Blog Index

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Recently, a friend of mine asked for advice on modding his N64 to allow for hdmi output as he was using one of the cheap AV to hdmi adapters and not getting very good results. This gave me the opportunity to test out the Hispeedido N64 mod board. This mod comes with a nice ribbon […]

My latest eBay purchase was a Sinclair QL fully boxed with manual, power supply and a bunch of microdrive cartridges. This was again listed as not working so was expecting to do another repair. When it arrived my first test was to check the voltages coming from the power supply. Nothing seemed to be being […]

When I recieved this MSX2, I had concerns as it had certainly already had a reapair attempted on it. What if this person had tried everything and discovered that a custom chip had blown and it was unrepairable? Well, I decided to carry on regardless and work through the issue myself. To start off with […]

My next repair project is this Sony MSX2 computer. Purchased as not working (black screen). Unfortunately this machine has a bit more to its history than the eBay advert let on. Upon opening it I noticed that the problematic HIC1 board (The video out multiplexer that tends to suffer from corrosion on these machines) was […]