One of the things bugging me while tinkering with old computers has been the joysticks. Several of the computers I'm playing with can use the Atari 2600 joysticks, but those joysticks are awful. I've never liked them, even back when the Atari 2600 was new. I kept thinking about getting some other 2600 compatible joystick, or maybe making a box and sticking some of my arcade buttons and joysticks in it and wiring it up with the 9 pin Atari pinout. Neither of those ideas seemed...

I made these toys for the kids a couple of years ago. I found a single page description in a woodworking book for making toys at the library. It seemed very simple but it looked like one of those kinds of toys that kids would go back to again and again because it could be used in so many different ways. The construction is very simple, it's thin sheets with notches cut into them. The wide notches represent doors and windows, depending on which way it is turned, and the thin notches allow...

If you've messed around in the Commodore 64 world for even a short time, you've probably discovered that it's theoretically possible to hook up a Commodore 1541 5.25" floppy disk drive to a PC. Most of the information you come across though either talks about a specialized circuit board, or using a computer with a parallel port. While I do have plenty of older computers that have the nifty parallel port that can be used as GPIO, I was more interested in interfacing the drive...

Another retro computer I've been messing with is an Atari 800. It has been neglected for a long time and looks like it was left in some areas with some moisture. For the most part it works, but it has no color output. I got the Atari 800 field service manual and it talks about a SALT II diagnostic cartridge. Now that I have working EPROM burner, figured I could make one. There's an existing design for a PCB that would accept a 2764 or 27128 but none for sale. I could probably etch my...

Last night while I was fiddling with the newest addition to my collection of retro computers, my Commodore 64, I was having problems with the video output on the DIN connector. Everything I had found on the internet said that the Commodore 64, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, and the Atari 800 all used the same pins for composite video and audio. Just to be sure though I did a lot of searching and tracked down all the various pinouts and organized them into one cheat sheet. I also threw in the...