What’s a Sage SmartProbe? The Sage SmartProbe was a very spiffy “Hard ICE” CPU debugger, one of the few ever manufactured for use with modern (2010s) AMD x86-64 processors, and – as far as I’m aware – the only one ever sold on the mass market, rather than strictly to moneyed organizations (as e.g. Intel’s […]

Note: Please read the FAQ!!! If you cured your Sage SmartProbe of its congenital disease as per the last article on the subject, you may now be wondering what to do with it. The vendor supplied a massive Java shitware with the thing, which does not merit any discussion whatsoever. Instead, we will use the […]

Note: Please read the FAQ!!! The Sage SmartProbe was a very spiffy “Hard ICE” debugger, one of the few ever manufactured for use with modern (2010s) AMD x86-64 processors, and – as far as I’m aware – the only one ever sold on the mass market, rather than as part of “favourite son” deals (as, […]

“MyCloud Mini” is a ~$50, dual-core ARM, 256M RAM, 256M Flash, dual SATA box, in various respects similar to the famous PogoPlug. Use a standard (e.g., CP1202) TTL converter. And you will get: Stage-1 Bootloader 1 28 10:36:29 CST 2011 Attempting to set PLLA to 750MHz … plla_ctrl0 : 0x0000000A plla_ctrl1 : 0x000F0000 plla_ctrl2 : […]

Edit: This item has been adopted by Diana Coman of S.MG. This README (signed) mpi-genesis.tar.gz mpi-genesis.tar.gz.sig (See here re: formatting bug) mpi-genesis.vpatch mpi-genesis.vpatch.asciilifeform.sig mpi_second_cut.vpatch mpi_second_cut.vpatch.asciilifeform.sig —–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—– Hash: SHA512   What you see here is a very classic version of the GNU MPI (bignum) library. It has been surgically removed from GnuPG 1.4.10, […]

The public discovery of FLUXBABBITT, a modestly-clever American spy gadget – that may or may not have been “fired in anger” yet – has provoked the usual flood of media garbage (“JTAG is a Chinese back door! Threat or menace?”) What follows is some basic investigation regarding the plausible workings of this device, based only […]

Not long ago, I happened to come across a very cheap and heavily used CO2 Laser Cutting Machine, made by Full Spectrum Inc. About 1K USD, including curbside delivery from across the continent.  I also bought the traditional water chiller, air compressor, exhaust manifolds, etc: The junk seller promised an intact tube, and indeed there […]

I have decided to publish some of my “archaeological” work from last year on Cy Endfield’s MicroWriter.  The original objective was to produce a cycle-accurate emulator.  I do not currently have the free time to complete this project, so I will post my results here for anyone who might care to pick up the torch. […]

Here is a somewhat dumb example of the kind of thing one can do with Stierlitz.  Let’s say that you have some memory-mapped I/O ports in your system architecture, which you would like to test without having a working CPU design of any kind loaded into your FPGA. The Xilinx ML501 board includes a Tianma-TM162, […]

The tool described in this post may be helpful to other ab initio machine-architecture developers.  If any exist.  The rest of Loper will remain in my private code repository, because it is not a collaborative project. Meet Stierlitz [1], perhaps the world’s strangest bus analyzer.  For basic use, it requires no software at all on […]