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me


19
Nov 08

ZX-Spectrum Child

zx speccy logoMy first computer book was “Basic for Children with Arturo”. It was 1989, the book was in Russian, and I was 10…

Back then, in USSR, to own a 8086 compatible PC was somewhat mystical, and therefore people, who knew a thing or two about microelectronics, were putting together Speccy(s) (ZX Spectrums), which were based on Zilog Z80 8-bit microprocessor and ran at 3.5 MHz.

The official ZX-Spectrum that was sold by “Sinclair Research Ltd” at that time was a bit pricey for middle class families, and therefore many cities across Europe and USSR started to come up with their own “clones“. There were over 50(!) semi-official clones that came out by the end of 1980s, beginning of 1990s. But to cut cost even further, people who knew “how to solder” created hybrids of the clones at home, which came out to be very cheap.

The process to build ZX-Spectrum’s clone’s hybrid was “a bit” involved, and included many days/weeks of hacking poor, incomplete electrical circuit documentation and sleepless nights of manual calibration of the hardware. The one had to “get” a ZX-Spectrum full circuit schema:

zx spectrum electrical circuit

Study it, change it to fit the budget. Go to several flea markets to first find a CPU, which was a quite rare find:

zilog z80 cpu

plus many more components: an empty electrical board, all other chip, transistors, capacitors, resistors, etc…

After some time and a combination of new ideas, documentation, hardware and labour, the one ended up with something like this:

zx-spectrum circut board

ZX-Spectrum keyboard had an interesting feature – pretty much every key, depending on the combination of special keys used, could represent 3-4, sometimes even 5 different things (commands/letters/symbols/special characters/etc). This made it much smaller (“compacter”) than for example PC keyboards:

zx-spectrum keyboard

And due to its small size, it most of the time served as a ZX-Spectrum case, and fit it the Speccy’s “motherboard”:

zx-spectrum under the keyboard

There were also some alternatives, and some people used “an extended” keyboards, but “a single key multi-purpose” pattern was still there. Here is a snippet of the Russian ZX-Spectrum keyboard, for example:

zx-spectrum russian keyboard

which is “a bit extended” – has a separate cursor, and some other keys. But take a look at the individual keys – due to the additional Cyrillic letters, “an average key” is now used to represent even more (+1) values.

At this point, when most of the work with oscillograph was behind, the only true way to see if the creation works was to see it with your own eyes. The word “monitor” in a sense of a “computer monitor” was not a widely used due to its price mostly, therefore most of ZX-Spectrum people used old black and white (at first) TVs. Speccy (well it’s clone’s hybrid at least) was designed in a way that it could be pugged into a regular TV Antena’s jack:

zx-spectrum hookup to TV

And due to the fact that family is usually more than one person, the main TV often was not used, and people used old TVs as a Speccy “monitor” instead:

zx-spectrum TV monitor

The whole process above was about 50% of the job – yea, just 50%. The other half was split on two. First quarter was spent in calibrating hundreds of little circuits, in order to get a sacred “© 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd” message at the bottom of TV (monitor):

1982 Sinclair Research Ltd

This message brought lots and lots of joy into families once it appeared on the screen. It meant a lot – CPU was working (so that guy on the flea market who sold it to you was ok.. sigh…). ROM was working (so that guy on the flea mark…). CPU and ROM were calibrated to work together, along with RAM and some other parts.

Usually the one plugged in Speccy to TV with no RAM/ROM/CPU at first, and calibrated all the circuits to reach a documented pattern on TV (for example small squares). After that was achieved, RAM/ROM and CPU were inserted one after the other by the same technique – each had to produce a certain visual pattern. So if all the parts were inserted and the message “© 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd” appeared, job was 75% done.

The last quarter was usually spent to tune all the parts to work as designed. Most of the time Speccy would restart in 3-4 minutes of use, just because something was “out of it”. To find that “something” was an art on its own. There was no Internet, no books or literature on this – it was pure work of art!

Fortunately my father is such an artist, and by the time I was 10, I got one of those Speccy beasts that my dad and I put together. The only problem though was that although it was designed to have 64Kb of RAM, it only had 16Kb. Well, 7 months later we solder more capacitors around 4Kb RAM memory chips, and that fixed it, but for 7 months I could not really play any games, because most of them required 64Kb to be there. Hence, the “Basic for Children with Arturo” book did not get a chance to get too dusty…

Where ZX-Spectrum shined the most is of course boot time – there was none :) Well, everything was in a ROM chip, including Sinclair Basic.

So having spent about 4-5 months to build Speccy, I was out of luck, and could not use it. Well, that is how I saw it for the first one or two weeks. But then…. I pressed a “p” key, which by default was a Basic “print” command, and then…. I typed what was on my mind: “I want to play!”, and to my astonishment Speccy “said“: “I want to play!”.

It is probably hard to surprise anybody right now by the fact that computer prints something on the screen, when you ask him/her to, but for me, being 10, and haven’t seen anything cooler than that, it was the biggest technical discovery of all times. I picked up my Basic book, and started to type, and type, and type, and then…. type a little more. That is how I started. That, in programming sense, makes me a “Speccy Child”.

A program in Basic in Speccy looked something like this:

zx-spectrum Sinclair Basic

where every line had to have a number, and the usual increment was 10. Quickly my favourite commands became “peek”, “poke” and “randomize” which worked directly with the memory (absolute addresses). And although I felt like a memory King, something was missing. I figured out what it was after I bought a system program that exposed me to something much more powerful than Basic – it was 8-bit Assembly language, the language that Zilog Z80 talked natively. Therefore me together with Z80, could control pretty much everything in the Speccy kingdom. That was awesome!

Here is an example on how you’d print a line of text to the screen in Speccy’s native language:

zx-spectrum z80 assembly

Cool – huh!? Another thing that was very useful at the beginning of my Assembly journey, was a documented character table ( like an “ASCII” ):

zx-spectrum ascii table

The only problem was that in order to work in Assembly, or in any other language, or with any other system program – it needed to be loaded since it was not in RAM/ROM – and that took time. No, really took time. It needed to be loaded from a tape – a regular cassette that is used in a tape recorder. In fact these very tape recorders were used to load all these neat programs in:

zx-spectrum tape

But not only it did take time to load, it was a constant pain to tune the head of the tape recorder for each tape bought on the flea market, since nobody followed the recording standards. A lot of times, you would have to sit and hold a screwdriver against the recorder’s head for 3-5, even 10 minutes, depending on how big the program was.

Here is what the screen looked like when the program was loading from tape into RAM. You can see the zebra looking lines, they were the moving loading indicator:

zx-spectrum loading screen

But time went, flea markets grew along with demand, and we upgraded to the real “RGB deal”. It was done by soldering an external controller (kind of like modern video cards, but not really) that had an RGB jack:

zx-spectrum rgb jack

Although it had 9 pins, only 5 were used: Red / Green / Blue / Sync / Ground. But we did not stop on this. Soldered another external controller, but this time for a disk drive! Oh yea – that was a huuuge deal. Looking at programs to load for seconds (well in rear occasions minutes) from these beautiful 5 inch disks!

Since we had a disk drive, Speccy needed to catch up with us, and the disk controller brought another cool thing, which was TR-DOS, where, of course, DOS stands for Disk Operating System. That is how pretty it looked:

zx-spectrum tr-dos os

Did you notice some colour? Good catch :) So now it was possible to actually browse the disk, and start programs with a button click. There were tons of system utilities with different browsers that you could start at the start up time (sort of like in MBS, but not).

Right after TR-DOS, I felt like I need more. I need more.. I need more.. RAM! And we soldered another level of RAM on top of 64Kb chips. So now my Speccy was equipped with 128Kb of RAM, which could free up some ROM real estate, which enabled ROM to fit a little menu on startup:

zx-spectrum 128 menu

At this point not only I could swim in the Assembly language ocean, but also play games, and use various utilities!

First let’s look at Photoshop:

zx-spectrum artstudio

well, maybe not the Photoshop you’re used to see right now, but Art Studio rocked! I was drawing away for hours!

Now, how about CuBase/ProTools:

zx-spectrum wham the music box

well, maybe not exactly the latest CuBase, but I wrote lots of tunes in Wham. Some tunes I actually recorded along with playing a real guitar – it was cool!

As to games, my favourite control was my keyboard, but for many friends that came to play, I bought a joystick:

zx-spectrum joystick

Now we could play multiplayer games like:

zx-spectrum match point game

Match Point (Tennis) or:

zx-spectrum fist game

Fist (Karate) game. Or even:

zx-spectrum tetris2 game

Tetris2 – which was a bit different from the regular Tetris in a way it gave different patterns and challenges on different levels, and was also a multiplayer game, which was of course cool.

There were tons of other games, but two I still remember are Robocop:

zx-spectrum robocop game

and Bomb Jack:

zx-spectrum bomb jack game

I could play long long time in Bomb Jack, not longer than I spent writing my own little games in Assembly language of course, but still – it was good amount of Bomb Jack time.

All the above was of course some time ago… 25, or even soon 30 years. Everything is a bit different now. Speccy lives somewhere in museum behind the glass:

zx-spectrum in museum behind the glass

But I remember him/her – those were times of big discoveries for me!

Like probably right now for some other 10 year old kid who just accidentally pressed a “p” button, and discovered….. time traveling…

Good luck to you kid!


26
Aug 08

USSR is Winning Olympics 2008

USSR National EmblemI was born and pretty much raised in USSR (Ukraine), and therefore when it comes to sports – not war/politics and definitely not nationalism/silly Soviet patriotism, it makes me feel happy when any of the 15 USSR (former) republics athletes achieve gold/silver/bronze or just a good notable performance.

As a kid, I went to Children’s Olympic Reserve School doing sport gymnastics for several years, where I could see how high our standards were and just how important the role of sport was on the grand scale of things in the country.

So I was looking at “Overall Medal Standings” at the end of 2008 Olympics and came to an interesting conclusion:

NOC Name Total Gold Total Medals
Russia 23 72
Ukraine 7 27
Belarus 4 19
Georgia 3 6
Kazakhstan 2 13
Azerbaijan 1 7
Uzbekistan 1 6
Latvia 1 3
Estonia 1 2
Lithuania 0 5
Kyrgyzstan 0 2
Tajikistan 0 2
Armenia 0 6
Moldova 0 1
Total: 43 171

As the table above shows the (formerly :) ) strong USSR could have taken 43 gold medals, which is 7 medals ahead of US, but still leaves USSR at the second “gold” place after China, however it would take 171 total medals which would make it a 2008 Olympics winner by the total medal count!

One “the very true” argument could be “foo get abour it, USSR is no more” – true. But I was mentally flipping pages through the history, combining the medals of Roman Empire, Osman Empire, and even Delian League, but their medal count did not come even close the third place. (“Persian Empire” came pretty close actually :) )

Just wanted to bounce it against people of www ;)


2
Feb 08

Discover Owners of SVCHOST.EXE

Microsoft Windows (any flavor) is known to be very secretive and dishonest when it comes to telling its user/client/owner what is taking up sooo much system resources, and answer the question “why is my Windows so slow?“.

If you take a closer look at your Windows system you will notice that many CPU cycles and megabytes of RAM belongs to the process with very non-descriptive name “svchost.exe“. You can go to windows task manager by pressing “Ctrl+Alt+Del” and choosing task manager (if it does not come up by itself), or by running “taskmgr” command in your run window “Start -> Run” (more about the second approach in this arcticle “Windows Commands: Think You Know It All !?). So here is an example of a Windows Task Manager:

windows task manager processes

(click on “Processes” tab to get to the same view)

This is a snapshot of a “clean” Windows that has just started with NO custom applications running (well besides “mspaint.exe” to get a snapshot, which is ultra small). And already you can see there are 6(!) “svchost.exe” processes that take up RAM and will take up a lot of CPU when you start your Internet Browser, e-mail client, MS Office, Games, etc…

But if you ask what these “svchost.exe” processes responsible for, who started them, and who is their owner, Windows will say: “You are an average Windows user, we exposed everything you need through window managers, if you are unhappy, well.. tough luck”. And that happens to most of people who use Windows, because most people who are technical enough will use something like Linux or if budget allows people would go for Mac.

So here is a simple howto, for all people who are still on Windows, on identifying and disabling owners of “svchost.exe”.

To see the owners follow these two simple steps:

  • Go to “Start->Run”
  • Type “cmd” and press “Enter”. Black command screen will pop up. (Don’t be afraid of it – it is your friend :) )
  • In this back command prompt (what people call it) type “tasklist /svc” and press “Enter”

You should see something similar to the picture below:

tasklist /svc - Discover owners of svchost.exe

Now you can actually see the “services” that are hidden behind this meaningless name “svchost.exe”. Well, that is one step forward, but now what?

Now you can go to Windows Service manager and read about each service that is using “svchost.exe”. Let’s do together:

  • Go to “Start->Run”
  • Type “services.mcs” and press “Enter”

windows start->run services.mcs

After you press “Enter”, you should see windows services manager:windows services manager

Browsing through the services you can read their description and decide whether or not you want the service to run.

There is another quicker way to enable/disable services, but without their descriptions:

  • Go to “Start->Run”
  • Type “msconfig” and press Enter

windows start->run msconfig

After pressing “Enter”, you should see “System Configuration Utility”:

msconfig -> System Configuration Utility

Click on “services” tab to get the above view. As you can see you can “check/uncheck” desired services to change their state from “Running” to “Stopped”. But if you unfamiliar with a particular service, read its description first in “windows services manager”, or google it, if it is not there.

Keep up a “clean” and fast Windows system, and good luck!


2
Jun 07

Switch Between Dual/Single Monitor on (Ubuntu) Linux

xorg logo ubuntuRecently I wrote a howto on dual monitor configuration, which works great for my setup. However one thing that is not that great is switching between two modes: dual and single monitor. At work I have an external monitor that I use (which means I use two monitors – my laptop’s and external one), but whenever I am not at work I only need to use my laptop’s. Since all the xorg configuration resides in xorg.conf file, and this file is a regular static text file that is used by X (window system – gdm, kdm, etc.) when it starts, it is nontrivial to change this configuration while running X without some X tools. Unfortunately, Ubuntu is not that fancy (yet) and does not provide these tools by default, so here is a way to do it (sort of) manually.

What we can do is to create two xorg.conf files – "xorg.conf.single" and "xorg.conf.dual". In "xorg.conf.single" just comment out the following line from ServerLayout section:

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration file)
#
.....
Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Default Layout"
        Screen          0 "0 Screen"
        #Screen         1 "1 Screen" Above "0 Screen"   <-- comment out this line
        Option          "Xinerama" "on"
        Option          "Clone" "off"
.....
EndSection

Here is the listing of "xorg" files that I have:

user@host:/etc/X11$ ll xorg.conf*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4457 2007-06-02 15:05 xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4456 2007-05-22 22:03 xorg.conf.dual
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4457 2007-05-22 22:04 xorg.conf.single

Now the idea is simple - before X (I use Gnome Desktop, but it can be any desktop environment) starts, we need to copy xorg file that we need (dual or single) to "xorg.conf", which will be picked and loaded by X.

In /home/user/ directory we have a .bashrc file that is loaded whenever the user logs in (if we use bash shell, which is a most popular shell anyway). Therefore we can leverage this file to define aliases that we would like to use once we login. Since alias can be anything we'd like, why not make a dual/single commands as aliases? Here is an example:

user@host:/etc/X11$ tail -5 /home/user/.bashrc
# restart gdm with dual monitor support
alias xdual='sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.dual /etc/X11/xorg.conf; sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart'

# restart gdm with single monitor support
alias xsingle='sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.single /etc/X11/xorg.conf; sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart'

Now when we need to switch between dual/single monitor, we can fire up shell (by pressing Ctrl+Alt+1, or gnome-terminal, or kterm, etc.) and type xsingle or xdual whichever we need.


14
May 07

KISS that Technology by Learning

So you need to learn (about) this technology… So you go to google… So you spent X minutes (hours? days?) to find a good candidate-article (tutorial, how to, step-by-step guide, etc.)… So you finish reading it… and most of the time you doing what? – exactly!  – going back to google and keep searching.

More often than not there are two main things that we are looking for when we need to learn something new:

  1. We want to learn it fast
  2. We want to learn it fast

See the difference? :) Here it is – the "first fast" goes for the quality of content that a source has to offer. The better the quantity, the more we learn, the faster we learn. And the "second fast" goes to the amount of time we search for that source of knowledge.

The "first fast" is going to be solved by only dealing with SIMPLE tutorials/guides/ideas about many simple and comlex topics. Simplicity is the key to solve "the quality of content" problem. Think about an IBM Redbook on something you do not know about, let’s say web services. Although it is a great book – lot’s of content – it is a very poor example of an efficient tutorial (not for all, but for most), it just has too much and will take hours to go through. Most of the time a redbook will make you quite sleepy on the page number 24 (my own observation).

And for comparison take this picture from soaspecs.com:

webservices through uddi, wsdl and soap

and spice it up with "SOAP::Lite for Perl" quick guide.

A combination of the two (pic and guide) will take you 5-10 minutes to go over and will make you understand what/how/why/etc.. about webservices. Although the guide is Perl based, it will by no means distract you from understanding the material even if you are not familiar with Perl, why? Because it is SIMPLE, that’s why.

In order to solve the "second fast", I would like to speak to everybody who is going to read this post. If you have a very cool and SIMPLE tutorial, how-to, guide, etc.., please share it with everybody by going to the comments section of this post and putting one or more links to it, or ideas where to get these very simple tutorials.

Later on I will compile this list, and either post it on a different website (if you like, I can put your name as a contributor, with a link to the tutorial/idea and your website, if you have it) or I will create a different post. This will be solving the "second fast" – decreasing the time of searching for the right source.

Apply yourself – KISS that technology! :)