The Contest

A year ago today someone came up with the bright idea to have an internal contest to see who could come up with a Delphi language cross-compiler and a minimal VCL port to the weirdest platform. About 6 months ago Steve Trefethen sent me an email with a link to one of his development machines, up popped one of those JavaScript C64 emulator’s, and about 30 seconds later, a very crude looking classic Delphi "Fishfact" demo with little rectangles for nav buttons was running in the Commodore 64 emulator, I clicked the "next" rectangle….."Angel Fish"! it actually worked! Since the graphics in original Fishfact were already 16 colors, it actually didn’t look that bad. It turned out that Allen and Steve had been leveraging a 6502 compiler port that Adam and Tagawa had been toying around with. About a week later Allen and MarkE had the VCL ported to Apple ProDOS and had Fishfact working on an Apple II emulator - the Fish were 4 color and looked horrible, but it worked! The next day I brought in my original Apple II Plus out of storage. We had an extremely tough time getting it to boot up, but after an afternoon of tinkering with my 22yr old 48k monochrome dual drive beauty we got it working on actual hardware (turned out to be a bad 80 column card - thanks Anders!). The whole team was both blown away and amused to see Fishfact running in glorious shade’s of green on the old beige box. After that everyone wanted to get into the act. A few weeks later Seppy and Jim demoed a modified version of Steve’s C64 port running on a Vic-20 emulator, they had to cut the Fishfact database down to 2 records, but it ran. ChrisH and MarkD teamed up to show off a TRS80 version, running on a Trash 80 and 13" mechanical tuner color TV with a coat hanger antennae that Chris picked up at a garage sale. Each time someone came up with a new working port we all gathered around and had a little beer and pizza bash to celebrate, but it started feeling routine after the 3rd 6502 version.

Then Dan, ChrisB, DaveL, and Jim did something a little different, they resurrected the source from the unfinished Turbo Pascal ARM compiler source code from 1993. After about a month they had a working Delphi ARM compiler for the Apple Newton. They didn’t bother trying to port any of VCL to the Newton; instead they just got the Newton SDK working with their Delphi Newton compiler and rebuilt Fishfact from scratch. Technically they didn’t follow the rules of the contest, but they did get a Delphi language app compiled and working on the Apple Newton PDA, with handwriting recognition! That was absolutely the weirdest at that point. Then in December Dawn showed up one day with a Sony PS2. I thought "this is gonna be good". She had ported the Kylix compiler to MIPS R5900 and with Alastair, Bruneau, Darren and some guys in the Kylix community they also got CLX running on the Linux for PS2 port. Very clever, fishfact worked and you could navigate with the game controller! The controller even rumbled when you reached the last record!!

We pretty much thought the contest was over, then Davidi sent out an email in early February of this year with the subject "I win"… nothing else. With great interest a bunch of us walked down to David’s office to follow up on the mysterious email. If you’ve ever been in David’s office you can’t miss the IMSAI 8080 sitting in the corner. David had moved the IMSAI out to the center of the room, and next to it JohnK was running a simple Delphi app on David’s laptop that counted up prime numbers. (someone thought it would be cute and said in a mock synthesized computer voice “do you want to play a game?”) John cross-compiled it with David’s 8080 Delphi compiler, then David loaded it into the Fischer-Freitas IMSAI mini drive he bought just for this contest (David even showed us the receipt dated November 2005! previously David only programmed the IMSAI with the front panel address switches), he flipped a few red and blue switches, and then little red lights started flashing. First 1 light, then two, then a different two, then three lights, and so on…. Sweet! It was counting up primes in binary! David was a clear shoe in to win now. But DaveW said "don’t give David the trophy just yet".

DaveW had been working on something the whole year, but wouldn’t tell anyone what it was. So last week, Dave finally shows up to the Borland campus with something huge and bulky covered up with canvas in the back of his truck. He pulls off the canvas and it’s his Stern Simpson’s Party Pinball machine. Dave and I are the resident Pinball machine collectors at Borland, and I was pretty surprised that he’d use his Simpson’s Pin for this - it’s one of the best pinball machines ever made and it’s pretty expensive. We dollied the pinball machine up to the 3rd floor. Found a nice central location to plug it in. Dave setup his laptop running his special Delphi Stern MPU compiler and an EPROM burner, shows us the Delphi source, then generated a very cut down "no-VCL" version of Fishfact, burned it to the EPROM, swapped EPROM’s on the Pin’s MPU, turned it on and sure enough, the Delphi Fish Fact app was running on the pinball machine’s dot matrix LED panel. Hit the right flipper and…. "Angel Fish"!

So after an exciting year the big contest is now over. Some of the most interesting entries didn’t actually port a VCL, so we’re removing that requirement from the contest. I have my idea who the winner is, but feel free to let us know your pick.

Happy April 1st!
Michael

Update 4/3/2006: A lightning strike Saturday night April 1st at 11:59pm wiped out all of the contest results, source code, and digital photos. Fortunately Dave stored the original EPROM under a tinfoil pyramid and it was saved from the lightning strike so we can still enjoy Pinball. We’ll also use the 13" garage sale TV for our new XBox 360 - if we can find an HD1080i to RF-Modulator. Happy to report that Davidi’s IMSAI is fine but it keeps trying to dial out to NORAD. Till next year, happy April Fools.

 

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Posted by Michael Swindell on April 1st, 2006 under Uncategorized |

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