I've made some more progress on my software that allows the Raspberry Pi to act as a Commodore 64 disk drive. I was amazed at how much more of the IEC protocol was missing from the documents I have. One of the things that I found a little strange about the IEC protocol was there was no way to specify how much of the data you want. Once you say go, the sender is just going to send it all. It turns out that when ATN is asserted it doesn't mean abort , it just means pause. Took quite a...

If you've been following along here or on Twitter or Google+ you've no doubt seen the experimenting I've been doing with interfacing a Raspberry Pi in various ways with several retro computers like the Atari 800 and Commodore 64. My first project was using the Raspberry Pi to act as a converter for a USB gamepad to turn it into an Atari 2600 style joystick. After discovering Eric Nelson  on Twitter and seeing all the games he was playing on the Commodore 64, I really wanted to...

Got the kernel module for the Raspberry Pi that does the Commodore 64 IEC protocol working quite well. Managed to get rid of pretty much all the timing issues, and cobbled together a simple user space program to handle the file I/O. I can now read & write PRG files, even very large ones. It was interesting sending a file (by accident) larger than the C64's RAM, the poor C64 freaked out and overran even the screen and crashed. It was very cool to load a Demo without having to mess...

A couple of days ago I decided to visit Surplus Stuff in Sacramento for the first time. Since I've been on this retro computing kick I thought it might be fun to check out what they had and see if they had anything interesting. Found a lot of really old stuff along with stuff that was only 5-10 years old. They're not as big as Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale, but it was still a fun trip. A stack of HP9000/300 computers Something that caught my eye while wandering around was a pile of HP...

I often get asked by people how they can browse the internet on their TV. When I ask why they would want to do such a thing, they have this idea that it would be neat to be able to watch TV *and* browse the internet at the same time. I've been telling them they should get an iPad or Android tablet instead, because it had to be better than trying to browse the web on a TV. Of course the reason they want to do it on the TV was because they didn't want to spend much money. Since I was...