This is really fun! Great work!

Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it!

I just released the first alpha version of my RISC-V hobby kernel, written in Ada: https://github.com/ajxs/straylight

My next step is documenting how all of the subsystems work (such as virtual memory, allocators, drivers, etc.), then lay the project to rest. I don't have any grand ambitions for the kernel. The project was just a labor of love, and a way to learn some interesting things! Hopefully some of the documentation can serve as learning material for other people interested in osdev.

For what it's worth, Morpheus Descends had a song called 'Submerged in Adipocere', which is a similar kind of thing.

Just wanted to say hello to my fellow metalheads. And thanks for the song recommendation!

Really impressive work! I'm not sure I like the perspective any better than the original game, but the lighting makes for a nice aesthetic!

I'll take this opportunity to mention another engine-upgrade to a classic Origin game that got me excited: https://github.com/Howard-Day/WCUnity

I definitely remember the collection of boot disks I used to load the right autoexec.bat/config.sys settings for the Ultima and Wing Commander games, and how long I spent tuning these settings. I was just a kid then, but I remember the whole exercise being pretty complicated!

How does it compare with NetSurf? Whenever I'm setting up Linux, I usually start with NetSurf to download the other requirements. I'll have to give Dillo a look.

I consider Netsurf to be a beautiful and excellently well-done browser in its own right, so you can't go wrong with either.

But by comparison, Dillo is much more lightweight than even Netsurf (!!), much more brutalist, and a bit more idiosyncratic and the kind of texture and feel of how tabs behave, how you handle bookmarks, how you do searches. Dillo uses fltk while netsurf uses gtk3, and a lot of the resource usage savings in differences in vibe and feel come from that by itself. Netsurf is much more familiar if your baseline is standard modern browsers, and Netsurf does a better job of respecting CSS and rendering pages the way they should look.

Dillo can take a little bit of getting used to but it's a usable text oriented browser that I think is probably as good as it can possibly get in terms of minimalist use of resources, although at a rather significant compromise in not rendering many web pages accurately or using JavaScript or having an interface intuitive to the average person.

'sp' is the 'stack pointer' register. There's an explanation of the stack later in the guide: https://dramforever.github.io/easyriscv/#the-stack

These guys do amazing work! I wish Korg hadn't beat them to the MicroKorg VST though. I've used the MicroKorg extensively in music over the years, and would have loved an accurate VST. Unfortunately the filter in Korg's VST doesn't quite match the original, and I can't recreate some of my patches. For understandable reasons these guys aren't going to step on Korg's toes and compete with an actual commercial product.

Thank you! I really appreciate your support!

Lately I've been working on the Casio CZ101. Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll publish a partially annotated disassembled firmware on my Github, along with article too talking about its interesting NEC μPD7810G CPU. Mostly because there's almost no other information about the CPU available online, despite featuring in some prominent 80s synths.

Following Pajen's awesome lead, I poked around inside the Korg Volcas, but I didn't accomplish enough to write about it. A 16KiB EPROM full of hand-crafted 8-bit assembly is a totally different animal to 256KiB of compiler optimised ARM! One modern synth whose firmware I loaded up in Ghidra is the Prophet X: After Espen Kraft's video complaining about it, I thought I'd have a peek inside it for myself. Sequential published the firmware without stripping out the debug symbols, so if anyone else is interested there's a real possibility of progress!

Oh this is relevant to my interests.

I've been doing quite a bit of work on the Juno 106 ROMs but haven't really got my head around Ghidra yet. I've just been working from the service manuals for various versions (including the HS-60, which is probably the most complete scan of a manual) and the programming reference for the μPD7810. I notice that all of my Juno boards leave out the EPROM socket and latch that would allow it to run from external ROM - I wonder if there was ever an "upgrade" from an early version?

https://github.com/ErroneousBosh/j106roms

Hey thanks for the shoutout! I loved your article here, it is a wonderful intro to this kind of work. I started the Volca RE work on IDAPro, but moved over to Ghidra later...

A disassembly of the operating system for the series II Fairlight CMI would be fascinating, I would think.

Your bio suggests that you live in Sydney, so it would be particularly appropriate for you to examine code that was written in Rushcutters Bay!

Author here, thank you for posting this! If anyone has any questions about the article, I'd be happy to answer them!

The https://github.com/blackjetrock/ghidra-6303 repository your post links to (containing a SLEIGH spec for the HD6303) is no longer available, did you happen to save a local clone that could be re-uploaded somewhere?

Thank you very much for pointing this out! Fortunately I still have the code locally. I'll try to raise another PR to get 6303 support into Ghidra.

I found this: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/pull/6314

Thank you for finding this! Depili does great work! In another comment I mentioned that I've been working on the Casio CZ-101, which uses the NEC μPD7810 processor. Depili created a processor spec for the μCOM-87 architecture, which I've continued working on in this PR: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/pull/7930

Amazing work. I briefly explored trying to RE a more modern piece of hardware, the Tascam Portastudio DP-24SD, in order to try to fix some well-known bugs and limitations. Your article inspired me to maybe give it another go.

Previously, I managed to decode a firmware update file for the unit, but quickly found out that it uses a special-purpose DSP chip, and I wasn't able to easily find public documentation for its instruction set. So I gave up. Do you have a gut feeling on if REing and hacking this firmware could be done by a dedicated amateur, or is this probably more like professional-level work and I should find something better to do?

Interesting work, thank you. May I ask what you are going to do with it? Do you want to emulate it on a PC, or redesign it to make a VST plugin?

I just wanted to say thank you. This is a great read.

Thank you! I really appreciate it.

Very cool! I have a DX7IIFD with an EEPROM in it. It will be cool to see what I can do with this!