Have completed my small write up of my ZX Spectrum 128k +2 which can be found here:
Author: Croccy22
Running in Parallel!!
So since having the Iomega Zip drive I’ve had one missing component. A PC with a parallel port! Nothing modern comes with them anymore and it appears that PCI-E parallel cards just don’t like the Zip Drive. I have tried running VM’s etc but no matter what I did I couldn’t get it working.
I did have one hope, and that is an old Shuttle XPC computer I have running an AMD Sempron processor. This PC is my Retro PC which I keep around since it has a floppy drive too. Unfortunatly although the motherboard does have a parallel port, it was an optional extra connector which can no longer be purchased. Looking inside it looks like an IDC connector but has a smaller pin pitch. After much browsing on eBay I found a Lenovo PC which seemed to use the same connecter so I gave it a shot.
And the result is!!!
IT WORKS 🙂
Now I can get on and stick all my Atari Portfolio software onto a zip disk rather than having to send it across serial cables!
Subscribe feature added!
If you want to keep informed about what retro related stuff I am buying or playing with then I have added the option to subscribe for e-mail alerts.
With these enabled any time I add new content to the site you will get an e-mail alert letting you know whats going on so you can come back and check it out 🙂
Simply enter your name and email into the widget and you will recieve a message to confirm your address. Then just sit back and wait for me to spend some more money 🙂
Note: Subscription option should not be used by my wife for monitoring how much I spend on retro goodness each month!
Battle of the Barcodes!!
So I remember wanting one of these so badly when I was younger but couldn’t afford it. I am fully aware now that the game is most likely terrible, but the advert at the time was awesome!!
Anyway someone offered me one of them fully boxed and complete so I just couldn’t resist. It’s finally time to discover how bad (or good?) the game actually is 🙂
Connecting a Zip drive to Atari Portfolio
I have just done a write up of how to connect an Iomega Zip Drive up the Atari Portfolio. Read more here:
Time to expand my storage space :) – Iomega Zip Drive
It’s 1994 and I am fed up splitting files across 1.44mb floppy disks to transfer them between PCs. There has to be a better way?
Well here it is! The Iomega ZIP drive. 100MB of storage on a single disk!
Now I never had one of these back in the day as they cost a fair amount of money and I don’t think the media was that cheap either. But I just picked this one up for £15 so that seems a bit more reasonable to me 🙂
The best thing is during the facebook conversation somone annouced that these drives could be made to work with the Atari Portfolio too!! (Thanks Gavin). So with a bit of configuration I can get the entire portfolio of Portfolio software (see what I did there?) onto a single ZIP disk.
I am going to do a write up of this process soon and will add it to the modifications section when it is done. I may do a little video about it soon too.
Jaguar Skunkboard Guide
I have just added the first page under the modifications section of the site. I hope to fill this section with guides about how to do some of the hardware modifications I have done to the consoles and computers in my collection.
My first guide is the menu system I created using a Raspberry Pi to program the Jaguar Skunkboard flash ROM cartridge.
This can be found here:
http://localhost/wordpress/jaguar-skunkboard-programmer/
FunKey S – Retro gaming on your key chain!
I backed this little (and I do mean little!) device on Kickstarter a while back and today they delivered!
This small hand held measures just 4.5×4.5×1.5 cm and yet still manages to emulate systems up to and including the orignal Playstation.
Now this is obviously not going to be your main emualtion device but its a really cute thing to have attached to your keyring for those times times when you’re sat in a clothes shop waiting for the wife to try on everything in the store 😛
More information can be found here and pre-orders are now live.
Psion Series 3
Another one for the collection. The Psion Series 3 personal digital assistant. This little device containes all the basic functionality you would expect from a PDA of that era. It also had it’s own built in programming language. I have got a serial cable on it’s way for this so will try and get it online when that turns up, because why not? 🙂
Amiga 500 RGB HDMI
I have seen a few YouTube videos about this little device. It is an adapter board that plugs into the original Denise chip socket on the Amiga 500 and then has a raspberry pi zero connected into it. This then allows the Digital RGB signal directly from the Amiga to be output via the HDMI of the pi giving a pixel perfect digital output.
The actual RGBtoHDMI project was originally designed for the BBC Micro but has since been adapted to work with many other retro systems. The Amiga version requires an adapter board designed by C0pperdragon and can be found here.
The adapter boards are available for purchase but the waiting list is apparently quite long so I decided to get the bare PCBs ordered from JLPCB and ordered the components from various places and then built my own over the weekend. Suprisingly it worked first time!
The only issue with using it on an Amiga is that it doesn’t output the audio, so you either need to connect the audio up to an amp via phono cables or get a device to inject the phono audio into the HDMI signal. I have ordered one of these from China so will test it when it gets here to see how well that works.