• Emulating an old HP-IB disk drive with HPDrive

    14 Jun | 15
    • in Retro • 
    • by FozzTexx

    It'll never work like that! I bought a National Instruments AT-GPIB IEEE-488 ISA card last year intending to use it with HPDrive so that I could make an old PC pretend to be an HP-IB hard disk. I installed the HP-IB card in the old KT7A-RAID computer I’ve been using for doing lots of other retro things. Unfortunately the card had to go all the way at the end and the HP-IB connector was too large to fit on there which meant swapping the motherboard into a different case that...

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  • From Zed to Zee

    10 Oct | 14
    • in Electronics • 
    • in ZX Spectrum • 
    • by FozzTexx

    A while ago I stumbled into a conversation between Eric Nelson and Rod Hull on twitter. Eric was mentioning that for a long time he has wanted to get a ZX Spectrum to add to his retro gaming collection, but living in the US they weren't exactly easy to come by and he also wasn't sure how hard it would be to make one work in the US. I jumped in and somewhat jokingly said that when he gets one I'll have it shipped to my house so he has to come over and play some air hockey. A...

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  • Making more circuit boards

    11 Sep | 14
    • in Electronics • 
    • in ZX Spectrum • 
    • by FozzTexx

    A 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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  • Using modems without phone lines

    16 Aug | 14
    • in Retro • 
    • by FozzTexx

    Ever since I did BBS Week on RetroBattlestations , I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to use a modem without having to use a land line. It seemed like it should be possible since modems work with T1 lines, and T1 lines are digital. However when I experimented with it during BBS week, I didn’t have a PBX that I could use to interface to an analog line, and I didn’t have any modems with an acoustic coupler. I decided to setup an Asterisk PBX and get the cheapest card...

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  • Im not an expert on these things, just buy it already

    28 Jul | 14
    • in TRS-80 • 
    • by FozzTexx

    A lot of the auctions I win on eBay are for items that are listed as “untested, as-is, for parts or repair.” While the sellers will post lots of pictures, they often won’t do any kind of research or investigation of what they are selling. This is great for me because 9 times out of 10, the thing I bought actually turns out to work just fine and doesn’t need any repair at all. And with computers it’s not unusual to find some nice upgrades have been installed that...

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