the difference that is no difference makes no difference
So I recently bought an old Amiga 600 off ebay. It’s probably an odd purchase given I already have two Amiga 500’s and if anything “I always wanted an Amiga 1200, not a 600”. But I guess my son’s interest in more ‘kid size’ computers got the better of me, and I thought a 600 […]
So continuing on with my current binge in retro computing, I recently bought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. It was in quite good condition. It came with power supply, original box and manuals as well as tape cables and a cassette player with some original commercial games on tape. The keyboard still worked. Unlike all […]
If you have any old 80s computers that were originally beige in colour, it’s highly likely that (after 30 years) they have gone a rather yucky yellowy colour. I guess a lot of people must have thought ; the plastic is exposed to UV light during its lifetime and gradually the plastic fades or something […]
So while I was pretty happy with being able to get ADF’s into readable floppies using ADTWin, I had actually ordered a gotek floppy drive on Aliexpress. There are quite a few places selling these. I paid about $25. The gotek has a STM32 microcontroller running some firmware that can read disk image files off […]
So this is more of a part 2 to ‘Retro Computing and loading stuff‘ . One of the challenges I have with the Amiga is getting data from ADF images onto real floppy disks. Initially I used transwarp using a null modem serial cable. I was using linux as the source system, and without going […]
So after getting monitor output working on these old computers the next challenge is loading stuff. Generally, just about every game and application ever released for these old platforms has been ‘captured’ and is available for download. In the case of the Electron, the actual audio for tape loading of various games has been captured. […]
So I’m going through some kind of ‘retro computing’ urge at the moment. Sure I’ve used emulators, and I also have a Terasic DE-1 that can run as an Amiga or an old 8 bit Atari, but for whatever reasons its all ‘not quite the same as the real thing’. So I’ve collected my old […]
So I recently bought a pcduino3 nano . I have completely avoided the Arduino and Raspberry Pi crazes. Especially for the Raspberry I never quite saw the point of a computer that used an SD card as a hard drive and had no sata connector. However I did like the idea of a very tiny […]
DISCLAIMER: You should of course note the recommended ages for toys such as the Lego Mindstorms sets indicated in this article. So I have a 3 and a half year old son … and as a very nerdy Dad, I am slightly obsessed with how technology is introduced to him and what he’s allowed access […]
So I was at my parents recently. My old Atari 800XL was in a cupboard, so I dug it out to see if it still worked. It did, and so I was quickly playing Star Raiders again. I wasn’t much of a gamer when I was younger, but I did spend a lot of time […]
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