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Another fact of life that's pretty much slam-dunk argument for doing some kind of processor offload is if the goal is to let your Z80/6502/whatever actually "surf the web", access email, or do almost...

To be clear, I'm pretty much agnostic about most cases of using microcontrollers as elements for replacing obsolete/unobtanium hardware parts for "retrocomputing"; heck, right now I'm in the middle...

Resurrecting this thread with another ignorant question about arcane Commodore/6502-family obscurities. This is specifically about how the VIA is used in the PET.

According to the datasheet the...

Some of the other constraints that EtherNUT code has to deal with is running on microcontrollers with as little as 4K of RAM (It's an IoT OS, after all) so I can imagine it's not *that* hard to push...

I have to admit I'm not sure where realistically this would ever be a worry for a machine like this, especially if it's primarily in a client role instead of a server. Sure, if you're planning to...

Hey, I don't mind hearing about CPLDs. ;) I'm still mucking around with GALs so they're a bit out of my league yet, but maybe one of these days...

On the question of using as microcontroller to...

Whoever told you that is misinformed. On a “standard” 1.44mb drive the density selection jumper directly controls the write current, if you insert a 720k disk (or a 1.44mb disk with the hole covered...

On the flip side, I sort of wish the XUB configuration software would incorporate direct support for SST flash chips one of these days. The 128KB ones are massive overkill capacity-wise but they’re...

The details give me a headache, but the long and short of it is the circuitry that has to trap out the narrow bandwidth chroma pulses and compare them to the reference phase imposes significant delay...

But the chroma data isn’t shoved into the back porch, only the color burst lives there. (Which is the sync/phase reference for the chroma data overlaid/mixed on the luminance signal.)

Sure, it’s...

It's *possible* in CGA's case that IBM never actually thought of it and the fact that the hardware is capable of it is a happy accident resulting from sheer cheapness. (IE, it's possible IBM could...

A stock 5170's going to have an MFM + FDC board in it, not IDE, of course. But if you put a generic IDE/FDC card in there and want to just play the "I'll pick the biggest type on the list" game......

Just tossing this out there: they make IDE-to-SD and even IDE-to-Micro-SD boards that you could cable up instead of a CF adapter if you want something that'd fit through an even smaller, less...

What are you planning to use for the video output hardware? And keyboard input, so far as that goes. (Interface to an actual matrix, or some kind of PS/2 or USB converter?)

So, my list for 2021 shakes out something like this:


Build a complete "working" computer based on the video dingus I've been futzing around with the last couple months. I've never built a...

... so, in other words they successfully copied the *behavior* of the “canonical” 8080 accurately with the Z80. That says nothing about the hardware.

Electrically the 8080 and the Z80 aren't very much alike at all. The 8080 has an 8-bit ALU <strike>and a multiplexed address bus</strike>(*), the Z80's ALU is 4 bits wide yet it has additional...

Grrr. That one rankles me every time I see it. I understand he's a nice enough guy and means well, but he should know better.

Re: the "slow scan TV" claim, I'd be curious to know more about that....

Here's a mind-numbing cross reference of Commodore 1080/1084 family monitors. The vast majority of the individual SKUs supported both analog and CGA compatible RGBI, but the exact details of the...

My TRS-80 Model I came with one of those fabric glare filters stuck to it. I did inexplicably like it a lot; obviously it doesn't actually help with flicker (which is evident on the Model I's...

Don't run video modes that the attached monitor doesn't natively support. I mean, the reason it faked shades of gray like that was because if you tried to display a 16 color EGA screen using only the...

The idea of such a thing did actually occur to me, but here's the painfully obvious problems that to my mind prevent it from working on even a theoretical level:

The phosophors in the monitor are...

I'm pretty sure the placebo affect was depressingly significantly responsible for the relief people claimed to feel after sticking all kinds of ridiculous things to their monitors back then, yes....

That was a cut-and-paste for an earlier version that was designed to blow PROM "fuses" made out of barbed wire for programming the ENIAC?

Heh. GALASM so far as I can tell is an intentional clone of PALASM; from some brief digging on the latter the syntax looked almost identical to me; the main thing I could identify as different is...