bradgrier.com

Category: Vintage

  • TS1000 upgrade – log entry 4 — Oh the memories we’ll make with 16k!

    Part four already? Memory -- that thing where the more you've got, the better things are for your computer? Yeah, that stuff. We'll be upgrading this vintage computer using a bit more modern tech to get it up to a whopping 16K. Oh, and there's a bit of gold in this story too...

  • TS1000 upgrade – log entry 3 — On The Big Screen!

    If you’ve been following along, you may recollect that this journey to modernizing my vintage Timex Sinclair began when I watched this four-part video series by The Byte Attic, and decided ‘yeah, that looks like something I could do’. If you’re jumping in at this point, well, I’ve done things and have more things to do. This post will look at converting the video output of the computer from an RF signal to a more modern composite video signal with a simple hardware modification.

  • TS1000 upgrade – log entry 2 — More Power!

    As I'd mentioned in my previous post in this series, I've been poking around my TS1000 a bit and doing some online digging.  I found this series about refurbishing and upgrading a Sinclair ZX81. And since I wrapped up my last post testing the that unit is still alive and kicking (I think. Video is still a thing to verify with the MK One eyeballs, though it looks good in the multimeter), it's best to jump on to the next stage. Upgrading the power converter.

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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.  […]