cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/66094
It all started with a sarcastic comment right here on Hackaday.com: ” How many phones do you know that sport a 5 and 1/4 inch diskette drive?” — and [Paul Sanjay] took that personally, or at least thought “Challenge accepted” because he immediately hooked an old Commodore floppy drive to his somewhat-less-old smartphone.
The argument started over UNIX file directories, in a post about Redox OS on smartphones— which was a [Paul Sanja] hack as well. [Paul] had everything he needed to pick up the gauntlet, and evidently did so promptly. The drive is a classic Commodore 1541, which means you’ll want to watch the demo video at 2x speed or better. (If you thought loading times felt slow in the old days, they’re positively glacial by modern standards.) The old floppy drive is plugged into a Google Pixel 3 running Postmarket OS. Sure, you could do this on Android, but a fully open Linux system is obviously the hacker’s choice. As a bonus, it makes the whole endeavor almost trivial.
Between the seven-year-old phone and the forty-year-old disk drive is an Arduino Pro Micro, configured with the XUM1541 firmware by [OpenBCM] to act as a translator. On the phone, the VICE emulator pretends to be a C64, and successfully loads Impossible Mission from an original disk. Arguably, the phone doesn’t “sport” the disk drive–if anything, it’s the other way around, given the size difference–but we think [Paul Sanja] has proven the point regardless. Bravo, [Paul].
Thanks to [Joseph Eoff], who accidentally issued the challenge and submitted the tip. If you’ve vexed someone into hacking (or been so vexed yourself), don’t hesitate to drop us a line!
We wish more people would try hacking their way through disagreements. It really, really beats a flame war.
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There was a time I actually thought that Elon Musk wanted to help save the planet by making electric cars mainstream to displace fossil fuel vehicles, and by helping humanity return to space simply for the science and exploration value.
Musk's "some kind of pedo guy" comment about the diver that dismissed Musk's efforts with the cave children was the first WTF moment, but I wrote that off has him just having a bad day as he apologized later. Musk fighting the COVID lockdown was also more evidence that concerned me. This was all before Elon's embrace of trump and GOP Nazism, and long before Elon's double Nazi salute on national television.