the difference that is no difference makes no difference
PiTubeDirect is a project that turns a Raspberry Pi into one of many different coprocessors for the BBC Micro. It also works on other Acorn 8 bit computers including the Electron, but you need extra hardware for that. I have a few old Raspberry Pi’s including a Raspberry Pi Zero that was not getting much […]
Like all good retro enthusiasts I have some old Windows Laptop/Desktop that runs some ancient Windows program(s) that use a parallel port. In my case I have an old Thinkpad T42 running Windows XP. It has a parallel port and I have an old Willem EPROM/Flash/Whatever programmer that uses a parallel port. I am not […]
So making this simple A500 fast RAM expansion wasn’t too hard, and it reminded me that I had been meaning to make up one of the simple A500 IDE interfaces that have been around forever. There is this John Tsiombikas one that uses a bunch of simple AND, NAND and NOT gates, and this other […]
I have a few Amigas, and WHDLOAD is an amazing piece of software for running old games but you need a hard drive and plenty of memory to make it work properly. That generally means I am using my Amiga 600 (4MB fast RAM and 2MB chip) or my Amiga 1200 (also with 4MB fast […]
The Dragon 32 could be expanded to include a DOS cartridge. This contained a small DOS ROM and Floppy Disk Controller chip. You plugged a 5 1/4″ drive to the cartridge and you had a working floppy drive. There were a few companies that made similar expansions. Some are documented on the World of Dragon […]
A few years back I finally acquired an Acorn A3000. Like most A3000’s it did not work due to battery damage. I hacked away at it and eventually got it to work. My fixes weren’t exactly pretty, but I got it going and out of all the 80s home computers I have, I think the […]
So I finally bought a Dragon 32
A few years back I built a Funvision , then later a Colecovision using a breadboard. These were fun projects and I always thought there were quite a few other 1980s computer designs that were ‘achievable’ within the limitations of breadboards. To me these are good educational projects and you have to plug together seemingly […]
So I had an Amiga 500 in my late teens/early twenties. I had the 512K RAM expansion (actually a home brew one) and one external floppy drive. I wrote a heap of 68000 assembly back then using that setup. Hard drives were around but they were the ‘stuff of dreams’. They were so so expensive […]
So in the previous article I upgraded my SV-318 from 16KB of CPU RAM to 64KB of CPU RAM. But I really wanted to emulate the floppy disk controller on the Spectravideo. If you are familiar with the early Spectravideo’s you may assume that this is a silly goal. More on that later.
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