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Hop to it: Christopher Daws and his wife, Gillian, at their farm in Bodiam, East Sussex, which supplies Hepworth
&Photo: ANDREW HASSAN
It's the weirdest thing. Pubs are shutting all over the place & about 40 a
week at the last count & yet sales of quality beers are on the up. And it's
not just sales of bottled beer either, but keg and cask beer, too, which you
drink in pubs. I can't work it out.
My new favourite local brewer, Hepworth & Co in Horsham, is brewing around
the clock in order to keep up with demand. Sales are soaring, up 18 per cent
on last year, according to the company's head brewer Andy Hepworth.
"We concentrate on making beer that a few people rave about, rather than
beer that a lot of people don't object to," he says. "This seems
to strike a chord with our customers, along with the fact that we source
everything as locally as possible. Our barley and water are local, and our
hops come from Christopher Daws's farm at Bodiam in East Sussex. In
the current climate, people like that."
I first came across Hepworth's Sussex Golden Ale in Marks & Spencer, of
all places, where it is part of the store's range of British
bottle-conditioned beers. It's light and citrus with a crisp, bitter finish
and is deeply refreshing. At only 3.8%vol, it's what Hepworth grinningly
describes as a fine breakfast beer. "It's a traditional style of bitter,"
he says. "Farmers would drink it as a thirst-quencher after which they
would go back to the plough. It needed to be light in alcohol to ensure the
furrows remained straight and the farmer didn't end up in the ditch."
Even my wife, Marina, likes it, although commendably enough, she usually waits
until lunch or at least midmorning before getting stuck in. In fact, she has
developed quite a taste for beer of late and, now I think about it, I'm
surprised that more of her girlfriends haven't.
After all, beer comes in all manner of styles and flavours. It goes well with
food, it's fat-free, cholesterol-free and it has fewer calories than wine
(and less alcohol), as well as being low in carbohydrates (a pint of beer
has half the carbs of an apple). So what's not to like? It's almost as if
beer was designed specifically with women in mind.
"Quite right!" exclaims Kristy McCready of the BitterSweet
Partnership, a multi-million pound investment funded by Molson Coors Brewing
Company to encourage more women to drink beer. "The difficulty is
persuading women what a great drink it is. We drink more than 26 million
pints of beer every day in Britain, but only eight per cent of women say
that it's their preferred drink, while 77 per cent say they never touch it."
BitterSweet's research has shown that women see wine as aspirational and chic
but beer as unsophisticated and unstylish. They believe beer is fattening
and worry about what other women will think of them if they drink it.
Apparently, women have more taste receptors than men and are more likely to
enjoy the wide variety of flavours that beer offers, but are somehow
conditioned to think they won't.
"Nobody likes their first taste of beer," says McCready. "But
for guys, it's a rite of passage, a ritual, after which they're all part of
the gang. For women, there's no such reward because all their friends will
be drinking wine and they think they'll stand out as unsophisticated and
'chavvy' among their peers, with the added risk of developing an unbecoming
beer belly."
The trouble is that most beer is made, advertised and sold by men for men.
Women just don't get much of a look in. Happily, though, that is starting to
change as more women enter the brewing industry & and not just to pull pints
in a low-cut top. The head brewer at Marston's (which makes Marks &
Spencer's Staffordshire IPA) is Emma Gilleland and the assistant head brewer
at the St Austell Brewery (which makes the M&S Cornish IPA) is Paola
Leather, who must surely be unique & a qualified female brewer from Colombia
with an MBA to boot.
"Beer is my passion," says Leather. "I never drink anything
else at home and can't understand why more women don't do the same. There
really is a beer for every occasion and I think the female market is largely
untapped. Next year we'll be bringing out our first lager specifically with
women in mind."
Sales at St Austell are booming and, like Hepworth, the brewery is at full
capacity. Sales are up 32 per cent on last year, which itself was up 30 per
cent on 2007. It can't all be drunk by men.
"Once women get beer, they really get it," says Kristy McCready. "They
just need some persuading. You can't just make it pink, put a straw in it
and call it beer for girls."
Glassware is the key. The breakthrough for Marina came with the realisation
that she didn't have to drink beer out of pint mugs. Some Innis & Gunn
Blonde Lightly Oaked Beer served in a wine glass is all it took to convince
her that beer could be hugely enjoyed. That and some Kasteel Cru in a
champagne flute. Oh, and some Worthington White Shield in a tumbler, some
Lindemans Framboise in a martini glass, some Brew Dog Paradox in a brandy
balloon, some&
Le Rosbif Writes
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PAST MONTH
AdvertisementStick a Straw in Its Brain and Suck: How to Read a ROM & NYC Resistor
Last week I posted a screed about that peculiarly modern variant of grave-robbing, . That was the W this post is the How.
Dumping the contents of a ROM onto your computer is surprisingly simple. All you need to get started is:
An Arduino Mega or similar board[ref]I’m using a ChipKit Uno32 in the example below. An ordinary Arduino doesn’t have enough I/O pins! Sorry.[/ref] (you’ll need at least 24 I/O pins).
A breadboard
An EPROM to read
Some wires and a wire stripper
Your wits[ref]the bar for wits in this instance is pretty low. Unless you’re exceptionally addled you should be fine.[/ref]
That’s all. Gather your materials and let’s get cracking!
Step negative one: What are ROMs for?
ROM is an old term for “Read-Only Memory”. Nowadays these chips are often more correctly referred to as “non-volatile memory”, but it boils down to the same thing: they’re chips that store data even after you unplug your computer. When a digital device turns on, it effectively has amnesia. The only information it has about the world is what’s stored on its ROMs. So the first thing many devices do when they wake up is start reading instructions from a ROM. It’s like [ref]complete with instructions about who to kill next.[/ref] for your computer.
Step zero: Find a board with a brain.
Almost any board of a certain age[ref]generally
or so.[/ref] which has a digital processor is likely to have a ROM of some sort on it. The easiest way to figure out whether there’s an interesting ROM on a board is to take it out and start hunting! Here’s a pile of boards from our scrap bin that are likely candidates. Let’s see what we can dig up.
Step one: Find your ROMs.
There are many types of ROM out there, but today we’ll be hunting for EPROMs. EPROM stands for “erasable programmable ROM”. [ref]How can something be “programmable” and still be considered “read only”? By giving up and calling it “non-volatile”.[/ref] They look like this:
EPROMs are erased by exposing the chip to ultraviolet light, which is why they have that distinctive quartz window you see above. However, in general it’s a bad idea to leave the window exposed like this, since over time stray UV will start to erase random bits. That’s why most EPROMs you come across will have a label over the window, like this:
Both of the labelled chips here are EPROMs. You’ll also notice that EPROMs are almost always in sockets, rather than being soldered directly to the board. This is so the data in the ROMs can be easily written or updated after the circuit boards are manufactured, and so devices can be patched or upgraded in the field. Of course, it also makes them easy for us to remove!
Another popular type of ROM is the “masked ROM”. These are true read- the data is etched on to the chip at the time they are manufactured [ref]the etching is cont this is where the term “masked” comes from.[/ref] and can not be erased or updated. Because they aren’t reprogrammable, they don’t have clear windows, and usually don’t have labels. Here’s the mainboard from a Commodore 64; can you spot the ROMs?
As you can see, it’s difficult to distinguish a masked ROM from any other chip. Because they are manufactured in large quantities, they are usually silkscreened with a custom part number, and because sockets are expensive in mass-produced hardware, the chips are often soldered directly into the board. There’s only one reliable way to determine which chips are the ROMs. This is a picture of the same board taken at midnight:
It’s pretty clear which chips are the ROMs now, right? The low green phosphorescence you can see in this image appears at the witching hour due to the fact that almost all masked ROMs are haunted[ref]THIS IS COMPLETELY TRUE[/ref]. If for some reason you can’t stay up that late to identify the ROMs,[ref]you know, bedtime.[/ref] you can try to use a schematic to find them.[ref]many early computer manufacturers created extensive technical manual a surprising number of these are available online. Be aware that schematics are also often haunted.[/ref]
Masked ROMs are clearly bad juju. Let’s stick with EPROMs.
Step two: Prepare and remove the chip.
Next, if there’s no label over the window on your EPROM, you’ll want to cover it up as soon as you can. Electrical tape works well for this. Cut a small piece and make sure the entire window is covered, as below.
You can easily pry a chip out of its socket with a flathead screwdriver. Be gentle and patient! It’s important not to bend any of the pins. Pry slowly from one side, and then the other.
If you do bend any of the pins, use some pliers to carefully straighten them out.
Step three: Identify the chip.
Now that you’ve got your ROM, the next step is to figure out exactly what sort of chip you’ve got. Read the silkscreened part number on the top of the chip. You may need to partially remove the label to see th just be sure to keep the window covered (or cover it again with some tape once you’ve figured out the part number).
The part number is usually the topmost silkscreened text on the chip. Often you’ll see a part number that contains “27C”; this is one of the most popular types of EPROM. The chips above are all either 27C256 or 27C512 parts. The last three digits of the part numbers above&# and 512– represent the amount of data the chips can store in kilobits. That’s kilobits, not kilobytes, so you’ll have to divide by eight to figure out how many kilobytes the chips can store. For example, the 27C256 can store 32 kB of data.
Also, don’t forget to record any identifying information you find on the label or board! Having a pile of data is of no use if you don’t remember where it came from.
Step four: Figure out which pin is which.
EPROMs operate in a straightforward fashion. Internally, they store a number of bytes, each of which has an “address”– a unique number. There are a number of pins on the chip that are marked as address pins. You just need to set these pins high or low to indicate the binary value of the address you’re interested in. A few nanoseconds later, the chip will set another set of pins– the “data” pins– to high or low values to reflect the data that’s stored at that address. To read the contents of the ROM, all we have to do is write all the addresses in sequence to the address pins, and read the data from the data pins.
To hook up all those pins, we need to know what each physical pin on the chip does. The easiest way to get that information is to find the datasheet for the chip in question. Although these parts have been obsolete for years, datasheets describing most of them are still readily available online. Even if you can’t find a datasheet for your particular chip, you can often find one for a similar EPROM. Here are links to datasheets for the three chips shown above:
Once you have a datasheet, look for the pin diagram. It should look something like one of these:
This is a map that shows what each pin on your chip does. The pins labelled with the letter “A” are the address pins, and the pins labelled “Q” are the data pins. The chip on the left has fifteen address pins A0-A14, which correspond to the bits of a 15-bit address. The pins Q0-Q7 correspond to the bits of the data byte.
There are other pins on your chip. If you’d like to know exactly what each one does, just about every detail you’d care to know is in the data sheet. If you just want to get up and running, though, here’s a quick cheat sheet:
The “Vcc” pin is the power pin, and should be connected to +5V.
The “GND” or “Vss” pin is the ground pin, and should be connected to ground.
The “Vpp” pin is the programming voltage pin, and should be connected to +5V (unless it’s also on see below).
The remaining pins labelled “E”, “OE”, “G”, “CE”, etc. are pins that enable the inputs and outputs. All you really need to know about these is that they need to be enabled, and that they are active low. This means you tell the chip to enable these pins by hooking them up to ground, not +5V. You can tell that they’re active low because they either have a hash mark (#) beside their names, or a little horizontal bar is drawn over their names.
That’s it! We now have enough information to start wiring up our circuit.
Step five: Breadboarding.
It’s time to grab your trusty breadboard, some wires, and start plugging things in. The first step is to insert your chip into the breadboard. Make sure you align the semicircle on the end of the chip with the corresponding mark on your diagram. I started out by hooking up everything that wasn’t an address or data line. In this case, Vcc and Vpp are connected to power, and everything else that’s not an address or data pin gets connected to ground.
Next, hook up the address lines to your Arduino Mega. If you want to use the program provided below, you should hook up pins A0-A15 in order to the pins 26-41 on the microcontroller. (If you need to use different pins, it’s easy to change the code, but try to keep them in order!)
Now, do the same with the data pins: hook up Q0-Q7 in order to pins 2-10 on your microcontroller.
Once you have all the pins hooked up, connect the power and ground connections on your breadboard to the +5V and GND connections on your microcontroller. That’s it! No passives, just lots of wires.
Before you plug anything in to a USB port, though, take a minute to double-check that all your connections are right. With so many wires, it’s easy to knock one loose when you’re inserting another one.
Step six: Software.
from github, and open it in the Arduino environment. Before you upload it to your board, read the comments and change the MAX_ADDR value to match the size of your chip (and change the Q0 and A0 values if you’re using different pin numbers than I am). Then upload away! As soon as the program starts, it will start writing the data on the EPROM to your serial port at 115200 bps. To confirm that it’s working, open the serial terminal in Arduino and press the reset button on the board. You should see a river of fast-moving hexadecimal values rush by.
Now just use your favorite serial program to capture that data to a file. Congratulations! You’ve got disk full of meaningless hieroglyphics.
Step seven: Now what?
Now it’s time to go dowsing. The bulk of the ROM probably contains binary instructions, but anything could be in there– images, fonts, screed, mysteries.
For starters, a file full of space-separated hexadecimal values isn’t really much use to anyone.
that will convert those numbers into a binary file. Once you have a binary, you might want to try opening it in a hex editor. If you know the type of processor the board is using, you might try running it through a disassembler for that processor. Disassemblers for common processors like the Z80 are readily available.
Often there are a number of strings embedded in these ROMs; you can extract these with the unix “strings” utility, or just browse through the files and see what you come up with. One of my ROMs contained the string “-Sixteen Bit Digital Audio System rev 1.32 copyright 1999 Gilderfluke & Co. DCM-“, which led me to . Another has nothing but tantalizing, cryptic hints:
fUSITE CODE(S)
fUTROUBLE RELAY
fUGROUP SPLIT
fUTIME ZONE SPLIT
fURDR NUMB 1/4 MIN.
Finding image or font data is a bit trickier, because while such data is often uncompressed, it can be represented in many ways. For instance, here’s a snippet of an image I generated from the ROM marked “Hebrew”, which is from an LED array control board and as expected contains both English and Hebrew glyphs:
To generate this image, I essentially just drew each byte as a “line” of eight pixels across. This would have created a very long, narrow image, so I cut up that “ribbon” of data into parts and put them side by side, creating the image above. Each character is stored as consecutive bytes in memory.
Now, let’s look at the character ROM from an Osbourne 1. What I did here is again draw out each bit as a dot, but instead of creating an 8-bit wide “ribbon”, I instead just drew each byte one after the other from left to right, wrapping when I reached 1024 pixels across:
The pixel data here is interleaved: first the first scan line of A, then B, then C, etc. through the entire font, and then the second scan line of A, B, C, etc.
Puzzling out how data like this is stored is mostly a matter of experimentation and expectation. How was the ROM used? Do you have schematics of the rest of the board, and what do they tell you? Did the device have a screen? A serial port?
Anyway, that’s the brink of the abyss. Take a gander and tell me what you see!
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