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Look at That S'Card Go!
20 May | 23When I got the #ForestApples many years ago, one of them came with a 16k Language Card clone in slot zero, and another RAM card in slot one. The Language Card clone had a ribbon cable going to the RAM socket at E3 as usual. The other RAM card also had its own ribbon cable going to another RAM socket! It looked like there were two Language Cards installed, something I had never seen before. I soon discovered that the extra RAM card was a Legend Industries 64KC. It had 64k of RAM instead of a...
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Adding Solid-State Storage to an Original IBM PC
14 Aug | 17After CGA Weekend it became pretty obvious I needed to do something about getting some kind of permanent mass storage installed in my IBM PC. I can't simply add an IDE hard drive controller since the slots are only 8-bit and in general IDE controllers are designed for 286 computers and up which have 16-bit ISA slots. 8-bit SCSI cards are uncommon and ones that can be used to boot from even more so. I've messed around with using the XT-IDE BIOS over serial , but it was very slow. The...
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Making more circuit boards
11 Sep | 14A cassette adapter works, but is less convenient It’s been a while since I last made a PCB but I finally had need to make another circuit board. The board I needed to make this time was a simple circuit that would be installed in a ZX Spectrum +2B which would bring the record and playback lines out to standard headphone jacks so an external source like a smartphone could be patched in instead of having to use one of those cassette adapters. It came about because when the...
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Milling the PCB
16 Mar | 14This is part 3 in a series. Check out Part 1: Creating a circuit and Part 2: Using KiCAD . My CNC setup Some time ago I bought a small CNC with the intended purpose of using it to make PCBs. While I have used the CNC for lots of things, I have never tried to make a PCB. The amount of work involved in trying to figure out all the different software programs needed, as well as how they work, has made me constantly put it off. Most of the time I’ve found a way to work around making a...
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Breadboard to circuit layout
09 Mar | 14This is part 2 in a series. Check out Part 1: Creating a circuit and Part 3: Milling the PCB . Prototype on breadboard In order to make my own PCB for the CGA to analog converter project , the first step is to do what is called schematic capture, and get the schematic drawn in the computer. While it’s certainly possible to draw a schematic in a program like Paint, or using something more sophisticated like Illustrator, using a specialized program is a better choice...
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