Jamtronix

1 – take a document marked up with Textile
2 – paste that document into the web form at http://basicpoint.jamtronix.com
3 – save the resulting prg file, and load it in your choice of emulator or a real c64
4 – ???
5 – profit!

I recently acquired an IDE64. This is a cartridge for the C64 that lets you connect any sort of storage device with an IDE interface (typically a Compact Flash drive, but can also be an IDE hard drive or a CD-ROM). It also allows files to be transferred to/from a PC via USB.

Unfortunately the software that needs to run on the PC side (ideservd) only seems to be compiled for Windows, although the source code is available from the IDEDOS homepage. The source needed a bit of tweaking to compile on my macbook (OSX 10.6.4), specifically

• deleting #include from ideserv.c
• adding “-I /opt/local/include/” and ” -L/opt/local/lib/” to the gcc flags in the Makefile

Once it compiles, there’s some tricks to getting it to run.

First, it needs to be run under sudo, otherwise you will get a message saying “Failed changing root dir”.

Second, you need to disable the FTDIUSBSerialDriver that OSX has loaded automatically, otherwise you will get an error saying “unable to claim usb device. Make sure ftdi_sio is unloaded!”

Here’s a zip file containing the compiled binary and a wrapper script to load/unload FTDIUSBSerialDriver before/after running ideservd. – ideservd-0.24-osx.zip

RoShamBo is another name for ‘paper scissors rock’.

RetroShamBo will be a retro network coding tournament. The date is still TBA, probably linked in with the next Retro-Challenge.

So I’m organising a retroputing talkfest – TiNKeRCoN. We’ve done the hard part – picked a date. All that’s left now is to organise a venue, speakers, accommodation, yadda yadda yadda. What could possibly go wrong?

In a canonical yak shaving incident, I ended up adding geos support to peekbot so I could look at the source for geoLink and have now extended that support to allow previewing of font files and viewing of geoPaint files – for example, here’s a klingon ship.

geoLink is an IRC client for the C64, built by ShadowM on the ip65 stack.

Nifty!

If I ever decide to cross over to the dark side, the Spectranet project looks like fun. In any case, the “Tiny Network File System” (TNFS) looks like an idea I started dabbling with last year but got too distracted to complete. So I’ll add implementing TNFS in ip65 to my ever expanding “to do” list.