Hans Gelke
An open source project involving an automated telephone exchange powered by Raspberry Pi, utilizing old rotary phones. The system imitates exchange setups from different countries across the globe, allowing users to feel the genuine experience.
The hardware behind the music of Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, and more
kleines Filmröllchen
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System's sound coprocessor, the S-SMP, runs on the mostly-forgotten SPC700 architecture. To understand why the sound of Super Metroid or SMW was so ahead of its time, we will look at all the details of how this processor works and how it plays music.
Adventures running a NEC Vector Engine for fun and ... community
Johann-Tobias Schäg
The NEC Vector Engine (VE) isn't a GPU. It's a member of the only family of vector computers still alive today. Imagine a second CPU with a different instruction set running on the same Linux system. While obscure, it's a very approachable and hackable platform that is an addictingly fun machine to program and allows you to play with all the technologies seen in high-performance computing (HPC) today. I am going to cover lightheartedly what a small community learned about this singular hardware they shared: bemoaning a dangerous power plug standard, (ab)using this scientific simulation power house to run code never intended, some firmware and driver reversing, "rooting" a VE and more. I will also be giving an introduction to core concepts in HPC with knowledge transferable to any other (university) computer cluster and hopefully encouraging students and scientists to use those by making them seem less alien and hostile.