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mr-macrisc wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 06, 2019 2:28 pm

Watching with excitement and hopefully this continues to a purchasable item.

Absolutely. I'd snatch one of these up if it becomes available.

Fabless was definitely the right way to go after around 2000, unless you had colossal production volume like Intel. But back in the 80s I don't think fabless was the right model, at least for consumer-focused manufacturers. The costs of maintaining and upgrading a useful fab weren't nearly as high a...

After MOS Technology were bought by Commdore, most of the 6502 design team left the company. This may explain why no major changes were made to the design. Yes, that was almost certainly the case. Chuck Peddle remained with Commodore for a while, but pretty much everyone else on the 6502 team left....

So who did do this work? Are we referring to VIC and SID? If so that did not seem to work out for even Commodore in the long run. None of those making 8 bit home computers went on to long term success making games consoles. And in the other direction, business computing went from CP/M to the IBM PC...

This is off topic, but I do wish to point out that the QL graphics and sound were never intended to be suitable for games, as it was supposed to be a serious / business machine... Yes, getting a bit off the path here. Possibly time for a 'failed British computers thread' :D Getting back OT, I've ne...

What if the Electron had 8 1x64kbit DRAM chips instead of 4, eliminating the double nibble rubbish that killed the machines performance addressing DRAM. The 64k Electron would have more memory than the 48k Spectrum and a CPU clock frequency more than twice that of the C64 - as well as disk drives t...

However, I don't think Acorn were looking to produce a games machine - the Electron is still a serious hobbyist machine albeit in a cut-down, reduced cost form. It has an excellent BASIC and OS, a good keyboard and can do a proper 80 column display. It makes a good wordprocessor and a superb front-...

That video chip is a very interesting part indeed. Pity it's not 5v tolerant, but still.

Steve tells some amazing stories. I think it's a little sad that nobody has written a really exhaustive history of Acorn and the early days of ARM, something similar to Brian Bagnall's excellent books about Commodore.

I wonder if it would be possible to install this mod internally, by removing R45, R46, R47, connecting the left hand pad (on the schematic, the one connected to the ULA) to the gate inputs, and the outputs to the right hand pad, through some replacement 68R resistors. You would of course need flyin...

I wonder if adding a 74LS08 and the RGB resistors externally to an issue 2/4 would fix the dim video problem?

On an A1200 it is more likely to be leaky capacitors causing problems - the SMD electrolytics are prone to it so will probably need replacing. There are no batteries in the 1200 unless you have an expansion card in it. Yes, cap leakage on A1200s is almost universal. I've yet to see a Commodore-buil...

Two examples of my new development board for the Elk. EPROM, SRam and Flash sockets, 20 I/Os, and an SD card interface.

I built these last week, but was too lazy to take pictures until today

Yes, the white mask makes following traces practically impossible. It does look very nice, though, and one other advantage I've found is it hides any small smears of residue left on the board after cleaning.

I've used them in the past, but the long delivery time pushed me to switch to AllPCB. Their base fabrication PCB charges are more expensive, but for orders up to a certain weight they offer free shipping via DHL. In my experience the time from order to receiving the PCBs is around 5-6 days, and work...

Going by the posts here, my collection is still a bit amateur league! At the moment it consists of: 2 x Amiga A1200s (one accelerated, one not) 2 x Commodore Plus/4s 2 x Acorn Electrons (one working, one faulty) 1 x Sinclair Spectrum 48K+ 1 x Sinclair Spectrum +2 128K 1 x Commodore C16 No wish list ...

I'd never heard of this organisation before. Was it an early example of astroturfing on the part of Microsoft? I'm not sure astroturfing is the correct term for this kind of thing, but I don't really know what is. Setting up dubious 'industry' groups to lobby on their behalf was a tactic Microsoft ...

I think this may have been a lot of my logic too. I know the "real" keyboard was a massive attraction to me being that I was upgrading from a ZX81 Yes, I think you my be on the money there. I suppose most people didn't really know what they were buying so visible attributes were important...

I remember you'd buy a game and on one side of the tape was a version in the 4 (or 8?) colours that were on a green background and flip the tape over and you had the even more god-awful choices of something like white, cyan, orange (brown?) and something else. Really? What were they thinking? And t...

I have to admit to doing a bit of a happy dance when the board fired up first time :) Alas, no new source for connectors. I bought some cheap ones on Ebay that are intended for vertical through-hole mounting and just bent the pins inward and soldered the ends to the PCB pads. It looks ugly and proba...

An improved and more polished design with a few added features I something I'd like to do, this one was really just designed as a way for me to learn about the Elk and it is pretty rough in all honesty. It has a couple of missing traces that I only noticed after the PCBs arrived :oops: The SD card c...

After acquiring my first Electron less than a month ago I set out to design a bit of hardware to bung in the back of it. Working on the old principle of walking before you run, I decided on a very simple one-socket sideways ROM card. At the weekend I got the board up and running and was pleased to b...

I have finally invested in a reflow oven. It's the (infamous) T962A which is very well known and sold by a variety of Chinese vendors on eBay and AliExpress. It has a number of significant problems and is not recommended in it's unmodified form. I would say that's a very sensible warning. A colleag...

Thanks for the kind welcome, everyone.

Hi everyone, This is something quite new for me. I grew up in the 80s mostly using Sinclair and Commodore machines, and still do to this day. Acorn hardware really passed me by, other than the inevitable use of BBC Micros in school. But as my collection of Retro computers has grown there looked to b...