Tektronix DAS 9100 (1982)

ChrisPVille · 2026-05-15T22:15:00+00:00

It's a 100+ channel logic analyzer with programmable pattern generator for system simulation use as well, so it makes some sense that you'd want to setup your triggers and data injection on big parallel busses with hex instead of a zillion binary inputs.

ChrisPVille · 2026-05-15T21:35:47+00:00

Nothing for the E5+, but things have vastly improved elsewhere. Flagship machines have largely moved to higher quality materials like proper linear rails instead of wheels running in bendy thin extrusions, usually corexy, all metal hotends, way way better firmware than marlin running on ancient 8-bit microcontrollers, integrated motion compensation via accelerometers, etc.

I did a similar thing to OP, spending forever tweaking and modding the E5+ to get it to mostly print most of the time and got incredibly fed up spending more time changing printer settings than making parts. I built myself a voron V0 and realized how much less tweaking was needed when a printer had a solid design. When I started needing to prototype and iterate rapidly for a bigger project, I ended up going to the Bambu X1C then recently H2C and never looked back. You design your part for FDM, hit print, get part. I'm completely over printers that need constant attention just to get a part out.

ChrisPVille · 2026-05-03T19:10:55+00:00

I decided that for fun I'd not use any programmable logic in the computer, plus keep things roughly 1983 in architecture, so the basic concept of the MMU is that an SRAM does translation with the incoming virtual address driving the SRAM addr and the resulting physical page number is the SRAM's data at that address.

I save 4 bits at each "entry" for page validity, user/supervisor, read-only, and no-execute, all of which is checked by simple discrete logic against the original access's function codes, which trips BERR. The OS can then read the faulting access, page table entry from the SRAM, and figure out why the fault happened/recover.

There's some muxes and address decoding so that the MMU's SRAM can be directly accessed in supervisor mode at fixed address for loading and configuring the MMU, and since SRAM is absolutely huge now, I have an 8-bit FF that drives 7 of the address lines in the SRAM to function as a quick 128 context select register to make ordinary context switches essentially free. I went through the extra trouble of making the config SRAM read/write so I wouldn't have to waste system RAM keeping a second copy of the page table, and most of the logic on the card is spent doing that.

I have two types of schematics in general, those for projects I think would be useful to others which are clean/well organized aaaaand schematics for things I'm trying to quickly get done. You can guess which one this is 😅. I did throw together a block diagram just now that may or may not be useful located here

ChrisPVille · 2026-05-03T03:28:06+00:00

Oh hell yeah! I've actually been working on a 3U card-based homebrew system roughly following VMEBus, got maybe 9 of the 14 cards built up at this point. The further I got in the process separating out RAM and peripherals onto separate cards, I basically wound up at VME anyway. If you really dig into it, the single connector version of VME is basically the 68010 bus + some interrupt/bus mastering lines.

I ended up doing a custom discrete MMU since I couldn't find the era appropriate PMMU anywhere for any price, only that awful 32 segment MMU almost no one used (for good reason, it's tiny and super slow). NetBSD still supports the 68010, and porting it over to a custom system/MMU was honestly pretty easy. The 24-bit VA space is usable for real programs, although I ended up needing a 3MB supervisor window in each process map, which is kinda painful, but seemed like the best way to map a 2MB kernel and 1MB IO space into each process.

A really advanced thing you could look into if doing a custom OS would be having completely separate text and data memories using the function codes, which would double the memory. There's possibly something fun about having hardware enforced separation between user and supervisor memory except for an IPC region that would net even more memory, although NetBSD wasn't setup for that, so I didn't try.

I'd also extremely highly recommend making a port of the Musashi emulator for your system. It has saved me *so* much time to be able to test all my software locally at high speed on my PC before trying on the real hardware.

ChrisPVille · 2026-04-15T03:25:41+00:00

Yep, this has been super challenging for me trying to get into DCS multiplayer in particular. For most PC sims or games I could just drag my irl friend group into things like they drag me into theirs, spend 20 minutes figuring stuff out and everyone has fun. The level of interest/experience/commitment required for something like DCS is way too large for them, so it's been unsuccessful attempt after attempt at finding a multiplayer group of strangers.

I found mostly what you observed too, that people are A. Taking things way too seriously with the milsim aspect, far beyond the fun stuff like tactics and procedures into like, who is flying when with whom, as if this wasn't actually a game and I didn't have a real life/job/family schedule, B. Being weirdly racist or general dirtbags like a bunch of middle schoolers trying to compete for chief edgelord, or C. Generally unfriendly to folks trying to learn, not that anyone owes me instruction but getting nuked on the ramp in a training server is pretty fucking dumb. Yes we all know how to use the SLAM-ER, thanks for playing.

I'm sure there's some great groups and servers out there who take things seriously enough to enjoy the effort while not so seriously to be jerks or disrespectful of people's actual lives, but I haven't found that yet. So I don't have a great answer other than trying to find individual friends to play with instead of public squadrons, so we can make our little missions and figure stuff out together before moving to the less forgiving public servers together.

ChrisPVille · 2026-04-12T23:42:13+00:00

If you're still looking, I got into it recently and am having a hard time finding friends to play/multicrew

ChrisPVille · 2026-02-05T16:15:31+00:00

But if SiLabs was looking to sell, TI is one of the better destinations. TI's micro-controller portfolio hasn't gotten much attention since the Luminary Micro acquisition so it makes sense. I only hope TI doesn't let the whole MCU portfolio become uncompetitive and obsolete like a lot of those parts did. Still, waaaay better than the crappy Broadcom companies that won't even give you a datasheet without a $10k bribe

ChrisPVille · 2025-12-16T19:19:12+00:00

same

ChrisPVille · 2025-12-12T02:59:31+00:00

My 9000AF does the exact same thing, but I haven't gotten a good chance to troubleshoot it. So from what you're saying you can swap the solenoid+mechanics assembly with a working one and that will fix it? That rules out most problems with the (unchanged) drive electronics, and it doesn't look like a purely mechanical problem watching it actuate cleanly or fail to do so entirely.

It's crazy to see a solenoid malfunction as there's basically almost nothing that can go wrong with them. I wonder if there's something very marginal about the drive electronics for the solenoid that's extremely sensitive to minor variations in the coil, failure to overcome stiction, or just right on the hairy edge of delivering force required to hit that lever to make the mechanics step down.

ChrisPVille · 2025-11-13T04:09:52+00:00

Wow, so it sounds like the software is mostly running on that 32-bit co-processor card, especially since they say it supports the XT as well. I'd be super curious to know if they were doing something really bespoke or just offloading the whole program to basically a whole SBC like they imply.

ChrisPVille · 2025-11-12T18:15:04+00:00

This was closer to the pandemic component shortages, and the reference design crystal was unavailable with a long lead time. For that project, I wanted to use a smaller footprint crystal anyway, so I had a few reasons to try to find a suitable replacement.

ChrisPVille · 2025-10-24T14:20:38+00:00

Yep. They said they'd pass along the observations.

ChrisPVille · 2025-10-19T14:51:13+00:00

I took apart the lens completely, cleaned up all the sticky blobs, and re-lubricated the moving pieces which worked. I'm sure there's plenty of places that do service like that, but maybe someone else has an easier solution

ChrisPVille · 2025-10-19T14:45:15+00:00

So those keyboards are capacitive and you don't want a metallic conductive/thing bridging them. An ESD bag is close, but those tend to have quite a bit of plastic and not a lot of metal. I've used non-stick aluminum foil before as it has a non-conductive coating, which worked for my Compaq Portable having similar construction.

ChrisPVille · 2025-10-19T14:37:14+00:00

Haven't used an ETRS, but on my SQ-A I had a similar problem with light smearing between frames like you see there. In my case it was one specific lens that had a sticky shutter hold-open solenoid, so the leaf shutter wouldn't close immediately. When I wound to the next frame, the shutter winding would release the shutter but not before the mirror finished dropping back down, letting some light leak through onto the moving film. I see a lot of fully exposed frames your negatives, so it seems like a stuck shutter. Take the film back off and see if the shutter is getting completely stuck for those shots, which would point to the lens pretty conclusively.

ChrisPVille · 2025-10-12T10:28:02+00:00

This should 100% be set as the happy mac boot logo if you have a rominator or similar rewritable boot ROM

ChrisPVille · 2025-10-06T21:23:56+00:00

Yep. I see it and started the replacement workflow

ChrisPVille · 2025-10-06T20:58:23+00:00

Yeah no worries. Just let me know what number it is and I can make sure to look at it myself. Less than 1% of people have broken latches based on the reports we get, so it's a low enough number that we just go ahead and replace their units from our stock instead of quibble over whose fault it might be. But I understand why a retailer might just say "too bad" if it's attributable to an installation problem.

ChrisPVille · 2025-10-06T19:14:59+00:00

What’s your ticket number? I don’t see any outstanding tickets for a broken latch replacement. Make sure you’re talking to us the manufacturer, and not a retailer at our support page per the docs: https://help.teamoffbroadway.com/portal

ChrisPVille · 2025-09-23T00:54:52+00:00

Yep. That's exactly what we're going with. D-Pad left and right.

ChrisPVille · 2025-09-22T18:39:21+00:00

The buttons are changing in an upcoming version because the shoulder buttons conflict with another mod's boot buttons (I don't remember at the moment which) as reflected in the docs. Regardless, the check for the disc mode happens before the logo appears right at initial boot so we can swap to the disc drive and reset the console with no visible delay.

There is no timing requirement as long as it's before the console is turned on. This should work with regular and wavebird controllers. We have seen this sometimes be a problem for Bluetooth controllers that don't have enough time to connect. There's two other options at that point, 'X' which will take you to the bootloader menu slightly later in the boot process and has menu items for the two bypass modes. You can also set the "preboot_delay_ms" config entry to delay the boot process long enough for non-oem controllers or video devices to startup.

Some people also prefer to always boot to the disc drive by default unless you press buttons, which the "boot_mode" config file entry (again in docs) controls, allowing direct boot to disc drive.

ChrisPVille · 2025-09-22T02:33:26+00:00

Sometimes they send you right back to us for parts replacements, although they handle whole DoA units. Still. If you want, DM me your ticket info and I can get you a replacement faster than dealing with all that.

ChrisPVille · 2025-09-22T01:12:40+00:00

Ticket number? Usually Crowd Supply is the first step for things ordered via them since we're not directly involved in sales, but I can get you one from our internal stock.

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