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  • Writing Victor 9000 Variable Speed Disks with a Fixed Speed 1.2MB Drive

    27 Feb | 22
    • in Victor 9000 • 
    • by FozzTexx

    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...

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  • Booting a Victor 9000 with Cereal

    30 Jan | 22
    • in Victor 9000 • 
    • by FozzTexx

    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...

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  • A Multi-Format Cross-Platform Floppy for 5.25" Floppy Day

    25 May | 21
    • in Retro • 
    • by FozzTexx

    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...

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  • Booting a 486 From Floppy with the Most Up-to-Date Stable Linux Kernel

    06 Jul | 20
    • in Retro • 
    • by FozzTexx

    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...

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  • Retro Computer Day was a Success! Mostly

    21 May | 19
    • in Apple II • 
    • by FozzTexx

    Saturday morning I woke up early excited about my planned experiment. I took care of all the online stuff I needed to and rushed to prepare a boot disk for the Apple II Plus as an intro for Retro Computer Day . A couple of pictures, a little bit of image conversion on "the timeshare", and a quick transfer of files to floppy using an Apple IIe with an AppleTalk link. I then went around and turned off all the Macs and I was just barely ready at 8am. To try to keep myself from...

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