Category: Hardware
iz8dwf over on YouTube explains easy repair of a keyboard and joystick fault on a C64C (serial n. HB5 384826E). CIA (aka MOS 6526) at position U1 is usually the culprit in these cases. A little look at the schematic explaining what are the principal functions of both 6526’s in a C64 (there’s much more than that, but you get an…
The 8-Bit Guy takes a look at a Commodore 128 that he bought on craigslist in terrible shape. He then completely restores it to ‘as new’ condition! Check out the video below. [youtube wLp6bzG9exk nolink] YouTube Channel: The 8-Bit Guy
The March issue of MagPI magazine brings one of our favorite subjects: retro gaming! There were articles in the past talking about building a retro gaming machine using a Raspberry PI, thanks to the RetroPie project, but this time around the magazine brings detailed instructions about how to build a portable gaming machine for you retro needs on the go! The…
The awesome folks over at Hackaday (sponsors of VCF East) linked to a great article by a collection of Polish computer archivists and museums. One of them was working on an emulator for the Polish MERA-400 computer – but the only known copy of the machine’s OS was locked on 9-track tapes. The CROOK operating system was supposedly stored on…
If you, like me, have a pile of Commodore disk drives that don’t work, this video might be useful. Published by Jan Beta channel on YouTube, the video shows the steps to fix a 1541 disk unit. The drive didn’t spin up if you turned it on and didn’t react at all to commands from the computer. LEDs were working. Spindle…
Hackaday has always being a “friend” of retro-computing with many articles pointing to cool projects related to the computers of the golden age! Today, they are showing off a portable Apple IIe created by Jorj Bauer, which include a tiny keyboard, a TTF screen, SD card support, all powered by the microcontroller development board Teensy 3.6 equipped with an 180 MHz ARM…
Hackaday has an interesting write-up today about the 1957 machine that was built to pick winning lottery numbers for the British National Savings and Investments “Premium Bonds” program. Short for Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment, it was built to provide truly random numbers for the lottery picks and included an all-important hardware entropy source. Random noise in the current output…
Peter Leigh has released a 2-video special about the Amstrad CPC. The 1-hour long video is available on Nostalgia Nerd YouTube channel and tells a detailed story of the origins of Amstrad and how the iconic Amstrad CPC came to be. If you are from one of the countries where Amstrad sold the CPC, it is a great opportunity to revive the…
Introduction Back in the 80’s, the Brazilian government restricted the importation of microcomputers to help the local industry to develop. That was a great opportunity for those companies to create clones of the most important computers of the time: Sinclair ZX-81, TRS-80, Apple and later on, IBM PC. One of the biggest microcomputer manufacturers at the time was Prologica Computadores. The…
The wonderful Hackaday has an article detailing The Backoffice’s project to emulate an Atari ST mouse using a Raspberry Pi taking input from a standard USB mouse. He calls it, the RATARI ST! The video link has a shopping list if you want to build your own. He details some issues with powering the RasPi directly from the Atari, so…
