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koz1000on A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack (2013)

I contributed to Josh Tsui's Kickstarter. He did an excellent job on that, all the people in that video are exactly like I remember them.

There's another documentary called Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball by Greg Maletec that describes what we were going through on the pinball side near the end. It's streamable on a few services.

The stories themselves? Way too many to relate. But it was certainly like the doc. A cutthroat company where anything could happen. But probably the most talented and creative group of engineers I've ever worked with.

koz1000on A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack (2013)

Man, the 6809 was an incredibly fun processor to write for.

I'll let you know you were in good company. At Williams (pinball/video game company, later became Midway) that exact same hack was used in almost every game that used the 6809. We definitely used it in all the dot-matrix pinball machines to blit large pieces of data in RAM.

koz1000on Using Device Tree Overlays, Example on BeagleBone Boards

There's this intersection point in the MCU/SoC world where you can get by with a Cortex-M3/M4/M7 and need solid multitasking but don't have an MMU. ucLinux is a dead end, and then you have FreeRTOS (sorry, AmazonRTOS) or ThreadX (cough, AzureRTOS). And if you can afford GreenHills Integrity you probably aren't reading HN anyway.

I spent a year hacking with a Broadcom-supplied fork of Zephyr to Cortex-A and it was just a mess. It never worked right. Maybe it does now and it's mainline but I wouldn't trust it.

For a project started by WindRiver, taken over by Intel, then released to OSS it's mind-boggling how bad of a state it was in given its age.

koz1000on Using Device Tree Overlays, Example on BeagleBone Boards

It's not a comparison, but if you're looking for a lightweight RTOS and trying to decide between the two Zephyr looks appealing at first because you think you're getting a lot of facilities that are equivalent to a Linux-class kernel.

And then you discover you're not getting any of that.

If all Zephyr DT is doing is making a fancy header file for me, I'd rather just build my own and skip the learning curve.

koz1000on Using Device Tree Overlays, Example on BeagleBone Boards

I wouldn't call it the same concept. Zephyr uses the Devicetree format to create headers and configure the compilation of the kernel, but userspace code has zero visibility into whatever was set up in the devicetree file.

Zephyr is chock full of these creature comforts to make Linux developers feel at home but only deliver 50% of the usability. I went back to FreeRTOS.

koz1000on IBM Plex Typeface (2018)

All the warm feels of an old IBM Selectric typewriter without the convenient non-proportionality. I passed on this a long time ago.

koz1000on Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station

"Would you like a car that updates its entire control panel, unannounced, with a software upgrade and will hide familiar buttons on you when you need them the most?"

https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/1488030592880967680

koz1000on Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station

Touchscreen engineer here. There is no such thing as an 'off-the-shelf' capacitive touchscreen.

There is always custom engineering to match the customer's housing and bezel, tune the analog characteristics to the electrical environment, and handle other requests like a safer/thicker cover glass, optical bonding to the LCD, and low friction or hydro/oleophobic coatings on the surface.

koz1000on Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station

What's interesting is that this traffic map is also loaded on Mazda cars, but shown in a different application. Somehow the system searches for a HDRadio signal in the background to update this map from an independent receiver.

I've had AM radio on for long periods and then load this app, and the traffic map is up to date. I've also driven to a different city and the map is now showing the new city.

koz1000on Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station

In newer cars with video displays and HD Radio capability, the screen can show a small image next to the song information. It's typically album cover art for the song that is playing, but a lot of stations just put their station logo up and keep it there.

https://blogmedia.dealerfire.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/56...

Satellite radio had this capability very early, and HD Radio seems to want to keep up with that.

The data itself is sent on a sideband data channel that rides along with the traditional FM channel. Lots of links to read up starting here: https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/HD_Radio_(FM)

The signal specification can be read here: https://www.sigidwiki.com/images/f/f6/HD_Radio_FM.pdf

koz1000on Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

I use the Brave browser on desktop and Tweetbot on iOS.

I get two completely different timelines on these devices.

koz1000on Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station

The backup camera isn't critical, but it's been required in the USA since 2018.

https://www.fleetowner.com/safety/article/21687582/nhtsa-to-...

koz1000on Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station

The UI is developed by a U.S. company and I think is JavaScript based

The IVI from that era is an iMX6 hardware platform developed by Johnson Controls and was written in JavaScript running on the Opera browser.

JCI sold that business to Visteon in 2014.

koz1000on MAME Turns 25

I recall PinMAME being a fork of MAME, the UI was identical and they borrowed a lot of cores like the 6809 and various common sound boards that video used, like the Williams Yamaha 2151 and Midway DCS AD2105 DSP.

For a while they tried to keep the manufacturers happy by not allowing modified ROMs to run, I got a special build from the developers to let me run anything I wanted. I think those restrictions do not exist anymore.

koz1000on MAME Turns 25

I knew Lyman from USENET in the early 90s and then I worked with him at Williams. We started around the same time and got laid off together in '99 when WMS shut us down. Lyman was at my wedding.

It's extremely sad. It's a huge loss.

koz1000on MAME Turns 25

Actually, there's a whole list here:

https://www.mamedev.org/roms/

koz1000on MAME Turns 25

Jamie Fenton has released the ROMs for Robby Roto as freeware. So that's one.

koz1000on MAME Turns 25

Stern NASCAR

https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=5093

Sopranos was around the same time, but there were actually two versions of the code. One was in the old 6809 and the other was a test version of their new ARM-based hardware.

koz1000on MAME Turns 25

MAME saved my bacon. True story:

I was working on code for a pinball machine for Stern back in 2005. I had a memory corruption issue and Stern's crusty old 6809 hardware didn't have anything resembling a real-time debugger that I could use. There was no time or budget to get a 6809 ICE procured and running.

So I loaded up my code in PinMAME and let it run. I was able to watch memory in real time and caught the bug in an afternoon. It would have taken me a week or so doing it by hand.

So thank you, MAME.

koz1000on DIY Acoustic Camera

If you want to upgrade, we can bolt one onto a Spot for you.

https://youtu.be/0cu2bT6fdZY

koz1000on Illinois first state to tell police they can't lie to minors in interrogations

There was another awful case recently in Illinois that would be prevented by something like this. I'm glad Pritzker passed it.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/naperville-sun/ct-nvs...

TLDR: A high-school student made a recording of a sexual encounter and word got out. Kid is called to the principal's office where the resource officer (literally a cop that stays on campus) threatened the kid with being put on the sex offender registry among other actions. Kid slips away while staff is waiting for the mom to arrive and jumps off a parking garage, killing himself. School and police deny any wrong doing and "only meant to scare the kid".

koz1000on Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

GLI was always the go-to company back in my time.

https://gaminglabs.com/

koz1000on Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

The operator-set percentage and payout was always local to the machine. There's no way to network these things, and even when do you see networked progressive slot machines (e.g. IGT's Megabucks), the RNG and payout is always local to that machine.

koz1000on Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

I worked on a redemption device a long time ago, one of those "stop the lights" game for a large manufacturer.

There were a few jurisdictions, Iowa and New Jersey come to mind, that were already aware of the nature of these machines and required the manufacturers to have their software audited and validated by (state approved) third-party gaming labs identical to what the slot machine companies do when getting code approved for release.

The key point was that the probability of a win couldn't be adjusted on the fly to make the target payout percentage (kind of what the article says). The probabilities had to be fixed for every player on every game. Although the first method is a lot easier to write, software-wise. =)

For the rest of the jurisdictions, the default payout was 40% and anything was fair game to hit that number. Remember that the next time you're in a Chuck E Cheese.

koz1000on Defender (1981) by Eugene Jarvis and Sam Dicker

WOW! That's incredible.

This was exactly what I wanted to write someday. It definitely brings up a lot of memories if you played a lot of Williams' pinball machines as well. The sound ROM in Defender evolved from the pinball sound board, and some of the sounds marked as (?) came from all the games before Defender.

koz1000on Defender (1981) by Eugene Jarvis and Sam Dicker

I've read through some of these listings, it's legit.

koz1000on Defender (1981) by Eugene Jarvis and Sam Dicker

A number of ex-Williams engineers donated old work materials to the Strong Museum of Play in the last few years. It looks like this includes Sam Dicker's work:

http://archives.museumofplay.org/repositories/3/resources/22...

So perhaps it was scanned and distributed from there? Seems unlikely since the code was either printed on paper or stored on old 8" floppies from the development system. But you never know.

EDIT: looking at Historical Source's repo, they have a LOT of old Williams IP here. This was copied from someone's development machine somewhere.

koz1000on Defender (1981) by Eugene Jarvis and Sam Dicker

Joust was a different design team, John Newcomer and Bill Pfutzenreuter. But the hardware was the same as Robotron.

koz1000on Trill Flex: A sensor that bends to your project

Here's a similar demo I worked on a long time ago, we wrapped a 2D flex inside a joystick.

https://youtu.be/7mXlY7SGLvw

koz1000on Acoustic Camera Uses Many, Many Microphones

Fluke's new ii900 industrial imager is already for sale and is used to locate compressed air leaks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wx9B_0n1co