Category: Computer System

The Atari ST has been on obvious omission from my collection for a while and it was time to address that issue. I’ve been looking around for one for some time but wasn’t really in any rush as I don’t have a space to set it up at the moment and building a new display unit has been delayed due to covid (Wickes for some reason have stopped selling oak effect wood at the moment).

But over the weekend I saw an auction for an ST on eBay with no bids. The photos looked ok but the description was simply “Powers on, mouse works” not exactly the greatest of adverts. The seller also only had a feedback rating of 3 so I guess this put most people off. However, the item didn’t say it was un-tested or spares or repair or anything so I figured it was worth a shot and the buyer protection would almost certainly cover me if it was a lemon.

So £78+p&p later, the guy sent it our via parcel force and today I took ownership of a good condition fully working (including the floppy drive) Atari 520STFM.

So what are the next steps? It needs a good clean and the case is a bit discoloured so it will be going for a hydrogen peroxide bath within the next week or so.

I have also ordered another gotek drive to flash with the flashfloppy software so I can load the software from USB pen drive rather than having to deal with floppy disks all the time.

I will document these processes when I do them so if you want to see how it works out, be sure to subscribe for email notifications 🙂

Have completed my small write up of my ZX Spectrum 128k +2 which can be found here:

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? 🙂

I am of the age that at school we had these beauties in our classrooms. I remember designing many circuit boards on one of these in our Design and Technology classes. Well finally I now have on in my collection.

I have already replaced the power supply capacitors which were ready to explode (This is common on all BBC Micros).

Another mod I have also done is fitted the user port with an MMC interface which allows me to load BBC software direct from an SD Card.

Still plenty of more mods to come. Next will be the raspberry pi co-processor upgrade.

First things first. I’m off to play Elite, happy flying commanders o7

Been messing around with the MSX recently so thought it was a good time to do a small write up.

Despite sitting right in front of my main computer screen I just realised I didn’t add this to my archive.

So here it is, the Raspberry Pi 400 Home Computer 🙂

Click here to read my thoughts:

I haven’t messed around with MIDI since my late Sam Coupe years and early 286 PC years where I used to connect a Yamaha PSS-780 keyboard up to the computer and “attempt” to get it to play some music. Usually I just ended up shoving pre-made MIDI files through it back then!

But recently I was watching a YouTube episode from RMC The Cave (loads of good videos to watch!) and he did a review of the Yamaha CX5M which is an MSX based computer with a built in Yamaha FM synthesiser.

Well, i have looked at many MSX computers recently with the aim of picking one up, and after seeing this I just knew this was the one. Not only can I experiment with an MSX but I can also go back and have a play with MIDI again 🙂

So, here she is! My very own CX5M with the YK-10 Keyboard

So whats next for this one?

Well the one small issue with it is this system has the SFG-01 addon board which doesn’t support MIDI input. They released a later SFG-05 module that had better software and more features.

Luckily you can do a mod to upgrade it. So I have a freshly burned EPROM sat here waiting to go in it over the weekend!

I have also ordered a SD mapper and 512K expansion so I can play around with some of the MSX software that is available.

Really looking forward to this and will update the site with my thoughts once I have had a play 🙂

Something a bit different added to the collection. Been wanting one of these for a while. Now all I need to do is figure out how to hook it up to an ATM machine 😀

This computer was used by John Conner in Terminator 2: Judgement Day to hack the ATM and also the door codes in the most advanced research laboratory on earth. I guess they should have upped their security a bit!!

Introducing the Atari Portfolio

Used to have one of these when I was at school and used it for typing up my notes in class. Well thats what I told the teacher. This little gem however has a great built in feature, hit Function and B and you are dropped into BBC BASIC 😀. Great to have one back in my collection as mine suffered a cracked screen and got binned many years ago during a garage clear out 😪

So for quite some time I have had a C64 case which I put a raspberry pi inside to emulate the C64. That was a fun project but with my collection growing it seemed only right that I had a real C64 in there. So here it is. A C64C complete with the SDIEC adpater for loading games from an SD Card and the Epyx Fastloader to speed up the process :).

Write up coming in the not too distant future!