Do you have an Amiga 500 and do you want a plug and play solution for Hard Disk, Kick 3.1, Acceleration (2-3x speedup) and much more? Maybe the ACA500+ is for you. Or do you want maximum speed with a bit of manual tinkering? Check out my video about both the ACA500+ and the Lazarustorm: https://youtu.be/FH9UKcrfov0 #retrocomputing#commodore#amiga500
Want to have everyone who knows what they’re doing flip the bozo bit on you? Refer to reasonable preventative maintenance as “shotgun recapping” and go on about how you “diagnose failures” and try to keep everything possible “original.”
Those original capacitors will eat traces and vias before there’s a failure to diagnose, dumbass.
@pixel And yet, some YouTube bozos actively promote not replacing ancient electrolytic capacitors “unless they’re damaged or test bad” in order to “keep a system original.” #retrocomputing
Anyone got an old 486 or pentium 1-3 pc they wanna get rid of? My kid is really interested in playing with old computers #vintagecomputing#retrocomputing
Seller of 2004 Sony Laptop said he hadn’t tested the sound that it was probably just missing the driver. I think it’s a bit worse than that 😅 Well it was 40$. Audio out works though so I can just route the sound back to my speakers via the Mac.
one of my most cherished and irreplaceable retrocomputing devices is my peerless Roland SC-55.
while the MT-32 has been emulated quite well, the SC-55 always lagged behind in emulation - most attempts at it sounded pretty terrible, even using good soundfonts.
(and hauling around my SC-55 + midi & 3.5mm & usb cables just to play games in dosbox was painful)
in comes Nuked-SC55: it is a chip-level emulation project that just nails it.
it took about 30 seconds to build with cmake. i'm now going to try integrating it with dosbox, so i can finally play 90s DOS general midi games! (ultima viii pagan, here i come)
time for fairly obscure canadian retrocomputing history
IBM Home Computing seems to have been a canada-only chain of retail stores that sold IBM products. it didn't last long here - maybe 5-10 years - before it disappeared in the early 2000s. we had a single location in downtown Edmonton City Centre Mall in the mid-90s.
it wasn't the place to go for the best deals on hardware and software. everything was sold at retail prices, and i remember seeing very few sales. i remember buying my Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold at the downtown location as a first-year university student for the princely sum of $300.
as you can see in the last photo - buying an IBM in 1994 was a major investment. you could buy three used cars at the time for less than a pentium desktop. 😬
does anyone else remember these retail stores? did they exist in the US, or was it a canadian chain?
Got this Unidisk drive a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I couldn't insert a floppy disk, so I opened it, did a full maintenance and changed the infamous shitty gear that broke as soon as I touched it.
STP, my FTP client, is now much more usable. It gets search, is ported to non-enhanced Apple II, and more importantly can now transfer floppy images (.po and .dsk) to a floppy, in the same way that ADTPro does.
This means that if you make yourself an STP floppy (with ADTPro), you won't have to unplug your Apple II from the Surl proxy and plug it to your ADTPro computer to transfer other disk images anymore!
This is an IOCREST-brand USB to RS-232 serial adapter, which I bought from a seller on AliExpress. It arrived in exactly the same time as an identical eBay listing said it would, for literally half the price - if eBay is still your default go-to for weird stuff like this, keep in mind dropshippers are probably fleecing you.
This adapter contains an FTDI chipset, not the much cheaper CH340, and it's time to see if this is the reason I couldn't get serial mice working natively on Windows 10.
So, question: Can I get some suggestions for software / tips and tricks for recording and reviewing raw data coming off a serial port? I'm a very long way from trying to reverse-engineer a novel protocol myself, but that's the eventual goal, and the next step I'd like to take is compare what I'm seeing coming out of a serial mouse with documentation online to make sure I really understand what's going on and how all this works.
Some old but fascinating notes on the history of window systems by David Rosenthal, who worked on X-Windows and NeWS.
The post starts by commenting some remarks by Alan Kay on browser architecture and goes from there, discussing the work of other pioneers and their own comments. It covers display PostScript and other interesting system design ideas.