Articles from Techtravels Amiga Blog
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Hands-Free Debugging: Reviewing Gisler Precision’s Probe Holders
Disclaimer: While I purchased these myself at full price, Gisler did pay for shipping. This is my own opinion.
Validating my dataflyer BUSS PAL replacement GAL
As some of you that have been following my reverse engineering efforts over the last few years, one of the tasks I took on was reverse engineering the BUSS PAL TIBPAL16L8-25 present in on the Expansion Systems Dataflyer plus SCSI-ONLY card. My PAL reverse engineering tutorial series on this site documents some of the steps involved.
Recapping a Samsung 204B monitor
In September 2006, I purchased a Samsung 204B SyncMaster monitor for $320+tax. It was a 4:3 monitor, and for certain tasks like my Logic Analyzer Cart, it’s perfect.
It failed in July 2024, and would no longer power on. There was a VERY faint blue flashing happening on the blue power led on the right-hand side of the unit. I figured it was a power-related problem.
Amiga QB Extract recently updated
There was a HDD backup utility for the Commodore Amiga called Quarterback, part of a suite of tools called Quarterback Tools. This utility allowed you to backup existing files on your HDD, compress and/or encrypt them, and split them across multiple floppy disks.
This backup tool stores a catalog, which contains a number of directory entries at the beginning of the backup file, and then contains file markers for either compressed (CFM + 0x90) or uncompressed (FMRK) files.
Couple hi-res images of 16902A mainboard
I just recently added another HP/Agilent logic analyzer to my collection. This time it is the 16902A. I needed to remove the CPU tray to replace the IDE HDD with a SATA SSD. As a result, I figured I’d take couple images with my copy stand and share them. Hope you enjoy!
Agilent Logic Analyzer cable teardown photos
So for today ladies and gentlemen, I present a teardown of an HP/Agilent logic analyzer cable. I think this is part number 16715-61601. This cable is used to connect one of a series of 40-pin compatible modules (many of the 167xx series, but not all) from the 60-pin connector on the LA side, to the 40-pin connectors that supports a variety pod adapters. The most popular, at least in my world, of the 40-pin pod adapters is the flying lead one, the venerable Agilent 01650-61608 pod adapters.
Identify PAL inputs and outputs
In order to properly reverse engineer a PAL, you need to correctly identify which pins are inputs, and which pins are outputs. This in some cases is trivial because some of the PAL’s pin functions are fixed. Let’s look at the example of a PAL16L8.