Calcuscribe pictures

The keyboard:



The system board:



M37702 cpu chip:



System board copyright Link Corp from 1998 and HD61830B LCD controller:



The M27C801 eprom:



The messed up display:




The back:

Calcuscribe portable keyboard - battery damage

I got this portable keyboard called a "Calcuscribe" which is really neat looking. Unfortunately, it had a fatal flaw in its design: the battery compartment had openings to the main circuit board.



It wouldn't power up so I opened it up and found multiple spots of leaking battery damage. The bane of my existence are leaky batteries.

Putting 3 fresh AA batteries and pressing the power button didn't do anything. A power port is present, and plugging a 5v + tip power supply makes the display light up but it's all a smeary mess, but it does look like it's alive and doing something.

It should be a rule that a device should tell you what power you should be supplying. I felt confident that 5v would be ok, since it looks like it can be powered by a keyboard cable.

Anyway, it has some interesting chips on board: a mitsubishi 37702 (a 16 bit 6502 variant) and what looks like the rom, in a socketed windowed eprom 27c801.

Maybe I'll get a eprom programmer one of these days and read the thing.

Neat Kroy Factory

This factory looks really clean and neat.

Brother PT-10 is the same as the Kroy Duratype 210

I'm looking at a Kroy Duratype 210 and it looks the same as the Brother PT-10.



And likewise for the Kroy Duratype 215 and the Brother PT-15.

I keep banging my head on the car door frame

So I got a new car, and while it looks sleek I keep banging my head on the frame as I get in and out. I had the seat adjusted to the highest position but it seems better if I just leave it lower. An inch or two makes a big difference here.

Wearing a baseball cap doesn't help because what's above you is "invisible" to you, being blocked by the bill. You've got to be careful too when you're reaching down to get stuff off the seat.

This never happened with my old car. In some ways I liked the older, bigger cars. After doing it for the umpteenth time I am very careful now.

I think of the game "Operation": instead of "don't touch the sides," it's "don't bang your head".

VTech Genio 6000 Logo Programming Language

One of the things that I found most interesting about the VTech Genio 6000 is the LOGO programming language. I always liked turtle graphics.

So under "Personal Office" there are 3 different levels of LOGO examples: beginner, intermediate and advanced.



And after choosing "LOGO advanced" we get 3 different example programs:



I'll choose FLOWER.LGO and it starts drawing the flower. It's kind of slow at drawing taking around 10 seconds.



To edit the program, take the mouse and hover over the edit icon and click.



It's even got balloon help.



Or you can type edit in the command line.



And our flower program.



I'll type out the flower program here as it doesn't fit in a screencap of 5 lines x 20 columns.

to rarc
repeat 15 [right 4 forward 1.3]
end
to larc
repeat 15 [left 4 forward 1.3]
end
to petal
repeat 2 [rarc right 120]
end
to flower
penup window
forward -2 pendown
repeat 6 [petal right 60]
back 15
end


(actually a typo here in the procedure larc which I've fixed, the FLOWER.LGO program says right 4. I suppose it doesn't matter since the example program doesn't call larc)



I had to refresh my memory of LOGO with keywords like pots (print out procedure titles). If you type pots, it will list the procedure names one by one, and you have to press the space bar to continue to the next line as it will only display one line of text.

Searching the internet for VTech LOGO I found a manual for another VTech unit that's extremely similar to the Genio 6000 called the Power Zone Plus Desktop. The Power Zone Plus keyboard is English whereas the Genio 6000 is in Spanish.



The manual has a very good LOGO reference starting at page 25 (page 33 inside the PDF due to the table of contents).

https://www.vtechkids.com/assets/data/products/%7BFF036CC0-0F40-4808-83CD-87F8E2480A4B%7D/manuals/PowerZone_Plus_Desktop.pdf


I just learned how to create a URL to point at a specific page in the PDF, just add #page=XX to the end of the URL.


https://www.vtechkids.com/assets/data/products/%7BFF036CC0-0F40-4808-83CD-87F8E2480A4B%7D/manuals/PowerZone_Plus_Desktop.pdf#page=33

VTech Genio 6000

I got this neat Vtech laptop called the Genio 6000. It attempts to be a "real" laptop, as real as a 132x48 LCD can represent. (I don't know exactly what its resolution is, I haven't counted the pixels).

When you boot up it asks you to choose your language. If you leave this alone for awhile, the mouse pointer turns into a spaceship and flies around the screen.



The keyboard is fully featured, along with a "mousepad" and mouse buttons. The mousepad has a directional pad to move the mouse around. There's a mouse port on the back of the unit, but I don't have a mouse to plug into it.



The touchpad that has buttons to turn on and off and directly choose apps.



The main menu:



The word processor. The display will show about 20 characters across.




It's got a whole bunch of little apps built in, including a fun trivia quiz game.

What's interesting to me is that it has the computer programming language LOGO built in.



It has battery backup that works if your power (9V 300MA DC adapter or 4 C batteries) goes out so you don't lose your work.

There are serial, parallel, and mouse ports on the back and an expansion port on the side.

It's pretty advanced for a "toy" laptop. If it had a high resolution screen or TV out it would be far more useful.


Apologies for the screenshots, taking pictures of an LCD like this is quite difficult with all of the reflections.

System Board for PT-2030

I had some serious battery leakage on a PT-2030, enough to warrant disassembling the unit to clean up. Thankfully it was contained in the battery compartment, but I couldn't reach all of it without taking off the back.



While I was at it, why not see what's on the motherboard.

It's got an NEC V850ES/ST2 microcontroller chip.



And a spansion_(now cypress) S29GL032N90TFI04 32MB flash memory chip.

Manufacturer Part #: S29GL032N90TFI040
Manufacturer:Cypress Semiconductor
Description:Flash Memory 32MB 2.7-3.6V 90ns Parallel NOR Flash

Superman titles from 1978

I recently watched Superman again and I remembered how iconic the titles were.

At "the Art of the Title", they have an interview that is quite interesting.

Everything we did until the mid-’80s was pre-computer — Superman is all pre-digital. It is more beautiful, in a way, than digital work could have been.

http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/superman/

Atari 2600 Magicard and Odyssey 2 Computer Intro

I am fascinated by attempts to demonstrate programming on the old videogame consoles. These programming tools were limited and primitive by today's standards, but they were pioneering efforts.

The VCS magicard was made by CommaVid and is super-rare.


http://www.racketboy.com/retro/atari/rarest-and-most-valuable-atari-2600-games
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-magicard_12094.html
https://atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=281

On the Odyssey2, there was Computer Intro.

http://www.the-nextlevel.com/odyssey2/db/game.php?gameid=12

I like this forum post about Computer Intro:

"Another exclusive for the Odyssey^2 is Computer Intro; a cart that, along with its manual, teaches its user the fundamentals of assembler and machine language programming. Say what you want about the Odyssey^2's games, sound, graphics or exclaimation-point-driven-advertising, but Computer Intro deserves nothing but respect. We're not just talking about a well-written manual, this is a programming environment that lets the user enter and run their own programs with up to 100 lines of code!"

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/87/entry-3065-computer-intro-odyssey2-1979/

Reading the manual is interesting:

http://www.ozyr.com/o2/o2comput.html

I used to think DVD menus were bad

So I was watching "Our kind of traitor" on dvd the other day, and it struck me how long I had to watch CGI company intros and text describing who made the movie. I think it was over a minute and a half before a single frame of the movie started.

It used to be that I hated DVD menus and previews because they made me wait, now I get to wait after I start the movie.

Oh yeah, what is that Disney Fastplay stuff? Fastplay would be starting the movie, thank you.

Why is my text not black on Ubuntu 16.04?

So I'm using firefox and it looks like the blacks aren't really black on my monitor.

I did a screenshot and put it into gimp and it tells me that it's 54/54/54 not 0/0/0 for black.

No wonder text doesn't look dark like black should be.

The top text has been darkened by me in gimp to 0/0/0. The bottom text is 54/54/54.

This has been zoomed up by 500%.




Actual size: