Evan Allen
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Evan Allen
@abzman.bsky.social
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https://abzman2k.wordpress.com/
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Reposted by Evan Allen
justinoaksford.bsky.social
Just a reminder:

Seattle has until this Tuesday (Feb 11th) to turn in ballots that can both hit the wealthy where it hurts while also building the long term public-housing-for-all we've been waiting for.

Please vote Yes on 1A, please tell your Seattle friends- turnout is only 15% right now.
justinoaksford.bsky.social Justin Oaksford @justinoaksford.bsky.social · Jan 23
Seattle folk, can do something RIGHT NOW to channel your rage and fear and despair.

Ballots were sent in the mail today for Prop 1A:

A 5% tax on the compensation of millionaires, paid by their employer, to go straight to our Social Housing Developer.

Vote.
Tell your friends to Vote.
Volunteer.
February 8, 2025 at 4:20 PM
If you want to test some old DRAM, I made a tester that does everything common in the DIP16 socket. The real hard part is the power supplies and remembering what each of the jumpers do.
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Cheap and cheerful DRAM tester
While working on my Commodore PET 4032 I had a strange problem where it started chirping like it normally does in the boot up sequence and then crashed with some extra characters on the screen. There ...
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July 22, 2024 at 6:50 PM
I went through some effort to repair the screen on a broken transistor tester and went down the rabbit hole of finding the original project, modifying the code, and updating it to have features beyond the original cheap one
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Chinesium Transistor tester repair (fail?)
This works, believe it or not This is a post I'm writing mere minutes after completing the last bit (a rarity). Months back a friend bought one of those yellow chinese 'component tester' modules from ...
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July 19, 2024 at 6:26 PM
Two posts separated by 7 years, one hacking the billy bass and one putting it to use. It got it out of the parts bin and onto a shelf which is an improvement:
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Billy mouth billy bass hacking
Well, here's a classic: hacking the old Billy M0uth Billy Bass!  This is an absolute classic, it seems like everyone and their tin dog has done this one.  I picked this thing up at a garage sale, the ...
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July 8, 2024 at 8:49 PM
Today I have some old s100 stuff. First is building a system from scraps, second is modding the ithica cpu board for a more modern ROM
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Poly-88 S100 system raised from the dead
Back at Makerfaire Detroit I did a booth with my buddy Frank. We showed off a bunch of vintage computers we had fixed over the prior year and had them set up for use. Because of this a member of our h...
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July 3, 2024 at 4:16 PM
I did some reverse engineering of a vtech whiz kid computer. These days the schematics would be in kicad, but they're all there along with a clever way to configure the ROM carts
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Vtech Whiz Kid reverse engineering
In an effort to free up space and get some low hanging fruit projects done fast I took on this one. This is a small learning computer from the 1980s. It uses a custom segment LCD for display, an optic...
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June 28, 2024 at 4:53 PM
This is what it takes to add neo geo compatibility to your standard JAMMA harness (cheapie from ebay)
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Neo Geo compatibility for my portable arcade test rig
I figured I'd go over some mods done to make my arcade test rig Neo Geo compatible. The first thing to do was make a JAMMA fingerboard adapter. I have a 2-slot motherboard so it's not the vanilla JAMM...
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June 27, 2024 at 8:08 PM
Here's an old one that involves some reverse engineering to create a real neo geo cart using repro shells and salvage boards.
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Synthesizing a neo-geo game from scratch (ish)
I recently decided to take on a project building a neo-geo MVS cart of a rather rare game, Twinkle Star Sprites. It is possible to buy this game for cheaper on the PS2 or Dreamcast, but why hack one o...
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June 12, 2024 at 8:22 PM
What do you do if you can't get a pink Konami Justifier? Build one! I also just set up a ko-fi, linked from my blog if anyone feels like contributing so I can do more cool hacks
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How to use a Sega Master System Light Phaser as the pink Konami Justifier
This is a simple hack that I put together from several places on the internet to get right. I don't know that anyone's done exactly this before, so I figured I'd share it here. The Pink player 2 Konam...
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June 11, 2024 at 4:01 PM
Last bout of posts about the Eagle, this is what I managed before I sold the thing. I'm particularly proud of the diagnostic box that decodes the signals using only logic chips.
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AMC Eagle hatch repair
This is a combination fix, I decided to replace the hatch struts so I didn't have to haul around a stick to hold it open.  That necessitated making sure I had quality hinges and replacement hinges if ...
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June 9, 2024 at 5:18 PM
Just got back from a business trip, now I can resume promoting my old posts. This isn't the last batch of AMC Eagle projects, but it's getting there.
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AMC Eagle Horn Replacement (very superfluous)
There's a lot of cars I'd like to own for various reasons. Most of them are small parts I think are cool, like the electroluminescent hemispherical dash of some Chrysler 300s and the Nash fold flat re...
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June 8, 2024 at 3:53 PM
more electrical and lighting stuff from my ole Eagle
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AMC Eagle automotive breakers
While replacing the dome light bulbs with LEDs (that post will be up when I've figured out what I broke to make them stay on all the time) I blew the dome light fuse, and I didn't have another one. Ra...
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May 27, 2024 at 7:46 PM
More Eagle stuff, some repair to bulbs and modification to LEDs
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AMC Eagle LED marker lights (LEDs part two)
This is a small post, but I think an important one.  I had no idea how to safely get the marker lights off my car.  I didn't know if just the lens came off, if there were screws under it, if the previ...
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May 23, 2024 at 3:20 PM
next batch of mods to the AMC Eagle (has since been sold though)
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Completely mandatory Eagle accessories
This one is just me showing off.  All my life my dad has had a brass embellished american flag and eagle licence plate frame in the basement on a workbench.  Last year he picked up some model paints a...
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May 22, 2024 at 9:50 PM
Continuing with the AMC Eagle, I have a few more small things I did almost as soon as I got the car
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Keys aplenty
I am coming to terms with the fact that I got three keys with this car.  I don't like it, but there's not a ton I can do about it right now.  I have one key for the ignition, one key for the doors and...
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May 21, 2024 at 3:01 PM
Here's phase 1 of me getting an AMC eagle and documenting some things I did to it.
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My new car!
I bought a new car.  This car has (or can have) just about everything I want in a vehicle.  After working in the automotive industry since I got out of college I have become intimately familiar with t...
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May 20, 2024 at 6:44 PM
My mousebites post got picked up by @adafruit.com

blog.adafruit.com/2024/05/06/m...
Making a ‘mousebites’ PCB chip replacement adapter board
Evan’s Techie-blog is looking to dump all the TMS7000 series processors’ internal mask Read-Only Memory (ROM)s encountered. Not all are so easy, especially capturing communications with exter…
blog.adafruit.com
May 6, 2024 at 6:42 PM
We were out for the first run of the year today in Royal Oak MI with the Great Lakes Live Steamers. Weather permitting we'll be doing it again tomorrow at Starr Jaycee Park. Noon to 4pm. www.greatlakeslivesteamers.org
Great Lakes Live Steamers
1/8 scale trains running in the cities of Southgate and Royal Oak
www.greatlakeslivesteamers.org
May 5, 2024 at 2:29 AM
I just saw a video on durable east german glassware that failed in the west because of capitalism's planned obsolescence. I think it could work these days because the current corporate grift is short term profits at the expense of long term profitability: youtube.com/watch?v=vEvBpjCOBu0
How Communists Made Unbreakable Glass
Try Shopify for free and create your own online shop now: https://shopify.com/fern (ad)This is the story of how communists made nearly unbreakable glass. Why...
youtube.com
May 4, 2024 at 4:21 AM
Working on this arduino controlled tv tuner to use old hardware on monitors that don't have a tuner. Not done yet, but the hardware should be alright as designed
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arduino-controlled-tv-tuner
In recent times I've come to want a standalone tuner that outputs composite video. This would be really nice because I have good composite monitors, but ones with tuners are not usually quite so conve...
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May 2, 2024 at 3:58 PM
This is actually a super useful device that sits right on a serial port and connects to an esp32. It transparently converts the serial to telnet. There's even some features after the enhancements I made.
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ESP232 code enhancements/porting
I did this a long time ago and am just now bothering to write something up for it. I was not super satisfied with the esp-link telnet adapter software, and I wanted to make some smaller simple boards....
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May 1, 2024 at 4:12 PM
Over 10 years of trying to evolve the same crappy hacked diy logic analyzer. I don't actually recommend you do this, but I did so here it is
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Saleae Logic clone build
So, I wanted a logic analyzer, and I wanted it cheap.  After hearing about the Saleae Logic I was excited, after all what is a logic analyzer but a pile of IO and some nice software.  The thing is, th...
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April 30, 2024 at 3:59 PM
I took a stab at casting epoxy instead of 3d printing to replicate things. It worked alright, and this 8088 works reasonably well with the covox sound card.
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carry-1 covox sound card / cast epoxy key
Frank and I picked up a nice PC compatible computer at an estate sale, the Carry-1. It's (at the time at least) the world's smallest PC compatible computer. It takes an XT protocol keyboard, has the w...
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April 28, 2024 at 3:27 PM
Latest projdect is breaking out an SOIC to a DIP for the purposes of MITM-ing the processor. Actually more of taking complete control, but that's for another entry. This one was also sponsored by PCBWay
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‘mousebites’ adapter
This is a somewhat generic idea, but I've implemented it for a specific purpose. In trying to be able to dump all the TMS7000 series processors' internal mask rom I've come across some pretty unique o...
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April 26, 2024 at 9:06 PM
I've been dumping the internal mask rom out of various tms7000 processors, I've almost got them all. Latest post sponsored by PCBWay
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TMS7000 dumper rev. B sneak peek and obscure footprint processor dumping
Do not use git branches, this is a way to lose shit you've been working on. Do not use git stashes, this is a way to lose shit you've been working on *and it's not backed up anywhere*. Git is just too...
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April 25, 2024 at 6:59 PM