Category: Computing

Ken went to EclipseCon and all he brought me back was this lousy USB drive..

Actually, I had seen Ian’s post EclipseCon Guide to Free Stuff and asked Ken to grab me one.

As expected, there were a bunch of AMD promotional .pdf files on the device.  I’m interested in reading through it at one point, but I also think a ‘free’ 1Gig USB drive is pretty handy.  The drive shows up with 2 partitions, one is 20MB with the promotional material on it – read-only, and the other is a read/write partition with the remainder of the Gig.

Now maybe there is something I just don’t know about flash drives, but I’m not able to convince Windows or Linux to reformat this thing to remove the 20MB read only partition.  If anyone out there knows the magic, please add a comment with the solution.

I got to thinking maybe it was a hardware hack.  So of course, I busted it open.

The flip side is a very generic looking 1Gig flash chip.  The controller chip is by ChipBank, a CBM2090.  There are some data sheets available for it, but nothing that really tells me much.

I’m actually starting to get the feeling that this is a clever firmware hack.  If I had access to the right software, I could reach in and tweak the system to ‘fix’ the read only flag and reformat to my liking.  So far, no luck.

I tell people that I’m pretty handy, but the truth is I just like to take things apart. When I was a kid I used to take the kitchen cupboard doors off with a screwdriver, and then put them back on. So noisy fan and a label like this:

Is just an invitation to crack the case open and fix it. How can you resist when they tell you they don’t expect you to be able to fix it yourself? Actually, over the years I’ve fixed a few power supplies – so this was pretty much business as usual.

Now what was a bit unusual about this one was how nasty it had gotten inside. This PC was my old webserver, and it sat in the basement while I was renovating – including busting open the concrete floor to do some plumbing (something I don’t recommend). The PC case itself had a very dead spider, and a fair amount of concrete dust everywhere. It is sort of surprising it was working at all.

Even after blowing the dust out the fan was very noisy. Luckily I happened to have a few 80mm Vantec Stealth fans around. Replacing the fan was pretty straight forward. I ended up splicing the wires as the new fan had 3 wires (yellow for speed control) and the stock fan plug wasn’t a match. Here is the new fan installed in the cleaned out power supply.

The date on this power supply is April 30, 1998, the PC its in is from the same era. I’m actually using this Pentium II 400 for something useful, but I honestly can’t say how much longer I’ll bother keeping this relic around.. 10 years is a good run for a PC.

I’m a second generation programmer, which is a bit odd given my age, but my Dad was one of the types who bought the kit and built his first computer. So even as a very young child I had access to computer systems, but it wasn’t until I was in high school that the light went on and I “got it”.

The first system I got to spend any time programming on was a TI-99/4A – not having a tape drive, my Dad and I would hack up a game in basic over a weekend and just leave the thing on. I remember losing hours of work to the reset key combo (right shift + one of the number keys, left shift got you the symbol you wanted.. duh).

My first computer was the Commodore 64 – it was ~$700 of my own hard earned money for the main CPU + floppy drive. This is the machine I learned assembly language on. Being a pack rat, I’ve still got it rotting in a box in the basement along with a big stack of 170k floppies.

Knowing assembly opened the door to ‘demo’ programming, this mostly consisted of tight sequences exploiting the quirks in the video chip. We’d “borrow” the music from a game or another demo not having any music skills ourselves. Graphics were similarly lifted, or painfully hand-crafted. There were various groups I was part of, often the same folk in the group just under yet another cool sounding name.

One stuck out as particularly successful in my mind: Screaming Euphoria. I think we only made one actual demo release as this group – and sadly I had misplaced the demo (or re-used the diskette for something else) and thought it was lost in time. Enter the internet – and thanks to folk who are much bigger C64 fanatics than I am, you can download the “Disconnect” farewell demo, and get an emulator (I used VICE) to view it.

Pretty cool for a little 8bit machine. Amazing what could be accomplished with so little. Frightening how many cycles we waste today. I’m glad to have found a bit of my programming past again, maybe I can finally ditch that C64 in my basement.