I went to see Kill Bill Vol. 2 last night. What an awesome film! I was worried that it might not live up to my expectations, but I needn’t have been concerned. The audio at the Century 21 theatre (San Jose, CA) had problems with the front left channel cutting in and [...]

I’ve succeeded (mostly) at cross-compiling Nonpareil for Windows using MinGW. I was pleasantly surprised at how little change to the code was required. There are a few minor issues to resolve.

This morning a group of Computer History Museum volunteers went on a tour of the USS Pampanito, a WWII-era Balao class Fleet submarine moored in San Franciso. The normal tour is very interesting, and I’d definitely encourage anyone interested in naval history and technology to go, but for us the highlight was a specially-arranged [...]

Just got back from Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara, buying a bunch of wire-wrap sockets, wrap-IDs, and a few chips. Together with other chips, DC-DC-converters, etc. I’ve ordered from Mouser and Digikey, I should have enough stuff to build the next version of the romsucker, which is what I use to capture traces and [...]

Not only was that theory correct, but ALL bank-switched ROMs track a single bank switch state, and toggle on every 1060 instruction, regardless of from what ROM address the 1060 is fetched. This is unlike the bank-switching on the HP-41C, where every 4K address block that supports bank switching tracks its own independent bank switch [...]

Watched the DVD of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 in preparation for seeing Vol. 2 in the theatre on Sunday. Am once again amazed at the cinematography and choreography. Not to mention that Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu are really easy on the eyes. Not recommended for those with an aversion to violence, [...]

I spent several hours over the last few days studying traces captured from a real HP-38C trying to figure out the details of the bank switching. Sometimes the 1060 instruction seems to switch banks and other times not, yet it doesn’t appear to be data dependent. At least not in any obvious way.
Just [...]

Dan and I drove back from Oregon. Back to Atkins diet tomorrow. I’m dreading looking at the scale; I’ll be surprised if I didn’t gain five pounds. I have been able to stick to the diet very well at home, and when visiting family and friends in Colorado, but not on other [...]

I’ve been trying to get the HP-38C working in Nonpareil. In the Spice series, the HP-34C, HP-38E, and HP-38C all have more than 4 Kwords of ROM. Since 4K is the addressing limit of the processor, they use bank switching. The HP-38E/C have two banks for quad 1 (1 Kword from 2000..3777 octal), for a [...]

Went to 3 Square for dinner. Owned by the same brothers as the late, lamented Mona Lisa. Has the same great tiramisu that Mona Lisa had.
Watched a DVD of the short animated film MORE. The DVD comes in a particularly strange and amusing shipping box. When it first [...]