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I suspect they may have some trouble sourcing new stock as getting multi-layer PCBs made in China is basically impossible right now, all the major PCB fabs are either closed, limiting production to 2 layer boards only, or tentatively quoting 30-60 day lead times. Assembly services are also, from wha...

Glad to hear you both got your interfaces ok. The Elk is a funny machine. I don't have any history with it, for me the 80s were filled with various Sinclairs and Commodores, and there were plenty of better specced machines even BITD, but I find myself using it more than any of my other 8-bit machines.

Just the same as above, drop me an email at my username @gmx.co.uk

Other common problems are: mains wiring that does not meet reasonable electrical practice or U.K. standards. Possibly including fused neutral (only the line should be fused), switched neutral (where the line is not switched), inadequate earthing, U.K. type mains plug with no fuse, undersized U.K. t...

A good soldering station doesn't have to cost much at all. I use a Circuit Specialists model that costs less than £60. And, yes, they commit the crime of shipping it with a conical tip, so buying a few useful tips is mandatory to get good results. https://www.circuitspecialists.eu/soldering/solderin...

You're not being dim at all

The PM option isn't enabled until you have 25 posts on the forum. I got your email and have replied.

If you can't get PM access, drop me an email at my username @gmx.co.uk and we'll get an ElkSD64 sorted for you.

Good to see Elite on there, thoroughly deserved. Four Amiga entries too, my inner Amiganut quite likes that

Manufacturers sometimes inflate sales numbers. For instance, there were somewhere between 10–30 million C64s made. Everyone who worked for Commodore states the largest number as gospel. The largest number I've seen backed up by serial number statistics is around 18 million. Commodore's record keepi...

I strongly suspect the Acorn machines came very close or beat the Amstrad CPCs in the UK at least. Amstrad did a major amount of business in France and Spain, somewhere around 60% of their sales if I recall correctly. That's why Amstrad managed to ride out the 1984 UK market crash that did for Sincl...

Ask yourself this question, when will B become 1? If this were a programming language, B would not become 1 until A stopped being 0. But in HDL, the answer would be immediately. That's because in a hardware description language your are describing the functionality and connection of logic cells. 'B...

Hmm. £5 for a nice case would be acceptable, but £17 is quite steep for what is just a plastic box with a couple of holes in it.

Very saddening news indeed. Chuck was more responsible for the personal computer revolution than anyone else, a truly great engineer who never stopped innovating.

Oooh, this is very impressive! I had no idea the Master could sound so good.

I'm possibly miss-reading, but the OP doesn't have any form of disk interface? That was what I was referring to.

Yes, my understanding of it is that a bunch of 'legacy' lines were omitted to save space and cost so there's little to no chance of getting one of these drives working on a standard 34-pin interface. Given how cheap normal floppy drives can be found on EBay I think there's little point trying. Of co...

USB floppies, at least the ones I've seen, don't use anything like a normal floppy drive internally. It's a mechanism specifically designed for USB use, I don't believe there's any simple way of getting it working on a standard floppy interface.

It's possible to do such a thing, in theory at least. Google has an idea they refer to as as 'negative latency', where the server tries to guess what the player will do next and send the required data before they actually do it. But they don't have it working yet and I doubt they ever will. The rang...

Re: Google Stadia The standard rebuke to streaming games over the internet like Stadia is the issue of latency: games that require fast reaction times (like shoot-em-ups such as Doom, Quake, Call of Duty, Halo, etc.) won't take kindly to having your movement inputs sent across the internet to a rem...

Pretty sure this started within the last month. I sold an item to a US buyer in early October and everything was normal, but got another US sale yesterday and tax has been added and then deducted from the paypal transaction.

I suspect your Spectrum membrane example is a good measure, Mark. From my own experience, the number of SD interfaces I've sold to forum members is less than 10% of the total. There does seem to be a very large number of retro computer owners who maybe buy some stuff or occasionally watch retro Yout...

Thank you very much for the kind words!

Pretty much every major retro machine has reasonably priced SD interfaces now and I don't see why the Elk should be left out. And thanks to the assistance I've received from people here on stardot I'm happy to be able to help with that a bit.

Ah, but I believe all of Ramtop's interfaces re-implement a Electron Printer Port (EPP) interface in the CPLD for driving the SD Card, even the cartridge port one. Spot on, Dave. They all implement just enough of the EPP for MMFS to work. The ElkSD-Plus 1 merely changes the addresses used so as not...

The concept of on-going support doesn't seem to occur to eBay (or they're not interested in sellers and buyers who believe in this sort of service). They do seem to be set up purely for pile-em-high commodity sales. There is a sneaky workaround for sending links via Ebay messages ... send the link ...

Ian, you are absolutely correct with this. I've complained to EBay about their ridiculous policies before, and like you got short shrift. Many, many times I've had people enquire about the Electron SD interfaces I sell on EBay and are flabbergasted when I tell then Ebay will not allow me to link to ...

The technique demonstrated in that video is a very poor way of soldering surface mount ICs. Putting solder on the pads causes them to be lumpy, making it more difficult to align the chip. Its pins will tend to slide into the gaps between the pads. And using a hot air gun is slow and subjects the chi...

I say give hand soldering a try. Given sufficient practice it becomes very possible to solder fine pitch parts with accurate, repeatable results; I soldered ten CPLDs in 0.5mm QFP packages this evening and it only took me about 40 minutes to do, because I work with those regularly. To start I'd sugg...

That's what I use. The software is ugly and basic, but the programmer is mostly fine. I've use it to program hundreds of EPROMS and flash chips with no complaints.

It's quite spooky seeing an Elk with the CPU socket empty

Drop me a PM and we'll get it sorted.