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koz1000on Private Pilots Get Their Chance to Fly into Major Airports

Probably. Here’s someone that did it 4 years ago (although it was just a full-stop taxi and back out). It just takes some polite asking to TRACON on a hopefully quiet night.

https://youtu.be/vipvtaRbQho

koz1000on Private Pilots Get Their Chance to Fly into Major Airports

Back in April I spotted a Cessna 182 doing some late night touch-and-gos...at Chicago ORD.

https://imgur.com/a/dIWXfij

koz1000on Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive

We're still uploading photos from that QuickTake 100...

koz1000on Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive

1994 checking in!

http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/

Is anyone from Linköping University reading this? I need to thank them for 26 years of free hosting. :-)

koz1000on Randy Suess, computer bulletin board inventor, has died

I was a Chinet subscriber in the 90s and early 2000s. For many years after I left UIUC it was one of the few places you could get a Usenet feed without belonging to a university or a company like AT&T. I met Randy at a number of parties and CBBS reunions.

He was a unique cat, and this NYTimes writeup was very nicely done.

Thank you, Randy. We'll miss you.

koz1000on Apple Factory Thefts: Secret Tunnels, Hidden Crawl Spaces

In a previous lifetime I worked for a company that had a Lucasfilm merchandising license for Star Wars: Episode 1.

It was made precisely clear what the damages would be if script details leaked out prematurely, and they would be enumerated in dollars and the figure was incredibly large.

Multiple-commas large. At least two, possibly 3.

The project team toiled for nearly a year behind a locked door, we couldn't discuss a single piece of the project with them until the premiere date.

koz1000on Xinu – A small, elegant operating system

It does, but it's owned by whomever owns the Williams IP. I believe these days it's Scientific Games.

SG isn't making pinball machines but apparently has licensed the code to an outside group to maybe remake old games or whatever.

koz1000on Xinu – A small, elegant operating system

I don't recall. The lead O/S engineer was from Purdue so perhaps he went to XINU right away out of familiarity.

koz1000on Xinu – A small, elegant operating system

Pinball 2000 engineer here.

The "Pinball 2000 hardware" setup was an ATX motherboard running a MediaGX CPU (x86 clone, it lives on as AMD Geode). It also had a custom PCI card for storage and sound DSP, and a secondary board connected by parallel port for driving lamps and solenoids.

XINA was an application layer on top of XINU that handled the executive tasks of running a pinball machine, and also abstracted the various hardware features. We used Allegro as the graphics SDK.

The name XINA was inspired by XINU, and was an acronym for "XINA Is Not APPLE". APPLE was the previous pinball programming system, no connection to the computer company.

koz1000on Xinu – A small, elegant operating system

In 1999 my team at Williams Electronics chose XINU as the O/S for the Pinball 2000 project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rHbsCyde1g

At the time, embedded X86 boards were not really a thing yet so we needed something simple that could run with a COTS PC motherboard.

The major factor was that the licensing for other operating systems was too costly or too restrictive. Anything GPL-based was ruled out by our lawyers. Turning Linux into an RTOS would have forced us to release source code and that wasn't a fight with Legal that anyone had time for.

XINU turned out to be just what we needed. The process limit wasn't a huge problem since we were used to running threads on a single process. Adding networking later turned out to be very easy.

koz1000on I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

David was a pinball fan like myself and couldn't attend the expo in Chicago that year.

I was commiserating on Usenet about not being able to find affordable hosting for the website. This was way before hosting-only companies were available or even Geocities. David stepped up and generously offered room on Lysator.

As to why it's still up, I'm not sure. There was a short period where it looked like it was offline, but it's back now. Perhaps because Expo '94 is on a lot of "oldest websites that still work" lists.

koz1000on I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

You could try my site for Pinball Expo 1994.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/

Did it by hand with MS Notepad, MS Paint, Apple QuickTake 100 camera, Chameleon TCP/IP, and Mosaic for PC.

I did, however, drop the webmaster email address about 20 years ago.

koz1000on MAME devs are cracking open arcade chips to get around DRM

But note that it didn't stop the counterfeiters. It just slowed them down. In the arcade business, having that window of time was enough to get the production run done and not have any interference with knockoffs.

Another lesser-known reason for these chips was to lock in a serial number to help identify distributors that were selling outside of their territories. That was the primary reason for the "security" chip in a lot of the pinball machines I worked on back in the 90s.

koz1000on BeagleBone Blue – A complete, Linux-enabled robotics computer

Hey let me throw KaRo on that pile as well.

They refused to remove a label from their SoC in production so we could install a thermal sink plate in our final assembly. Even for 2,000 SOMs/year they wouldn't do it. Went to Boundary Devices and they happily helped us out.

koz1000on Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement

Thought the same thing.

Remember in the early days when Tesla owners would claim some wacky thing or other about the car (unintended acceleration etc) and Musk would publicly say "Nope, got the logs right here on our server"?

Seems nearly impossible that a trouble code as bad as "car will be undrivable" wouldn't be logged like crazy somewhere.

koz1000on Masaya Nakamura, Japanese arcade pioneer, has died

Want to know the best part? Nearly all of those signature sounds were generated algorithmically by the processor on the sound board.

The main program would feed some values into a series of feedback loops and shifts to generate the waves before pushing them out the DAC. Game programmers would just play around with various vectors until they found something that sounded interesting.

The whole shebang ran in 2KiB of ROM firmware and 128 bytes of RAM. At 894 kilohertz.

This dude reverse engineered the 6802 code and translated it to C#. Pretty amazing:

http://www.lomont.org/Software/Misc/Robotron/

Next time on our show we'll talk about the magic of palette cycling. Jarvis still uses this on his games to this very day. Kind of his signature now, right?

koz1000on Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

Spot on. BSP != "blob".

koz1000on Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

Sometimes talking to RPi developers is like talking to coffee drinkers that only visit Starbucks.

You can't convince them that there's a bigger world of options out there that can be better for your particular application.

koz1000on How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games

"Some designers have sworn off pulling the levers of luck at all. For a long time Larry DeMar, a noted pinball-game designer who worked with Williams, avoided using the ball-saver in the company’s designs, believing it undermined the purity of the game. If you lose, you lose—tough luck for you."

Having worked with Mr. DeMar, I can also say that he engineered other things to make you feel lucky without being so obvious.

It was only recently discovered that in Robotron:2084 (a video title he designed with Eugene Jarvis), the game's difficulty would ratchet down dramatically if your game started out badly (i.e. you were getting killed over and over before making it out of the first wave).

There were also some clever things Larry put into stuff like pinball match routines. This is the "random" number that would come up at the end and if your last two score digits matched, you won a free game. Cleverly, if you were playing a multiple-player game, the odds of one person winning a free game would suddenly increase - thereby increasing the real-world chances that the rest of the players would insert more money for another round.

koz1000on Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

My colleagues at Creaform have something that works pretty well. Their latest handheld scanner can generate a wire mesh on the fly with 0.030mm resolution.

http://www.creaform3d.com/en

10K scans/day is way beyond their limits, and I'm not sure that's a very common use case. But I bet they could get there if they wanted.

koz1000on Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

1995. Pinball game code for Williams Electronics "Jack*Bot".

I also don't count it as code, but the Pinball Expo 1994 website I put together before that (in Notepad, natch) is apparently still up and running at Linköping University in Sweden:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/

koz1000on 15-Year-Old’s 200 Vintage Apple Computers Are Now a Mac Museum

Oh man, that Torx wrench. Pre-internet, that was nearly impossible to find unless you knew someone that had a Mac repair business.

koz1000on 15-Year-Old’s 200 Vintage Apple Computers Are Now a Mac Museum

On Saturday he was looking for so-called Easter eggs, or surprises hidden by software programmers, on Macintosh SE models that reveal a slide show of the company’s development team.

>G 41D89A

That one has been etched in my brain for the last 29 years.

koz1000on Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

Sooner or later, all project management ends up in Excel. Doesn't matter what ticket or tracking tool you've paid for.

koz1000on Limor Fried’s Artful Electronics

I was recently prototyping a commercial project with an IL9341 LCD driver, a common part that my LCD glass vendor used in their modules. I asked the glass vendor for a development unit that had a wired-up interface and available schematics - they didn't have one. Perhaps they could find one in China in a few weeks, once everyone returned from the New Year's celebrations.

Adafruit had a usable unit in stock, with full schematics, and it was on my desk in 36 hours.

koz1000on Pacman-5.0 Released

Namco is very involved with Pacman and still involved with arcade equipment based on it. Here's something my friends at Raw Thrills just introduced a little while ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koLvoCMHCrI

From what I've heard on the inside, Raw Thrills has been actively working on new Pacman games based on the original 1980 source code given to them by Namco.

TLDR: They definitely still own the trademark and they are still making money on it.

koz1000on Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off

Closed door meetings with odd combinations of managers that don't normally meet is a HUGE red flag.

koz1000on Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off

When your company sends a press release about the layoffs to the wire services and it accidentally gets released 24 hours before the event.

koz1000on Chuck Forsberg has died – author of Zmodem

As someone whose last name ended in "rz", I was aware of this every single minute. =)

koz1000on How the F.B.I. Made 'Winners Don't Use Drugs' the Arcade Motto of the '90s

I won't lie, it was a blast. It was also an insane amount of work. Years went by like a blur.

Some of what went on over there is documented in Greg Maletic's film Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball. Josh Tsui (from the Mortal Kombat team) just completed a Kickstarter to make a similar documentary about what the guys downstairs in video were doing back then as well.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshuatsui/insert-coin-...