11 ms·

I don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great.

ForHackernews 7mo ago
Same. Cloning proprietary hardware is doing God's work. We should all hope someone in the modern era can knock off NVidia and Apple silicon. Competition is great for everyone except Apple shareholders.
- mentos 7mo ago
  Yea I feel like if even one kid was introduced to the world of computing through a Franklin it justifies their existence.
  - drzaiusx11 7mo ago
    They sold 100,000 of em. I bet there was more than one.
  - the_af 7mo ago
    That's how I feel about clones in general. Ok, I owned a real Commodore 64, but all my PCs during my formative years were clones. Actually, this wasn't such a good example since I believe PC clones were legal. Let me change it to something more controversial: I feel the same way about software piracy. All my games and software growing up were pirated. I didn't even understand this, because you got software by going to a store and buying it, e.g. C64 games... but it was all warez. Same with DOS or Windows (which one usually got from someone else). All of my early programming languages were pirated too: QuickBasic, GW Basic, Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, etc. And this is how people got acquainted with computers, and then got into programming (games, systems, business software) as a job. So piracy was a net win.
    - Projectiboga 7mo ago
      I do recall the assistant at the store when I first showed up said wait for the upcoming Commodore 64 more stuff for much less money. But as a 14 year old I wasn't ready to wait after being exposed to Apple the summer before. That professor really advocated for the Atari 800 and I really considered it, but the Apple's easier to copy floppies along with a much larger user base won me over.
- wildzzz 7mo ago
  I did this with some proprietary hardware. It's an HDMI encoder lor the original Xbox. I designed a PCB to be electrically compatible along with being compatible with running a binary provided by the original maker. I used the same microcontroller so it could be flashed using his binaries that I was able to extract from an app he distributes. Normally, you'd run the updater app on the Xbox which sends a firmware update over the SMBus to the microcontroller but it's easy to slice up the updater app to extract the firmware image. Then you can use an ST programmer to flash the image to my clone. Despite what it says on my GitHub, I did actually get it working but there's some irregularities between original Xbox revisions that make my design not universal. Oh well, at least it works for me and I didn't have to give this guy any of my money. The whole project started because this guy changed the design of his HDMI encoder to move the microcontroller off the board and into another board he sells that provides an alternative BIOS for the Xbox. Meaning instead of paying $60 for one board, you now pay $50 for the neutered board plus $100 for his other board. Someone released a barebones board that had the same microcontroller (running his firmware) on it that could be connected to this neutered board and this guy sent a DMCA takedown notice to a site hosting the instructions on how to build it. A lot of people in the original Xbox modding community got upset so some people were looking for ways to build open source HDMI encoders as a means to kick the proprietary junk from the community. I took it a step further and just built a clone. https://github.com/TeamFoxbat/XDV https://github.com/TeamFoxbat/XDV
gnfargbl 7mo ago
> Apparently, when Steve Wozniak first got his hands on an ACE 1000-series machine, “he felt that Franklin had even copied the circuit-board layout, right down to how the chips were arranged.” Reviewers were even able to pull cards out of an Apple ][ motherboard, plug them into an ACE machine, and they’d work without any other modifications. And while I couldn’t verify this claim anywhere else, one retro hardware forum had a comment claiming “they outright stole the Apple BIOS code, including -- bad move -- the copyright notice, itself.” Building a functional equivalent is one thing, making a direct copy in a different case is another.
- dwgumby 7mo ago
  > Reviewers were even able to pull cards out of an Apple ][ motherboard, plug them into an ACE machine, and they’d work without any other modifications Which was kind of the point? If I remember correctly Woz had patents related to the video generation hardware which Franklin did change to try to avoid infringing but I can’t remember if the court agreed that it did it successfully.
  - drzaiusx11 7mo ago
    Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article. The author implies "the nerve of them", when they're simply providing exactly what they advertise: a 100% compatible machine.
    - Projectiboga 7mo ago
      I had one, I believe they never delivered on the color compatibility. Mine came with an easy on the eyes amber crt. Here it is the Ace 1000 was greyscale only but was 80 column. Wohlscheid - Computer Ads from the Past Unfortunately, the Franklin didn't copy the Apple's ability to display color graphics. It was limited to “shades of grey and black and white”. https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/franklins-ace-1000 https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/franklins-ace-... I got the computer with an 80 column graphics card one floppy drive and an amber monitor. It was less than a similar Apple bundle. I got mine in December 1980. I also got a disk of copy programs and a floppy with a few pirated games. Those two got me started as an early pirate video game collector. That was freshman year of high school. I grew out of video games a few years later. I did use it for word processing in college. I had a decent dot matrix printer which had a parallel interface but I chose to take floppy to a study location with a small printing lab. I would copy my file from the 5.5" to a 3.5" pro-dos formatted disc. Then open the doc in Word on a Mac and get it formatted nicer. I don't recall if Word had Auto-Format back then. And laser print my paper for a sharp look. I still keep a licensed Word on hand just for that single feature. I printed a few papers using my Franklin to Smith Corona typewriter via a cable, had an english teacher who didn't want dot matrix and that was more fun than typing manually. Whew this brought back a flood of my early tech memories.
dwgumby 7mo ago
I worked at Franklin and was one an early hire. Using the Apple ROM code was an explicit choice. There was no real defined API so a lot of apps called random routines in ROM or referenced arbitrary ROM data and if it wasn’t there the app broke. Franklin’s argument was that the ROM was the API and if you wanted to be compatible it had to be identical. Court didn’t agree, probably rightfully so. But Franklin was a fun place to work. It survived for years after the court decision and pivoted to making handheld gadgets. Their electronic Bible was apparently really popular in some circles.
- drzaiusx11 7mo ago
  Honestly their argument works for me. It truly cannot be "100% compatible" without sharing the same memory layout/contents in this case. Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations. I find it more "sad" than "upsetting" as the original author implies in this piece. Personally, I love cloned hardware and software. I seek out clones when I can and even make my own (for fun, not profit.) I have a few Atari 2600 hardware clones I designed and built along with eprom cloning software and burning hardware. Not for any real reason, just because I like figuring out how hardware and software works and cloning is often a means to that end.
  - djmips 7mo ago
    How do you design Atari 2600 clones? Do you have to replicate the TIA?
    - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
      Yes, although there are a number of ways to "cheat" aside from just pulling chips...
    - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
      Apparently my terse sister comment is beyond the edit timeout threshold, I had meant to follow up with more details. If there's interest around general "chip emulation" techniques I've employed, I could try and do a blog write-up. The first attempt was using a PIC32 with a bunch of lookup tables a couple decades ago. Then I played with fpgas (the cheap lattice ones.) My latest attempts relied on a combination of SoC and inline rom dumps using all the known bank switching schemes, which tbh was a pita to validate until I finally bought a harmony cart (I was eproming up until a decade ago.) The SoC design allowed me to use a ARM that could output HDMI (via daughter board) with various filters to mimic CRTs artifacts and the like which I found fun.
the_af 7mo ago
> I don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great. The whole article is a framed as some kind of denunciation, but when I read it, it just seemed like a charming piece of computer history. Bob Applegate's blog is also charming, but a bit difficult to navigate to find the good bits.
pimlottc 7mo ago
And honestly what’s wrong with the ads? Sure, they’re a bit cheesy, but not really that much out of the ordinary for magazine ads back then. There were certainly much worse (sensational, sexiest) ones… Let’s not forget, IBM themselves used Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” [0][1][2] in their home computer ads for quite a while back then, so this isn’t that different. 0: https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1o2y2gs/multipage_ad_for_ibm_pcjr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1o2y2gs/m... 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4 2: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMtramp.html https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMt...
- CamperBob2 7mo ago
  The whole article is just plain weird. They make it sound like a personal slight, and not a legal battle pitting two companies with a history of questionable behavior against each other. As others have noted, it was far from a slam-dunk case that what Franklin did was illegal or unethical. "You could even pull a card out of an Apple and plug it in" is not exactly the rhetorical death blow that the author of this article was aiming for.
mrandish 7mo ago
From a modern context, I think it's hard to appreciate that in 1981 it wasn't clear that a computer BIOS would be copyrightable. Franklin even won the initial court case.
- chasil 7mo ago
  Compaq notably did this correctly. https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/Compaq_BIOS https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/Compaq_BIOS

Same. Cloning proprietary hardware is doing God's work. We should all hope someone in the modern era can knock off NVidia and Apple silicon. Competition is great for everyone except Apple shareholders.

mentos 7mo ago
Yea I feel like if even one kid was introduced to the world of computing through a Franklin it justifies their existence.
- drzaiusx11 7mo ago
  They sold 100,000 of em. I bet there was more than one.
- the_af 7mo ago
  That's how I feel about clones in general. Ok, I owned a real Commodore 64, but all my PCs during my formative years were clones. Actually, this wasn't such a good example since I believe PC clones were legal. Let me change it to something more controversial: I feel the same way about software piracy. All my games and software growing up were pirated. I didn't even understand this, because you got software by going to a store and buying it, e.g. C64 games... but it was all warez. Same with DOS or Windows (which one usually got from someone else). All of my early programming languages were pirated too: QuickBasic, GW Basic, Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, etc. And this is how people got acquainted with computers, and then got into programming (games, systems, business software) as a job. So piracy was a net win.
  - Projectiboga 7mo ago
    I do recall the assistant at the store when I first showed up said wait for the upcoming Commodore 64 more stuff for much less money. But as a 14 year old I wasn't ready to wait after being exposed to Apple the summer before. That professor really advocated for the Atari 800 and I really considered it, but the Apple's easier to copy floppies along with a much larger user base won me over.
wildzzz 7mo ago
I did this with some proprietary hardware. It's an HDMI encoder lor the original Xbox. I designed a PCB to be electrically compatible along with being compatible with running a binary provided by the original maker. I used the same microcontroller so it could be flashed using his binaries that I was able to extract from an app he distributes. Normally, you'd run the updater app on the Xbox which sends a firmware update over the SMBus to the microcontroller but it's easy to slice up the updater app to extract the firmware image. Then you can use an ST programmer to flash the image to my clone. Despite what it says on my GitHub, I did actually get it working but there's some irregularities between original Xbox revisions that make my design not universal. Oh well, at least it works for me and I didn't have to give this guy any of my money. The whole project started because this guy changed the design of his HDMI encoder to move the microcontroller off the board and into another board he sells that provides an alternative BIOS for the Xbox. Meaning instead of paying $60 for one board, you now pay $50 for the neutered board plus $100 for his other board. Someone released a barebones board that had the same microcontroller (running his firmware) on it that could be connected to this neutered board and this guy sent a DMCA takedown notice to a site hosting the instructions on how to build it. A lot of people in the original Xbox modding community got upset so some people were looking for ways to build open source HDMI encoders as a means to kick the proprietary junk from the community. I took it a step further and just built a clone. https://github.com/TeamFoxbat/XDV https://github.com/TeamFoxbat/XDV

gnfargbl 7mo ago

> Apparently, when Steve Wozniak first got his hands on an ACE 1000-series machine, “he felt that Franklin had even copied the circuit-board layout, right down to how the chips were arranged.” Reviewers were even able to pull cards out of an Apple ][ motherboard, plug them into an ACE machine, and they’d work without any other modifications. And while I couldn’t verify this claim anywhere else, one retro hardware forum had a comment claiming “they outright stole the Apple BIOS code, including -- bad move -- the copyright notice, itself.” Building a functional equivalent is one thing, making a direct copy in a different case is another.

dwgumby 7mo ago
> Reviewers were even able to pull cards out of an Apple ][ motherboard, plug them into an ACE machine, and they’d work without any other modifications Which was kind of the point? If I remember correctly Woz had patents related to the video generation hardware which Franklin did change to try to avoid infringing but I can’t remember if the court agreed that it did it successfully.
- drzaiusx11 7mo ago
  Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article. The author implies "the nerve of them", when they're simply providing exactly what they advertise: a 100% compatible machine.
  - Projectiboga 7mo ago
    I had one, I believe they never delivered on the color compatibility. Mine came with an easy on the eyes amber crt. Here it is the Ace 1000 was greyscale only but was 80 column. Wohlscheid - Computer Ads from the Past Unfortunately, the Franklin didn't copy the Apple's ability to display color graphics. It was limited to “shades of grey and black and white”. https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/franklins-ace-1000 https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/franklins-ace-... I got the computer with an 80 column graphics card one floppy drive and an amber monitor. It was less than a similar Apple bundle. I got mine in December 1980. I also got a disk of copy programs and a floppy with a few pirated games. Those two got me started as an early pirate video game collector. That was freshman year of high school. I grew out of video games a few years later. I did use it for word processing in college. I had a decent dot matrix printer which had a parallel interface but I chose to take floppy to a study location with a small printing lab. I would copy my file from the 5.5" to a 3.5" pro-dos formatted disc. Then open the doc in Word on a Mac and get it formatted nicer. I don't recall if Word had Auto-Format back then. And laser print my paper for a sharp look. I still keep a licensed Word on hand just for that single feature. I printed a few papers using my Franklin to Smith Corona typewriter via a cable, had an english teacher who didn't want dot matrix and that was more fun than typing manually. Whew this brought back a flood of my early tech memories.

dwgumby 7mo ago

I worked at Franklin and was one an early hire. Using the Apple ROM code was an explicit choice. There was no real defined API so a lot of apps called random routines in ROM or referenced arbitrary ROM data and if it wasn’t there the app broke. Franklin’s argument was that the ROM was the API and if you wanted to be compatible it had to be identical. Court didn’t agree, probably rightfully so. But Franklin was a fun place to work. It survived for years after the court decision and pivoted to making handheld gadgets. Their electronic Bible was apparently really popular in some circles.

drzaiusx11 7mo ago
Honestly their argument works for me. It truly cannot be "100% compatible" without sharing the same memory layout/contents in this case. Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations. I find it more "sad" than "upsetting" as the original author implies in this piece. Personally, I love cloned hardware and software. I seek out clones when I can and even make my own (for fun, not profit.) I have a few Atari 2600 hardware clones I designed and built along with eprom cloning software and burning hardware. Not for any real reason, just because I like figuring out how hardware and software works and cloning is often a means to that end.
- djmips 7mo ago
  How do you design Atari 2600 clones? Do you have to replicate the TIA?
  - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
    Yes, although there are a number of ways to "cheat" aside from just pulling chips...
  - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
    Apparently my terse sister comment is beyond the edit timeout threshold, I had meant to follow up with more details. If there's interest around general "chip emulation" techniques I've employed, I could try and do a blog write-up. The first attempt was using a PIC32 with a bunch of lookup tables a couple decades ago. Then I played with fpgas (the cheap lattice ones.) My latest attempts relied on a combination of SoC and inline rom dumps using all the known bank switching schemes, which tbh was a pita to validate until I finally bought a harmony cart (I was eproming up until a decade ago.) The SoC design allowed me to use a ARM that could output HDMI (via daughter board) with various filters to mimic CRTs artifacts and the like which I found fun.

the_af 7mo ago

> I don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great. The whole article is a framed as some kind of denunciation, but when I read it, it just seemed like a charming piece of computer history. Bob Applegate's blog is also charming, but a bit difficult to navigate to find the good bits.

pimlottc 7mo ago

And honestly what’s wrong with the ads? Sure, they’re a bit cheesy, but not really that much out of the ordinary for magazine ads back then. There were certainly much worse (sensational, sexiest) ones… Let’s not forget, IBM themselves used Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” [0][1][2] in their home computer ads for quite a while back then, so this isn’t that different. 0: https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1o2y2gs/multipage_ad_for_ibm_pcjr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1o2y2gs/m... 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4 2: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMtramp.html https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMt...

CamperBob2 7mo ago
The whole article is just plain weird. They make it sound like a personal slight, and not a legal battle pitting two companies with a history of questionable behavior against each other. As others have noted, it was far from a slam-dunk case that what Franklin did was illegal or unethical. "You could even pull a card out of an Apple and plug it in" is not exactly the rhetorical death blow that the author of this article was aiming for.

mrandish 7mo ago

From a modern context, I think it's hard to appreciate that in 1981 it wasn't clear that a computer BIOS would be copyrightable. Franklin even won the initial court case.

chasil 7mo ago
Compaq notably did this correctly. https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/Compaq_BIOS https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/Compaq_BIOS