A little over a year since I started down this road , I've finally managed to do it. There were definitely some unexpected twists and turns along the way. But yes, that's right, it's now possible to write out Victor 9000 / Sirius 1 floppy disks without having to use an actual Victor machine. As with everything, one project leads to another. There is an annual BBS Week contest on RetroBattlestations that happens in the middle of February. With my success of getting my Victor to...

In February of 2021, with a brand new standing desk completely devoid of clutter, I polled Twitter to ask what retro computing project I should attempt . Trying to get my Victor 9000 to boot was the most popular, and so off I went to attempt it, knowing in advance that it was likely to be an extremely difficult challenge, because not only does the Victor use a rather unusual floppy encoding system, I wasn't even sure if my Victor was completely working. The Victor 9000 (renamed as the...

Something I’ve wanted to do for several years is to create a cross-platform 5.25” floppy, one that could be used on two different incompatible computer systems. Not by making a “flippy” disk with data for one system on one side and data for the other on the back, but instead with everything all on a single side. This may seem like it would be trivial, but back when the 5.25” floppy was king every computer system had its own idea of how data would be encoded at a...

Back in August of 2019 I had a  Sing-Along Week contest on RetroBattlestations  with the challenge of playing a MIDI file synchronized to a speech synthesizer singing the lyrics. In my stash of cards I found an MQX-32M MIDI card (Roland MPU-401 clone) which I wanted to use for converting MIDI signals to interface to an Apple II+ with an Echo II speech synthesizer, but ended up using a laptop with a USB MIDI interface. The  Pizza Week contest  made me more interested in...

October 1st started off like a normal day. I went to move a 20 year old Celeron-based iPaq near my Teletype in order to finish setting it up for the party I was having a few days later. After getting everything plugged in, it refused to boot up insisting that /sbin/init and many other files were missing. I booted into a rescue Linux via PXE and sure enough, the files were missing. Since I had had so much trouble getting it setup I didn't think much of it and wiped it and started over with...