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For Saturday night, I can highly recommend the Wrestlers on Newmarket Rd. Best Thai food in the area, but will need a reservation.

Put me down for whole weekend, with some kit.

IIRC they’ve got a working A680 there with appropriate flavour of riscix. Could do with cloning that onto my 680.

Is the C64 still available?

If so, please can I have it?

Interestingly, he seems to have several versions of the same items for sale, some of which are vaguely sensibly priced and some are extortionate.

The extortionate ones all seem to have a “P” prefix in the item name. Wonder if this stands for what he’s taking?

I’ve done a bit more experimenting. I use !sparkfs v 1.42. Compressing as zip (ie /zip) in fact allows me to nest archives (either zip or arc) within each other and all wirks fine. Don’t know why I’ve struggled before). Conpressing everything to a spark file (ie /arc) will allow zip files within it ...

I’m trying to move my software archive between machines (some HostFS, some ADFS). Previous attempts have led to corrupted file attributes for random files. The most bulletproof way to avoid this I’ve found is to compress them as a spark file and transfer that. The only drawback is that some of the a...

These cheap eraser units are okay. But just be aware of the limitations:- The timers are clockwork, so don't expect good accuracy Some units don't prevent the UV light from escaping, so if light does leak out, don't look at the light!!! Either fit a proper UK 13A plug (with a 3A fuse), or use a pro...

Have you checked the voltages on the auxiliary power connector, ie does it produce 12V? I’ve had a PSU where Q4 died. Despite appearances and labelling, it isn’t a transistor but some sort of comparator to regulate the 5V line. The symptom was that the 5V line was dead but 12V was fine. For the reco...

Did even Watford ever sell dual disc drives, in which the two drives were so blatantly mismatched?

A3000 version please
Can collect at Wakefield

I recently obtained a breadbin C64. Initially, it did nothing. Opening it up showed that the large glass fuse had blown. One replacement later, it gives the BASIC header and number of bytes free. However, there’s no cursor and the keyboard’s dead. Swapping the two 6526 CIA chips changed the problem ...

And if you opt for an NVME drive on the M.2 interface, the performance is positively obscene. The Samsung 960s come close to saturating 4 channels of PCIe 3.0.

Part of the problem is that both CPUs are pretty dire, with woeful Passmark scores. The P360 is low-end, but the 4355M is even lower. My old laptop is an 8 year old I5-430M (also HP), so hardly high-end or expensive, even at the time of manufacture. But even that CPU scores higher than those two. Wi...

Good suggestion, but I doubt it’d be strong enough.
These things are sheet steel with pretty industrial hinges/clips. Unfortunately, they seem to be less than precision engineered, so take quite a lot of force to open/close and even more force (I worry about using a weak screwdriver) to clip shut.

One of my (alleged) Cambridge Workstations came from inside Acorn. During it’s life, it’s had its 32016 board removed, along with the hinged aluminium carrier that the copro board usually sits on. What makes me suspect that it wasn’t originally an ACW is that it also has the Acorn mouse board fitted...

You may have hit on the reason why it was designed but never launched as a beeb in 1983. The 1985 Beebug review of the 128k upgrade claimed that the connector was never intended for sideways ram. It was originally there to take a different type of main ram should there be supply issues with the usua...

Agreed. So the bigger question is why it wasn’t rolled out as the Model C in 1983/4, when it would have been a much bigger hit? As it was, the July launch reviews all asked the same question. And when the Master came out the following February, the people who’d bought a B+ were foaming at the mouth....

Not sure if this counts as sage advice or just an example of luck triumphing over stupidity... Whenever I re-cap a PSU, I always test it off load. The voltages are always what they should be, and nothing bad’s happened. Yet. Maybe the few seconds it takes to test isn’t long enough to make me see the...

By the time the B+ came out (only six months before the Master), Acorn will have been well on the way to designing the Master. The prototype Masters were apparently originally called the Model C (I just missed out on one of the Model Cs from an ex-Acorn guy back in the mid-90s but did get lots of fu...

Lardo Boffin wrote:
I believe they are the Z80 co processor utility discs so will be on line, probably here

http://mdfs.net/Mirror/Image/AcornCPM/

Certainly look like them. IIRC, don’t they create about 13 or so discs of actual software?

My board has a row of pins.

I’d be interested in one of each, please.

I use an own-brand Tesco (Technika?) one. It’s about 3-4 years old, so not the latest but not obsolete either. 22”, 1080P, SCART, and 2xHDMI. Works great with my Master. And being Tesco own-brand, it’s cheap. IME, SCART just tends to work. I’ve also used a 12 year old 26” Samsung and 9 year old 20” ...

I've been playing around with creating ide drive .hdf images in VirtualRPC for some time. I'd always assumed that 2Gb was the largest image I could create because that's all I'd been successful with in the past. Today, I tried again to create a 3Gb drive (6144 63 16 512). It worked fine, and formatt...

Lardo Boffin wrote:
Ooh! Bitstik discs. They are rare.

Bet whoever buys/bought his Bitstick will be miffed.

My local store still stocked components, and was handy for just a few resistors/caps in a hurry. Trouble was, they no longer had an in-store catalogue and the website got progressively harder to use. Plus you had to find an assistant over 40 (preferably 50) if you wanted them to have a chance of fin...

By default, Cub monitors take digital RGB, but can be modified to take analogue instead. ISTR it’s links ir switches inside that need to be adjusted. The Micro User published details on how to do it back in the mid-late 80s (either when the Arc came out or when Mike Cook did his chameleon board), bu...

It’s an original Intel chip, ceramic LCC. Apparently, they only made 4 MHz parts for a limited time, back in 1982.
So the board is probably a pretty early example; pictures of other ones have a 6 MHz part.

Many thanks.
My Master now has a lovely pair of flaps! Although my Peartree quad rom cart no longer fits...
Charity cheque on its way.

I thought of overclocking, but the processor itself is stamped as a 4 MHz part. Whilst I’m quite happy overclocking my modern intel procs, a 25-50% overclock of a 30+ year-old cpu is possibly unwise, particularly when I have to find a replacement when I fry it!