TubeTime’s monochrome display adapter core ported to my PCI FPGA VGA passthrough board. Maybe the first PCI MDA card. Full intensity is white, everything else is bitwise abuse of a rainbow pattern generator.
hah, super cool!
Mountain View Reverse Engineering (mtvre) meetup on Wed! 7:00 pm at Wagon Wheel BBQ. Talks:
- @tubetime.bsky.social on "HP 16717 PCB Reverse Engineering" (40 min)
- @natashenka.bsky.social on "0-click Android exploits" (25 min)
rainwater collection system?
book excerpt. "...ASCII, pronounced 'ass-key'."
I mean can you figure out a better way to help people pronounce ASCII?
New blog post! A what-if scenario where we try to see how a home computer designer might've dealt with the field-sequential color television, had the Korean War not stopped that standards' rollout. Enjoy! nicole.express/2026/the-app...
fun fact--the Apollo moon mission's color cameras were field sequential, essentially System 1 in your table. this caused weird color artifacts when transmitting the LM's launch from the surface.
super clean looking, wow
yes. pretty nuts, right?
they call it pop art, but a can of Campbells is not a can of Coke.
screenshot from the failed Magic Cap operating system. hallway with a door, a table, and some signs on the wall. there are a row of buttons at the bottom.
i mean it has that Magic Cap energy
still in progress, slowly
a "pixel art" room with a sofa, telephone on a small table, a door, window, and some artwork on the wall, including a Lichtenstein painting titled "Look Mickey"
a bad Leisure Suit Larry game? no, it's Roy Lichtenstein in 1973.
Mitsumi MM1025A system reset IC.
www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pd...
i saw those earlier!
metal can oscillator marked HOORAY VX8111 34.500MHz . 9 1 4 1
Hooray! it's 34.5MHz!
peeling pcb layers with a spudger
sanded the copper off the top so the via barrels had no tops.
the board i sacrificed for this had extensive rot from the adhesive. it made it all the way through to the other side of the board through a via.
which ones do you have?
it was actually easier to peel the layers apart.
yeah that's a weird one. think they're trying to add a series impedance to a filter capacitor.
electricity is one of the few commodities that costs more to make more of. it's the opposite of a quantity discount.
3 months
full thread with all the details is over at Mastodon: mastodon.social/@tubetime/11...
top level schematic of a complex circuit board.
what's really useful is that i now have the complete schematic, which i used earlier today to repair one of these cards that was broken. and best of all, i've released it so anyone else can see it: github.com/schlae/hp16717. so if you have an obscure HP logic analyzer, check it out!
xacto knife on top of a board with some of the copper layer removed. on the right is a small pile of copper shavings.
and yes, it was a bit tedious.
circuit board, backlit, with black traces highlighted against a glowing light brown fiberglass substrate.
the middle two layers look very cool since light can easily shine through.
center "core" layers of the board with a bag of parts on top and a bag of copper fragments. there are rolled up sheets of FR4 fiberglass that look like scrolls.
i scanned the board one layer at a time, peeling away layers of copper and fiberglass to expose the layers underneath. almost 3GB of image data.
colorful circuit board in a layout program. each layer is a different color. it's complicated!
this is the largest circuit board i've ever completely reverse engineered. 8 layers, larger than a sheet of paper, 1000s of nets, over 1000 parts. 🧵
