guppi. Guppi development seems to be stalled, and I didn’t see any example code or documentation describing how to do the sort of stuff I want. (I noticed that [...]

A preliminary release of WREC is now available. There’s a tarball on the web page, and a link to information about the subversion source code repository.
WREC Reforms Electrolytic Capacitors using an SCPI-programmable power supply. WREC was written for use on the Computer History Museum PDP-1 Restoration Project, but should be useful to reform [...]

Got to work on the caption decoder a bit more today after all. It’s now basically working, though I may have to tweak the demodulation code a bit. Or maybe not; the errors we’re seeing may just be the result of a very poor quality video signal here in the basement of Rich’s [...]

After hearing friends talking it up, Rich bought the DVD of “Memento” and we watched it last night. Pretty strange! I’ll definitely have to watch it again. It seemed to end too soon, though, as it was still unclear what really happened at the beginning of the story. Maybe after another [...]