Retro computing on steroids with SidecarTridge
Put enough goats on a small island and eventually they will eat it to death. The grass goes first. Then the bushes. After that they start chewing the bark off the trees. Once the roots are exposed, the rain does the rest. What used to be soil becomes rock. The goats do not hate the island. They are not trying to destroy it. They just keep eating. European bureaucracy works in much the same way. It…
the SidecarT turns three Three years. Give or take. I built the first one because I wanted one and nobody else was going to make it. Soldered it at this same desk, in this same chair. It was ugly and it worked. I was happy and that was enough. This isn’t about the company. I don’t want to talk about the company. This isn’t about the board. I don’t want to talk about the board. This is about me. I…
Year One Yep, it comes a bit late. I had a small health issue with my middle fingers, plus Black Friday chaos and the launch of my first Commodore Amiga device. Typing for long was painful and, sadly, Neuralink isn’t quite there yet. But here we are. Year Zero was about laying the cornerstones for growth. Year One was different. More building, more experiments, more highs and lows. A proper…
Year Zero: My Journey Back to the Future of Computing You know, sometimes life has a funny way of coming full circle. I still remember the day I got my good old Oric-1. It was love at first byte. I spent countless hours tinkering with it, not entirely sure if I was coding or just making the poor thing suffer. Fast forward 40 years, and after a wild ride through the IT industry—complete with…
I should talk about the TOS emulator, but… Although this week I’m not announcing one new product , but two , today I’m going to talk about the cornerstone of one of them: the SidecarTridge ROM emulator . But why does it deserve a post of its own instead of being part of the SidecarTridge TOS emulator announcement? Well, I think it’s time to explain the differences between the two and why I decided…
A new feature for SidecarTridge Multi-device: GEMDRIVE Hard Disk Emulator This week, I’m rolling out something that’s going to make the SidecarTridge Multi-device really cool: a new firmware update that slaps hard disk emulation right onto your beloved Atari ST. That’s right, we’re going to turn that humble microSD card into a digital vault for all the bits and bytes you’d normally entrust to a…
Tracing the Path of SidecarT’s Revisions This week marks a significant milestone for the SidecarTridge Multi-device community as I’ve rolled out the latest revision of the SidecarTridge Multi-device board to the first customers. It’s been an incredible journey since I introduced the initial version in the summer of 2023. In just six months, I’ve seen over 400 boards make their way into the hands…
I’ve been in the software game for almost 30 years professionally, with another 10 dabbling in programming. I’m one of those who think anyone can code, but creating a software product is a feat few can achieve. It might sound a bit arrogant, but I know how to make and sell software products. However, hardware was an entirely new world for me. I found it to be an unforgiving, harsh, complex…
It’s been nearly 30 years since I managed to pass my Digital Circuits and Microprocessor Design classes. Ah, those were the days! We were so unpolished that, to make our circuits work, we had to stealthily place a finger on the circuit, hoping the assessing professor wouldn’t notice… Obviously, jumping headfirst into software professionally was the sound choice. A few months ago, I rolled up my…
About 33 years ago, I packed my bags to leave La Rioja in the north of Spain to study Computer Science in Madrid. In that suitcase, my beloved Atari 1040STFM couldn’t fit due to space constraints: I had no place to set it up in the student residence. And during my studies, we worked on the university’s computation center’s machines or on PCs. So, it stayed in my hometown, gathering dust. One…