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New Red cameras?


Thomas Winston

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More amazing to the geeks on campus was my Amiga 2000. It had 8 meg of direct access RAM... OOOOOOOOH!

 

I loved the Amiga computer. There was this great image editing program called "Deluxe Paint", which seemed quite advanced compared to what was being offered on PCs/Dos at that time. I was so glad when finally Deluxe Paint was ported to PCs and used it extensively for my work.

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This talk of assembly language and the old days led me to look at some of the stuff I did back then, and I found something interesting:

Here's a little assembly language puzzle for you. What does this code do?

 

cmp al,00Ah

sbb al,069h

das

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

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I loved the Amiga computer. There was this great image editing program called "Deluxe Paint", which seemed quite advanced compared to what was being offered on PCs/Dos at that time. I was so glad when finally Deluxe Paint was ported to PCs and used it extensively for my work.

 

I also had Sculpt 4D Animation. The output took weeks to render. You could actually watch each rendering line roll across the screen because it was so slow. I had a board that did the frame buffers and SVHS frame record control. Every time I needed to use the Video Toaster, I had to swap boards with the buffer/controller. Ah, the good ol' days.

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This talk of assembly language and the old days led me to look at some of the stuff I did back then, and I found something interesting:

Here's a little assembly language puzzle for you. What does this code do?

 

cmp al,00Ah

sbb al,069h

das

 

 

Seems like those BCD/ASCII conversions. Right?

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Gotta go.

Jim's just got his 1st Epic running.

All us "RED-Haters on C.com" now have to projectile-vomit, burn our clothes, scrub our mouths out with laundry soap, and then sit naked and sobbing in the shower for a few hours. :lol:

 

:lol:

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And more -- try a few values in al and see what happens....

-- J.S.

This is starting to turn into one of those "Our Jokes are not like your jokes" Intel Ads :lol:

 

I can't for the life of me understand this fixation some people have with assembly language programming.

I can do it, and I have done it, and it was sort of interesting for the first 30 minutes or so, but after that, it was just a necessary evil to be palmed off to the enthusiasts.

 

Speaking of which there was this guy I used to work with in the early 1980s who could just about think in machine code. You could give him a Hex listing, or even a punched paper tape for Christ's sake, and he'd immediately start scribbling notes in the margins, locating subroutines and giving them incomprehensible names that he seemed to think hilarious etc, giggling at God knows what he thought was funny (just like in the Intel Ads, I swear :rolleyes: ) and somewhere between five minutes and five days later he'd have figured out how the thing worked and made the necessary changes etc.

 

He specialized in de-dongling and otherwise de-protecting software, and I still have some of the stuff he cracked, but just about all the useful software needs a dot-matrix printer, and I've never been able to locate a reliable emulator. (I've got a Laser Printer with parallel as well as USB input, that almost but not quite works with Dot Matrix files, almost as if the programmer gave up, and nobody else has noticed... :blink: )

 

Unfortunately I think this guy may have been borderline Autistic, because if you let him near any of the hardware design, he was utterly hopeless. He would breadboard things that couldn't possibly work, and sit there for days puzzling over it, and when you could finally get him to discuss what he was doing, he would come out with these truly bizzare concepts of how the various components worked, which was nothing like what they actually did. (He had a particular fixation with the National Semiconductor LM3900 "Norton" Op-amps, an excellent device unfortunately not terribly well understood by most engineers, and not at all by him!)

 

His other big problem was that for all his cleverness in reverse-engineering other people's code, he was utterly hopeless at writing user interfaces. (I suspect he's alive and well and living in China, designing user interfaces for cheap DVD players, TVs and the like).

 

He used to drive a horrible old van, and I wondered how he managed to keep it on the road. Then one day I realized that its registration and Certificate of Roadworthiness stickers had all been beautifully hand-painted with a set of oil paints! We couldn't help commenting that if he would apply that skill to commercial illustrating, he'd probably make enough to buy a decent car, but the concept seemed beyond him. He theory was that if he was involved in an accident he'd just run off, since there was no way of identifying him through the car!

 

The gear lever had long since broken off and he'd "fixed" it with a pair of vice-grips. The ignition switch had also long since died, and he used a pair of large crocodile clips to connect the coil and activate the starter. Every now and again he's stall the thing while negotiating the roots of a large tree he liked to park under, and then he'd sometimes forget to remove the clips, so at the end of the day he come out to find a flat battery, and occasionally, a burned-out ignition coil.

 

I wonder where he wound up.

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And more -- try a few values in al and see what happens....

 

I did try a few and it seems like, as I said before, valid in hex (0-F) -> ASCII conversion ('0'-'9' and 'A'-'F' ranges). Is there more to it? It is a clever construct. I recall using things like that a long time ago when I was active in assembly language programming.

 

Joofa

Edited by DJ Joofa
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