Subj : What's in your attic?
To   : nelgin
From : Bencollver
Date : Mon Oct 09 2023 14:38:08

  Re: What's in your attic?
  By: nelgin to All on Mon Oct 09 2023 13:00:24

Awesome that you are restoring a ZX Spectrum.  I had a friend who did
that.  He said the older hardware is easier to repair, connect to a
scope, etc.  Reminds me of things i have heard from mechanics about
older cars.

I understand regretting the loss of retro stuff.

I wrote some clever code in my youth, a mixture of BASIC and assembly.
It was stored on floppy disks, and at some point after college i lost
those floppies.  I don't even remember how i lost them, but with them
i lost all that code.

I remember playing arcade-style games on a Vic20 loaded from cassette.

I get most of my retro kicks in emulators, but i do maintain a couple
FreeDOS machines.  One is a 2005 era HP NC6120, which has a Pentium M
processor, a weird hybrid of a Pentium III and Pentium 4.  FreeDOS
runs blazing fast on that hardware, but does not support its audio
chipset.  The other is a 1999 era IBM PC 330 6577 79T, which has a
Pentium 133MHz processor and 32mb memory.  It has USB ports, but they
do not reliably work.  I installed an ISA CT2910 SoundBlaster 16 Pro
CSP and a Sony CDU31A optical drive.  The hardware seems ideal for
retro gaming.  Both machines have a good UART that communicates
full-speed over a serial connection to my Linux system.  Some day i
plan to build a virtual modem using a Raspberry PI so i can "dial in"
to an Internet BBS from DOS hardware using a WIFI network.

.