Hobby-Electronic | 64'er Magazin
https://www.64er-magazin.de/8601/hobby_elektronik.html
#c64 #retrocomputing #64er
Das Schwabenland war schon immer dafür bekannt, das Land der Bastler und Tüftler zu sein. So kam es denn auch, daß man vom 7. bis 10. November auf dem Stuttgarter Killesberg eine Messe erleben konnte, die sich nicht nun in ihrer Zielsetzung von anderen Messen wie beispielsweise der Systems unterscheidet. Zunächst fiel auf, daß man so gut wie alles Ausgestellte auch gleich

Hi @declan . Just been to the market. Not sure if we met. It was fascinating and fun to see the old retro machines. Very excited to meet Ewan of #microbee fame, and his new kits under development. Would love to get one of those when ready. Had a lot of cool chats with stall holders about their machines and see the passion to keep the computing dream alive. #retrocomputing

nOw PLaYiNG oN qUAntUm RaDio!: in judish rejwownia bY CDX! tUnE iN NoW: https://radio.erb.pw #retrocomputing #demoscene #chiptunes #trackermusic #sceneradio

Update on the Apricot IR hackerying

Managed to make the USB HID stack library I was using work nicely with USB mice, and now we have a pretty fully functional USB mouse adaptor (which was my end goals :blobfoxlaugh:)

#apricotportable #apricotpc #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #dos #msdos #vintagelaptops

@root42 the cartridge arrived today and I assembled it. I’ll try to use it tomorrow and maybe 3D print a case for it. #retrocomputing #c64

Today, I could finally dump a German 3.5inch floppy disk set of Windows 3.0... not the updated v3.00a, but the original from 1990. I was 7 years old back when this was released. 😜

P. S. I just realized, disk 7 was missing from the photo, as it was still in the disk drive. But, of course, I will upload all of the disks to the Internet Archive a.s.a.p.

#RetroComputing #Windows #90er #90s #Oldschool #FloppyDisk #Disketten

#retrocomputing

I'll be throwing this simulation up on Github here in a little bit, just need to fix up a few things and finish writing the README. It requires a patched version of the simulator so its a bit tricky.

https://github.com/dbalsom/cga_sim

#retrocomputing Note also the "MUX A" and "MUX B" inputs - these represent graphics or text mode.

Fun fact, there is a way to "accidentally" turn both of these on.

#retrocomputing

And here's where the Color Magic happens, the color muxers U9 and U10.

It's a bit of a squirrely mess but basically we're either selecting a color bit from the attribute byte, or falling back to the background color.

The AND gate at the top controls blinking, combining bit 7 of the attribute byte and the "blinking enabled" bit from the mode control register.

The "STR" signal turns off color muxing altogether - this signal is active if you disable video, or when dots aren't being generated in high resolution graphics mode (where the background is always black).

Built a SNES controller card for my Altair, which doesn't have any immediate use but I'm sure I'll think of something. #retrocomputing

#retrocomputing

Attributes are applied two bits at a time. The CC byte (for graphics) and the attribute byte are serialized out a bit at a time in odd/even pairs as C0 and C1.

These get shifted out at the "dot clock" which is either 14Mhz or 7Mhz depending on whether you're in high resolution text mode or not.

#retrocomputing

That goes over here, to the character generator. This is a parallel-in, serial-out shift register. It produces the 'CHGDOTS' signal that indicates a 'dot' of text is being output - whether or not that dot becomes a pixel depends on various other logic.

You can hook the CHGDOTS signal directly up the video output and get a monochrome text display.

#retrocomputing

The first step is to latch the character and attribute.

The thing to note about the character latch is that it is the actual *character code*. We don't rasterize the ascii value -this is used for graphics mode, but it's still called the CC latch.

U33 is the font rom and it is addressed by the character code and dutifully emits 8 bits, representing a single scanline of a character glyph.

I've implemented attribute support in my digital logic simulation of the IBM CGA.

The logic to apply attributes takes some twisty paths!

#retrocomputing

@dandylover1 Sure, you can use FreeDOS as a modern DOS, and that's great!

But many people want to run FreeDOS for the "retro" experience -- and for that, I often like to run my VM without acceleration so things run a bit slower, more like classic era systems.

So that's why I wrote the article. 🤓 #retrocomputing

Quick play with #FreeCAD and adding all the bits together gives me some nice results.
The screen is 10.1" 1024 x 600, it has some basic graphics capability (lines, squares, circle, fill, etc) and some fonts built in.
I find it really helps me to be able to assemble things like this to check alignment, sizes, spacing, etc.
This will be a fun ride to get everything working.
#Retrocomputing

Ah, yes, the riveting saga of adventure games from the dawn of time presented like it's the Rosetta Stone of gaming history. 🕵️‍♂️✨ Somehow, this verbose journey through pixelated yore is supposed to enlighten us about personal computers with all the excitement of watching paint dry. 🎨🖥️
https://technicshistory.com/2025/12/13/the-rise-of-computer-games-part-i-adventure/ #adventuregames #gaminghistory #retrocomputing #pixelart #nostalgia #HackerNews #ngated

And because I'm a masochist, also have my own bug ridden #z80 #assembler to intel hex format too. ...slightly worried I might need to write a linker to get a working .com executable from the pile of .ihx files from my compiler source files. Hopefully BDS C can do that? I'll need to find docs or reverse engineer how symbol tables are handled... but first fix all the parse error from self compiling. #retrocomputing #cpm #fz80

IBM Model 2420 tape drive encoding video! #retrocomputing #ibm https://youtu.be/Ep8PBlRECZE

This week on the blog: wrapping up my tour of the Sega Master System by pushing its scrolling system a bit with parallax and its weird "scroll inhibitor" system that prefigures later systems' window layers a bit.

https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2025/12/13/smooth-scrolling-on-the-sega-master-system/

#retrocomputing #sega8bit #segamastersystem