Category: Accessory

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3D Acceleration from 2002

My old Shuttle xPC Windows XP PC has needed a little more grunt for a while. The motherboard has an 8x AGP slot so my choice of cards was slightly limited. After a bit of research I found the best AGP 8x card available and then discovered they fetch £150+ on eBay. So i started reducing my specification until I found some cards for a reasonable price. However, even at that point I came across an issue which I haven’t had for a long time, the Shuttle xPC only has a 230w power supply and this was no where near enough for the higher end AGP cards of the time.

I eventually settled for this little beauty. The GeForce 4 MX440. With a staggering 64mb of RAM and both VGA and DVI ports it’s an amazing piece of hardware for £15. Well maybe not amazing but it runs the orignal GTA at a frame rate that is far too fast to be playable so I have to turn the frame limiter on.

This PC is never really going to be used as a gaming machine, but it’s nice that it can run the old classics of which some don’t work very nicely, or at all in Windows 10 on modern hardware. Time to run up some of those old talkie editions of point and click adventures like Simon the Sorcerer and Day of the Tentacle.

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1.3GB of storage in 1994

Another small delivery today. Since I only had a few zip disks I figured it would be best to have a little bit of stock. They seem pretty easy to obtain still at the moment but the same could be said about 720k Double Density floppy disks a few years back and now they are a pig to get hold of (luckily I purchased 5 sealed boxes of those a while back too)

So here we have 13 zip 100 disks, a few of them used, some “new” and some still sealed in their plastic wrapper. Should keep me going for a while!

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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!

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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.

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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/

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My Atari Portfolio goes online :)

After many months of waiting and monitoring eBay. I finally managed to acquire a serial interface for my Atari Portfolio 🙂

So now along with plugging it into cash machines to take out as much money as I want, and breaking into the secure areas of Cyberdyne Systems, I can also connect up to my WiFi network and browse the BBS’s

Incidently my WiFi network is named “SKYNET” so it’s pretty cool when I connect the Portfolio up to the ESP 8266 based MoDem to see the phrase “Connected to SKYNET” showing on the screen. It’s the simple things that make me smile.

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Going online with an Amstrad Notepad??

I never imagined that this would actually be possible. But whilst I was looking around retro projects recently I came accross another ESP8266 based WiFi MoDem project. This one connects up to any device using a standard RS232 Serial Port.

Reading through the project it mentioned some of the computers it works with. The Atari Portfolio was listed as compatible which is what I was searching for so I will be having a play with that once I can source the serial port adapter for it.

But also in that list was the Amstrad Notepad NC100! I knew this already had a serial port as I used to use it for transferring my school homework over to my PC back in the 90s. But I never thought about the fact that it had a terminal emulator built into it.

So I build the modem, designed and printed a case for it then turned on the NC100 and hit Function key + S. After a few config changes in the menu I was ready to go. Setting up the WiFi network was easy and is all done through a text driven menu.

Then it was just a case of using the atdt command to connect up to one of the many BBS’s still available.

Now obviously the experience isn’t perfect as the notepad has an 80 x 8 character display. But I found a few BBS’s that actually allowed that to be configured and it worked perfectly!

I wish this would have been available back in the 90s, would have made my english lessons much more bearable! I could have done it back then with a dial up modem and a telephone line, but I am guessing the teacher would have noticed that even if they had no clue what it was.

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Taking the C64 online in 2020

So I have a few ESP8266 boards kicking around and wondered if there was any cool C64 projects available. Well yes there is! With a bit of soldering and a C64 userport, you can turn one into a WiFi capable Modem for the C64.

I built this up a few nights ago and have since been connecting to some of the many BBS systems still running and usuable from the C64 terminal program CCGMS.

With its colour character based graphics the experience was actually pretty satisfying and there is something really cool about going back in time and seeing the “internet” back as it was in the good old days 🙂