Month: May 2022

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The Steamdeck arrives!

After pre-ordering back in July last year and then patiently waiting (which I’m not very good at). My steamdeck has finally arrived. So the first thing I did was tested the performance to the absolute max and played Monkey Island on it 🤣

Funnily enough the deck managed to play this at full frame rate with no issues 👌

I did try go on and test some less well known games such as Grand Theft Auto 5. It is pretty amazing to see this game running with high settings at 60fps on a handheld PC. This truly is a VERY capable handheld gaming machine.

I’ve also spent a brief amount of time messing around with emulators and currently have it emulating PS2 games pretty well. I will be spending more time on that side of things in the near future.

If you are still waiting for yours to arrive, you will not be disappointed!

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Amstrad PPC512 External ISA Expansion

With HUGE thanks to Joao (Website: http://www.enide.net/webcms/index.php?page=ppc512-640-isa-expansion) I recently received a PCB to build up an ISA Card expansion board for the Amstrad PPC512.

This allows you to plug up to three 8bit ISA cards into the PPC512. I built up the board with just one ISA slot to start with (There was only one available on eBay and I can’t find them for sale in the UK anywhere at the moment so have to wait for some to come from China).

My first experiment was to connect a Soundblaster sound card. This is possible thanks to the Unisound DOS driver which is a driver and config utility for Plug and Play sound card under DOS.

As you can hear in the video above, this worked perfectly. A much better gaming experience than the internal beeper 🙂

The next test was to plug in an external EGA Graphics card. Luckily the wiring for CGA is the same as EGA, so I didn’t have to change any cables. Also, the RGBtoHDMI board in my monitor already supports EGA. So all I had to do was flip a couple of DIP switches on the PPC512 to tell it to use an external video card and voila!

I now have 16 glorious colours on screen at the same time and my Lemmings are the right colour as opposed to their weird pink and cyan CGA versions.

I am really impressed with what I’m being able to get out of this 086 8Mhz PC with 512k of memory.

I now need to wait for the other ISA connectors to arrive so I can get both cards connected at once. In the meantime, I think I’m going to design a 3D printed case to hold the expansion board and the ISA cards securely in place.

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Build guide for the mini CGA Monitor

I’ve had quite a lot of people interested in my mini CGA monitor build so have put together a build guide to show what components I used. I have also uploaded the 3D printable files so anyone with access to a 3D printer can build their own.

I do still need to complete the wiring diagram for one of the cables which I will do shortly, I just forgot to take a photo of it before I put everything back together!

Click the link below to find out more, or head over to the “Projects” section of my website.

http://localhost/wordpress/mini-crt-cga-monitor/