I Like 8 Bits and I cannot lie
Being a blog about my adventures in Retro Computing
Note to myself
3½” Floppy drive power connectors: The female is made by AMP, part number 171822-4, the male is also made by AMP, part number 171825-4. The female does not come with contacts.
Had a lot of time
In which the site owner is a bit lazy. So I haven’t died, and I haven’t stopped working on systems, but I have stopped posting. This will be the “bullet point edition” of all the things I’ve done. No idea what any of this means. So not dead, just quiet 🙂
Why I’m not posting nearly as much
Hey everyone. By now you’ll have noticed content has dried up a lot. Now there are several reason for this so I thought I better document them. Work In February I finished up my long term job that I’d held down for over 10 years. This was, by far, my longest single employment, and with…
Rebuilding Apple II Power Supplies
So a friend requested I rebuild two Apple II power supplies for him. They’d both been “worked on” before, so rather than attempting to repair the existing boards, I decided to replace both boards with a modern PSU. Of the original PSUs, one was a clone and one was an original. The original was already…
TI 99/4a Speech Synthesiser Module
Thanks to an incredible offer from Noel from Noel’s Retro Lab, I have now got a Texas Instruments TI 99/4a Speech Synthesiser Module for my setup. Look at this! It’s beautiful! Now this simply plugs into the side of the TI 99/4A and any games and applications that support it can use it. Now what…
Ticking along
First, let me lead by saying I’ve started a new job, so posting will drop down to a less regular schedule from here on out, I’m afraid. I’ve been working on all sorts of projects without much success on many of them. Meanwhile I have had some wins! Microbee CGA to VGA Adapter Firstly, after…
New Pickups
Picked up two new items this fortnight. Commodore 1804S This is often considered the “holy grail” of Commodore monitors. It supports just about any signal you can throw at it, including composite, s-video and RGB. This one I found while at my local maker space, Artifactory, in the “Virtual Recycling” pile. It wasn’t quite “in”…
Power Supply Build for the CreatiVision
AKA the Dick Smith Wizzard So I recently built a replacement PSU for my CreatiVision. I have a working PSU, but it’s always best to have a spare on hand. The original needs 9V 1A and 16V 250mA. Thanks to some help from another collector (Hi Tim!) and some basic research, I was able to…
Bits ‘n Bobs
Wherein I potter for 2 weeks. Lots of little projects this time. I kept working on the BBC Micro. I made up one of my Microbee ROM switchers and installed it. I now have 16 different ROMs to choose from. I also made a “Atari to BBC” joystick adapter for all those games where I…
BBC Micro – An Update
As per the last post, my BBC Micro lived again, thanks to a replacement PSU. Unfortunately with more testing, it became obvious that it was unreliable. Some times it would boot to BASIC. Sometimes it would hang on a cursor prompt. Some times it would hang on an error about a Drive Fault and some…
I am always interested in your old systems! Consoles and Computers.