Recently a BBC Master was listed on one of the Facebook Groups I am on. It was listed as not working for £75 so I decided to grab it and try and revive it.
My assumption was that the issue was going to be the Rifa caps in the power supply.
So after waiting for Royal Mail to take a week to deliver a 24hr parcel, it finally arrived.
First of all I opened it up to see what we were dealing with. I was not surprised at all to discover the Rifa capacitors had indeed let go.
Luckily I had already ordered some replacements so a few minutes later, I had the old ones out of the board.
All of the other capacitors in the PSU looked fine so for now at least, I have only replaced the main culprits.
Upon putting everything back together, the BBC got powered back up and it sprang into life. Since the CMOS battery was also dead, I had to reset the settings and replace the batteries.
I really want to set this up somewhere where I can use it easily. So I think I’m going to look into getting an additional desk for my retro room. Hopefully I can setup some Acorn and Amstrad computers as I don’t have any out currently.
After moving house, one of my first tasks was to sort out my new retro room. I have really enjoyed getting it all sorted, but for a while now I kept having one thought which I didn’t want to know the answer to, where the hell is my FunKey S!!!!
All of my handhelds were neatly packed and bubble wrapped into a single box so nothing got misplaced during transport. However, the FunKey S is the size of a biscuit and weighs next to nothing. After searching high and low for the thing, it was finally time to come to the conclusion that it got thrown away with the box filled with the remaining bubble wrap😭
So let that be a lesson to everyone, when you move house, create a list of what you put in the boxes, and tick them off when you unpack them!
Anyway, I am not one to edit my website and simply remove an item from my collection, so instead, here it is, my new FunKey S! This time I got the transparent version so at least it’s slightly different to my previous one.
When I first started building my mini pinball cabinet, it was designed to be powered by the Steamdeck. This was mainly because I didn’t have a spare PC kicking around that could do the job.
The Steamdeck has being doing the job, but it had one issue, the loading times! Because the pinball software runs on Windows, I was booting Windows on the Steamdeck from Micro SD. Yes, I could have installed Windows on the Internal storage, but I didn’t want to mess around with dual booting and I wanted to actually use the steam deck for its intended purpose with Steam OS.
I decided I needed a dedicated machine to run the cab moving forwards, but I didn’t want something that was going to take up a load of space. So after looking around at various Mini PCs I decided to give the AceMagician AMR5 a go. This little PC runs an AMD 5800U processor with integrated GPU which I figured should do the job for my little 1080p cabinet. It also has a 512gb SSD and 16gb of RAM.
The PC has a USB-C port on the front so the cable that used to plug into the Steamdeck now just plugs into this. After running the Baller Installer and doing a few extra tweaks, my cabinet was back up and running, but now with amazing boot/load times.
All I need to do now is finish off the physical appearance of the cabinet and then setup some additional tables to play on.
A while ago I purchased some UV overlays for the Vectrex. These overlays require a UV light source to make them glow. At the time when I purchased them, my 3D printer couldn’t handle the size of the Vectrex screen so I made a frame using multiple 3D printed parts and glued them together.
I was never really happy with the design though so decided now I have larger printers, I would re-visit this project.
I also decided to experiment which switching filament during the print so I could use transparent filament as a diffuser.
This still may not be my final version, but I am pretty happy with how this has turned out for nowadays
After another busy couple of weeks, I finally have my new retro room/workshop in a possition where I can start to enjoy it.
Obviously, a room like this is never truly finished, but at least I can now escape from the real world and have a nice place to relax.
So let’s have a quick tour!
We start off with my workbench area. This is where I will spend my time fixing old computers/consoles and tinkering with developing hardware for old systems. I also have a PC in the corner which I use for creating models for 3D printing.
Next, we move around to the 3D Printer zone. I have a resin printer on the workbench above, but mostly I use the FDM printers. The K1 MAX is my go-to printer, but recently I also purchased a Neptune Max 4 which has a huge build volume. I’m looking to use that for printing a replacement computer case in the near future. I also have a vinyl sign cutter which is very useful for creating logos etc.
Next, we move on to the console area. Everything is now connected up using Wi-Fi smart switches and automatic Scart switches so everything is playable within seconds.
We now go around to my modern gaming PC which I mainly use for VR gaming with the Meta Quest 3. I also have my bookshelf filled with games from various systems.
Next in line is the retro computer setup. I have some of my favourite computers set up here, but can swap them out with other systems when required. The black monitors are 4:3 HDMI monitors off amazon and a couple of them have OSSC Scart converters connected so I can connect any system up via RGB Scart.
And finally, my home-made mini arcade cabinet and my work-in-progress virtual pinball machine.
I will see about doing a video shortly of everything up and running. You get that real arcade vibe once you have multiple systems all blasting out their own game music.
I now have my computer desks in and setup so just thought i’d do a quick post showing what it looks like. Still got some cable management to do and then I need to make a start on cabling up to 20+ consoles on the other side of the room!
I was hoping to get everything finished off this week as I have another week off work. But think this is going to turn into a longer project than originally expected. It took me two hours yesterday just to sort my cables into two piles of power and video cables lol.
I have just finished my two week break from work, of which much of it was spent doing bits and pieces to the new retro room. Still have a lot to do, but here are a couple of updated pics. More to come in the following weeks 😀
Things have been a bit quiet recently as we have been going through the stressful process of moving house. But we are now in, and work has started on the new home of north devon retro archive!
I would by lying if I didn’t say one of the biggest reasons I picked this house, was because of the self contained 31ft long basement workshop. This will give me more room to setup my collection exactly how I want it.
Anyway, today was the first day I got to do some work in there to start making it the area I want it to be.
So here is a sneak peak of the room before and after today’s DIY session. More pictures will come as the space progresses.
After a trip down to the South West Amiga Group’s latest meet on Saturday, I strangely enough ended up returning home with an Acorn Archimedes A3010. The computer was labelled as non-working and I paid the sum of £50 for the privilege of bringing it home with me.
These computers are notorious for being destroyed by their onboard batteries. Thankfully the previous owner had already cut the battery out and cleaned the board, but then didn’t get any further with the repair.
I don’t class myself as an Acorn expert by any means, but I have done a lot of reading up on the Acorn machines in the past from when I repaired my RISC PC. From my previous repair, I also have an Acorn “POST Box” which is a little USB board that connects to the diagnostic port on 32bit Acorns and gets some extra diagnostic details from the machine.
Upon connecting up the board, I could see a RAM error message with the code 0000FFFF. These error messages are actually in Hexadecimal and therefore translated as 00000000000000001111111111111111 in binary. Indicating that the highest 16 bits of RAM were fine, but the lowest 16 bits were not working. The A3010 has two RAM chips on board and the one furthest to the right is responsible for the low bits.
After grabbing my multimeter and the schematics for the board, I probed all the pins and found the RAS line was not connected (RAS and CAS are used for selecting the Row and Column of memory to be read) and neither were 6 other pins. So my first repair was re-linking these traces. Some I just soldered on top of the board and some I used fine wire from the memory chip to the vias on the bottom of the board.
After this, I had a booting computer but quickly noticed the mouse wasn’t working. Using my oscilloscope I probed the LS241 buffer chip on the board that deals with the mouse signals. All signals looked fine going into the input pins on the chip apart from one bad trace, but there were no output signals at all. Luckily I have a spare donor board for the RISC PC which uses the same chip, so a quick transplant and another wire repair got the mouse back up and running.
Almost there, but one last problem was that the floppy disk drive not working correctly, it would initialise but then return an error saying “Drive Empty”. After doing a bit more research I found that the A3010 used pin 34 on the floppy to determine if there is a disk in the drive. I probed all of the pins and they all had connectivity to the controller chip. But most of the floppy control pins are pulled high to 5v via a resistor. I checked pin 34 and the signal was permanently low.
Further inspection revealed that the trace going to the pull-up resistor was broken. The same issue was affecting the index pin also (Pin 8). With both of these now repaired, the floppy drive came to life and I now have a fully working Archimedes.
Gotta say I’m pretty happy with how that repair went. And what better way to celebrate, than a quick game of Lemmings!
I know I’ve been a bit quiet for a few months but I have been working on a big project in the background (More info soon).
To keep me busy though, I decided I needed something new to have a tinker with, so I purchased a non working Apple Macintosh Classic II off Ebay.
The seller did a great job of packaging it up and it arrived with no damage whatsoever. I tried powering it up and got vertical lines on the CRT just as the eBay listing showed.
Interestingly, on my 3rd or 4th power on, I heard the startup sound and the machine booted straight up. The hard disk was working fine and so was the floppy drive!
Not exactly the repair challenge I was hoping for, but I can’t complain.
I have since re-capped the logic board, although to be fair it was in near-perfect condition, no corrosion, and even the battery had no leakage.
Even after the re-cap though, it suffers from an issue where when powered on, it will stay on a black screen, and after 10-20 seconds it will then spring into life. I’ve noticed this start time has decreased in the warm weather.
I am expecting it to be the capacitors on the Analog board that need replacing. I don’t have all the correct values here currently though, so will sort that another day.
I am also just about to acquire a SCSI Zip drive, so once I get that I can use my PC with Zip drive to transfer some software across and have a proper play.
