I was rummaging my old Amiga hard disk for a little talk I’m giving in Hamburg two weeks from now when I found this gem – a GUI mockup of a phone cost estimation tool I was designing, apparently:

Telekom was the only phone landline provider at the time (a spin-off of the national German postal service), and this mockup shows the fresh new tariffs introduced in 1996. For dialling up our long-distance mailbox contacts (more than 200 kilometers away), “Mondscheintarif” was the only sensible option – moonshine tariff. I remember staring at the clock impatiently, waiting for 9 PM when calls would only cost 0.36 DM every 60 seconds. I also remember seeing the sun rising outside, in horror, because the moonshine tarrif would end again at 5 AM.

A quick ten minute call of lurking and downloading maybe one 880 KB disk image would set you back by 3 € in today’s value!

The numbers in the GUI are only placeholders – it probably wasn’t 31:32 o’clock, and the 31st of December 1996 was a Tuesday, not a Wednesday/Mittwoch…

So, the nostalgia is double-edged. I sure don’t miss the pricey phone tariffs, but without having to wait for the moon to shine, I might not have had the time to doodle this little mockup in the first place. :)

Edit: It seems I mixed up the call rates and misread the cardboard dial.

At the dawn of 1996, there was already a Nachttarif (night tariff, listed in the mockup). That one was even cheaper than moonshine tariff! Also, while the initial call cost you 0.12 DM, that 0.12 DM lasted for somewhere between 36 and 240 seconds, not necessarily 60 seconds. Of course, that all depended on the distance, the the time of day, and whether it was Saturday, Sunday, or a holiday. Now I’m beginning to see the need for a call rate utility…

If I dug up the correct diagrams, a ten-minute long-distance moonshine tariff call would cost you 2 € in today’s money on any day including Saturday and Sunday, and 1.70 € on holidays. Nachttarif: 0.50 €, but that rate was only available from Monday through Friday – and in the days “between the years”, from December 27th to 30th. Regular holidays wouldn’t have any Nachttarif at all, because, um, obviously.

Or was it “Up and at them”? :)

By popular request (hi Fredrik!), I have added a rudimentary Atom feed to the site. To be honest, I’ve never really used RSS or Atom feeds much – which is kind of weird, given how many blogs I was reading on a daily basis in the heyday of weblogs…

Anyhow, point your feed reader to this address and hopefully get notified of new blog posts and pages:

• https://heckmeck.de/feed/
  Atom feed of the 20 most recent heckmeck! blog posts and pages.

The feed is rudimentary because I cannot easily include the full contents for technical reasons (there is no CMS, the pages may contain PHP code, and I would have to rewrite all resource URIs to be absolute). But I did try to extract the first paragraph as a kind of post summary. Also, the timestamp resolution is limited to full days for now. Enjoy!

After the initial enthusiasm of getting it to work, the prospects of getting a little intro onto the Nokia 3410 (see previous post) are fading. Support for Circuit Switched Data has long been shut off in the German GSM networks, and as I understand it, the 3410 would need to make a CSD call to access a WAP gateway to download new J2ME apps, since it has no other connectivity built in. (And I would have to find or set up that WAP gateway, too.) There goes my dream of self-made 96×65 pixel porn…

There are options, but they all sound tedious: Get some flashing hardware and prehistoric software to bake my content into a firmware image, or maybe get another phone and use it to operate my own GSM base station with CSD support… Easy! :)

But! At least I got to enjoy some other pixel goodness on the weekend, with a whopping resolution of 128×112 pixels and even four greyscale levels!

The nice people at Digital Retro Park had set up a Game Boy Camera for their visitors, and I gotta say, the picture quality is way better than I had expected!

Earlier that weekend at another retro event, I was finally able to get my hands on a new art Amiga – at least for a photo-op! :)

I recently got my hands on an old mobile phone, a Nokia 3410 from 2002. By coincidence, I have been following polyducks’ Nokia art jam events, and they all revolve around that specific model. So, naturally, when I stumbled upon this phone, I had to take it with me!

(I also took part in last year’s event, but I missed this year’s deadline – it would have been cool to show off an entry on real hardware.)

Notably, the 3410 was one of the first consumer phones with support for third-party apps (in the form of Java mobile apps a. k. a. J2ME). It even has OpenGL-like 3D support, as showcased by the built-in screen savers:

I’m not sure how the 96×65 pixel display fared in 2002 – was that considered “hi-res” or “okay”? My 1999 Siemens SL10 already had four colors with 97×54 pixels. Then again, that definitely wasn’t a consumer-class phone…

Since I’ve dabbled in J2ME development professionally back in the days, I would love to put something new on that screen (and on the beeper). I’m not sure what’s the easiest way to achieve this – forage a Nokia data cable and dig out some ancient Nokia phone suite software? Get an extra SIM card and hope I can download something that way? (At least in Germany, GSM/2G hasn’t been turned off yet.) I just hope I don’t have to flash the firmware or something.

Getting this phone to work was fun already:

• Buy a new Nokia power adapter, because it’s just the law that your giant box of cables contains everything but the adapter you need.
• Find a spare SIM card – without it, the phone won’t let you do anything.
• Get trolled. :)

The SIM card was easy. I found a deactivated one in an old iPhone 5, and the fact that it was cut down to a nano-SIM while the phone expects a standard-format SIM provided a great opportunity to do some hardware MacGyvering:

I even remembered the PIN code! But after the phone accepted the code, I got this message:

“Device defective” – damn, I thought this phone should work with any SIM card inserted, even if it’s deactivated? Turns out it does, and this was just a little joke by the previous owner. The previous owner, who happens to be my SO, had even told me about it in the past!

But as I was already expecting an error message at this point, I didn’t even think of it: “Gerät defekt” was set up as the phone’s welcome message twenty years ago! Heh, nice one… :)

Revision 2025 saw another lovely Amiga demo by Cosmic Orbs (Enchanted Glitch), and main coder Jobbo put together a detailled tech write-up again – I love those! The demo features tight optimizations and display tricks for the main effects, stellar transitions by Paradroid, and awesome pixel art by Facet and Prowler that works well even with very constrained palettes, often using only three or four colors.

The background effect in the end scroller was a special “Oh, wow!” moment for me: We see a bitmap being distorted in different patterns, and then being distorted back into the original image:

Back in 2017, I tried something similar for plnx (at 2:10 in the recording) when displaying the party invitation texts. Only I did it in an unnecessarily convoluted way: I set up a tool and designed the distortions by moving 16×16 pixel blocks around, gradually warping the image, and build the effect around that.

In the demo, I wanted to display the text bitmaps in their scrambled form, distort them into the readable orginal image, and distort them back into egg salad. Since my process was destroying the image (each 16×16-pixel copy operation would overwrite portions of the bitmap), I spent a lot of time setting up a just-in-time rendering pipeline that would pre-calculate half of the distortion frames for the “in” transition, play them back, distort the full image in realtime for the “out” transition, and start the next pre-rendering loop as soon as possible.

The clever method used by Jobbo is to do all the distortions in a lossless fashion using horizontal and vertical rolling shifts that don’t destroy any pixels. You can just reverse all the steps and end up with the original image again. Genious! This way, I could have scrapped the complicated back-and-forth render pipeline – just start with a pre-distorted image, un-distort until readable, pause, and distort into the fade-out… Also, this would save tons of memory, and with a pre-warped image as the starting point, the animation could still keep its direction (i. e. no need for ping-pong).

Edit: Come to think of it, you couldn’t do a “shrinking” effect easily this way because that cannot be lossless. But then again, you have room for a a much larger screen area and can do weirder transitions – like Jobbo did. :)

So, kudos to Cosmic Orbs, and thanks for the greetings! :)