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...

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...

Not long after I started RetroBattlestations I started contemplating spending an entire day using only a retro computer, even possibly lugging it to work and using it there as well as at home. The idea of seeing whether or not an old computer could still be usable in a modern world sounded somewhat interesting, at least to me. After all, as much as computers have changed in the last 40 years, they also haven't. I often find myself using knowledge I acquire from tinkering with these old...

As part of collecting I've managed to build up a small pile of Apple II+ computers that were purchased to get various cards and other parts. A revision 7 one made in 1984 (contrary to popular belief, Apple II+ production did not cease when the IIe came out in 1983, see last two images in gallery) had become my favorite test machine when I needed to try out a newly received card or other Apple II+ hardware. One night while testing out a Micromodem II card and going through the...

When I first saw this clip from the BBC show Tomorrow's World several months ago I was fascinated by it and was impressed that they were sending a program for two different models of computers. It was also interesting that they chose to write something for the Apple II. Since then I thought it would be neat to try loading the program simultaneously on both models of computer and I thought Cassette Week would be the perfect time to try it! Unfortunately it took much longer to get...