Crazy ideas I have
A little over a year ago I got deeply involved with the FujiNet project. I started by adding write capability for Disk II to the Apple II version, and helped out with adding other features, debugging. I also worked on bringing up FujiNet with MS-DOS over RS232. In August there was some discussion on what might be an interesting use of FujiNet that could be used as a simple cross-platform…
In May of 2024 I acquired a couple of Toshiba luggables, one of them being a T5200 . The T5200 is a 20Mhz 386DX with an orange gas plasma screen with VGA resolution. The internal hard drive is a Conner desktop 3.5” drive with an IDE interface. The RAM unfortunately is non-standard and uses proprietary Toshiba 40-pin simms, something that was used in only 2 or 3 models of Toshiba computers…
Just a few days before the end of #MARCHintosh a call went out over Mastodon asking if anyone had an Apple IIe with an Apple Workstation Card . The hope was that someone could try to use it to join the #GlobalTalk network. While I have the hardware required, I had been reluctant to try and participate in GlobalTalk. Many posts had gone by my feed about the steps required to join and it looked like…
When I got the #ForestApples many years ago, one of them came with a 16k Language Card clone in slot zero, and another RAM card in slot one. The Language Card clone had a ribbon cable going to the RAM socket at E3 as usual. The other RAM card also had its own ribbon cable going to another RAM socket! It looked like there were two Language Cards installed, something I had never seen before. I soon…
A little over a year since I started down this road , I've finally managed to do it. There were definitely some unexpected twists and turns along the way. But yes, that's right, it's now possible to write out Victor 9000 / Sirius 1 floppy disks without having to use an actual Victor machine. As with everything, one project leads to another. There is an annual BBS Week contest on…
In February of 2021, with a brand new standing desk completely devoid of clutter, I polled Twitter to ask what retro computing project I should attempt . Trying to get my Victor 9000 to boot was the most popular, and so off I went to attempt it, knowing in advance that it was likely to be an extremely difficult challenge, because not only does the Victor use a rather unusual floppy encoding…
Something I’ve wanted to do for several years is to create a cross-platform 5.25” floppy, one that could be used on two different incompatible computer systems. Not by making a “flippy” disk with data for one system on one side and data for the other on the back, but instead with everything all on a single side. This may seem like it would be trivial, but back when the…
Back in August of 2019 I had a Sing-Along Week contest on RetroBattlestations with the challenge of playing a MIDI file synchronized to a speech synthesizer singing the lyrics. In my stash of cards I found an MQX-32M MIDI card (Roland MPU-401 clone) which I wanted to use for converting MIDI signals to interface to an Apple II+ with an Echo II speech synthesizer, but ended up using a laptop with a…
October 1st started off like a normal day. I went to move a 20 year old Celeron-based iPaq near my Teletype in order to finish setting it up for the party I was having a few days later. After getting everything plugged in, it refused to boot up insisting that /sbin/init and many other files were missing. I booted into a rescue Linux via PXE and sure enough, the files were missing. Since I had had…
Saturday morning I woke up early excited about my planned experiment. I took care of all the online stuff I needed to and rushed to prepare a boot disk for the Apple II Plus as an intro for Retro Computer Day . A couple of pictures, a little bit of image conversion on "the timeshare", and a quick transfer of files to floppy using an Apple IIe with an AppleTalk link. I then went around and turned…
Not long after I started RetroBattlestations I started contemplating spending an entire day using only a retro computer, even possibly lugging it to work and using it there as well as at home. The idea of seeing whether or not an old computer could still be usable in a modern world sounded somewhat interesting, at least to me. After all, as much as computers have changed in the last 40 years, they…
As part of collecting I've managed to build up a small pile of Apple II+ computers that were purchased to get various cards and other parts. A revision 7 one made in 1984 (contrary to popular belief, Apple II+ production did not cease when the IIe came out in 1983, see last two images in gallery) had become my favorite test machine when I needed to try out a newly received card or other Apple II+…
When I first saw this clip from the BBC show Tomorrow's World several months ago I was fascinated by it and was impressed that they were sending a program for two different models of computers. It was also interesting that they chose to write something for the Apple II. Since then I thought it would be neat to try loading the program simultaneously on both models of computer and I thought Cassette…
I thought it would be nice to make a portable PBX that could travel with me when I take some of my retro computers places to demo them. The PBX would let me demonstrate how dial-up works without needing to find an actual working land-line, and if a land line was even available, without having to make an expensive long distance call. I can't remember what keywords I was looking for but the first…
My Plex server continues to fill up, mostly with various TV series and cartoons. I generally prefer to get my content from DVD or Blu-Ray disks because most of the time they include chapter markers. Chapter markers are fairly important to me, at least for TV series. Why? Because when you're watching a TV series it gets old having to watch the opening titles every single time, and trying to skip…
Just as the 40th birthday of the Commodore PET rolled around I managed to get a Commodore PET 2001 with the itty bitty calculator keyboard and a built-in cassette drive. The cassette drive on my model is some off-the-shelf cassette player that Commodore hacked up with a bandsaw and mounted under the lid of the PET. Old brittle belt Of course being 40 years old the belt on the tape drive had long…
After bringing home an IMSAI with a JAIR 8080 board from VCF West it didn't take long before I wanted to get it connected to something else. As always, my go-to communications program is Kermit. Since the JAIR 8080 board is a little bit different than other S100 or CP/M computers, I wasn't sure if there would be support for the serial ports in Kermit already. After trying out a generic Kermit…
After CGA Weekend it became pretty obvious I needed to do something about getting some kind of permanent mass storage installed in my IBM PC. I can't simply add an IDE hard drive controller since the slots are only 8-bit and in general IDE controllers are designed for 286 computers and up which have 16-bit ISA slots. 8-bit SCSI cards are uncommon and ones that can be used to boot from even more…
During June I was bombarded by an overwhelming amount of videos and discussion of the Penultimate cartridge for the VIC-20. Unable to withstand it anymore I splurged on an untested VIC-20 on eBay that also included the original box and eight cartridges and simultaneously placed an order for the Penultimate cartridge. While I had planned on getting a VIC-20 eventually, I regarded it as sort of a…
Storage comparison vs 25 years ago My server has been getting rather full from all the cartoon DVDs I have been ripping so I've been saving up my money to replace the 2TB drives in it with 8TB drives. The last time I spent this amount of money on hard drives all I got was a 5.25" full-height 350MB drive. Quite a difference 25 years makes! I didn't want to build a new server or do a new install…
You're probably reading this because you saw the #SaturdayMorningCartoons Periscope broadcast I did and you're wondering how I did it when not only don't TV stations show cartoons anymore, how I managed to find three TV stations showing classic cartoons! Some time ago I found an old Zenith CRT TV with knobs on it at a garage sale. There's no remote control on this kind of TV and the only inputs on…
The retro computing high score challenge this weekend is a special one! Unlike previous contests which were meant to inspire me to mess with computers in my collection that I'm not very familiar with and know very little about, this contest is about the Apple II which is the one I grew up with. 35 years ago in 1982 my family got an Apple II+ and in 1986 we got a IIgs. In 1990 I even worked on two…
I've posted my code which uses the RMT peripheral on the ESP32 to control WS2812 RGB LEDs. The LEDs can be controlled from within a task without any flickering because the timing of the pulses is controlled by the RMT peripheral. As the RMT peripheral exhausts its buffer it sends an interrupt which then refills the buffer just in time. I tried to make the driver fairly generic and re-usable, but…
Because of how uncommon the Cauzin Softstrip reader was, I thought it would make a great starting point for another retro computing challenge . I don't think too many people still have them around. It also seemed like combining ancient 2D barcode technology with Bitcoin might be kind of interesting too. Encoding the private key directly into a Cauzin Softstrip was too obvious. I wanted to obscure…
It's been a while since I did a retro challenge since they tend to be quite a bit of work to put together. The last two used modems and my BBS as the heart of the challenge, with the first one simply requiring dialing in with a real modem, and the second one requiring a little more work by decoding a secret message and running some special software. This time around the data won't be encoded as…