Exploration ·
A red and white ball bouncing across a purple grid sold a computer. Take it apart with live tools — the copper and the beam, colour cycling, sprites and blitter objects, the cookie-cut blit, the fight for chip RAM, and Paula's boom — and see how a 7 MHz machine made it look effortless.
Tool ·
Open a KiCad board (.kicad_pcb, KiCad 6–9) in the browser and look round it — every layer toggled, tracks, vias, zones, pads and footprints drawn as KiCad places them, the back seen from underneath, a net lit up with a click (its pads and track length), measure, find a part, board facts with the smallest clearance, export the visible layers as SVG or PNG, and send the outline to the enclosure maker.
Tool ·
Size drains, stacks and building drains from drainage fixture units, vents by developed length, trap arms, drain slope, water supply pipe from fixture units (Hunter's curves, Hazen–Williams loss and the available-pressure method) and the water heater — by the 2021 IPC or the 2021 UPC, with each table cited.
Tool ·
The smallest US conductor (NEC 2023) for a load, rule by rule — 125 % of continuous load at the terminations, ambient and bundling corrections, the breaker it must be protected by, the 14/12/10 AWG limits, parallel sets — and voltage drop by the K-factor or Chapter 9 Table 9 method, with the rule that governs highlighted. Or the reverse: what a given wire will carry and how far.
Tool ·
Size a shop's compressed air: the SCFM your tools need with their duty cycles, your compressor against it with tank pump-down and recovery times and starts per hour, pipe pressure drop for copper, black iron, aluminium or PEX-AL-PEX (Darcy–Weisbach and a rule of thumb), how much water the air drops and its dew point, and the motor's current and circuit.
Tool ·
See who owns every colour clock of an Amiga scanline — refresh, disk, audio, sprites, bitplanes, copper, blitter and the 68000 — and how screen depth, resolution, overscan and blitter-nasty steal chip-RAM time, with per-frame and per-second budgets for PAL and NTSC.
Tool ·
Every OCS, ECS and AGA custom chip register at $DFF000, searchable; bit-field decoders for DMACON, INTENA, BPLCON0–4, ADKCON, POTGO and more; a display-window and data-fetch calculator; a blitter minterm calculator; and a copper list assembler and disassembler.
Tool ·
Write 68000 assembly, build it with the real vasm assembler and vlink linker compiled to WebAssembly, and boot it on an emulated Amiga 500 (vAmiga) with the free AROS Kickstart, or your own ROM. Includes examples, a listing, a hunk view, downloadable ADFs, and the vAmiga debugger.
Tool ·
Write an Amiga copper list and watch it run against the PAL or NTSC beam — raster bars, split palettes, per-pixel colour changes, animated with expressions — and run real blits with shifts, masks, minterms, and area fill on bitmaps you draw.
Tool ·
Design colour gradients and shaded raster bars, see them quantised to Amiga OCS/ECS, AGA, Atari ST or STE colour depth with optional dithering, and export a copper list with the line-255 wrap handled, a UCopList in C, an HBL colour table, a palette ramp, or a sine table.