Hell Labs

No, I am your father is so lame. Green tea is much better.

Following the port of xmp to QNX6 I wiped out Neutrino from the test machine and installed BeOS Max Edition. A new BeOS sound driver was written, based on the OSX CoreAudio driver and documentation found in the Internet. Some tweaking was required to build the driver since the SoundPlayer API is in C++ and the rest of application is C.

Sound quality is fine, terminal settings work correctly and latency is decent. Should we try Plan9 now?

Recent rediscovery of xmp and the amount of improvements on the player since then is proof that modplaying is still one of my obsessions favorite idle-time activities. Like coding, or reverse engineering file formats. Put them together, and what you get is a modplayer with support to strange file formats you possibly never heard of, such as STMIK (a precursor of Future Crew’s famous S3M format), MASI (used in some old DOS games such as Epic Pinball and Jazz Jackrabbit), DIGI Booster (Amiga), TCB Tracker (Atari) and so on. This time we had a different and intriguing challenge: a simple module format with a rather strange sound sample encoding. If you’re interested in retrocomputing, reverse engineering, investigative stories, or Python, read on.

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Do you have a Wistron laptop? What about Compal? If you have a notebook computer, the chances that it was made by those or another one of the top 5 ODM/OEM manufacturers, which also include Quanta, Inventec and Asus, is pretty high. A quick survey among the notebooks in the near vicinity revealed that many of them were actually Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Uniwill, Mitac or Clevo machines. Some ways to find out where yours came from is, in Linux:

• Check system, base board or chassis manufacturer DMI data with dmidecode. For instance, a Positivo V44 shows “Manufacturer: CLEVO Co.” and “Product Name: M550SE/M660SE”. But Compal-made HPs can have this marked as “Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard”.
• See PCI subsystem vendor IDs with lspci -vv. The aforementioned Positivo machine shows “CLEVO/KAPOK Computer”. A Positivo D35 shows “Uniwill Computer Corp”. The HPs and Acers I examined list subdevices as their own.
• See the vendor ID in the first three octets of the ethernet interface MAC address. Some HP machines have “00:16:D4″ which means Compal Communications. An Acer Aspire 3620 has a Wistron ID in its ethernet interface.

So far my LG LW20 seems to be designed and manufactured by LG itself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes from somewhere else (notebooks and hot dog sausages, nobody really knows what they’re made of).