See Acorn Archimedes Get Repaired And Refurbished, In Glorious Detail

June 21, 2021 by Donald Papp 3 Comments

Want to see a 90s-era Acorn Archimedes A3020 home computer get opened up, refurbished, and taken for a test drive? Don’t miss [drygol]’s great writeup on Retrohax, because it’s got all that, and more!

A modern upgrade allowing the use of a CF card in place of an internal hard drive, via a CF2IDE adapter and 3D-printed fixture.

The Archimedes was a line of ARM-based personal computers by Acorn Computers, released in the late 80s and discontinued in the 90s as Macintosh and IBM PC-compatible machines ultimately dominated. They were capable machines for their time, and [drygol] refurbished an original back into working order while installing a few upgrades at the same time.

The first order of business was to open the machine up and inspect the internals. Visible corrosion gets cleaned up with oxalic acid, old electrolytic capacitors are replaced as a matter of course, and any corroded traces get careful repair. Removing corrosion from sockets requires desoldering the part for cleaning then re-soldering, so this whole process can be a lot of work. Fortunately, vintage hardware was often designed with hand-assembly in mind, so parts tend to be accessible for servicing with decent visibility in the process. The keyboard was entirely disassembled and de-yellowed, yielding an eye-poppingly attractive result.

Once the computer itself was working properly, it was time for a few modern upgrades. One was to give the machine an adapter to use a CF card in place of an internal IDE hard drive, and [drygol] did a great job of using a 3D-printed piece to make the CF2IDE adapter look like a factory offering. The internal floppy drive was also replaced with a GOTEK floppy emulator (also with a 3D-printed adapter) for another modern upgrade.

The fully refurbished and upgraded machine looks slick, so watch the Acorn Archimedes A3020 show off what it can do in the video (embedded below), and maybe feel a bit of nostalgia.

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Growing Up With Computers

June 19, 2021 by Elliot Williams 78 Comments

My son is growing up with computers. He’s in first grade, and had to list all of the things that he knows how to do with them. The list included things like mousing around, drawing ghosts with the paint program, and — sign of the times — muting and unmuting the microphone when he’s in teleconferences. Oh yeah, and typing emojis. He loves emojis.

When I was just about his age, I was also getting into computers. But home computers back then were in their early years as well. And if I look back, I’ve been getting more sophisticated about computers at just about the same pace that they’ve been getting more sophisticated themselves. I was grade school during the prime of the BASIC computers — the age of the Apple II and the C64. I was in high school for the dawn of the first Macs and the Amiga. By college, the Pentiums’ insane computational abilities just started to match my needs for them to solve numerical differential equations. And in grad school, the rise of the overclockable multi-cores and GPUs powered me right on through a simulation-heavy dissertation.

When I was a kid, they were playthings, and as a grownup, they’re powerful tools. Because of this, computers have never been intimidating. I grew up with computers.

But back to my son. I don’t know if it’s desirable, or even possible, to pretend that computers aren’t immensely complex for the sake of a first grader — he’d see right through the lie anyway. But when is the right age to teach kids about voice recognition and artificial neural networks? It’s a given that we’ll have to teach him some kind of “social media competence” but that’s not really about computers any more than learning how to use Word was about computers back in my day. Consuming versus creating, tweeting versus hacking. Y’know?

Of course every generation has its own path. Hackers older than me were already in high-school or college when it became possible to build your own computer, and they did. Younger hackers grew up with the Internet, which obviously has its advantages. Those older than me made the computers, and those younger have always lived in a world where the computer is mature and taken for granted. But folks about my age, we grew up with computers.

Build A New ZX81

May 28, 2021 by Al Williams 17 Comments

[Retro Shack’s] ZX81 died, and while he tried to figure out the fix, he decided to build a new one. Of course, building a circa-1980-something computer from new parts is a bit daunting. Unless you start with an existing design that has it all ready to put together.

The PCB looks great and we like that the silkscreen shows acknowledgments of projects that helped the designer, [Alejandro Sebastian]. The case is, of course, 3D printed. At first, the power LED didn’t work, but voltages looked correct and the board powered up.

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Inside The VIC-20

May 19, 2021 by Al Williams 51 Comments

Commodore machines are well-loved around here, but usually when you think Commodore, you think about the Commodore 64, or maybe the PET or Amiga. But the Commodore 64 had an older sister, the VIC 20. This was the first computer to sell a million units and has a lot in common with its better-known successor. The machine was only made for a few years, and [Dubious Engineering] has been restoring one over a few videos. In the video below, he opens it up for a look inside, among other things.

If you want to get straight to the opening, you’ll need to fast forward about 5 and a half minutes. The keyboard pulls off and a nice old-fashioned set of cables made from individual wires connect to the skinny main board with all the smarts on it. No ribbon cables or flex PCBs!

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Retro ISA Card Means Old, Slow Computers No Longer Need Old, Heavy Monitors

May 18, 2021 by Donald Papp 66 Comments

One thing about vintage computers is that they depend greatly on whether or not one can plug a compatible monitor into them. That’s what’s behind [Tube Time]’s Graphics Gremlin, a modern-design retro ISA video card that uses an FPGA to act just like a vintage MDA or CGA video card on the input end, but provides a VGA port for more modern display output options. (Actually, there is also an RGBI connector and a composite video out, but the VGA is probably the most broadly useful.)

Handy silkscreen labels make everything crystal clear. Click to enlarge.

Why bother making a new device to emulate an old ISA video card when actual vintage video cards are still plentiful? Because availability of the old cards isn’t the bottleneck. The trouble is that MDA or CGA monitors just aren’t as easy to come across as they once were, and irreplaceable vintage monitors that do still exist risk getting smashed during shipping. Luckily, VGA monitors (or at least converters that accept VGA input) are far more plentiful.

The board’s design files and assembly notes are all on the project’s GitHub repository along with plenty of thoughtful detail about both assembly and troubleshooting, and the Verilog code has its own document. The Graphics Gremlin is still under development, but you can also watch for the latest on [Tube Time]’s Twitter feed.

Thanks to [NoxiousPluK] for the tip!

A “Disgusting” 1980s Computer Restored

May 17, 2021 by Al Williams 42 Comments

It takes a special eye to see a junkyard car and envision it as your latest hotrod. The guys at RMC found what they termed a “disgusting” Acorn Electron and decided to restore it to its former glory. The Electron was a budget version of the BBC micro with a 6502 running at 2 MHz when executing code from ROM and 1 MHz when it hit the RAM. Apparently, at least some of the bus was operating at 4 bits instead of 8. Go figure.

The 1982 machine was meant to head off the Sinclair ZX and was set to sell for about £200. However, the machine didn’t catch on like the Sinclair and undersold it by around 20 times with a paltry quarter of a million units.

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Apple Gets CP/M

May 13, 2021 by Al Williams 13 Comments

In case you wanted to run WordStar on your Mac, [Tom Harte] offers CP/M for OS/X, and it looks like it would be a lot of fun. Of course you might be happier running Zork or Turbo Pascal, and you can do that, too.

There are plenty of Z80 emulators that can run CP/M, but what we found most interesting about this one is that it is written in Objective C, a language with a deep history in the Mac and NeXT worlds.

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