Sven Krasser's Blog

The most recent family trip was to go skiing in Mammoth, CA, and I brought my latest lens with me, the TTArtisan 11mm F2.8 Fisheye. It’s my second third-party lens for the Nikon Z system. Like my Tokina SZX 400mm f/8, the TTArtisan is a manual focus non-CPU lens. But those commonalities aside, it is the polar opposite of the Tokina. It has a fast f/2.8 maximum aperture (exclusively controlled over an aperture ring since the lens does not exchange any data with the camera) in contrast to the slow fixed f/8 aperture of the Tokina. And with a focal length of 11mm it is squarely in the ultrawide angle territory, compared to the Tokina with its 400mm super-telephoto focal length at the other end of the spectrum. It ships in a nicely designed box, and considering its compact dimensions it brings some weight to the table: 439g according to the manufacturer.

Since my last post in October about Cab Hustle, my Commodore 64 retro game programming project, there has been some progress—mostly under the hood. Before diving into it, the game was also covered on the Universe64 YouTube channel. That was a bit of a pleasant surprise since outside of this blog and on my YouTube channel, I haven’t been talking about it at all.

As a quick review to catch everyone up: Cab Hustle is a two-dimensional thrust/gravity-based game. The objective is to pick up passengers by landing on platforms and then bring them to their requested destination platform. Here’s what’s new (alongside some background about developing for the C64).

Outside of cooking and eating turkey, Shannon and I spent the last week gallivanting around Sedona, Arizona, by foot, car, and UTV. Below are a couple of pictures I took using my Z6 II, my X100T, and my iPhone.

Over the past months I’ve been sporadically working on a new game for the Commodore 64, which for now is called “Cab Hustle.” The game’s objective is to maneuver a flying taxi through the playing area to haul passengers between platforms, similar to “Space Taxi” on the C64 with a ship that flies like the vessels in “TurboRaketti” on the Amiga.

After a pandemic-induced one-and-a-half year hiatus, my wife and I were finally able to see the family in Germany for a trip to the island of Sylt. Below are a couple of snapshots, taken with my trusty X100T.

Nikon’s lens lineup for the Z-mount is still fairly sparse at the telephoto end of the spectrum (as I noted e.g. in my post on the Sentinel-6 launch). I was hoping for the 100-400mm being released soon by Nikon, but so far there hasn’t been much movement on lenses with long focal lengths outside of the 70-200mm and the 24-200mm. To fill up my camera bag in the interim with some longer lenses, I decided to give the Tokina SZX 400mm f/8 a try now that it comes as a Z-mount version.

What follows has been a bit of an odd project to me. My 3D printer so far has been a Flashforge Creator Pro (you can see it in action on my YouTube channel), and it generally “just works.” The thought of modding a 3D printer was as remote to me as messing with the innards of my (paper) laser printer. That changed when my friend Marcus approached me to find a new home for his second printer, the aforementioned CR-X Pro (specifically, an upgraded version sold by TinyMachines3D). The printer has an appealingly large print volume, but the catch was that it no longer had a hotend. However, Marcus had a new dual-nozzle E3D Chimera hotend already at hand, along with a bunch of crimped extension cables. So with a bunch of goodies stashed in my hallway, I set out to solve this electromechanical puzzle. If you’re already familiar with messing with your printer, this post will contain a bunch of obvious facts, quite possibly some solutions contrary to best practices, and maybe a couple of chuckles as I work through the project by trial and error. Lots of error. But if you’re a casual 3D-printing enthusiast, there are hopefully a few useful pieces of information in here, too.

This month, my wife, our beagle, and I spent a week in Joshua Tree. Here are a couple of photos from the National Park and the area.

I’ve posted a new video on my YouTube channel covering my earlier posts on building a C64 using an Ultimate 64 board and 3D-printing a joystick and paddle controller. While this utilizes a bunch of old footage and pictures from earlier last year, it also gave me an opportunity to use my new camera and some new backdrops I got (for example, for this shot of the components for the paddle controller). You can view the video below.

The C64’s user interface is Commodore BASIC v2, which presents itself without delay as a REPL the instant the machine is powered on. BASIC lives in 8 KB of ROM of 6502 machine code. Michael Steil has worked on collecting versions of the BASIC source for various 8-bit platforms, putting them into a single source tree, and adding comments. There’s also EhBASIC by Lee Davidson, a popular BASIC interpreter used by a number of 6502-based homebrew computers. EhBASIC fits into 10 KB.

There were other interpreted languages available for the C64, e.g. LISP dialects such as LISP 64 (page in German). From a glance at the screenshots, LISP 64 is delivered as a 52-block large PRG file, so about 13 KB in size.

With scripting on resource-deprived microcontrollers becoming more popular, I was wondering if there are also new options for 6502-based systems. Alas, languages like MicroPython still require at least hundreds of KB of memory for the interpreter. Then, I came across an excellent blog post by Serge Zaitsev who was evidently on a similar mission in 2016.