Bad RAM on the IIgs A couple of weekends ago I was in the mood to do some retrogaming and didn’t know what I wanted to play so I asked for some suggestions from Twitter. I played some Castle Wolfenstein, Snake Byte, BC’s Quest for Tires, and Miner 2049er on the Apple IIe and then I wanted to try some games on my Apple IIgs. Unfortunately my IIgs has had intermittent issues for a long time, and it was looking like bad RAM might be the culprit.   The IIgs has an Applied...

I picked up an old Roku at a garage sale recently. I was interested in it because it has composite video out on it in addition to the HDMI, so I would be able to hook it up to some of my older TVs that I have around the house. The owners had lost the remote, but since there’s what appears to be an IR window on the front, I figured I could probably use one of the numerous universal remotes I have. Unfortunately none of my remotes have built-in codes for the Roku. Since at least one of my...

As I continue working on digitizing old VHS tapes , I decided I wanted to at least partially automate the VCR control so I set about building a computer controlled universal remote with an old Arduino Duemilanove with an ATmega168. It didn’t take much to start running up against the 1k RAM limit. I purchased a ton of ATmega328s for cheap without a bootloader several years ago since I knew I could use another Arduino and a bunch of parts on a breadboard to burn the bootloader, but I...