I’ve done an extended writeup of a little project I’ve been working on and off on for the last few months. Extending the video modes of an old Atari ST in new and interesting ways. Going from 4 colors to 16 might not sound much with today’s tech, but for us oldies this is pretty fascinating ;)
Atari · Code · English · Retro
57 words
1 minute
It’s somewhat easy finding modern software able to read ancient data formats (note, "somewhat"). It’s often more difficult finding the opposite - conversion from modern formats to older ones. When I’ve wanted to edit graphics using modern software (GIMP) and convert it to Atari ST I’ve so far used the excellent Netpbm package.
Atari · Code · English · Retro
211 words
1 minute
TL866 firmware updater macOS support
I own a TL866CS IC programmer . Wonderful device - I truly recommend it (and I assume its successor is even better). It’s been known for many years that the company who made them had one hardware revision, and limited the CS revision compared to the A revision purely in firmware. That limitation has of course been hacked for almost as long as the device has existed. Someone going by the name “radioman” detailed many years ago how the bootloader could be reflashed from CS version to A , after which the original software and firmware updates will see the device as the A model in all aspects. To get access to the in-circuit programming abilities, you additionally have to solder a header to the mainboard . radioman’s software is open source, and exists for Linux (QT) and Windows (.NET/QT). People say it works great under parallells or VirtualBox for macOS users. But that’s no fun, is it? I spent the last week changing out libudev for macOS’ native IOKit library in the QT codebase. That’s the only change needed, since libusb has good macOS support. My macOS pull request has now also been accepted and merged into master by radioman. Open source working as intended. And my TL866CS has become a TL866A.
Apple · Code · Development · English · Retro
213 words
1 minute