ilike8bits

The PET Lives!

Liiife! Give my creation…. LIIIIFE! So today my SRAM arrived, really well packaged and very promptly (So hats off to ScribblyGum Technology for that) and I thought, since I won’t be able to use my workbench for the next 3 days, I’d have a stab at replacing the SRAM tonight. It was a battle toContinue reading “The PET Lives!”

Deliveries

I’ve put the Microbee away for a bit. I’ve done a lot of work on it, and it’s a LOT more stable. Not completely stable and I’m yet to work out why. (I’ve desoldered the connectors between the boards and completely replaced them. I’ve also replaced the ROM socket for the IC27, which was greenContinue reading “Deliveries”

2 Bee or not 2 Bee

Couldn’t resist THAT bad pun 🙂 So I’ve got a couple of days of leave, and now that my wife has plied me with Yum Cha, and I’ve done my first non retro repair around the house, I thought it was time to start working on another one of my retro-computers. Sorry, not the PET.Continue reading “2 Bee or not 2 Bee”

Some Experiments Fail

Today I tried a little experiment and it almost worked. Unfortunately it didn’t work well enough. I like the size and feel of gamepads these days, despite being raised on traditional joysticks. In the past I have hacked a couple of Genesis / MegaDrive controllers, purchased cheaply on AliExpress but I have always found themContinue reading “Some Experiments Fail”

Of Bees and PETs

Another quickish update on two of my systems. Microbee The Microbee is happily working now. I swapped out an underpowered PSU for a more “meaty” one and now it’s booting reliably and is able to load games off my nearby Android phone. I just use the built in Android playback app to playback WAV recordingsContinue reading “Of Bees and PETs”

Another update on the Microbee

So I have now tested the Microbee with software and I can report I have successfully loaded several old tape games. It did highlight two issues: Two of the keys were not registering at all. I carefully desoldered them but couldn’t work out how to get into them at first. They seemed quite different toContinue reading “Another update on the Microbee”

Another one lurches to life

I have got the Acorn Electron working! I’m actually quite proud of this one. My diagnostic was that the fourth RAM chip was dead and I was spot on first go. I’d ordered the RAM from China as it’s so hard to source this stuff locally. While waiting for it to arrive, I realised I’dContinue reading “Another one lurches to life”

We’re gonna need a bigger boat

So after the teaser last week, I was really happy when a donor who wishes to remain anonymous (Thank you! You know who you are.) sent me across another system for my collection. This one is a real doozy! This is a Commodore PET model 4032. The evolution of the very first “real” computer producedContinue reading “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”

Quick Updates

I have one of the Microbees booting, having made a quick cable to supply power and video. In the end, I needed to reseat the top board and remove the corroded battery, and that was it! Back on the 11th,I bumped my Atari STᴱ, it slid off the shelf and fell less than half itsContinue reading “Quick Updates”

The New Haul

So that moratorium on buying new Computers? Yeah that’s totally gone. Look what I got! So I got an incredibly kind offer of a Microbee, with box, no less, and two more “spare parts” systems that were nearly complete. The Microbee is another Z80 based system. Later models ran CP/M with disk drives but theseContinue reading “The New Haul”