Personal Stuff

The MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID (Sound Interface Device) is the almost 40 year old sound chip that was used in the famous Commodore 64. It uses a 5bit address / 8bit data synchronous bus with a chip select, rw, and clock signal. Since the chip uses the 1MHz (well not exactly 1MHz as I’ll explain later) clock signal also to generate all the audio frequencies, so it is important that the clock signal is stable, even though the read/write access would work fine with a unstable clock as long as the signal setup times are correct. [Read More]

To understand what this is about you absolutely should watch Dylan Beattie’s brilliant presentation about The Art of Code. Now you know Rockstar is a computer programming language designed for creating programs that are also hair metal power ballads. The famous Fizzbuzz program looks like this. Midnight takes your heart and your soul While your heart is as high as your soul Put your heart without your soul into your heart Give back your heart Desire is a lovestruck ladykiller My world is nothing Fire is ice Hate is water Until my world is Desire, Build my world up If Midnight taking my world, Fire is nothing and Midnight taking my world, Hate is nothing Shout "FizzBuzz! [Read More]

To understand what this is about you absolutely should watch Dylan Beattie’s brilliant presentation about The Art of Code. Now you know Rockstar is a computer programming language designed for creating programs that are also hair metal power ballads. The famous Fizzbuzz program looks like this. Midnight takes your heart and your soul While your heart is as high as your soul Put your heart without your soul into your heart Give back your heart Desire is a lovestruck ladykiller My world is nothing Fire is ice Hate is water Until my world is Desire, Build my world up If Midnight taking my world, Fire is nothing and Midnight taking my world, Hate is nothing Shout "FizzBuzz! [Read More]

After fixing the Amiga 2000 motherboard it was time to cleanup the power supply. I preemptively wanted to remove all the electrolytic capacitors so I ordered some new ones. Since the power supply is just a single sided PCB, getting the old capacitors out and soldering the new capacitors in would be relatively easy. But this model (later versions don’t seem to have it) has a little daughter PCB that kind of block access and itself also had two capacitors on it that I also wanted to replace. [Read More]

A while back I bought a non-working Amiga 2000 that, according the seller, only displayed a white screen. In the 80’s and early 90’s I only had an Amiga 500, so I thought it would be fun to now get a working Amiga 2000, and restoring one would be a nice X-mas holiday project. Dealing with the Amiga Killer One of the main Amiga 2000 killers is the battery, after 30 plus years they tend to leak and in the worst case can corrode away half the PCB. [Read More]

My first major motorbike ride was from Noord-Holland to the Nordkapp and back. Since it was the first time I planned going on a multi-day bike trip I had no idea how far I would get, well it ended up being 100030km and lasting 5 1/2 weeks. On my bike, a BMW F800GS, I had an onboard camera that shot a total of 75 hours of video. Sadly even those 75hours are not the full trip, I am missing parts and a few days, because the camera had the annoying habit so shut down when I started my bike, so I always had to remember to restart the camera after getting gas. [Read More]