What a splendid weekend! Thanks to @computinghistory.org.uk for hosting, @heredragons.be for organising and everyone who came to stop and chat! Winner of the Beeb high score was @snuggsy187.bsky.social with a frankly ridiculous 237110, and the Speccy was @morefunmakingit.bsky.social with 23030 😄

Of course, @binarydinosaurs.co.uk hatched a plan to have most versions of Chuckie Egg on his table.

Well, those scores have increased a bit! And the shock of the weekend was Nicholas getting 64 on Flagon Bird - which we think is the highest possible score! Come see us tomorrow at @computinghistory.org.uk and see if you can do better ...

Hell's teeth, one of my favourite ever games. Hard to believe it's 26 years old! UNSTOPPABLE!

Ready to röck your Chuckie Eggs at @computinghistory.org.uk this weekend. That poor little Spectrum being dwarfed by the bigger machines is my original machine so be nice to it 😄

Just for lols I’ve added the Toshiba HX-22 as a backup to the Sony because it has a great picture in, surprisingly, RF mode. The LG monitor shown here is not in RF mode, it’s composite.

Any MSXperts about? Is there such a thing? I’ve tried three (3) different machines (Sony, Sanyo, Toshiba) and they all have the picture slightly offset to the left. Not an issue for the weekend, I’m just puzzled cos it’s clearly either a) LCD issue or b) VDP issue.

I still have my original 48K Speccy that I saved up for ages to buy this SAGA 1 Emperor keyboard for. Today it fell to bits. At speed I grabbed my other Emperor keyboard to find it too has fallen apart. Curse these manufacturers not thinking their products might still be used 40 years later 😆

Sony HitBit HB75 reporting for Chuckie Egg duty now it has a refurbished keyboard.

Acorn Atom now has a turbo mode, AtomMMC2 SDcard adapter and all the classic games work! Apart from Chuckie Egg which seems to think it’s in joystick mode 😆 #retroGamingFest25 Arses. It works fine in ‘slow’ mode but there’s a lot of snow on the screen as was the case with most Atom games.

Dust bunnies! 1980s filth! Almost a shame to clean it, but it’s CAKED. Mmm cake. #sonyHitBit75

I love finding build faults in nearly 50yo machines. This seems to have been like this since new. Good job nobody has tried to get a printer working on this Acorn Atom! Without a 6522 fitted to the IO socket this won’t upset the machine, but guess who’s just fitted a 6522… 😆

I've seen mentions of this and the occasional project update, but not what the finished form looks like. This looks *great*

I'll be the one to add the missing word - 'week'. Insert where you see fit, then come and see me exhibiting some Chuckie Eggs on as many machines as I can fit on my table* 😁 Join in to decide which is the best version! (*4, at a guess)

Result! After a lot of faffing with different TANBUG versions trying to get things to work properly, I discovered the second TANEX board wouldn’t function properly in my working Microtan. Answer: pull the RS232 chipset! Suddenly, TANDOS works properly 😁

Huh. For those following the Microtan saga I pondered that the keyboard I got with the machine wasn’t a Microtan keyboard. Turns out that if you feed it -12v and its own GND connection it only bloody works fine. TANDOS board next, in that case.

OK, so this week's tale of woe was a non-booting Microtan65 + TANEX expansion. Zero activity and the mysterious case of a clock signal being flattened. Voltages at the header looked good, yet the thermal camera showed a very dead looking board. This was backed up by scope traces showing nowt. /n

Nintendo Gamma Boy

Repost for the morning and day crew 😁

Puzzle time. Microtan65 and TANEX expansion. In yellow is a CLK pin going to its only destination. In red is /RESET going to 1 of 4. Both come from the CPU underneath which I know works. No shorts are present. With both connected, CLK is mushed to nothing and /RESET almost mirrors it. How? /2

Did an Einstein TC-01 replica board with @peepouk.bsky.social. All good and well, except the keyboard plays a tune - on the boot screen. 🤷 😅

For 20 years I’ve thought this was the keyboard for my rack mount Microtan 65, but now I’m not so sure, purely because the SMC controller needs -12v and nothing is feeding it that voltage. Also +5v is right down to 4.4v so maybe it needs an external PSU.

Where we’re going we don’t need sockets. #microtan65

Start the week with a unicorn! No, not the Torch Unicorn though I'd quite like one of those too. No, there'll be two camps for this one. You'll either instantly know what it is or, more likely, you'll never have heard of it because it never sold. This is the HH Tiger, aka the Tangerine Microtan 2.

Recent Acorn A3000 japes made me dig out my A3020 to check for battery woes, I remember it being stored upside down and this was verified when I checked if I’d snipped the battery - I had, phew - and the damage was on the metalwork under the floppy drive.

Happy birthday, MS Word; released today 1983! Word was the first software officially confirmed by the Vatican as haunted. Despite several exorcisms, users around the world still suffer fonts mysteriously changing in the night & paragraph spacing moving with a life of its own! 😱 #TillysGameversary

This is QUITE the achievement 😁

Yep, I’m sure there’ll be no issues seen at all wiring some power into two of these tiny pins, seen here next to a regular 7805 (deceased) because a banana would be ridiculous.

Power plug for my little Husky turned up this morning. What an excellent little sci-fi type thing it is, I’m sure I’ll have no issue at all soldering wires to the contacts.

This is amazing. Any progress is good no matter how small. Currently I think this is the only working Torch TripleX in existence, if you know different let us know!

AWS earlier today.

Dug out some Torch TripleX Workstation floppies for @crashedfiesta.bsky.social earlier. They took some reading over 3 drives, but hopefully they’ll be useful for booting his WORKING machine. Unfortunately the Unix V1.0 disk is physically damaged but there may be enough to boot successfully.

I keep trying to tell people about #FujiNet. That it is a WiFi adapter for your favorite #Atari8bit, #Apple2, #ColecoAdam, #TRS80CoCo, #Commodore, #Atari2600, #AtariLynx, and #MSDOS machines, with more to come. But word isn't getting out. Can u help? fujinet.online

BBC Teletext test page rendered on the Philips P2000T in BASIC. Took me an hour to type in this listing and I can only see a couple of typos so well done me. Can I find a microcassette to save the bloody thing? I have STC Executels galore and have bought multiple tapes. Loads. Nope.

I completely forgot I’d bought this replacement Lisa front plate, NEARLY turning it back into the Lisa 1 it once was. Witness my happy little face 😁

Yes, it’s the Philips P2000T, otherwise known as ‘the what?’ unless you were at a Dutch school in the 80s when they were everywhere. Being designed for an education market AND using the viewdata character set means their gaming capability is limited to poor. But hey! Pac-Man in viewdata 😄

Kent correspondent @petescircuit.bsky.social visited earlier to take some pics and drop off a new inhabitant at Castle Dinosaurs that he’d picked up for me. I’ve wanted one of these since I found out they were a thing so this is awesome. Thanks too to Bart at the Homecomputermuseum. Any guesses?

Yeah, that’s not going to be loading RiscIX any time soon ☠️ This is the Rodime drive from my Acorn R140. MFM interface too, I don’t know of a project that emulates those aside from David Gesswein’s excellent board which I have, but it’s 5.25” sized.

Success with the Acorn A3000 and seeing an R140 working yesterday at the museum made me try powering mine up. Yesterday I tested the PSU and today tested the power rails. Honking great tantrum on the 12v rail was shorted so I swapped it for a less explodey one and… …it worked! For 5 mins.

Moving quickly on to the Mac 512k which just needed a new RIFA, a clean and a few component reseats. Now where did I put my System 1 disk…

BBC Model Linear B

Acorn A3000 is getting there. Last night was 'test the floppy drive' so I gave it a little servicing and by and large, nothing happened. 'Drive empty' said RiscOS. Discovered the battery leak had destroyed the cable internally so I thieved one from my R140. It works! Time to make a new cable...

Much bodge and repair later, the mouse port on the A3000 works and I can set the clock and other fun things. Picture is still mono because I’m using the composite port.

My coffee table book, Open Circuits, with beautiful cross-section photos of electronics, is 25% off through the 12th. Use the super-secret discount code "SHOWOFF". What, you already have the book? BAM--you just thought of a friend who would enjoy a copy. nostarch.com/open-circuits

A3000 doesn't like talking to an LCD TV, I suspect because it doesn't have the 12V autoswitch in the cable. However, it WILL talk to my Philips CM8233. I also found a quadrature RM Nimbus mouse which should work... but it doesn't. More testing and cleaning around the mouse connector tomorrow then!

A3000 news! It lives again! Not something I thought I’d see given the state of it and my unfamiliarity with all things Archimedes, but with a lot of discord help from Mattmos and Baz this is the result. Now to find a rodent.

I hope he’s paying rent.

What every Acorn Atom needs is a PSU that’s almost bigger than the machine itself. This one is beautifully constructed and wired, and the extra ports make me wonder what it was actually used for originally. @peteronion.bsky.social

I do love me a kit built Acorn Atom, even if they DO have The World's Worst Keyboard setup. Even worse than the Apple ][ RFI keyboard which is just waiting to go SPROING if you so much as look at it with a screwdriver in your hand. /n

I was going to post a few pics tonight, then I remembered it's friday so everyone will either be drinking or watching TOTP or both 😆 Apropos of nothing though my old Demon IP address (1995) just popped into my head - 158.152.136.250. How odd.