This weekend the Glenside Color Computer Club is holding their annual CoCoFest. This year is the 25th anniversary of the release of the TRS-80/Tandy Color Computer. I was able to attend this event two years ago and had a wonderful time.
I hope everyone there is having a blast.

Last night, on my way home, my “Check Engine” light came on as I went thru the Caldacot tunnel. I decided not to stop and just continue for home. When I got home I read my owners manual and found out that light speciffically means: Something is wrong with the emmisions systems. There is no immediate danger, but the issues should be looked into as soon as possible. It also said that this light would go on is the gas cap was not tighten properly.
Hmm, I thought to myself, I should into that tomorrow morning.
This morning I decided to take my car into the shop. I went to our regular guy, and his building was empty! I called my friend to find out where he moved to and I could not get any signals on my cell phone. I drove to her house and she was not there. I drove back to my house and called here again.
This time we talked and she told me to “Make a u-turn at Shell and he is three doors down.” So I went up the street a little and made a u-turn the Shell gas station and didn’t find anything three doors down.
So I called her back and said as much. Debbie promptly informed me that I need to do a u-turn at Shell Avenue. D’oh. Shell Avenue is down the street the other way.
After I found the place I told the guy what had happened, and he asked me “When was the last time you got gas?”
“Monday morning”, I replied.
“Because if the gas cap is loose that light will come on.”
So we went to my car ad I turned the gas cap a little. It seemed tight as usual. So we talked about how I am at 59,900 miles and need service anyway. So we scheduled it for tomorrow morning.
When I started my car to go, the “Check Engine” light turned off.

A friend of mine recently asked me to write a disassembler for the hd6309 microprocessor. Since I had already taken the m6809 disassembler in MAME and reconfigured it into a 6309 disassembler I decided to start with that work.
It turned out to be pretty easy to deMAMEify the disassembler. But after I was done, how did I know I didn’t break it? So I decided to write some test code to disassemble every 6309 opcode, including every variation of 6309 opcode. I use the unix regex library to determine if the disassembly was correct. For every opcode of every addressing mode I write a pattern, and then compare it to the resulting disassemble.
So far I have 12 opcodes begin disassembled and this results in 4,011,927 different tests. And I already found numerous bugs from the original work. They’ll need to be back ported into the hd6309 MAME disassembler.
Now I am finishing this task just to see how many opcode variations there are!

I am about half way through porting Aaron Giles new MAME debugger to MacMAME/MacMESS. It is really interesting, this is really my first exposure to Windows GUI programming. It is interesting the creating a window and creating a control in a window use the same function call, that’s different.

But with Mac OS X 10.3′s HIView API the two platforms have very similar C APIs. It is a case of: the function names have changed to protect the innocent constants.

I do like the all-in-one call Windows has that sets scroll bar properties.

My daughter painted this. I really like it.

Dolphin
17.5 in x 23.5 in
Watercolor on paper

It’s sad to admit this but I just googled for ‘MacMESS’. This is what came up. In particular, look at the text above the first returned result.

I am getting really close to finishing up a MacMESS release. I feel when Raphael see the release he will be very unhappy. I took out imgtool support, and natural keyboard support.

The current binary is really solid, and worthy of releasing to the community who have waited far to long for a release. My plan is to quickly finish up the remaining issues I have, then release. Then fix any issues that come in from the user community, update to the latest MAME/MESS versions add back in natural keyboard support and do another release.

Then my goal would be to write support for the new MAME debugger. That is, after all, the whole reason I started on this path!

In the morning sun
around seven o’clock
The parking lot fills around Toy’s R Us
And my little girl, she will get her way
Riding around on

Toddler Highway
Take my clothes and play
Toddler Highway

My family just spent the weekend at Disneyland in Los Angles. I sure do love going there.
I think I had more fun at the California Adventure theme park than the main park. I like the rides better and the shows are good also. I must recommend the Aladdin show. Here is a trick to get good seats: get in line early!
If you can’t do that do what we did. Get in line late, very late. Then when you don’t get in to see the show they’ll feel sorry for you and take your name for the next show. Now you have 45 minutes to have a quick dinner. Show up in line very late again, eventually you’ll work your way to the podium, give your name and you’ll be whisked away to the front of the line and be let in first. Before even the VIPs who paid extra for special treatment. That’s sweet.
This is the second time I’ve been to California’s Adventure park and think it is highly underrated. The California Screaming roller-coaster is a very fun ride. Soaring Over California is a great “experience flying” kind of ride — very hard to describe. It’s sort of like hang-gliding with 45 of your best friends. They also have the best water ride I’ve ever been on. But then again, I don’t get around much!

My daughter and I finished the air foil experiment. We ended up building two different wings. One would fly with a lower wind speed. The experiment was to predict which wing flew better and explain why.
We got a “participant” ribbon.
The judges couldn’t get the wings to fly at all. Even though we tested them many times at our house and Bethany demonstrated it successfully during class.
I tried to get the wings to fly during the science fair and they didn’t work at all. The wings looked fine. They just didn’t fly anymore. This made Bethany really mad.
Megan also entered an exhibit. Her exhibit was on diabetes. Of the four first graders who entered a project, Megan got not the first prize, nor second, nor third, but an Honorable Mention ribbon. This infuriated Bethany, but we didn’t want to tell her why Megan did so well. Because we didn’t want Megan to feel bad about coming in last. She really liked the honorable mention ribbon.