Blog Index

The new website design is live!

After a couple of months of recategorising everything and making sure all the redirects are in place. The new website design is finally live. There are probably still a few kinks to work out, I need to put the projects section back in place, and I still need to find a way to move the […]

I’m on the Retro Hour podcast!

Every now and then, I decide to do something well outside of my comfort zone. So when I was messaged by Ravi from the Retro Hour asking if I would like to be on his team for the yearly Christmas quiz, I decided to say yes before I started talking myself out of it! We […]

A new CRT for the 3DFX

After fixing the 3DFX card, I sat back and looked at the LCD monitor I was using, and decided it just wasn’t right for the system. But the problem was, I’d ran out of suitable CRT monitors. I did spot one in a skip at the local recycling centre a few days back, but as […]

3DFX Repair – Diamond Monster 3D VooDoo 1

I already have a few retro PCs in my collection, but I was missing one specific era, and that was the era when the 3dfx VooDoo cards hit the shelves. A friend of mine got one for his pc, and it was a complete game-changer back then. Everything went from blocky-looking textures to gorgeous, smoothed […]

An ambitious and not 100% successful repair attempt – Epson HX20 LCD Board rebuild

I decided I wanted to pick up an Epson HX20. The fact that it has a built-in dot matrix printer seemed like it would be a pretty cool thing to mess around with. After a bit of research, I discovered the main issue is that they came with a Ni-Cad battery installed, which usually leaks […]

Fujitsu PCTV – Switching to Scart input

Ok, so the information in this post is pretty niche. I’m only aware of 4 of these computers in existence and currently none of them have the original remote control. Mostly, this isn’t an issue because you can control the majority of the TV functions by the buttons on the screen. But ever since I’ve […]

Sharp Twin Famicom

In the UK, we had the Nintendo Entertainment System. But over in Japan, there were a few different systems released. One of these was made by Sharp and was the Twin Famicom. It took the normal Famicom cartridges but also included the Famicom Disk System which was an add on drive which allowed games to […]

Sony Trinitron KV-28FX68U Repair

Whilst sat browsing Facebook one day, I saw a post from someone local asking if anyone had a CRT for sale as theirs had broken, and they included a photo of their lovely 28-inch Sony Trinitron TV. I messaged him and asked what the fault was, and apparently the picture went off and was now […]

Microvitec Cub 1441 monitor repair

Back during my early school days, some of the classrooms had BBC Micros in them along with a beige metal CRT monitor with Cub written on it. These displays were nicely matched to the BBC and were very common at the time. I happened to log into Facebook at a perfect time last week when […]

Sam gets a mechanical keyboard

Although the keyboard on the Sam is quite nice to type on, you just can’t beat the feel of a hugh quality mechanical keyboard. Luckily for me, Colin at Quazar builds a lovely mechanical keyboard for the Sam and this evening I got around to fitting it. The install process is pretty simple, it just […]

Amstrad 6128 Plus

Another recent purchase was this Amstrad 6128 plus. The only thing that was described as being wrong with this one was the disk drive not working properly. I first replaced the drive belt as these are a very common failure point. This got it mostly working but it still seemed to be struggling to read […]

Atari 400 repair

The Atari 8 bit computers have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I never owned one myself when i was younger, and only ever got to play on an Atari XEGS a couple of times at a friends house. I have a few different ones now but I didnt have an Atari […]