#retrocomputing

Club Med eventually moved upmarket and away from experiments like this one. Atari eventually became something else entirely. But for thirteen weeks in the summer of 1983, on a beach in the Dominican Republic, you could sit down at an Atari 800 between windsurfing sessions and learn to program in BASIC, compose a piece of music, or weave a headband from a design you made yourself on a computer with 256 colors to choose from. Nobody made you. It was just there if you wanted it, which is very Club Med.

SysInfo is an application for Motorola 680x0 based Classic Amiga and is used for getting information about the system like OS and library versions, hardware revisions and stuff.

Commodore Amiga - Operating Systems - Workbench

A unique Gotek Mount for the Amiga A1200 that moves the interface (OLED screen + rotary encoder) to a “floppy” sticking out of the mount, simulating a real floppy.

Finally, an online ‘cyberpunk’ game that comes close to portraying computing as depicted in classic cyberpunk works like Neuromancer by William Gibson. In this game the player is a NetRunner, an arrogant and bold futuristic hacker. Armed with his cyberdeck and an arsenal of offensive, defensive and analysis software he’s ready to invade corporate systems in the grid and raid their credits, for fame and fortune! It’s no cakewalk though! Waiting for the unwary are Intrusion Counter-measures (IC). Machine controlled defenses that can inflict damage to hardware and software, steal the players own credits and even cause… death.

I recently purchased an Amiga 1200 which has hard drive support through an internal IDE connector. Adding a hard drive is appealing since booting from floppy disk or a Gotek floppy drive emulator can be quite tedious and slow. The good news is that there are solid state options using compact flash (CF) or secure digital (SD) card solutions through an IDE adapter. I went with a CF card adapter that I purchased for less than $30 from AmiKit on eBay. This is shown below inserted into the IDE slot on my 1200.

I’ve been working on developing an operating system for the TI-99 for the last 18 months or so. I didn’t intend this—my original plan was to develop enough of the standard C libraries to help with writing cartridge-based and EA5 programs. But that trek led me quickly towards developing an OS. As Unix is by far my preferred OS, this OS is an approximation. Developing an OS within the resources available, particularly the RAM, has been challenging, but also surprisingly doable.

HstWB Installer is an application, which can automate installation of Amiga OS, Kickstart roms and packages with additional content. Creating new harddrive images for Classic Amiga and installing Amiga OS, Kickstart roms, ClassicWB, WHDLoad games and demos properly can be a cumbersome task unless you spend a lot of time figuring out how this is done step by step.

The Amiga was designed during the aforementioned “MB” days. It was generally conceived that there was not going to be any affordable storage medium higher than 4GB in size. If 4GB was all the space I wanted, I wouldn’t be writing this post in the first place.

My 6502 project in a PC104 like formfactor

A 6502 based laptop design

The EPSON MX-80 printer was a commercially successful product in the early 1980s. It was often used to print type in programs in computer magazines in the 1980s. These fonts are therefore useful for retro printout simulation or program listings on web pages and in documentation.

A 3D-printable, fully working, customizable computer inspired by one of the loveliest retro computers of the 80s

Explore the golden age of home computing with Compute!’s Gazette. Dive into archives of classic articles, game listings, and programming tutorials from the legendary magazine. Relive the 8-bit era and discover the roots of modern technology.