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...

This is the second part of a previous article about getting Linux installed onto an old Mac. You can read the first part here . Inspired by the upcoming #RetroComputerWeek I had tinkered around and got my Apple IIgs connected to Dropbox. It worked but I started wondering if I could find a better way. The method I used was rather roundabout and required far too many computers. About a month ago I rescued a couple of PowerMac 7200 computers from destruction. I thought that if I could get Linux...

A real live functional PowerMac 7200/75 This is the first part about getting Linux installed onto an old Mac. You can read the second part here . What started out as something that I thought would take an hour or two tops has turned into a major challenge! I had this idea that I would put Linux on an ancient PowerMac 7200. After doing some searching to see if current distros supported such an ancient thing, it appeared that Debian does. However I'm not beginning to wonder if...

Last year I was messing with an Apple IIe from early 1984. It was one of the oldest and didn't have the 65C02 processor and BASIC commands had to be typed in uppercase. A few programs like ProTERM wouldn't run because of the age of the computer. Since the only thing needed to enhance it was a 65C02 and a few EPROMs I already had on hand, I thought why not. After putting in the 65C02 things stopped because I didn't want to fight with my EPROM burner. MiniPro TL866 on the left,...

We've been using SVN for a long time for managing web sites we develop. I built a custom web front-end to SVN called SiteMgr so that all the designers and programmers have an easy way to do updates and commits, push things to the live site, and work from multiple branches. It also includes an easy way to look at old revisions of specific files by just choosing from a pulldown list. Because we develop our websites using MVC methodology, we keep the server side program separate from the...