Gee-k.net

My Father-in-Law was pestering me a while back to sell some "old computers" for him and I had mentioned at the time that I wasn't so keen on helping as they don't fetch much money.
Now, that was quite unusual for me as I quite like old tech (you'd never have guessed eh!?). But at the time I didn't have the inclination to deal with them.
After having spent so much time watching people fix their old computing equipment on YouTube I thought I'd at least have a look at these computers. I asked if the computers could be looked out and I'd get things set up to get them sold on.

I was told that there was a boxed c64 (more modern style, not a breadbin sadly) with cassette drives and a pair of joysticks. Three or four am... Read More!

I was looking through the contents of the cassette that came with the Teach yourself Amstrad basic book and found a blackjack game.
I played it for a bit and found it quite addictive, even with it's lack of graphics, sound or even wording that looked vaguely human.
I was thinking about how I could make it better by using sprites for a few things. Maybe even add some background music and sound effects. This led me to look into how to make sprites for the Amstrad. It took me a good bit of searching and reading to try find something that might work. I was thinking I might need to just remake it all in assembler, but I don't quit... Read More!

The very first part of Ben eater's 8 bit computer is the computer clock. This is made by using a 555 timer, some resisters, capacitors and an LED to show it working.
Each time the LED is on, it represents a clock cycle. This will eventually control the computer cycles in a similar way to how an oscillator works on other computers.
I had another look at the video on YouTube that Ben made and followed it the best I could with the parts that I had.
I used a 220ohm resister instead of a 1kohm and tried various different capacitors for the clock speed.
At first the LED just stayed on and I wasn't sure why. I'm still not sure what caused it, but I fixed it by wiggling a few of the components and wires around.
I'... Read More!

I ordered my soldering station and all the paraphernalia a while back as can be seen with the date on my last post about it.
Finally today the last, and main, part arrived. It arrived whilst I was geeking (should that be gee-k ing) around with starting my Ben eater computer.
Obviously, I just had to have a play around with it straight away. I set out my heat resistant mat, which had mega static when I took it out of its bag. I hope I managed to destatic it before working on my raspberry pi.
I tried a couple of different soldering tips before I found one that I can work with. My first attempt at actual soldering was to solder on the header to my pi zero that I want to use for creating and programming things in the future... Read More!

A while back I found and bought another cpc464 on eBay that was needing some TLC whilst I was looking for a machine for modifying. One that I wouldn't feel bad about drilling holes into the case for an audio input jack.
The buttons for the cassette deck are broken and will need replacing. I'd like to make the buttons myself, but I'm not sure what to make them out of yet. Or how to make them.
I was very close to buying a German amstrad (not Schneider) that was close by but decided against buying yet another 464 just for the sake of it. If I do get a German one, it'll be a Schneider one as I believe there are some pin layouts that are slightly different somewhere (in the 6128 the disk drive ribbon is the change I think, but I'll... Read More!