Author: Cheshy Chesh
Non Electronic Hackery
My wife had some lovely boxed files that she had left over from a previous business she had run. I use one to hold all my resistors, but I wanted to use the other one to hold my documentation. Only problem was it was a three ring binder and I didn’t have a three ring…
Fixing the VZ200, Cleaning the Battleship, TIPI/32k
VZ200 Last time I posted, I mentioned that the VZ200 wasn’t quite right. It seemed logical to tackle it as my next packet of work. The system was sort of working, and after some mucking around I realised that some games were working. First some background here. The VZ200 has a very limited amount of…
Battling Entropy
One of the things I have noticed is that Retro Computers can spontaneously stop working. These systems are often 30+ years old. Expecting them to still work beyond a presumable lifespan of 5 years is a bit much. Here are some system repairs I conducted recently. Apple IIgs Keyboard This one was interesting. They keyboard…
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”…
