I have always been a Commodore fanboy and therefore never understood all the fuzz about Sinclair Computers. For me they always seemd to be underpowered, cheapy cripples – no sprites, no joystickports no real sound. As a constant reader of the fabulous Retro Gamer Magazine, you have no choice to neglect those tiny computers, though and talking to some guys at HomeCon really made me curious.

Now, two weeks ago, I bough a realy nice 70s design black and white TV on a bootmarket – the cool model that I spotted one week before was gone (oh wonder!) and so I had to go with the remaining Telefunken. Despite having a big scratch on the front, that I didn’t notice due to all the dirt, it is in working order and I took both – the ZX81 and the TV – to last weekends HomeCon. After some heavy knobturning sessions I went for the BBQ outside and Mugg managed to tune in on the ZX81. Great.

Just turning 30 years last year it cam to no big surprise that my ZX81 that I kept in the closet for ages now had the same problem.  A quite common problem is keyboard membran that it stops working after a few years. The plastic band usualy is broken due to being bent inside the case and sitting on top of a RAM chip that tends to get hot, leaving the cable dry and brittle. Same was here. So no chance to load something.

A quick search on the net and I got an all newly produced replacement keyboard from RWAP. Replacing it is no big task and here are some pictures. As I stored away the tiny black and white TV in the basement, I haven’t tried the fixe machine by now, but a quick hookup to the TV that only gave me a really bad picture so that I couldn’t read a thing, showed that at least the keys are responding. Mhhh… if I should sneak down to the basement for the TV and give it a run now???

Some pictures of the process. In retrospect I should have read the included instructions prior so that I would have used a hairdrier to lift the old sticky keyboard… I did it the brutal way.

Lately I found myself pixeling along for the C64. Off all the old computers that are in my collection the C64 still is my first an biggest love. Early 90s, I teamed up with a guy from around my hometown and despite some lame stuff at the beginning, the newly formed Laxity (or LXT for short) was big fun.

Two years ago, Didi was about to give away all his old C64 stuff and we set a date for our last meeting. We had nice meal, some chat about the scene and live… than Didi touched the C64 that was setup and started poking around in some game Goat that brought along. Three hours later, the game was a new release for LXT and Didi was back into business completely hooked and heart of the old crew with him.

Lazy, as I am (and was) I was always looking for a simple way to get my pixels right in Photoshop and transfer them over to the C64 – I never really got used to pixel images with a joystick and as time is more rare these days I needed something to keep it fast and simple. After going back to Godot and Congo I ended up with p1 wich does a decent job and offers realtime rendering to see and fix the bugs. In the end this is all about pixeling along painting a picture pixel by pixel… like in the old days ….there is no easy way around and therefore it takes time, that I lately really love to spent. It has something zen-like to it, to build a complex picture bit by bit, pixel by pixel. Here are some of the things that got released recently:

A full list is here:

http://csdb.dk/scener/?id=460

Puhh… where to start? So much has happened. My basement and room are getting cramped full of old hardware and I will try to present tese treasure to you as soon as I find the time and place to take proper pictures. It seems to be a fact: As sad as it is, I am getting old, somehow. At some part my computers seem to stand the test of time better than I do. Let’s go to the fridge and take a mouthful of retr0bright…probably that helps.

Still some time is spent right on the forthcoming Bended Realities Festival, held in Offenbach. Hessi and me will present our digitalretropark idea in order to find some help considering the still-no-room-problematic. I prepared some nice little game of pong and hope that it will spread some fun among the visitors. The other part is giving an overview of alternative, independent games on modern devices. Take a look at our freshly started tumblr blog (German, off course – sorry).

As the BR festival was primary all about circuit bending and hacking away on synthiehardware it seems logical to set up some old-school hardware and show the history of sound visualistaion. Probably this will be a bit time consuming, in regard of all the other projects that I am involved there and so the good old Aatari Video Music will be on spot, as it seems to be the first – and somehow even the last – of its kind in that lineage. Every year I will try to complete the family tree a bit more and add new hardware. This will save me time and keep the money  side of things down to a bearable level. For next year I am looking for an Atari Jaguar CDRom… if you happen to sell one, please let me know.

Lately I really find myself thinking about scrapping this blog and transfer all the content to tumblr., blogspot and the likes. I always keep crawling back to this blog and the whole template is so outdated, but having not stuck my nose into html for the last 6 years makes it somehow tideous and time consuming to start all over again… designer by heart, that I am, the design plays a major role for me. Let’s see, what this summer brings along… besides our baby Yeah, a little girl is underway and that will most likely eat the major part of time, and is not controlled by a joystick, nor has it a RUN/STOP-Key. That’s real life…

Just a short update on the last two posts. Hessi did a nice Video of some images of the Fix-It-Felix cab, along the way – from creation to the final spot in the cinema. Check it out:

And a littel addition to the iPod post. It was thrown on the dumpster because of the left channel not working at all. Bought a replacement jack/holdbutton combo for 3 euros from some Chinese ebayseller and Thomas just fixed it. NOW, I can hear all the Sids, thanks to Rockbox running on it. Yeahhhhh…

nighty night.

I don’t know if I mentioned it before that most of my spare time goes into the digital retro park project. The basic idea is to do what we can best, namely preserve, talk and repair old hardware and put it into a modern context, show the beginnings and relate to the present. So far we have a strong concept, with lots of nice exponates and talked to a couple of officials in Hanau, Offenbach and Frankfurt, with not much success, to be honest. Non the less, we adhere to our ideas and in the search for a cheap room and potential sponsors, we do promotional stuff now and than. The latest clue can be seen and played at the Cinemaxx cinema in Offenbach right now.

Disney launched nine revamped Donkey Kong cabs, playing Fix-It-Felix Jr., as promotional gag for this years ComicCon. (For those who don’t know who Fix-it-Felix, nor Wreck-It-Ralph is… head over to Disney and take a look.) Soon it became apparent that 9 were far to less and so they build another 50 cabs from scratch. The game itself was coded on a modern Windows plattform, but the cab and all the signs were trimmed to look and feel like it is a real cab from early 80s – even the copyright notice states 1982. We pitched the idea of having a little arcade in the cinema to the Cinemaxx marketing people and they agreed. When the deal was struck, we had about 1,5 weeks left and the following weekend, 1 week prior to the premiere of Wreck-it-Ralph (Ralph reciht’s in German) we had the idea to build a Fix-It-Felix-Cab. Hessi donated his generic cab and so we rebuild the control panel to be as close as the original as possible. Than I sat down and reworked all the graphics needed. RidicRick has done some marvelous work before, but his files were done in Photoshop, hence pixels and so hard to transform and scale. Took me three days and I adjusted some spots that I found being a step off the original and used screenshots and pictures I found on the web. Printing an applying the big stickers was handed over to my colleague Björn, who broke a new record in revamping an old cab. Took him about 20 minutes and everything was on and the cab looked completely different.

Mark from FAO got the task to get the flashgame that Disney put on their website into the cab. This was my biggest concern, to get this falsh stuff running properly. No one on the net seem to have the original game form the promo cabs. Three days prior to our roll-out, we got the game and we were good to go. Mark stuck his head into the code and wrote a loader that would start the game right away, as soon as the PC is turned on. He put in an SLG3000 that adds scanlines and some distortion to the far too clean VGA screen, making it looking like a screen from the old days. Yeahh!

The final assembly was done at FAOs open door day and 2 hours late with visitors putting their heads into our cab, we got it working. That same night, we packed it up, along with Pole Position and Donkey Kong (sadly only in the german cab version) and drove it over to the Cinemaxx. Done with the setup, I replugged the Fix-it-Fleix Jr. Cab and… nothing. By than it was 1.00 a.m. and so we gave up for that day. I gave Mark a help call and on suturday, right before the childerns program straed, we got it working again.

Most kids recognized Fix-It-Felix Jr. but rather played Donkey Kong but that changed after they saw the movie.;)

The official premiere for the rest of us is tomorrow and if you are close to Offenbach and feel like playing a bit, come over!

Here are some pics of the project, showing the process… I can fix it!

Sometimes there are things that really leave you gobsmacked in a good way. Today seems to be one of those. Everything seems into flow and fall into its place and some things fall – strangely enough – into the dumpster. Checking our electronic trash at work from time to time brought me a lot of useful things for my projects. From sorted out old CRT screens down to cables and cases, hence quite a few good things turned up, but today it must have been christmas. I spotted a 5th gen iPod in the trashbox and thought I just keep it for our museums project… Apple has revolutinionized the music industry with this, right? To my surprise the box was not empty and to an even bigger the surprise the enclosed iPod 30GB seems to be in quite a good shape- some scratches and some spots … okay, but quite good to put it on display.

I hooked it up to my mac and it stated “low battery” and displays backlight beeing off. I waited and waited and finally it came up. A quick launch of iTunes showed that it kept all its files on there … WOW, that thing seems to work. After formating it and putting some music on it was time to check if there’s probably some trouble with the music output (e.g. the jack) itself. No! All just working fine and the music came out to the hooked up speakers. All buttons working and the clickwheel operating just as it supposed to. Damn it! Finnaly I got an iPod. Back in the day I opted for an iRiver 320, as it was an open system and a little hacked firmware in the name of Rockboxx was just released, making the player play tons of formats, including SID (C64 music) and MODs (Amiga modules) and lots more. Most people won’t even call it music, but nerd that I am, this is the music I grew up with and that is some kind of timemachine to go back to easier days. Anyway, my iRiver is still running, with an new battery that I popped it lately but it has one big drawback and that is the flimsy buttons to operate it. Don’t ask how often it cam close to an desaster when trying to choose a new song, while driving.

A quick question to to big G revealed that Rockboxx can be put on iPods as well, now. Wow… what a day. After reformating the Pod under virtualPc with the PC version of iTunes, I could install it. Rockboxx needs a Fat32 partition and this was the easiest way to get it. The actuall High Voltage SID Collection cosists of  more than 42.000 SIDs, but as one SID file is around 2kb the whole collection is only about 230MB. And so WOW again… all the music from the c64 on one tiny iPod, with good navigation – expect me to have some loud SID-music-drive-home-session, tonight.

But honestly: Although there is a lot of wining about sinking living standards, but when I find something like this in the trash bin I can’t follow these trend. If you throw away something like this you must have still enough money to buy a new one. On the other hand 5th gen is about 6 years old now… and there are more shiny things out there. Whoever, however: Thanks, anyway!

Ok, this post should have been out for about two month now and MiniPONG had been on two “Exhibitions” so far. I let you down, my dear fellow readers (are there any?), but sometimes it is more important to get the thing done, than talk or write about it. Right? At least that’s how I tick. Despite that, it still is  a little rough around the edges and I was deliberating wether I should post the picture of the inside, as I already got  some harsh comments on it, but see for yourself.

Facts and production notes:

The whole cabin is made out of Forex© – foamed plastic boards 10mm thick (doubled 5mm) and pasted together with an appropriate glue. Wooden texture was printed on adhesive vinyl and scaled down to fit the dimensions. CPO is handcut 2mm alluminium plate brushed afterwards. Decals are standard waterdecals for RC- and modeling. Some clear film of transparent coating protects the decals from being rubbed off.

On the inside we have an Arduino UNO, hooked up to a 9″ black-white TV, two 10K potis, a pushbutton and some wires. The Arduino is fead with a hacked/adjusted version of Arduino-pong from Pete Lamonica.

At this point a big thanks must go to Björn, for helping me with building the cab, Thomas for fixing the code at some point, where I was once again too stupid to see.
Pete Lamonica for the original Arduino based Pong code. And off course Nolan Bushnell, for kickstarting it all. Thanks guys…

Still there are some things that need to be fixed:

- potentionmeters are logarithmic ones, so when your paddle reaches top or bottom, it gets slowed down
- testscreen showing up when turned on or resetted – needs to be removed
- ball angle needs to be resetted after scroing
- potentiometer for volume on TV is broken, only full throttle or nothing to hear…

Mini PONG had been to some shows:

@HomeCon 16 via Homecon.net – here it was still WIP

@VCFe 20121 via Heise

@VFCe 2012 via Load-Magazin

If you guys are interested in the plans and graphics for that project, drop me a line and I will rework them and put’em online.

I always wanted an Apple //c, since I spotted one, back in our school in the early nineties. A few years ago I got one from a bootsale but it was missing all cables and the power supply, not to mention the driveledge was broken. On eBay I way occasionally bidding on one and last year missed the chance to get one for really cheap, as I told the guy that would only pay a maximum of fifty bugs for an untested computer that was missing all cables again. He put it up on the bay and it ended with a staggering 90€ pricetag. Since than prices seem to have rosen even more.

Last week a //c showed up, along with a bag, monitor with stand and second external 5 1/4″ diskdrive. I got it! Not quite cheap, but with all the extras and this groovy monitor it was okay. The lady I bought it from must have some special deal with the postoffice, as it was here the next day… I never got a big package that fast.

The first thing when unboxing was an evil smell of old cigarette smoke. I could stand it for five minutes, than Nadine came down from the upper level and asked me if I was smoking secretly. The poor little Apple looked the way it smelled. Yellow and black where the primary colours (a fresh Apple //c is almost white) and the first bootattempt showed that the smell seemed to be the minor problem here. The screen went green and was covered with jibberish chars all over. I kept it turned on, while asking google for help. After 10 minutes or so, it came up after I truned it on again. Instead of the “Apple //c”-notice it still kept saying something like “asihj $%”. Every reset showed new effects. Sometimes I ended up in the command prompt, another time it kept pumping out hexdumps…… something was completely wrong. Half an hour later, I managed to load a game but the keyboard was gone. I contacted the lady and we agreed on half the price, leaving me with a computer that was actually intended to look and act like a swan but it was more like a drunken elephant that had spent the whole night under the bar table. Nadine was so kind and handwashed the bag for me (it is still drying in the bathroom) an I started to get the baby back to life.

Took me almost 4 hours to take it appart and clean off the smoke and dirt. I completly drained the keaboard and used a special plasticcleaner, that is refered to as pigpiss by the guys of  For Amusement Only e.V., because it solves all that yellowing caused by smoke. The remains are a yellowish soup that stinks like pig peeeee.

After letting all parts dry and putting it back together the moment of truth came. The first start showed a clean “Apple //c – Check Disk Drive.” and it loaded everything I put into the drive. Great! Testing it with some games the keyboard got stuck again, repeating the last key pressed forever. Google showed me that this seems to be a common problem with the //c and a fix would include bending off a leg of chip on the keyboard…. I didn’t do it and thought to myself that this little treasure is just out of training. Every time I kept it running for some time the symptoms got better and by now it works fine. Apple! Building selfrepairing hardware since 1977.

I was not able to get all the yellowing off, but most of it. The rest is the typical yellowing caused by UV exposure (probably a harder form, mixed with tobacco smoke in my case). Half an hour ago I fixed the Apple II joystick that I got some time ago. Directions where working, but the buttons where dead. Some Spiritus on the switches and we were good to go. Here you can see some pictures and a video of my new lad in action. Besides, playing Choplifter with one hand an filming with the other is a real task.

Next thing to do is replacing the drive port, as the nuts got pulled out by some budbrain and testing and cleaning the external drive. Keep your fingers crossed that it works.

Jack Tramiel died yesterday at the age of 83. Besides Jobs and Gates one of the driving forces of the early eighties homecomputer market. His vision of building a coumputer that was affordable and had enough power brought Commodore the C64, that is the most sold home computer of that time. Known for beeing a real tyran when it came down to giving orders and talking to his engineers – the game Jack Attack shows how some of the Commdore Staff was feeling.
Probably such a harsh manner is needed in order to get almost impossible things done. If I recall it right, the engineers only had half a year to build the C64 and under that pressure they made one of the best computers in the world.
Later Tramiel was basically thrown out of Commodore because he seemed to be unbearable to the board – once again a parallel to Steve Jobs. Tramiel was far from giving up. He took over the than struggeling Atari and setting sail to push Commdore out of market, building low priced Ataris.

More Infos and stories about the Tramiels and Commodore can be found “On the Edge”

A great read and a big picture of all the happenings in the Commouniverse and a great insight what could have been if some right decisions would have been made a the right time.

R.I.P. Commod, R.I.P. Jack…

With more than three hardware projects on my desk on top of the other things like making and iphone game, an Amiga demo, a game for playpower, trying to get an retro computer museum/exhibition started and a few untechnical real life things it is kinda hard to split my rare spare time up. Progression is slow and so writing this blog eats up even more of the missing time. Guess you all know what I mean. It seams to be commonplace nowadays that no one has time for nothing and when winter kicks in, everybody burries himself head down in the couch. This year it became even more harder, as our dog and my grandpa died throughout the last month… a lot of death going on.

So I am kind of happy to write this post, to tell you that things can only turn better from here on – not with sometimes stepping back and redoing things.

Yesterday I got my PET 2001 running, with a little helper called PETvet. Michael Hill has done a great job in producing this RAM/ROM replacement board. The static RAMs of the PET are hard to find and use to fail due to their age, so replacing them with newer and more flexible hardware is a good choice.

Here are some pictures of the process

The other project is more arcade related and made a minor progress. I soldered the wires to the GBA SP for the tiny Donkey Kong cab. All works well. Now I put it to rest on my desk, till I made up my mind weather I should build a new cab, CNC cut, or if I should brush up my prototype. Neither have I found proper buttons to look good and be tiny enough, which is more an excuse, as I just did not find the time to search for it. Here’s a picture of the hooked up tiny joystick.

Slowly… very slowly (time passes…. even more time passes…) the mini Pong is comeing together nicely. Not without regrets and regress, as you can see from the pictures. I painted the yellow parts over and over, to get a nice looking finish and while trying to apply the pong logo with using a vinylcut and a cheap permanent marker, it turned to worst. The marker had run beneath the stenciled sticker and looked washed out. With acetone I could scrape down the most of the black color, but I head to repaint it – a good zen-meditational exercise. Now the logo will be a vinyl cut and hopefully stick to the rough finish.

The CPO took some tries as well. The plate itself I cut using a compass saw and grinded down the surface to look like brushed metal. Apllying the text was the harder part. Initally my idea was to vinyl cut and paint it, but the letters are to small to be plotted and so I ordered some sheets of decal material. Man, that felt like beeing 12 years old again, trying to get all the labels on the just finished Tie Fighter Model. Afte a couple of tests I made it and a clear coating finish did the job of preserving it quite well.

More details soon, when the next steps are made.