Re: [9fans] A shot in the dark

2008-05-28 Thread Bruce Ellis
I went to that fest, it was an early AUUGM. I think it was the BFI interface team at UNSW. I'll check the c-side library (I keep everythng). brucee On 5/28/08, ron minnich [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Bakul Shah [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Not quite the same but

Re: [9fans] A shot in the dark

2008-05-28 Thread Bruce Ellis
When I did the port to the PS2 there wasn't even a light to blink. To get thru l.s I discovered a register I could write that resets the video. Only a hundred lines (most innocent) to binary chop. Ken has a better tale of a device that only had a speaker and debugging by tones. brucee On

Re: [9fans] A shot in the dark

2008-05-28 Thread Digby Tarvin
Way back in the dim distant pre-IBMPC days of Z80 PCs, my favourite debugging technique was to use the screen memory. My original Exidy Sorcerer had 1920 bytes of character oriented screen memory (this was when 8K was a respectable amount of main memory). Each byte displayed a 8x8 character

Re: [9fans] A shot in the dark

2008-05-28 Thread Digby Tarvin
That brings back memories. I think it was Dave Milway who gave a talk on the BFI at UNSW, where he revealed during question time at the end that 'BFI' stood for 'Beut Fast Interface'. Regards, DigbyT On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 05:17:07PM +1000, Bruce Ellis wrote: I went to that fest, it was an

Re: [9fans] A shot in the dark

2008-05-27 Thread Pietro Gagliardi
No, I wasn't around that time :-) But I was looking for the Hello World X11 paper a while back, which was pre-website USENIX. But on the USENIX website it seems that you can purchase papers from before 1991(?). Perhaps they had a paper? On May 27, 2008, at 6:02 PM, ron minnich wrote: OK,

Re: [9fans] A shot in the dark

2008-05-27 Thread ron minnich
On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Pietro Gagliardi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No, I wasn't around that time :-) But I was looking for the Hello World X11 paper a while back, which was pre-website USENIX. But on the USENIX website it seems that you can purchase papers from before 1991(?). Perhaps

Re: [9fans] A shot in the dark

2008-05-27 Thread Bakul Shah
On Tue, 27 May 2008 15:02:15 PDT ron minnich [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK, this is a long shot, but i'm running out of ideas. Long, long ago, at a Usenix, I saw a talk by some adventurous australians (are there any other kind?). It was concerning some neat hardware designed for kernel

Re: [9fans] A shot in the dark

2008-05-27 Thread ron minnich
On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Bakul Shah [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Not quite the same but perhaps you are thinking of Hardware Profiling of Kernels by Andrew McRae in Winter 1993 usenix. From his paper: it's good enough, and my memory probably is bad enough that this is the right one.

Re: [9fans] A shot in the dark

2008-05-27 Thread Paul Lalonde
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 FWIW, we used a similar technique just last summer debugging some PS3 code. The dev system is kind enough to include 4 front panel lights and a very lightweight API for setting them. We wound up printing out the program counter during a