This is part 1 in a series. Check out  Part 2: Using KiCAD  and  Part 3: Milling the PCB . When I got my Commodore 128 I was expecting I would just connect the RGBI TTL output to the GBS-8200 knockoff that I have been using with the BBC Micro’s RGB TTL output. Of course the moment I went to do that I realized that I had an extra pin for Intensity with no place to connect it. I found several circuits online that were supposed to convert the 4 bit TTL output to an analog...

After getting the Mac SE upgraded to 4 megs of RAM and a working internal HD, the next thing to do was to see if I could get a working web browser on it. The SE doesn't have an ethernet card, but it does have built-in AppleTalk networking. I have plenty of PhoneNet adapters. I ended up using another Mac ( the one that I fought to put Linux on ) running MacOS 9 and LocalTalk Bridge to move traffic from LocalTalk to Ethernet and back. It worked well and I was able to mount a share from a...

My newest Mac next to my oldest Mac I pulled out a dual floppy Mac SE for the Macintosh 30th anniversary for a spur of the moment photo. Since I had it out I thought it would be fun to have it dial in for BBS Week . But while I had a bootable external hard drive with System 7.5.5 and Crystal Quest, it had no other software on it, not even the AppleTalk drivers. Since it has been too long for me to remember which files I needed to add to get at least AppleTalk working, I decided to do a...

Glitchy Not long after getting the BBC Micro working with US power and a VGA monitor, I discovered it had an issue in modes 0 through 3 when hitting return enough times to make the screen scroll. At first the prompt would move over towards the center of the screen, and then it would start filling the screen with garbage. It sort of looked like bad RAM, but I wasn't convinced of that because I noticed that some of the garbage would actually twinkle as I typed, so it appeared more that...

With it being BBS Week over on RetroBattlestations , many people are trying to get their retro computers online so they can connect to a BBS over the Internet. One reason for wanting to connect over the internet is because phone calls cost money, and for others (like me), we don't even have a phone line to use with a modem anymore. Some of the discussion has pointed to some specialized serial to Ethernet or serial to WiFi adapters. Those boxes can be over $300 so I thought I’d put...