bradgrier.com

Category: Lifestyle Technology

  • Rogue One: A Masterpiece of Star Wars Storytelling

    Star Wars is a uni­verse of myths and legends, a place where the impossible becomes pos­sible, where dreams are made real, and where her­oes rise from humble begin­nings. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story con­tin­ues this tra­di­tion, weav­ing a new tale of hope, sac­ri­fice and cour­age into the fab­ric of the Star Wars universe. The […]

  • TS1000 upgrade – log entry 1

    #retrocomputing has been taking up more of my attention recently. Specifically, I found this series about refurbishing and upgrading a Sinclair ZX81. Since the Timex Sinclair 1000 is essentially a ZX81 that jumped the pond (and doubled it’s native RAM in the process), I’ve got one. And it’s been sitting in a box for 20ish years, used heavily previous to that. Time to rectify (ha!) that situation.

  • A Virtual Parallel Printer for a Vintage Computer

    One of the neat things about using vin­tage com­put­ing equip­ment is fig­ur­ing out mod­ern ways to work with the older technology. Why virtual printing? Recently, I wanted to explore prin­ted out­put from my NEC PC-8201a. For one thing, work­ing ‘on the hard­ware’ in this case has a dis­play lim­it of eight lines of forty char­ac­ters […]

  • I Made some RAM for my NEC PC-8201a — and it’ll work on a Tandy Model 100 too!

    Original expansion RAM for the NEC PC-8201a and Tandy Model 100 is pretty hard to find these days -- so I made some.

  • How long will a NiMH battery pack last in a NEC PC-8201 or PC-8201a?

    As I was converting NEC battery packs to be recharegable, I wondered just what the run-time of a battery pack would be. So I came up with is a simple BASIC program to run the computer battery down, and record the time that it dies and calculate the run-time. This is the story...

  • Vintage Computing: Saving data to an audio device

    Back when the early days of personal computing, you did your work on your computer and either printed out the finished work, or stored it to work on later. Early on, cassette tapes were the storage medium of choice as they cassette tape recorders were commonly available, and reasonably affordable. Some computer system did have […]

  • Aloha to a Hawaiian TRS-80 Model 100

    Well, finally got a chunk of free time to get back to my ‘Mod­el 100 school’. My goal is to learn about these m100s through hands-on learning. A new friend (Hi Larry) sent me his ail­ing m100 to fur­ther my edu­ca­tion. Who knows? Maybe I can get it run­ning again — it’s a nice look­ing […]

  • NEC PC-8201a Adventures – Part Three: Getting Rid of the Dirty

    NEC PC-8201a Adventures – Part Three: Getting Rid of the Dirty

    Wel­come back to part three of my res­tor­a­tion and adven­tures with an NEC PC-8201a vin­tage com­puter circa. 1983. Let’s get to it! Stripping Down It’s actu­ally not that grungy to look at. Sure, a minor scuff or two, but from the looks of it, this unit is actu­ally quite clean. So, let’s get it apart and get […]

  • NEC PC-8201a Adventures – Part Two: Rebuilding the NiCad Battery Pack

    NEC PC-8201a Adventures – Part Two: Rebuilding the NiCad Battery Pack

    These were great batteries, 40 years ago. This was a good task to start on. It’d been years since I’ve done any ser­i­ous elec­tron­ics work, and my pre­vi­ous Ardu­ino pro­ject, while suc­cess­ful, reminded me just how much I’d for­got­ten about elec­tron­ics over the years. And my skills had mostly van­ished too. So a nice easy pro­ject was […]

  • NEC PC-8201a Adventures — Part One: It’s here, now what?

    NEC PC-8201a Adventures — Part One: It’s here, now what?

    Back in the early-to-mid ’80s, per­son­al com­put­ing was find­ing it’s way. Desktop com­puters were becom­ing more vis­ible in smal­ler busi­nesses, but the work of com­put­ing still had to be done at the work­place. Port­able com­puters were really just shrunken down desktops — they were called lug­gables at the time. Then came the revolu­tion, as they say.  […]

  • Instructable: Arduino Keyboard Joystick Extender Box and Sound Controller Thing Using Deej

    Instructable: Arduino Keyboard Joystick Extender Box and Sound Controller Thing Using Deej

    Update Jan. 23, 2021: Looks like the Joystick circuit has failed as it no longer toggles the Mute function. Well, I wasn’t too happy with the initial wiring job so this may be an opportunity to update that. A while ago I developed an interest in Ardu­ino micro­con­trol­lers, and this is my first ‘actu­al’ project. […]