Hardware Archive

JEDEC DDR5 memory will offer improved performance with greater power efficiency as compared to previous generation DRAM technologies. As planned, DDR5 will provide double the bandwidth and density over DDR4, along with delivering improved channel efficiency. These enhancements, combined with a more user-friendly interface for server and client platforms, will enable high performance and improved power management in a wide variety of applications.

This was freaky. When you owned any 8-bit computer, you became intimately familiar with its colour scheme. This simple photograph blew my mind. That blue colour just wasn't possible.

According to the caption, by presenting two colours to the eye and alternating them quickly enough, a whole new colour emerged. What would this new, secret colour look like on your crappy early-90s CRT television? The screenshot was only a hint. Would it glow? Would it flicker?

Twenty-six years later, I found out the answer.

The problem with laptops has, at least in recent years, been one of expandability. Once you buy a machine, you’re generally stuck with it, unless you’re willing to take it apart with repairs that have more in common with surgery than mechanics.

Part of this has to do with the complexity of our modern machines, but a bigger part is the fact that, simply, upgradability has become less of a concern for manufacturers.

But there was a time when laptop upgrades were a big deal - and that time was the 90s.

Here's the story of PCMCIA, an acronym only a 90s laptop owner could love.

FAP80 is a Z80-based retro computer with a sprinkling of modern twists to make the experience of designing, programming, and debugging this computer as painless and straightforward as possible.

A lot of retro computer projects today are rooted on nostalgia, they tend to use "period correct" components to get the "feelings" right, and the result often ends up on perfboard or self-etched circuit boards, rudimentary video capacity if at all, few I/O ports, and a symphony of 74 series chips.

While there is nothing wrong with that, I wasn't around during the 80s home computer era, so I didn't have the same attachment to how things was done back then. So instead of trying to recreate the "good old days", I made the decision to liberally use modern parts to simplify the design process, as well as making this computer highly flexible and easy to program and use with very little overheads.

I figured, for this and future posts I have planned about MSX, that I wanted an MSX font face. I browsed the web a bit for one and found nothing that I liked. So decided to create one.

I'm pretty sure I'll be violating someone's copyright here, because I won't be making an MSX-inspired 8-bit looking font. I am going to build THE EXACT FONT that the MSX 1.0 I grew up with had. I just hope the copyright owner will let this pass, given how "valuable" this font is nowadays and that I won't be making a cent from this. If he or she is not OK, though, I'll comply with their request.

The FireBee is a new Atari-compatible computer. Ataris and Atari-Clones are special computers with their own hard & software. They aren't PC's, Mac's nor Amiga compatible.

A FireBee is similar to an Atari Falcon and works very much like that. It will run most of the Atari compatible software that would run on a Falcon. Different to older Ataris and their clones, the FireBee is a modern computer that supports almost everything you'd expect from a today's machine, like USB ports, Ethernet, DVI-I monitor connector, SD-card reader and more.

When HP designed the 3000 series 30 using the processor from the HP 300 they had to make it compatible with previous HP 3000s and the HP MPE OS they ran. This entailed breaking down the MPE OS into 2 parts, those that were entirely software dependant, and those that were hardware dependant, and then writing the microcode to handle the hardware dependent part of the OS. Like the HP 300, the HP 3000 architecture is stack based, with the PCU chip holding 2 Top of Stack registers for fast access to the (off chip) stacks. The Series 30/33 have a total of 214 instructions while the HP 300 uses just under 200 instructions. Instructions are 32 bits long and typically

The exact same ICs are used for the HP 300 as for the Series 30/33 with 'one pin of each chip tied to a different voltage level.' Exactly what pin that is and what voltage is not said. Looking at the handdrawn schematic of the Series 33 does show the /DIS pin pulled high (12V) on both the RALU/RASS chips, though what that pin is for is unknown.

A few weeks ago I noticed some foreign exchange students at my university who were huddled around a Panasonic laptop. This wasn't one of the Toughbook models that are sold in the US, but a newer Japanese model. Seeing this rare laptop out in the wild combined with the recent wailing and gnashing of teeth concerning the MacBook Pro piqued my interest in the current Japanese PC market.

Did you buy the new MacBook or MacBook Pro? Maybe the Google Pixel? You're about to enter a world of confusion thanks to those new USB-C" ports. See, that simple-looking port hides a world of complexity, and the (thankful) backward-compatibility uses different kinds of cables for different tasks. Shoppers have to be very careful to buy exactly the right cable for their devices!

So how do the Atari ST sales and marketshare actually stack up?

According to research by Reimer, who gathered his figures from various annual reports, International Data Corp (IDC) forecasts, Gartner Dataquest research, as well as a few magazine articles from the 1980s (most of which have gone dark online since originally compiled, unfortunately). The numbers were pretty grim for both platforms when looking at the larger overall marketshare picture.

But now, seven years later, Lenovo is introducing a new take on the tablet computer. No, Lenovo didn't make a Courier, but its new Yoga Book might inspire the same reactions. It's about the size and shape of a hardcover children's book, has two panels attached by a hinge, and can be used with your fingers or with its included pen. It even does some tricks with the pen that we've never seen before, like letting you write with real ink and have it all digitized. Lenovo didn't set out to build just another tablet with the Yoga Book - it wanted to make something that was better for getting work done than what is already out there.

But in the process, it made a computer that's both futuristic and relatable at the same time, just like the original Courier concept. I wanted to use the Yoga Book from the first time I laid eyes on it, and if you're anything like me, you will, too. And unlike the Courier, you will actually be able to buy the Yoga Book.

I'm covering the topic of FreeRTOS and interrupts in my university lecture material. But I have seen so many wrong usage of interrupts with the RTOS that I think it deserves a dedicated article. The amazing thing I see many times: even if the interrupts are configured in a clearly wrong way, surprisingly the application 'seems' to work, at least most of the time. Well, I think everyone agrees that 'most of the time' is not good enough. Because problems with interrupts are typically hard to track down, they are not easy to fix.

I worked for Lexra, a scrappy CPU company, now out of business. The Lexra story is filled with lessons about the business of selling microprocessors and semiconductor intellectual property. I have found many incorrect statements published about Lexra. I hope to set the record straight.

A look into Dr Abrasive's lab and a super detailed behind-the-scenes of what it took to engineer a plug-in-flash-card for the Sega Saturn.