ilike8bits

Life Gets in the Way

It’s been nearly a month without a post. While some things have happened in the meantime, not a lot of new developments have occurred. Microbee: First the bad news I was supposed to be bringing one of my Microbees to the Perth Amiga Users Group gathering, so of course, I chose the DRAM 128k withContinue reading “Life Gets in the Way”

My goodness, it’s been a while!

Hi Intarwubs. It’s been a while since my last post. Things have been very slowly proceeding, and then, like unplugging a cork, there has been a huge rush this long weekend. Updates on the last post So some quick updates on everything covered in the last post. Firstly the Microbee ROM switcher is working fine.Continue reading “My goodness, it’s been a while!”

Some new additions, some new repairs

While the last few weeks have been busy, they haven’t been that busy on a retro front. I realised I’d ordered the wrong Floppy Disk controllers for the Microbee and the MSX controller, so I had to order replacements. They’ll take quite some time to get here, but that’s OK. Due to some financial commitmentsContinue reading “Some new additions, some new repairs”

Stuff coming down the pipe

So it’s been a while since I did anything major. I did do another spin (My third so far) at the laser cut Microbee case, which revealed I needed to refactor parts of it. I tried to make a fastening system so the upper half and the lower half could be screwed together, but IContinue reading “Stuff coming down the pipe”

Upgrading the VRAM in a Quadra 950

So you have a lovely Macintosh Quadra 950 with only the onboard 1MB of VRAM, and you want to upgrade it to the full 2MB? Here’s how. Firstly you will need 4 sticks of compatible VRAM. These come in either 256K or 512K sizes. While you can use 512K sticks, only 256K will be visibleContinue reading “Upgrading the VRAM in a Quadra 950”

Some upgrades for the Quadra 950

Thanks to the ever generous Greg, I have received several NuBus cards to my Macintosh Quadra 950. They’re provided in a “unknown” state, so it’s going to be a fun job to install some of these and see what we can get working… So what do we have here? First up we have a generousContinue reading “Some upgrades for the Quadra 950”

The Archimedes is back on the bench

Now I have an oscilloscope, I thought it was time to break out the Archimedes. So far it has resisted my attempts to diagnose exactly what is wrong with it but I will persevere. Symptoms are the same whether I use a Gotek or a real drive.When you try and access the drive you getContinue reading “The Archimedes is back on the bench”

Posting will slow for a while

So I’ve gone back to work after an extended holiday, so output is likely to slow for a bit. However, I’m still doing retro “stuff” so I thought I’d share some of it. One of the coolest projects I completed on the weekend was building an MT32Pi Hat. This consists of a Raspberry Pi runningContinue reading “Posting will slow for a while”

Expanding on removing corrosion caused by batteries.

Recently in a Facebook chat, the question was asked: “How do I deal with battery acid damage so things don’t get worse?”. Having recently dealt with both the Quadra 950 and the Amiga 2000, I felt eminently qualified. Here is my answer This is my method. There are many like it but this is mine.Continue reading “Expanding on removing corrosion caused by batteries.”

Understanding Memory Chip Codes

I wrote this up for a forum post and thought I’d share it here. It’s not 100% accurate but is “good enough” to help in a lot of cases. The discussion started with a poster trying to understand how we knew what the capacity of a 41256 RAM chip was. It’s actually there in theContinue reading “Understanding Memory Chip Codes”