Deep Dive: Kansas City Standard Cassette Storage
Building a Kansas City Standard cassette peripheral: FSK at 2400/1200 Hz, tape transport simulation, and why saving 8 KB takes five minutes.
ARTICLES // TECHNICAL NOTES
40 ENTRIES
// WRITING
Articles
Writeups, deep dives, and devlogs — antennas and packet radio at one end, emulators and language design at the other.
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Deployment Prep and Backend Growth
Kubernetes/K3s deployment configs, CI/CD scaffolding, schema-driven API generation, and the Star Trek BASIC backend.
Three Languages, One Weekend (Sort Of)
Building BASIC, Forth, and Scheme interpreters in Rust, running them in browser workers, and what the contrast between them revealed.
The Big web/ Move and Parser Migrations
Moving the web app under web/, migrating three parsers to Pest and Pratt, and getting the Z-Machine opcode engine executing.
Deep Dive: CTS Flow Control in the Serial/Modem System
Why you can't just shovel bytes through a virtual modem: RTS/CTS backpressure, buffer gates, and the timing budget that makes dial-up feel like dial-up.
Deep Dive: The Z-Machine Interpreter
Building a Z-Machine transpiler in Rust: opcode decoding, Z-strings, branch offsets, and the constraints that make Infocom's bytecode tick.
Z-Machine Foundations and Storage Sync
Z-Machine decoder work, text handling, and SAVE/RESTORE, plus content-addressable storage with S3 sync.
The Dungeon Gets Real
Turning the dungeon crawler demo into a persistent roguelike: progression gates, deterministic daily seeds, and meta-unlocks across five pull requests.
Emulation Milestones and TypeScript Migration
Intel 8088 demos, Zig-based 6502 experiments, and migrating the frontend to TypeScript for better type safety.
Deep Dive: PETSCII and the VIC-II Text Adapter
Translating PETSCII screen memory into ANSI terminal output: character maps, colour approximation, and the minimal contract a terminal-based VIC‑II can keep.
Big Repo Restructure and Backend Migration
Splitting the repository into cores, languages, assemblers, and BIOS so the directory layout matches the dependency graph.
Build System Groundwork and Modem Plumbing
Making the WASM build honest about its dependencies, loading backends on dial, and giving the modem one source of truth for pacing.
Deep Dive: Bell 212A and V.32bis Handshakes
Simulating Bell 212A and V.32bis handshakes: phase modulation, training sweeps, and why the negotiation audio has the shape it does.
Deep Dive: Bell 103 Audio Modem and FSK Implementation
Implementing the 1962 modem standard behind 300 baud dialup: FSK modulation, Goertzel demodulation, and the two-band split that makes full duplex work.
A Small Day That Mattered
Nine small bugs in the CRT, modem, and BBS paths, cleared before they had a chance to compound.
Raspberry Pis and APRS
The first implementation of an APRS-IS Tier2 server and iGate using Raspberry Pis.
Tuning the Butternut HF9V
The second round of tuning the Butternut HF9V took place a few days after the storm on installation day.
Butternut HF9V Installation
Assembly and initial installation of the Butternut HF9V multi-band ham radio antenna.