Furby source code (1998) | Hacker News Reader

Furby source code (1998)

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Dave Hampton, also well-known for his work on Q-Bert.[1]

You can watch a Computer History Museum interview with him here. [2]

[1] http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/qbert/qbert.htm

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U9eqBzmvZw

Obsessed with resurrecting Q*Bert Circus ;)

What's that?

https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/anybody-ever-hear-o...

I skimmed around that three-hour video and couldn't find the part you're referring to. Could I maybe get a two-sentence summary?

The summary under the reference article above states this:

About a minute in, he talks about the work he did at Western Technologies, programming VCS/2600 Raft Rider and Qbert. He also mentions WT getting the contract to make home versions of a Mylstar arcade game that wasn't released called Qbert Circus. I'm not sure if he's confused and was talking about Q*bert's Qubes (which a VCS version was released) or possibly Circus Charlie (which a VCS version was planned but never released).

Here's the datasheet for the chip.

https://archive.org/details/SPC81A/mode/1up

A very simple SoC with what appears to be a 6502 clone suspiciously missing anything to do with the Y register. Stack is also in a non standard place (the top half of the zero page), probably due to only having those 128 bytes of RAM total and not wanting to give up zero page access.

I read your comment out of context (actually in the context of programming an NES) and tried to figure out how the heck you’d live without a Y register. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but if I were writing a game It’d be a pain. Obviously it doesn’t Apply here.

"The SPC81A 8-bit microprocessor is a high performance processor equipped with Accumulator, Program Counter, X Register, Stack pointer and Processor Status Register (this is the same as the 6502 instruction structure)." Well not exactly haha. Yeah, if you look at the source code. No Y register related instructions!

I thought about it and you could get used to writing code without the Y register pretty quickly...

The actual instruction set manual for SunPlus 6502 CPUs (covers several but you can see the low end doesn't have Y instructions)

https://www.manualslib.com/products/Sunplus-Cpu6502-8692958....

The best Furby project I’ve seen is the Furby organ https://youtu.be/GYLBjScgb7o

Thanks. I was going to go to sleep soon but now I will not.

Why don't people relate bitcoin to Furbies? It's always tulips or Beanie Babies. Crypto is much more like furbies.

Did anyone ever pay more than store prices for a Furby? My mom only bought us expensive toys if they would last and she deemed the Furby to be too much of a gimmick. I've never heard of people not being able to buy a Furby.

>> Did anyone ever pay more than store prices for a Furby?

Either you’re joking, or you absolutely didn’t live through the late 90’s to see the sheer insanity of what the Furby craze was really like. Furbies would be resold for hundreds of dollars, absolutely no exaggeration. It was mind boggling.

Maybe I was too young, I definitely remember the hype, but people around me were just buying the Furby for store prices, I think it was 120 Dutch guilders. I remember the commercials on TV and wanting one, but couldn't justify it to my mom :P Maybe by the time they started selling in The Netherlands the hype had already died down enough that they had enough in stock?

I was in HS in the late 90s and somehow missed that. I remember Beanie Babies selling for hundreds though in the mid 90s.

I missed both beanie babies and furbies in Australia. I think I have seen one though.

I have no recollection of a "craze" at all.

I remember Furbys being a punchline on late night TV and such. But I didn't know there was a craze and a shortage.

Of course, those were my college years, and didn't have many young kids in my life... so I guess I didn't know what was popular with them!

There were countless arguments over the ladt decade about which part of crypto is pure speculation and which ones are legit investments.

Few people are willing to rehash old discussions - so few people want to discuss why Bitcoin is/isn’t like tulips.

> Few people are willing to rehash old discussions - so few people want to discuss why Bitcoin is/isn’t like tulips.

Society at large is wildly different than the discussions from here on HN, but at least here, discussions about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, tend to generate very large discussions, lots of them are about why cryptocurrencies is/isn't like tuplips/beanie babies/$hyped item.

which leads you to the equally amazing Floppotron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCCXRerqaJI

It always amazes me how magic this lower level stuff seems, but at the same time is super simple.

I remember these little critters and I feel much warmer towards them after seeing the human notes of the code author(s).

Unexpectedly interesting.

heh. Furby's code is 6502 assembler, just like the T-800. What if sky-net just circuit bent a load of Furbys lol.

A Furby without fur even looks like a Terminator. Sort of. Similar vibe at least. There is definitely a non-zero chance that circuitbent Furbies will enslave humanity and bring about its end.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TIHI/comments/gid2pj/thanks_i_hate_...

Whole subculture of people out there modding furbys.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRg21Mh4/

I can't give you skynet, but I can give you circuit-bent furbies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o

> I'm not going to lie I spent a lot of money on furbies.

Oh my...

If anyone else isn't clear on what circuit bending is.

From Wikipedia:

> Circuit bending is the creative, chance-based customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low-voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators.

Wikipedia is wrong here. Although the term is primarily used for acoustic properties, it doesn't have to be. I'd agree with the 'chance based' aspect though.

That was an awesome video. Never seen his stuff before.

Also seems straight out of Disco Elysium.

If you ever took the fur off a furby you'd know it was pure sky net underneath

> Furby's code is 6502 assembler

It's actually a SPC81A [1], which supports about only half of the 6502 opcodes. It is also used in some HP calculators.

[1] https://datasheet.datasheetarchive.com/originals/library/Dat...

Sure. Makes me wonder how easy this code could be ported to run on the Commodore 64 though. You'd need a cartridge with the TI voice synthesis chip used in the furby of course, but it'd be doable I think. It's interesting code to read through.

Furby: "I'm a cybernetic organism: living fur over a metal endoskeleton."

plastic endoskeleton right lol :)

On page A-287, it has a "DANGER SLEEP".

Mod list #5: "When hungry is low enough to trigger sick counter, each sensor deducts two instead of one for each hit." He made it get sicker quicker when it was on its death bed??

And everything on the mod list is hilarious.

Is this available anywhere in plaintext format? I see a txt file but it looks like it was OCR'd from the ebook.

https://github.com/gnomon-/furby-source

That's only the first few hundred lines, whereas the source in the pdf is a few hundred pages.

Good, you can contribute.

(Not OP.) You got downvoted, but you motivated me to at least run it through an OCR scanner.

if anyone wants it here you go -

https://github.com/robss2020/OCR-furby-source-code

This is just the PDF run through OCR. I did not manually correct anything, and the results aren't great.

It is broken into a few different files by function, but this should get you there. Note that it appears that the original document omitted a few things.

https://github.com/charlesUnixPro/furby

This was more interesting to look at than I expected. Good change log and comments. I didn’t know so much was going on in a Furby.

I don't know why, but stuff like this (e.g. the Apollo moon lander assembly code) is really interesting to me. I think it's because I wish I had this kind of knowledge and skill. It seems daunting to wrap my head around it and become proficient.

It really isn't that hard once you have to do it, as long as you have the time to get a test / feedback loop with the client going. They probably had a dozen test versions of the Furbies for whoever was doing QA to play around with.

With the moon lander code, they surely had a very good specification of what it was supposed to do.

I worked with the second case once, some IoT-ish sensors that would be buried in the ground in greenhouses, to monitor soil data. The business logic was 90% specified, and of course, the remaining 10% took 50% of the time. Before you ask why we didn't do it in C at the very least, we had a very solid codebase from the previous products. Sure, we had to port things from a Toshiba microcontroller to an STM8, different architectures, but since we were working with 8 or 16 bits inputs it was kinda trivial to test every single possible input to make sure things matched.

My only previous experience with assembly at a Computer History college course where we coded for the PDP-11, the 6502 and a stack machine. So yeah, not a lot. Winging it while admitting you don't know what you're doing can get you decently far in some circumstances.

Don't overrate the skill. It's a toy at its core. Let's not act like only geniuses could've made Furby.

Don't overrate the skill of writing assembly, sure. But don't underestimate the software craftsmanship. Looking at the code, it's obviously expertly written. I'm not sure if I've ever had the pleasure of working with such a well thought out and documented code base.

And don't underestimate the skill of putting together the entire product: being able to create behavior that is relatably live-like for millions of people on such a limited Plattform may not be Apollo-Level genius but is exceptional nontheless.

IMHO the main skill is to cram it to the minimum necessary MCU as not to make the resulting device too expensive.

It would likely be much easier to use a more powerful MCU, at the per unit cost being higher.

Any fool can do that. It's up to the programmer to salvage the situation.

I have a bit of an idea banging around in my head for a Furby-based project aimed at making it a lot more intelligent while still keeping the uncanny aesthetic:

* The furby's motions are controlled by one motor and a series of cams and gears, so it should be fairly straightforward to pull out its brains and attach the motor and position sensor to a suitable controller to allow a raspberry pi to control its movements. I've seen this done before (someone put an Alexa in their furby this way) but I think they were only running the motor when the pi was putting out audio, I'd quite like more fine-grained control so it can do all the movements it originally was capable of.

* The unusable crappy speaker and microphone should be pulled out and replaced with better equivalents (maybe even an okay quality one for dual use as a horrifying bluetooth speaker). RGB LEDs could be fitted behind its eyes for added nightmare fuel and another way to express mood. The IR gear could be kept in situ and hooked up to the Pi for some nefarious TV-related uses. I quite like the idea of a proximity sensor too so it can sense people's presence and accelerometers to sense how it's being handled.

* I'll have to fit the furby on some kind of plinth to hold all the new gear because there's no way I'm fitting all this stuff and enough batteries to run it in the original casing. Getting it all running off a bog standard USB-C connection would be nice, might even be able to figure out how to share an internet connection this way to avoid wifi-related hassle.

* I was going to use MycroftAI as its new 'brain' but I think finding some way of hooking it up to ChatGPT might be more fun! Either way I need some kind of text-to-speech and speech-to-text working on the pi for this to happen.

Anyone got any suggestions/improvements to this idea?

A raspberry pi pico would probably fit in the space available and have all the capability you might need to run mycroft on it. The pi pico has 26 gpio pins which should be plenty for what you need as well. And it has a usb on-the-go port.

That is an amazing shout, I forgot they were a thing!

Use Chat-GPT to generate gibberish responses to keywords recognized by a microphone and spoken through a Furby voice changer. Use 3+ 18650 Li-ion batteries to power this omnipotent all-knowing Furby oracle for days before recharging.

If you could somehow get access to tay from microsoft with its post twitter knowledge base, really complete the nightmare.

Additionally, you could hook it up to a speech to text and visa-versa for another type of hell.

Original Source code for the Furby [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17751599 - Aug 2018 (152 comments)

It is a matter of time until we have a furby emulator.

This is what I'd also like to see.

I wonder what the legal stance here is. I'd expect that this could get you in trouble.

Possibly, but the 1998 furby is not longer sold. You wouldn't be competing with the company that made them by making an emulator. The code itself is most interesting as a part of history and I think you aren't really preserving historically significant code if it can no longer be run. Would this be considered fair use?

Yeah, but the trademark is still active... Mhm, idk - maybe it's fine and I'm just overthinking. :)

I remember when these were the biggest thing ever for a holiday season. Rumors there was understating and higher order thinking. Purchase at an premium and pretty disappointing.

And Rumors were they were Chinese spy devices. They were highly politicized for almost no reason that I can find. https://thriftcon.co/blogs/news-culture/the-nsa-once-banned-...

I remember they were banned from the nearby nuclear plant, because they were "recording devices".

Yep I thought it was some kind of breakthrough AI toy. It ended up being a lot of fun to laugh at how bad it was.

Commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHWcBbf0Eng

Don't feed it after midnight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs1RPclm5MY&t=10s

I met Caleb Chung when I was in Boise several years ago. Cool guy. Real low-key. He drove a simple Chevy Express camper van and told me the porta-toilet was a game changer. If I hadn't heard of his Furby background I wouldn't have a clue that he was very successful and rich.

Something very weird is happening to the page indicator below the PDF, it skips 190 pages and then goes back to page 1 at the bottom of the document.

I'm sure it's just an encoding error, but I find the repeated ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ before every comment is strangely fitting for a toy this creepy.

Can a Furby run doom?

They tried to get one of the newer ones with the digital display eyes to do it but the CPU of those is one of those nasty Sunplus ones that are real uncharted territory with their u'nSP instruction set. https://devpost.com/software/doomfurb

I'm actually the guy (Sam) from that post! Never got DOOM running on the Furby, but I was able to get a custom version of Pong running, with accelerometer controlled paddles.

The CPUs are definitely weird, and I ended up porting Ghidra to support u'nSP as part of that project. https://github.com/SamuelWAnderson45/sleigh-unsp Reverse engineering a CPU was a wildly fun learning experience; still proud of that project.

Can you share any more details about the Pong port? I have been collecting various bits of information about u'nSP processors, particularly the SPG2xx series used in mid 2000s plug-and-play games, but so far I have never seen an actual homebrew game for any of these chips (with the exception of the Mattel Hyperscan's SPG293, which however uses a different architecture).

I have also been looking into the newer GeneralPlus GPM4x30 SoCs used by some modern Chinese plug-and-plays with HDMI output, at least by the ones that aren't straight up Famiclones hardwired to a composite to HDMI upscaler. Those are ARM based so much less of a pain to reverse engineer but also much less fun...

Busy at the moment, but send me a message at samuelwanderson45 @ gmail . com and I'll try to get back to you

It's nice to see code written in such a professional manner. Thank you for sharing.

It's interesting i was just watching a video on the "Furby" craze. I remember my little sister had one and was interesting.. this source code is so simple but clever. Really cool.

I am wondering if there are any Easter Eggs revealed in here that haven't yet been discovered, though I do see the Release Note specifically discuss added hidden functionality.

Please let me know when you have it running in linux...

Doubtful. But per this page you could get a Linux like system running on it.

http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=560

> I think its not possible to port Linux on a 6502, maybe Minix could be used as a base for a port. As far as I know (??), early versions of Minix did not require an MMU. But check out the LUnix Project, its a kind of unix for c64 and c128 from scratch, ports to other systems should be possible:

> http://lng.sourceforge.net/

The actual furby chip was probably a glop top right? You can't do a lot with that other than mess with the sensor input lines. Getting the code here to run on other stuff is the real prize I think.

Not possible with real Linux, the CPU on the Furby is too limited while the smallest Linux out there still requires some more resources. Some small size Linux-like OSes do exist though: one commenter suggested Lunix (which I didn't know, thanks for the link), and a slightly bigger one is ELKS which runs on old MMU-less x86 CPUs. I managed to run it on a 8088 industrial PC ages ago.

https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

I should have a Furby buried somewhere; now that I think of it, it may be the right platform to stick a bigger brain into, make it wireless so that it could be connected to the home IoT network then signal events or alerts.

I'd suggest Fuzix instead. It will run on 6502, z80 etc. http://fuzix.org/

The great Alan Cox had an hand with the development.

Something 'Look mum no computer' would be ecstatic by :D

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