The Boston Diaries

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

The Repair Culture, Part II—Electric DeoxIToo

I've repaired my Logitech Trackman Marble a few times over the years, but this time the traditional fix didn't work. But I have seen enough Adrian Black computer repair videos to know that perhaps, a liberal application of DeoxIT Spray Contact Cleaner on the buttons might work. I ordered some last week, and when I went out to check the mail, I found it sitting on top of the mail box! I'm surprised it didn't fall off.

Anyway, a liberal amount of DeoxIT in the buttons and yup, that did the trick this time.

Sweet.

Dear LinkedIn, I don't think I'm the expert you want answering these questions

I cross post links to my blog on LinkedIn mainly to be contrarian, or at least think I'm providing something different than all the business related stuff posted there. But lately, I've seen notifications there like, “You're one of the few experts invited to add this collaborative article: …” and it's some article about AI, or Agile or the latest one, “Your team is falling behind on project deadlines. What web-based tools can help you catch up?”

Oh … nothing good can come from me answering these questions.

I know languages that have support for “read-only memory,” but what about “write-only memory?”

I'm still hacking away on my overengineered 6809 assembler and one feature I've beem mulling over is a form of static access checking. I have byte-level access control when running tests but I'm thinking that adding some form of “assemble time checking” would also be good. I've been writing code hitting the hardware of the Color Computer, and there are semantics around hardware that I don't think many languages (or even assembler) support—write only memory! As the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual states (only referenced here because it's a good example of what I'm talking about):

Registers are either read-only or write-only. Reading a write-only register will trash the register. Writing a read-only register will cause unexpected results.

…

When strobing any register which responds to either a read or a write, (for example copjmp2) be sure to use a MOVE.W, not CLR.W. The CLR instruction causes a read and a clear (two access) on a 68000, but only a single access on 68020 processors. This will give different results on different processors.

The Color Computer isn't quite as finicky (although the 6809 inside it also does the “read, then write” thing with the CLR instruction), but there is still memory-mapped IO that is read-only, some that is write-only, and some that has different meanings when reading and writing. And while C has some semantic support with volatile (to ensure reads and writes happen when stated) and const (to ensure the read-only nature) it still lacks a “write-only” concept. And I've never used an assembler that had “write-only” semantics either.

I'm thinking something along these lines:

		org	$FF40
DSK.CTRL	rmb/w	1	; write only

		org	$FF48
DSK.CMD		rmb/w	1	; write only
		org	$FF48
DSK.STATUS	rmb/r	1	; read only

DSK.TRACK	rmb	1	; these can be read and written
DSK.SECTOR	rmb	1
DSK.DATA	rmb	1

Here, the RMB directive just reserves a number of bytes, with a default access of “read-write.” The /W or /R designates that label as being either “write-only” or “read-only.” And if you look closely, you'll see that both DSK.CMD and DSK.STATUS are defined as the same address. It's just that writing to that address will send a command to the drive controller, while reading from that address give the current status. The only issue I have are hardware registers that can be programmed for input or output. The MC6821 used in the Color Computer has such registers, and the issue I have is how to signify this change in state in a program—that at this point in the program, such-n-such address is “read-write” but afterwards, it's “write-only.”