Story of Commodore from the Computer Engineers' Perspective

[Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome everyone to the first talk of the day at the design lab space we're very excited to have everybody here so if you can Chris already pretty much explained everything but if you have any questions just come up and ask me or ask anybody with a silver wristband bless you we are here to help um yeah my I'm Katie I work for supply frame / hackaday and I am going to be introducing bill heard he is a self-taught hardware engineer he has been with hackaday video producing for several years now so he's actually been with the organ part of the family's actually been with the organization longer than I have which is great he's an instrumentation designers all right yeah you do that on occasion and he's best known for designing the Commodore 128 a successor to the Commodore 64 I'm really excited about this talk bill is awesome like I said part of the family and let's give a round of applause for Bill I'm on there's still time let's let's all go sneak over and watch Allen Yates and then sneak back and said we had a great time that was me shouting in the back at the other place my apologies so and I'm actually using some apple technology here so this is like having no self esteem I have to rely on the competition so my name is Bill hurt as I said as she said I didn't say it yet but now I have and I call myself a recovering Commodore engineer it was an exciting time but it takes its toll on you and you know making videos for hack adays one of the therapies that you know kind of bring me back to reality even though it's been 30 years so one of the things I'm going to do it you know the theme here is talk creating hardware and so I wanted to you know my put in my proposal to talk about what it was like to create a home computer and in this case we had five months to do it we had a CES show coming in January and it was August when we said hey let's start this thing so it's is anybody here no Commodore have y'all heard of it at least once it's okay if you have it we're gone right we're no longer around Apple one doesn't mean I have to like Apple and in fact you're going to hear me slam them a little bit let's keep it between ourselves okay so you know we went through the stages of hang on see I'm trying to use two technologies here and for an old brain like this it just doesn't work well as you may know though with Apple we had the highest selling computer home computer ever is Commodore 64 we did 27 million of them it's in the Guinness Book of World Records so again you know when you hear all these days I see like shows about the 80s and they talk about oh and they show apples right there okay they did off but but we sold 27 million and they were using our chips we were a chip fab in addition to being a computer company so yeah I got a little bit of high horse about the chip thing I want to share that with you because it's actually pretty cool other stuff we were doing but you know we did spiral out of control jacked ramil our founder left and a couple things happened the company just kind of had no direction which to go marketing became just like you see in Dilbert right just just do togas you know they killed the last unicorn Chuck pedals unicorn the guy did 6502 and you know so you've heard of like the four stages of death what are they anger denial vandalism we do this I'll tell you anybody ever did this to a Commodore logo we call it chicken lips by the way it's our secret low but you know eventually the other stages catch in acceptance so I had somebody say I can't unsee that image anymore so the I want to talk about the 80s though right who here was alive in the 80s given the eighties ooh different time we all still fought digital watches were pretty clever and Douglas Adams was still around alive to write a book right you can't go backwards in time I could go here Pink Floyd played dark side of the wall no Dark Side of the Moon or the wall live right and we didn't call long hair mullets ever I don't even think I heard the word if you had said it to me we'd be talking right we used TV sets to show the computer guy told somebody yeah we put the computer on TV what on top yeah we displayed it that's how we displayed that you know the actual computer image but we were trying to get people more used to things like monitors there's a Commodore 64 if you don't know what one looks like and we even did something like this who's seen this anybody ever see one of these oh cool in that cool app I'll have something like that doc caller see I've gotten way ahead of my Apple device here so when I got to Commodore it's like walking into a pachinko parlor you're coming from all these offices right air plays playing video games and about half the people playing and we're even supposed to be playing them I have no idea what Oh see I'm getting way ahead of the technology 80s what's this everybody know what that is today that's a wafer let's see fine do the same pose that's that's all waiver that's a wafer from the 1980s it's a five inch thing so you can may and we used to fling these like frisbees I mean you know talk about having to chip fab downstairs right a matter of fact you can uh there's a flat edge along this and if you do it right you could cleave it and make things like this so what we do is we tell the beginners here go cleave this put on the edge of something to hit it glass everywhere right I'll be shaking it out on my long hair for like three down you know three three hours afterwards so when I got to Commodore it was the coolest place to work you'd walk by and see people looking through microscopes at chips right I learned not to walk up and bang into that desk while they're doing that you know it's like meerkats where they'll turn and look at you because you just ruined all morning's worth of work one time they were looking at a chip through a microscope and they turned on the light to put it into NTSC mode and turn it off the chip was broken they couldn't write to it but they used the photons I'm like did you just use the light to change the state on the south I go ink yeah oh I'm such in the right place this is where I want to work but there was something wrong too there was the subliminal fear so I was working there when Jack terminal was still there but things were getting a little dicey but I was just a kid I was 24 and I knew kind of instinctively that we couldn't be afraid of making mistakes we're not going to get that can I curse in here we're all friends right we're not going to get this done I'll wait till later I'm really going curse we're not going to get this done if we're afraid to fail and there was this finger-pointing thing going on when I got there so one of the things I said is I'm going to make mistakes in fact if I'm doing my job right I'm going to go fast and if I have to be making mistakes so one of things I did is I wanted my enemies to help me find my mistakes right because I'd rather do that then put something in production and have millions of the mistake come back and keep slapping me for the rest of my life I have people slap me for things I actually liked I thought were good let alone the bad things but I didn't want that coming back so those of you know that the know me know I speak of Commodore is a Greek tragedy in three acts so on from the second act I'm from the c64 is done and Jack terminals on his way out this is his last day was today after this and I actually did those two computers that are in his hand and you know so so that too is as Jack leaves but before the amiga right and we had a computer called Ted and Ted is Commodores swinging a Miss I mean you know I take some crab for doing the 128th but I also did the worst line ever done by Commodore and it didn't have to be that way what had happened was Jack Turmel had said I want a business machine I want to Sinclair Killer Timex and Clara was now we had already done the Apple we killed apple with the c64 in our humble opinions so now we're going for the business market that little thing there is supposed to be $49 that's that's a Raspberry Pi these days except it's got a case keyboard and everything right so by with Jack Tramel gone marketing got confused then they confused us they're like it's not a Commodore 64 didn't say it was we know how to sell a Commodore 64 do you or is it selling itself these are the arguments via so marketing then here's another version it's it's half of this one but two-thirds of price that makes sense right then there's this one oh by the way one of them talked the 364 we absconded with the guys from T I Speak and Spell we had a talking computer in 1984 and it was supposed to be a desktop where you could talk to the desktop move things around drop them in the trash sound familiar Apple didn't invent an 86 or seven you know we had it too but it's just you know it's in the trash file eventually we do this that looked like a Commodore 64 yeah so they're happy nobody else is I had some a just wrote me an email about three days ago and he said on such-and-such a year I got a C 16 he's like what the you know as he says his worst Christmas next year he gets 128 it was his best computer so he said I was responsible for his worst and his best Christmas so but that's that's so now the thing that happens because of all this all those machines I signed off on them all suddenly the most prolific system excuse me the most prolific systems good designer a Commodore is a 24 haired long-haired party and kid with an attitude but but it's like now I'm their cash cow right because I at least know how to get stuff done so our next computer before Jack to meld left he had left he left us a gift we owned an LCD fabrication plant we were the only American producers of LCD glass we called it everything else came from literally one plant in in Japan except ours it was called Eagle pitcher and so we had an LCD computer in the works and I this is why I started in after the Ted series we actually got it done I have one of the three of these in my basement it was supposed to be evolutionary it made sense we did the game market we flopped on the business no LCD um alas commoners mismanagement one of the things that happened was the President and II do everybody member the LCD computer that Tandy had at the time it sucked if that little golden blue little Z squinted but the President and II told our then president of Commodore that there's no money in portable computers he's our competitor what are you doing listening to him he did right so I'll dump to that but this is what I started on next and let me see what I'm supposed to talk about when there's a blank scoffs all right so I was working on this and I had given it away to a guy named Jeff Porter went on to become the vice president of engineering and there was a chance to work on something that had to be done in five months well when you're a kid you know you always throw down the gauntlet right five months that sounds more exciting than an evolutionary thing that will take a year but the main thing was the guy did know what he was doing that was working on it in the there was a design going on and they overlap we had this thing called a bee series or a P series or a D series and it's something where computers went to die at Commodore we have be 128 d1 2050 256 anybody in are they familiar with any of the bees or peas or DS well that's about right yeah because who knows I mean they were elegantly designed and everything but they're what the main thing was there was a design slot resources allocated to producing one of these and the guy that was working on it was screwing up really anyone screwing up he just didn't have what it took to really do good at Commodore and so I looked at the programmers on it he looked at me his name is Fred Bowen and he's actually one of the famous people Commodore for the software side and we said let's get together let's do something but if we're going to do it that that thing I just showed you how to 65 oh nine 6809 made by Motorola wait a minute we're Commodore we own MLS technology we're the creators of the 6502 which the Apple uses so everybody take by tantu used it right it's like well let's do some with the 6502 instead we've got in the 6502 this is cool you can see out processor works in here that's really cool if you actually track it down and you can actually go to the schematic to find each gate of this but what had happened was a guy named Chuck peddle and Charlie winter below bill men shake up Allah Allah and they had developed a microprocessor there by micro we meant it fit on a chip well motorola hated that motorola was charging twenty thousand dollars for a pc you know for a processor board and he literally got a CSUN decease and desist internally stop making your microprocessor you're cut into profits he took that to mean him me and Chuck peddle that he had permission to leave and take the intellectual property with them now we're all as lawyers didn't agree with that he got his only and what check I remember a check say said I've been thrown out of better places than Motorola so he bought the 6502 s they actually started 6501 but there's a 6801 so we ended up with the 6502 and again we're chip fab plays right this this is like the layout of the o2 and at one time I actually knew where all the you know which the different sections were but one of the things that was cool I was hanging out with the the the manufacturing engineers we're wondering why we were down so much heat and this is all hanging laid out back then right they would cut Ruby lift and expose it and make photographic negatives and then reduce them and things and and then you could be a brilliant IC designer but it mattered how well you went in and checked how those Ruby lift layers had all overlapped and everything very very tedious well one of the things that got through was the chip was using a little too much power and they laid do you remember mood rings from the 80s right those crystals that they laid it crystal on this that's made to do it and they found a hot spot and one things they found was just a 200 ohm resistor from VCC to ground right and he finds it with a mood ring you know so very 80s in that so when I you hear me talk about MOS that's where I was originally hired was MOS I was on the second floor above a chip fab and this actually picture out of the Omnibus from two years ago and I just saw the Atari game over in basing that documentary when the guys walking up to the old Atari building he's like well that's that's the way I am when I see this building right but there's one thing here is because we were a chip fab you didn't park on the downwind side because we had we had ruined the water table and under FDA or FDA whoever EPA regulations they're aerating it to get it out of the ground well you ruined your paint job on your car over here if you parked on this side of the building so you'll never see I mean I it took me like three weeks to get the crap off from my first day working there now one time I said something about the 6502 and the lead designers hit yeah we got that hear what he said it's here 6502 no what are you talking about he goes to the dustiest lowest drawer among those big drawing doors and he opens it I can hear it my mind still speak and the lights dim and there's chanting right this is my memory at least and I'm burnt out okay there's incense I think we're purifying the air and he pulls out the 6502 handwritten schematic I swear it's written on parchment right they even make the blue lines on parchment so it's like just oh my god and you would find where they didn't even know what to call the pins each pin didn't have there's one that had CPS MIT Chuck peddle special guy next to me laughs is a stuff they found me later out of my car crying right I'm like it was beautiful because as a religious experience the 6502 that's how I got started as an engineer so it was they do also have pictures of me licking a Cray one somewhere out there so and it still can taste it right so I asked chuck paddle one time we did an interview with him with a young lady named Jerry Ellsworth myself and we asked him a question about the 6502 I'm like Chuck the Terminator at 6502 the first time I saw terminator in the 80s I suddenly you know how when you relax you enjoying yourself and you'd get on your own HUD you start getting code development going and stuff and it's like I'm reading the code as it flashes by as he's about to shoot the dog and stuff and and you know so terminate your evil right bender right he's okay unless he's doing the kill all humans thing so I asked pedal I said are you like an evil genius bent on world destruction what's going on man guy didn't miss a beat his father of microprocessors why would he he goes well if you look at all the equipment in the hoenn the hospitals and and you know I mean we didn't count microwaves and all that but the hospitals and life care and stuff I'm like so what your point is you've saved more lives than you've taken and he's like yeah yeah so that's how he gets that's how he you know comes to terms with that you know the all the destruction ease cost now at some point we needed our own 6502 for what we're about to do we need to depend bond it out and true to nature remember I said we got to go fast enough that we make mistakes yeah boy we made one we had what's called a bonding diagram where you take the die and you literally you know decide which wire's go from the die to the pens and back then we didn't have computers what we had was a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy so we went to the photocopier to make one more generation of it and of course by this time it's all grainy and crooked and standing at the photocopier and still see it we went yeah let's pin it out like this well we should have pinned it out like this you know 140 150 but we went like one two three four five we ran around like that the wires that's physically impossible to do that somebody at the the room where they bond these neighbor hand bonders you look in this to this room you see a whole table little ladies with microscopes and their hand-soldering chipped bond wires they had to go and turn this thing 45 degree angle to make the wires match we called this the tie tack right so yay Hertz got his own 6502 and it's up it was actually kind of cool though because we could to run the logic analyzer and whatnot so now we're off to a great start not only am i we using the chip that started my career I even have my own version even though it's screwed up so if we're going to use the 6502 and we're going to advance things we needed more memory so we need a memory management unit anybody familiar with them they dig they dig Bank stuff they move stuff around so but it'd have to be a custom chip well good we do chip fab we have our own custom chip thing so I'm like alright let's let's start we need an MMU well I told you about the LCD computer I'd worked on I have been doing the MMU in it so I just lifted up the design and took it out I'm like good I'm done with it you know are not done but I've got my MMU design this was almost the first MMU in a home in a home computer but I missed a bit called the supervisor bit so we didn't care about being on the record books we just wanted to get that stuff done but the problem with doing custom chips we've got five months to get done well I can't wait for a custom chip to be done for the programmers to start so for every chip we did we had to do an emulator board so we would design the chip twice right the chip designers are working I did this one and this is what they look like on the bottom if you thought wire wrap was easy and we this is how we got our programmers we're now down to four months to go and we've got like an emulated MMU we needed a PLA appeal like programmable logic array we had one in the c64 I mean it's what glued everything together it was also our highest failing highest chip failure it was 30 40 percent of me you're not in your head you know about this right we didn't care we called it getting it under your Christmas tree right if it failed after it was under your tree you will replace it but we got it under your tree didn't we so that that's literally was the commodores made it for the masses not the classes and we had this PLA it turns out years later I find out they had too much boron in the silicon nitride passivation now that sounds boring but if you hung around chip guys you'd all be lovable huh oh that's it you know because we would get this purple creeping crud it'd get infected with moisture and you could actually look under the microscope and watch a Commodore chip eat itself so but I needed one so hopefully we had fixed enough of it and the PLA was born and of course we have to emulate it so we've got multiple other PLA s trying to string them all together to make the 140 pin we had stolen I don't want to short anything out here with water we had stolen the PLA design that's Dolan's wrong word lifted it I know that because in the chip lab we had a big piece of cardboard and we had Polaroids around the edge and then down where the bus drivers we have been buying them from significant 8 to s 100 and we don't like buying our people's chips to put in our computer especially at our quantities so we literally they took a microscope and they're still doing it these days you know you see all these people de chipping and stuff so we stole the 60 or the PLA and for our reward it was our highest feeling part but we got one now - there's a Vic chip under here you can't see it anybody know what the Vic chip is you ever hear the Vic chip it is the most wonderful it is the chip that made obviously the Commodore 64 but it was the gain chip eight or 16 sprites I forget how many everybody know what a sprite is it's trademark we're not allowed say sprite its movable object block Texas Instruments trademark sprite but a sprite was you know in the Atari before then you had player missiles - you had one player one missile or two players two missiles well we've got these 16 sprites we can move all over the screen without using the processor and we get an interrupt when they overlapped and stuff so if you fire a missile and you just have a routine that moves at every timer and it hits it'll tell you automatically stuff wonderful wonderful chip it was also the most harshest I've ever known this thing would make the most beautiful colors and then screw the DRAM timings I mean royal I mean got down in production there hanging competin that capacitors off lines to get it shipped so it'd be under your tree even though that capacitor was like no good at you know when once the thing warmed up and we were actually not allowed to go down in production to find out what they were doing to to get these units shipped so the Vic chip was beautiful but it had its issues here I had to emulate the next Vic chip and I wanted to get DRAM Tommy's right Commodore 64's don't work by the way they look like they work they give every appearance right they would on the average they'll reboot every 20 minutes or so but they did things like we get this light blue sparkle on a dark blue screen you know without Devi's our screen was light blue and dark blue well the raid they got rid of the sparkle was they made all of the cells that weren't turned on dark blue on dark blue they're still sparkling it's just you can't see it because it's dark blue and dark blue I mean those guys got paid like $2,000 for that idea so here's our vaq and I get to use delay lines well you're not in real life I can make a perfect signal with delay lines there are four dollars each in cost twelve dollars by the time I multiply it times twelve I end up doing six million units so how many you know everything gets multiplied when you're at these mass quantities so we didn't get to use like stuff that was actually useful all right eighty comps there was an 80 columns at home but we wanted you to try it how about he columns you want it will give you a forty columns so you can still play Jumpman but you want 80 columns full we'll get to you a little you up I was going to use the sixty eight forty five a venerable venerable chip knew it cold right like back Mahan well it turns out Commodore had been working on the gazai log nine thousand I think that's what we called it it just hung on and hung on and hung on whereas we returned and product every year the business guys are on their second or third year of a 16-bit machine we'd have been first if they turned it in year well they'd been working on this 80-column chip for over a year and I remember when the head of chip design came to me it was guy named Bob Ola he said hey we're trying to find a home for the 80-column chip because it's doomed we're never going to finish the site to the Z 8,000 computer would you like to use all this I like the idea right it's a common or MLS custom chip so I look at the other designer who he had drug along with them I'm like well is it a 68 45 superset and he goes on yeah later I realized after it's too late that he didn't understand the question unfortunately and this is a mistake I made I should have been anal I should have torn that design apart like I do either but I figured the Z 8,000 people had already vetted it they've been trying to use it for a year I'm sure I'll use it the biggest mistake I made we almost didn't make see us because that so here's our new our new computer is going to have an MMU a programmable logic array the victim arced 2 or whatever I'm a microprocessor 6502 and he's a new font Romney's 80 comb and the computer like I said that I'd signed on for what's called a d1 28 it had a 60 509 funky banking which meant I don't anyone describe it and make my brain hurt how do you know they were looking at the Vic - and there's no code base because who does 60 509 so I stuck in a 6502 I added an MMU with actual windowing like we used today I added an 80 column color and we said well we're doing all this Irish let's make it c64 compatible highest selling computer in the world who wouldn't right it's like I'm your brother be one of the one of Walter Payton sir so yeah Eli or something let's add the SID chip best sound chip at the time yes yeah did you lose your finger see you went like that it's like yeah I said chip cost me that finger alright so I got to be we we found we could do things like double the clock speed you've heard of Moore's law right now everything doubles well sure let's do it ourselves here in five months right so we found a way to go twice the speed we wanted to build in floppy version because you know Commodore you'd buy a cheap computer right for 200 and then buy a $300 floppy drive with us right and it was under your Christmas tree and I wanted a reset circuit because I'm just that way right and you can't do anything in these quantities without like reinventing the wheel so this is the best job in the world for two weeks because for two weeks every variable is up in the wall up in the air you can do whatever you want for a while you picture it you rotate it you look under it you think about it but it has to start coming together and the more decisions you make the less the more constrained you are but you're still doing it with your right brain but at the end of the day you use your left wing because you now have 3,000 math equations you have to solve for and at quantities of a million every single one has to work if you blow it five percent of the time five percent of five million is a lot right a lot of money by the way on my twenty four thousand a year when I did this so they were getting their money out of me so one of the things I did in my math is I realized that plugging in the zilog CPM cartridge would draw too much power the six hundred milliamps or something would cost me $2 dollar and a half something like that again we're already getting used to the math right times five million times so I said well let's plug let's put a z80 in it so remember how he's going all 6502 made by a Commodore oh no oh now now I'm no important myself a lot I subscribe as I logs the 80 and stick it in there too even though we didn't make it we already got one we made so now we're looking at the first dual Pro I don't know first but first big a you know 8-bit dual processor system and this would come to haunt me but it would also come and say save my tail in so with four months to go about three and a half months to go this is what a prototype system look like you can barely see it because of all the emulators under here actually this was in a hackaday article this picture and I don't know what management thought this is what it looked like you know we're three and a half months out and in the board looks like this and there's only three of them that are working in the designer is you know this guy can you imagine what they thought would this is your designer and the board looks like that but nobody said are you not going to get done I mean what would you say yeah and again this came back to I was the guy that had done X last X number of computers for him so we're off to the races Vic chip drops right by drops I mean pops out of the oven first and I had asked I gotten to the guy in time said when you do a Rabb of the BIC chip I need a z80 clock unlike anything else everybody know what CMOS is what's what's the C stand for Complementary it pulls high and it pulls low equally what's in Maus means negative right or something well in Maus is good at pull and low and it sucks pulling high it goes to four volts and then it kind of just Peters out and it didn't work they tried to make a z80 clock for me using that very special spec so I like this is the first Cluj I had to go in where I just threw my ownself I don't say integrity but the problem is when you go to 5 volts using 5 volts you'll always get that tail right we're all engineers right so I stuck 12 volts in the base of a transistor and hooked it to 5 volt well 12 volts goes Wham I'm like you've got to 5 din yet click and the transistor would flip clarity and go up and it will hold it five volts but it's backwards it's a common emitter circuit in a synth configuration I've never seen and I'm scared to death because I'm going to make a million I had no other way I mean in by the way we fixed a problem before the next sunrise every day whatever the problem was the day before to stay on schedule we had to fix overnight so the next morning Sun comes up and this is what I have don't worry about how it works just notice twelve volts in there right I walked around I walked around two chip designers I walked around to the fabricators I talked to the guys that know how the bond wire sticks to the silicon sighs afraid it'd crack you know under a stress that I've never even figured out I'm afraid these things are going to what if after a million the next million transistors don't work right because I'm using it totally illegally what if after a thousand hours it stops working no I'm picturing people's Commodore 128 on airplanes and they start blowing up like today's you know we we didn't home on I still get an ear bleed blood actually out of the year when I looked at this circuit who puts 12 volts into logic right but but we had to fix one thing a day so then the 80-column chip drops and it's got a problem it was supposed to be an eighty column chip but it only had 79 the left column you'd see a little bit of flicker in there that was it and we're like looking at the desire going now you told us you were fixing things not making it worse see here's the thing chips we get to have our own chips if you can think of what you want in a computer you tell the chip guy you this is what you'll get then you pay for it with skin for the rest of your life and you live with the problems the chips bring you and this guy brought me this problem I said what'd you do to it why is this well right in the middle of this mad dash to CES he decides to put in he decides he wants to cut the power consumption so he puts what's called a back bias generator in it back bias generators make the substrate negative so pinches off harder but if you're familiar with RC curves right the further a voltage has to go the slower it is so right in the middle of this he screws with us and here's how I fixed it see that little metal tab there that's connected to the substrate I grounded his little stupid generator out and the chip started working we're back on track I fixed that one in an hour he shows up in he's pissed what'd you do to my chip fixing it go away go make it work again and it just it went on and on with that chip now sometime during this period QA we figured it'd be good to have a QA department in engineering and I mean engineers man when if we had a blind spot while designing it we're going to have a blind spot while testing it so we need somebody preferably enemies sure you can be in my enemy if you want if you're productive otherwise I'll fire you as in my enemy and make you my friend but the they declared war they didn't do it in a helpful way the the QA manager all but got on a chair and said it shall not work ok thanks well so anytime anything happened instead of going hard it's good we found this here's how we're going to plan for a fix he'd go I told you it wouldn't work haha I need dance around well I had over a an understanding with a QA department in the basement and you know it was I said give me a heads up one day the phone rings he goes they're on the way up ok now I know what's coming right I grab a sandwich did the movie Dirty Harry was out you remember that scene receipt the sandwich after after shooting the cars so I could show up in the hallway with my sandwich and there carrying it like a frickin torch that they have this cartridge aha the old annoy doesn't work now I remember I got in front of the guy and I stopped him he wants to run around he wants to do at least a couple victory laps before again I stopped him right in the hallway and I take it from his hand it's my computer it's my problem and he's like you know so now I've got it right I've got the sandwich in my other hand and I go and I plug it in and it's koala paint and what happens is this is the login screen right it actually ran it come up with this and then it would see it would start to paint the K red and then the O red and the a red and see when it gets to the eye it missed the dot on the eye and it would take two minutes to paint everything red because it had missed the dot on the eye we had moved the dot on the eye we thought it was in the wrong place on the Commodore 64 and so we cleaned up the font it turns out you can't even move the dot on the eye and be compatible with the Commodore 64 so that's all it was he's like and I'm like I start laughs and they hate it when you laugh they're like I have your career-ending thing here and I'm laughing at it right an hour later we've got a Commodore 64 font run it's called dead buggy we got a Commodore 64 font well I'm just stuck right on top of a neuron with two aren't one I had a signal it was one for 64 mode and one for 128 mode I I'm I barely finished my sandwich by the time we're done fixing it right so we did need a new font ROM so boom we're on our way to CS throw the font ROM down the road again so and then they'll try and get me fired over the font ROM remind me to tell you that fight for good so then the Commodore magic voice people show up the original bus pirate these guys are cool I told her GI Speak & Spell right do you and it was in a movie et yeah dr. dr. Richard Wiggins did that area he's like whoa talk to me I'm like hey Ritchie let's get drunk yeah so what what what this did was unlike her other cartridges which had a solder you would solder a jumper if you want her to be a game cartridge was thing plugged ain't said I'm not here you're not now if just drawn power okay let's go for the reset vector then I'm here right as you reached for FFF see if you know your 6502 he slammed the bus he said that's me he did it dynamically I'll tell you where to go I'll save you no problem was he didn't know anything about how to start up a c128 he knows how to start a c64 plus it's a Commodore product right I can't go they don't know what they're doing by the way I couldn't do that to any cartridge there was no such thing as somebody showing up with this crazily designed cartridge I saw somebody take a glitch on a read/write line to latch d0 or something I can't tell not to there's no rules so I had to put the glitches back in the Commodore 128 so so to fix this and again we're going to do it overnight right stay on schedule I thought of everything I could do before I did the next thing and that was the z 8000 or the z80 remember we shove that sucker in there just to save some power he starts at a different address zero zero zero zero his reset lines hi the 6502 s low I stuck an inverter in there now the z80 turns on first he goes I'll just go get some memory well this guy he doesn't he doesn't do anything down here z80 starts up I I called the guy who did RZ 84 the CPM but he wasn't home but his wife was and I said do you know the 80 coaches well I know I guess those 8008 used the same rep codes so alright tell me the codes to do this and I read her the thing she read me the code back over the phone this is like 8 o'clock at night and I go over and I punch it into an EEPROM burner the next morning when they walked in the z80 started first said I have frekin cartridges out there all and start setting up for Commodore 64 Mongols here you go so the z80 just saved my life right and and oh by the way when I stuck the z80 in I didn't tell management I had done it until after the boards were in and then I you know you make it sound like his idea will do all OS man do a processor you see him running off to telemarketing so we found that while we were doing this the way to do what we wanted to do was to just do it right Jack Tramel was gone there were no directions from up on top so this Commodore 128 the first computer only in computer I knew of there where a kid takes a piece of paper and says this is what we want to do and the whole secret was to keep do it faster than management they didn't even know we decided to call it the C 128 they were still walking around calling it the D 128 he got C 128 that sounds twice a c64 and runs off to tell marketing so that's that's how you know so we literally as long as we kept going and they're behind us by 10 minutes we're you know we're doing okay so we we ended up with the C 80 and then at this point we decided there's a Commodore key when you press that the z80 says well I'm putting you in the most so now I can work with every common or 64 cartridge all in one stroke so that was a good day here's the next day though again fix them every day in the 1980s a Michelob bottle look like this what's that yeah I should go get a case just to see if they still taste the same so the Vic chip drops again and it goes back in time an old problem came up now again we like moving forwards now we're down to two and a half notes right and Dave diore who is my best friend which worked out well because he's doing the chip and I'm doing the computer and he stared at that's what the looks like under a microscope I mean you'd make sense of it it's hard for me to make sense of it I'm supposedly know what some of that is it's also from a hackaday video you recognize that one Mike so it's a oh by the way since Mike's here hang on a second it's here somewhere so as you all know I do videos for hackaday and Mike's give me the sign that I'm late on mine so wait a second this is no herd and this is the hackaday super con [Music] all right shout like the newest iPhone just dropped and it has the exact same features all right shout as if the Commodore 64 64-bit version just came out oh come on all right I'll get you some kind of video of that Mike all right so what the heck was I talking about so Dave's at the bar and suddenly and we're having beers and he develops the picture he had taken while looking through the microscope and he realized that one of the layers was wrong so it's like his brain developed the picture that his his eyes had seen during the day it's like the 12-time beer helped us get through a night so we knew I was wrong he had saved half the lot it's called a 1 2 3 we keep the bottom layers and we call over to mos as they stop take the first three layers we'll send you a four five six do it again so we didn't even lose any time on this one but we got drunk that night what's that mean 10 minutes or 10 seconds okay I think I'm almost done so remember I saw one or two reset circuit turns out in Commodore didn't reset circuits you power cycled your thing right so something simple like a reset circuit there's a thing called a DMA everybody know what DMA is yeah you fired some off it's doing it for you and when you reset the computer and if it's still doing it and it's not listening to you so what happens is like one out twenty times we wouldn't reset right well at five million one out of twenty times this X number so during this time also when we're done with it with the PC board we've been working on four CS we have one month to make changes to it and then it's going to mass production so I'm not allowed to move any chips I'm not allowed to add any chips because I've already submitted to FCC and I'm not even done the rule is I can add joke I can move traces that's and I can add transistors that's the only thing I do so we end up like make it a latch out of existing garbage if you're if you do the logic on this this will give you another ear bleed right but that's actually a latching circuit done with garbage on the board I think we did this one by like 9:00 in the morning one day then we get our PC boards back we're at t-minus one and a half months in the CES show and we have to make like 40 of these things for the CES booth and 20% don't start CPM I'm sorry one problem we'll get to that all of them do this this is worse it'd be running along and go black right that's not what that screens supposed to look like in case you're not a Commodore person and it's like okay look it's a memory corruption when you say zero I'm going nuria okay justjust we'll still be friends but but so the thing about a memory corruption is here's a Vic chip on a bus here's a z80 on a bus they share the signals here's a 6502 sharing the signals with the ROM shared signals they're jumping on and off the D Rams are going we'll give me some give me the rest I've got it - anything in that can corrupt the DRAM it's the scariest thing I remember being scared but now that's the scariest thing that can happen to you because you don't know when the corruption occurred you only know it's like somebody let you know through a bunch of crap in the road and an hour later you hit and you get a flat tire well the problem isn't that you hit it the problem is the crap in the road an hour earlier one of the things I noticed was that there would be an @ sign at that one spot most often not every time and so what we're doing is we're using the video display as a logic analyzer processor done come along for an hour 100 milliseconds and trip over the bad memory but within one scan time with that at-sign getting there we knew it so I took a light pin I circled where it should be actually I took this light pin this 30 year old light pin I held this light pin up against that triggered an analyzer that triggered another one and it saw the corruption well before the processor so it's the first time we'd use one of these to fix something we traced it to a trace on the board about an eighth of an inch long where when you wrote 1 1 1 1 1 1 oh the ground bounce would make it in a 1 1 1 1 1 right so we fix that in enough time I mean we were able to put a jumper on there but this is the kind of thing that when I go to my final PC board if it does this we're we're screwed right so another fix that was a couple hours now we're almost to CES maybe I'll make your time and you know CES was everything Consumer Electronics Show the 8563 shows up and it's broken worse we can't load the font ROM in it we can't do anything the best way to describe what this designer was doing is if he had his own clock and he didn't care about my clock and he didn't try and synchronize it well if you've ever tried to walk through revolving doors with a whole bunch of boxes in your hands and you're not watching the state of the door you know you could end up you get through but some of the boxes are behind you worst case the boxes end up over there and you're still here on your ass looking well that's what was gone bad synchronization and he said well it turns out if it could happen one time in 10 to the 24th you know it'll always have what he didn't even try and fix it so we're two weeks out from the CES show and he takes a vacation which actually kind of that's nice to not have him around because he wasn't helping a lot I made a phase lock loop tower I said well if the problem is your clock and my clock and you didn't try and make up for the fact that they're different I'm going to make them the same actually here's from 30 years ago this cost us 1200 dollars to make we got him in 8 hours it's in the whole Lab set there did nothing but listen to the radio the guy courier we'd sent was on a motorcycle and we're listening to the traffic report in case there's an accident on the 202 wit involving a motorcycle so these things show up but they are as good old phase lock loop circuit rigging I take the Vic's clock and I make it into the 8563 clock and this plugs in in place of it and then I left one wire off where I didn't wire it up and I could move that wire to adjust it like the dwell on your car so we again in do that because I didn't know either but I could find it right so going into CES we pull one out of our ass so meanwhile another problem happens remember a QA they wanted it so QA wanted to get me fired one day I had done we we had a problem in the PLA PLA when you held the listing when all the way to the floor of that old green and white paper and there was an X instead of a one in one place I took the blame is my guys I said yeah we did in the manager the QA manager and he's with the other QA manager and they're sitting together something wrong he goes yeah we have proof you made the mistake and he pushes this little pile papers on the table I say yeah I up so here's how we're going to fix it we're going to do one two three member one two threes and he goes he we have proof you've broken I said yes I up here's how we're going to fix it he starts to open his mouth again in the president of MOS he didn't even clear his throat he just did that little lean forward thing in the whole room gets quiet he goes I think Bill's got it in hand and so that was you know first attempt at getting me fired right so I won't even tell you about the other pol I will real quick so we're down to two weeks to go the PLA that comes out from me making that mistake it didn't work well back biased generator we talked about those they had shorted all the pins down one side they had moved it so we ended up not moving but this is the kind of thing that we went through over no good finally pulling into Las Vegas CES shows we see billboards everywhere right we we couldn't be happier there's lies on there because marketing forgot to ask us what to do let's see if I can find you ah 1980s right can you tell just by the way people are dressed and stuff in there we get to the CS show by the way this is how you acted a CSO here I'm pouring a beer on a floppy drive here a guy is holding a beer we like Korres because out east you couldn't get Korres back in the 80s you know he's trying to break a floppy drive with a beer there they're punting one and this is a very dangerous program that's Fred Bowen you didn't want to corner him we always tried to leave him a way out so I just want to show collegiate type stuff we get there and CPM doesn't work with the new 80-column chip because nobody had told the CPM guy about all the maniacal things to do it turns out he was using a two minutes left I'll go real fast and you won't like he was using a hot air popcorn popper butter dish with an ice cube on it and putting it on his chip to make it work the problem was it was old he gets to the CES show and we explained to him he's got to change his code well he can't compile CPM he doesn't have all the computers that go with it he sits in that chair right there and edits with a disk editor the code which means he's hand calculating checksums he does all this stuff and CPM works the next day so we're fixing it till the very last day this is like a true programmers programmer you know I'm a hardware guy so you got to be really good programmer so he fixed CPM the night of the show post a post CES we have one month to go to production you'll notice this wire right here it doesn't do anything if you lift it off and put a voltmeter ohmmeter on there there's still a wire there's still trace what it happened this is the production board and you know we didn't have the tools we do today 20% of the time CPM would crash that's a deal breaker again I mean you know just everything we work for are not able to be able to go to production my boss and me were fighting because CES is over you know after CES by the way the number of showers and suicides just increased dramatically you find people wandering the halls you know just not knowing what to do with themselves so me and my boss are fighting and the CPM and I said something he said something he said then you're off the thing I said good I spent a week taking showers taking naps hanging out the bar it was the best week right Friday he comes in he goes fix it or you're fired cuz the other engineer you put on top yeah me one even close didn't have a clue I go in here with the scope and I actually I found it quick I got lucky when the z80 is running there was a ghost on the wire there was a reflection at just the wrong time it's like when the 6502 did it it worked fine it's like blowing a flute from you know like you're supposed to but the z80 is in a different place on the track and it's like blown a flute from the side and it didn't work all this wire does is connect the a-10 Linus another way we can't get a reflection when you you know reflection goes down from it goes around and keeps going so this is in every single c128 out there is this little wire sometimes it's red sometimes it's white and this is what we fought so hard for this is we ended up doing close to six million more than the Apple - one of the things I got to do is design a keyboard but I was in a hurry anybody recognize that keyboard bt 229 I was working on wow I like this and I made that two keyboard some other things have oh then they told me about the Easter Egg they didn't tell me beforehand because then they wouldn't been able to about not having enough wrong right well then take out the Easter Egg when they made the assisters how they found the font roms that where the guy tried to get me fired and stuff the QA department had never even tried all the letters by the way we ship the Commodore 128 to shift Q did not work because QA Department never even tried every key when they did this the way they knew the font ROM was wrong is when they did the V for Vaughn it had a bar in so so this got in there this was supposed to be the computer though after I left this got canceled well nice timing but this had a building drive and everything and this this would have been cool this is the computer I did like and to this day I get developers call me and say Mike first computer was a c128 D we had the 80-column screen in the 40 column screen and we had ROM honored so it was perfect for that the other thing that happened was the LCD computer went away because our our manager being our president used to be from us deal and he listened to the guy from RadioShack that said there's no money in LCD computers so and since Commodore you know like to say I'm a recovering engineer I I ended up wandering the streets I ended up in a trauma center right as a trauma technician unloading the helicopter into it I'll be like you got any stress mint anything at all I'm addicted to stress I ended up doing the ambulance calls and you know all the kind of things that go along with it but it's really sad what happened the Commodore it its mismanagement we were a great company we were on our way to the Amiga and it wasn't a Deathlok between the Amiga and the Atari doing this multicolored thing you know with the it's just bad management and so we're no longer round you get to be Apple fans I get to use one but you know for me working a Commodore was like working in Camelot you know and and so that was that was my time and so you know it's been my honor to to talk to you all today about it and as we share say is recovering engineers thanks for letting me share [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I [Music] [Music]

Channel: HACKADAY

Views: 39,946

Keywords: Hackaday SuperConference, Hackaday, Commodore, Commodore 128, Commodore LCD, Bil Herd, Computer Engineering, ECE, MOS

Id: cwr8tTFGZtI

Length: 63min 40sec (3820 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2016