Like many people, I had seen wild crazy looking mechanical keyboards, and had been both fascinated and confused by them. How could you get by with so few keys? What does each key actually do? They looked like some kind of wild alien input device, but, at the same time, must work well otherwise the […]
A couple of years ago I saw that somebody on the internet had made a Slow Movie Player, and that piqued my interest. The basic idea is that your favourite film is displayed on a screen at a really slow framerate. Eink displays are ideal for this as they use no power except for when […]
During the 2021 lockdown I started a laser cutting project I’d wanted to do for a while. It turned out that the research on this went much much deeper than I first expected. You probably recognise this image, and think you know where it comes from. But what if I told you the story goes […]
This is one of those little projects that didn’t need to be done, or could have been done very simply. Despite a lot of feature creep, everything just came together at the right time, and I’m really pleased with the results.
Ok, firstly, apologies for the lateness of this post. The stuff below was actually done a couple of weeks ago, but time has just got away from me. Hence this is being written up 2 days past the closing date for RC2017/4. Sorry Anyway, this part of my challenge involves investigating a rack that came as […]
After a visual check of the keyboards (see this post), I had a couple of questions, which were do the keyboards work? and how do the keyboards work? On the basis that neither of the Alphameric had their EPROM windows covered, and that one of the Cherry keyboards had already been modified, I chose the […]
Next up on the things to investigate is the 4 keyboards Judging by the connectors, it was obvious that these aren’t modern (PS2, USB or even 5 pin DIN) keyboards. Likely either a raw matrix or maybe parallel ASCII. Lets open them up and have a poke around!
I decided the easiest thing to tackle first would be the three ICE (In-Circuit Emulators) as they’re quite bulky things to get out of the way early. There are two non-identical versions of the same model Adtek ICE Engine BX and a Zax ICD278 – all with manuals!
So, once again Retro Challenge is upon us, and, yes, the timing is offset , but an April challenge should mean that more people are able to participate. To try and stay ahead of the curve this time, I thought I’d get in early and give my excuses for why I failed to complete the […]
So, you may well remember that I entered Retro Challenge 18 months ago, and what a fun crazy busy time that was! Well, the January Retro Challenge competition is about to kick off in just over 2 weeks. If you’re not familiar with Retro Challenge, shame on you! But you can de-shame yourself by heading […]
So, before I dive in to this, a quick history lesson for those of you that aren’t fully up to speed on your rare 80’s vintage 8 bit computers. In the beginning, there was Clive Sinclair, and he invented the Sinclair ZX80. From the ZX80, the ZX81 and indeed home computing was born. From the […]
A recent discussion started with the simple question “When is it New Year?”. Well, 1st January, right? The stroke of midnight on 31st December? Depends where you are on the planet? [depends what planet [if any] you are on]. It depends on which timezone you are in. So, we settled on it being at the […]
Yesterday this tweet appeared on my Twitter timeline [embedTweet url=”538666941335236610″] Now, being the geeky retro Sinclair fanboy I am, I read it, understood it, and retweeted it. Obviously.
Just a quick update to about the SD Bootloader I designed a few posts ago. Well, the PCBs have arrived and last week I took a soldering iron to one of them and gave it a quick test One side of the board is effectively an Arduino, so without plugging it in to the RC2014, I […]
When Google first launched the Chromecast, I wanted one as it seemed like it would solve a lot of viewing problems for me. The trouble was, my “TV” (technically, it’s a 42″ monitor as it has no tuner) doesn’t have any HDMI sockets, so it would cause more issues than it would solve, and […]
So, the RC2014 is great. I can run Microsoft BASIC and program it from there, and as long as I am using a terminal emulator, I can copy & paste to save and load programs. Alternatively, I can write Z80 code using an online compiler then download it, copy it to USB stick, move it […]
My original plan had never been to design and build my own computer. I had, however, planned to build a clone of the Sinclair ZX80, which has been on my bucket list of things to own for year, and which I had found plans for online. Whilst collecting the parts and reading up on simple […]
As a child growing up in the 1970s, I had no idea of what the future held. I didn’t know if Mr Benn would be able to get back from his adventures, or if Scooby Doo could catch the Evil Swamp Monster, or even if we were going through the round or square window in PlaySchool. […]
Recently I’ve read a few posts about other peoples working environments, office setups, man caves or work benches. I’ve also had a couple of people ask about mine, since I tweeted about the redecoration and overhaul of my old “spare room” as it transformed in to “Man Cave 2.0”. I had intended to write it […]
Some of you may remember that last year , after a regretful decision to ‘upgrade’ from Windows 7 to Windows 8 I decided to jump ship and switch over to Linux. Ubuntu 13.04 to be precise. I blogged about the install process here, and my first thoughts after a week here, with the intention of […]