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#cpm

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Digiday: TikTok ad prices fall as uncertainty keeps some advertisers away. “Advertisers are split on whether to double down or cash out as TikTok’s future in the U.S. hangs in the balance. But enough have walked away to send ad prices downward for those who do stay. CPMs on the app declined 80% between January 2024 and January 2025, according to an estimate from adtech firm AdRoll based on […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/03/22/digiday-tiktok-ad-prices-fall-as-uncertainty-keeps-some-advertisers-away/

My brand new #mfmemulator from decromancer.ca/mfm-emulator/ arrived from #Canada about a week ago. It doubles as an MFM harddisk reader as well as an emulator, and I just happened to have a 40 year old disk lying around.

#MFM was a weird standard, at least compared to SCSI and IDE. It's much closer to that of a floppy drive, than the hard disks we use today. That becomes apparent, when you realize that there are a lot of different standards for putting data on an MFM disks, and I'm just talking ones and zeroes here, not high level data like file systems. Basically, one model MFM controller probably won't read the data that another wrote on the same disk.

With that in mind, I was a little worried that the emulator wouldn't read my #CPM disk that was previously connected to an old Adaptec SCSI-to-MFM controller. To my surprise it worked like a charm, and I'm now looking at #pascal source code my dad wrote in the mid #80s. I'd call that a success! 🙂

The Decromancer · MFM EmulatorRead or emulate old MFM drives for your vintage computer

Here's a weird thing I found, while restoring my old #CPM computers from #GeminiMicrocomputers: while there were models available with Winchester drives (that's harddisks for you young folks), the setup was a little weird. This was the time of the #MFM and RLL harddrives, used by other systems such as the IBM 5150. Easily recognizable by having two flat ribbon cables instead of just one for each drive. RLL was a little more tightly packed with capacity, but basically the same concept - required slightly different controllers though.

Anyway, back to the Gemini. It featured a #SASI interface, which is sort of an early version of #SCSI. Did you connect a drive directly to it? Noooo. You connected a #Xebec SCSI/MFM controller. Did that require a lot of weird SCSI commands for telling the Xebec what disk was attached? Of course. Compared to how it's done today, very backwards.

Which meant I had zero luck with my new #zuluscsi device. zuluscsi.com/

I've got a plan B though.

ZuluSCSI - A hardware SCSI HDD & CD-ROM emulatorZuluSCSI - A hardware SCSI HDD & CD-ROM emulatorZuluSCSI™ is a SCSI computer storage emulation platform, which speaks both SCSI-1 and SCSI-2. It uses file-based SCSI HDD & CD-ROM images, similar to RaSCSI and BlueSCSI. It represents a fusion of firmware and concepts from both SCSI2SD V6 and BlueSCSI. Hard drive and CD-ROM drive images are stored on...