95% Chimp

February 2023 Curiosity Stream is a monthly blog article where I collect together all my links to interesting things... stuff that has piqued my interest for whatever reason. Sure, I could bookmark these links or put them on some sort of To-Read list somewhere, but why not simply put them in an online article instead. Welcome to #1. First up, a great video going through the rendering and physics tech of Teardown... so refreshing to see a different approach and a bespoke engine. [ LINK ] And as a bonus, the blog written by Dennis Gustafsson, the coder behind the renderer & physics of Teardown. [ LINK ] Thanks to Jendrik's Graphics Programming Weekly for this article with another breakdown of Teardown's rendering technology. [ LINK ] Really good lecture series on learning Vulkan. [ LINK ] Central resource collecting graphical breakdowns of games... what a goldmine... [ LINK ] Another graphics goldmine from Inigo Quilez... [ LINK ]

 Once again I'm planning on firing up this blog again and posting stuff... maybe it's my recent refusal to ever use Twitter again, or maybe it's because I'm trying to skill-up and will find the act of writing useful... whichever it is I'm hoping to get posting again. Lets see how it goes this time.

My original plan for the LINK_01... my first homebrew computer... was to ultimately have it built using a single PCB. But the more I think about that decision and the limits that would impose on the machine the more I want to go another direction. I'm heavily influenced by the RC2014 Z80 based homebrew machine which has been going since 2013... and the backplate design which the RC2014 uses goes right back to the birth of home computers. Breaking a machine down into discreet modules and making them all connect to a standard connector is a great way of managing both development and post-launch expansion. As long as the backplate supports enough signals so that you don't limit yourself the sky is literally the limit. The extra connection length may mean that you can't crank the speed up quite as high as a single-PCB machine, but maximum performance isn't something I'm aiming for with this machine... I just want to get something working which I can build upon. I'm

 I'd like to write some pithy blog articles about what I've been up to with the old electronics but I've not got the energy so I'm just going to post some pictures instead... here goes... My first actual circuit that does something. This one drives a simple 1BPP VGA monitor signal using a few pins on a Pi Pico. First shot of the LINK_01 BBC (BreadBoard Computer)... Here we have the Pico, which is in control of the whole thing, the VGA out, a bank of 3V3 to 5V voltage shifters and a bank of bi-directional shift registers, which I plan to use for letting the Pico read and write to RAM. There's a 65C02 up there too, buried behind my debug LED bank. Initial work on adding the busses to the design. 16 bit address, 8 bit data and whatever else I think is worth bussing. Now with added 8K EEPROM and RAM... I think it's the old 8K RAM I started with which has now been swapped out for a 32K one. You can see the bus sea-monstering it's way across the breadboards... I g

 It's now up on archive.org for anyone who wants to read it. HERE

This week I are mainly been liking... play.rust-lang.org The Rust books are written using rustdoc - I like the 'eating your own dogfood' philosophy, and the Rustlang folks are certainly eating it. Attributes... a clean way of doing meta stuff in your code.  New Rustacean podcast - fabulous podcast about learning Rust. Started listening to these during my daily commute - grab every minute you can to learn new stuff. Really good talk about driving a GUI system with Rust by Raph Levien