Marko talked about his Pacman port to the Steckschwein at VCFb. Basically it’s the same talk he did at VCFe in April, but this time, there’s a video. Enjoy! https://media.ccc.de/v/vcfb19_-_111_-_de_-_201910121615_-_pac-man_auf_dem_steckschwein_-_marko_lauke

Frank van den Hoef, who is adapting the Steckschwein SPI & FAT32 code for his tiny65 machine made me aware of a classic mistake for a 6502 assembly coder to make. Namely in our sdcard driver, when waiting for the “proper” response from the card (which should have bit 7 cleared). The routine handling this looked like this: 1 sd_cmd_response_wait: 2 ldy #sd_cmd_response_retries 3 @l: dey 4 beq sd_block_cmd_timeout ; y already 0?

The main motivation to get Forth up and running on the Steckschwein was to participate at The Ultimate Benchmark, in order to crush all 8bit competition to dust. So the plan was to benchmark the Steckschwein live at the VCFe. Unfortunately, Carsten could not be there, so no Forth benchmark competition this year. Recently, Carsten presented his benchmark results using TaliForth2, which led us to run the same benchmarks he did and send the results to Carsten, who was kind enough to include them on his site:

As real computer is not a real computer without a real time clock, the Steckschwein is no exception here. As we know, we use the Maxim DS1306 RTC, which is a very common RTC which comes as DIP IC and has an SPI interface. And of course it supports battery backup in various configurations. And this is where things get interesting. Apart from timekeeping, the DS1306 also has 96 bytes of battery buffered RAM.

The Tekway DST 1062B (also known unter the Hantek or Voltcraft brand) is an inexpensive 60MHz digital storage oscilloscope, which is very much hackable and has proven to be worth its weight in gold pressed latinum. More recently, my scope became affected by the infamous white screen problem, which apparently is a problem quite common to this model and its 100MHz or 200MHz siblings. The Tekway/Hantek white screen of death

The newly made boards made their way from China to Munich. Starting now, the multi board version of the Steckschwein is made up of 3 Boards: CPU/Memory, IO/UART and V9958-OPL2.