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Replacing the CPU in a Tandy 1000HX!
What’s the difference between the Intel 8088 and the 8086? It’s all in the pins! The 8088 used an 8-bit address bus, and the 8086 uses a 16-bit address bus. This can be a big slowdown– you take two data fetches to get as much as just one– and there’s very little you can do about it after the computer is built. But what can you do?
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Nicole Buys Stuff: The Timex Sinclair 2068!
It’s the early 1980’s, and you’re in charge of the Timex Corporation. You have a pretty good business with Clive Sinclair, manufacturing his machines for the European market, and reselling his ZX81 in the US as the Timex Sinclair 1000. It’s a primitive machine, with 1K of RAM and only CPU-controlled graphics, but it’s a good introduction to computers and BASIC. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could sell something a little better?
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Of Floppy Drives and Tandys
Retrocomputers are often judged by their games, and thus, by the gaming characteristics of graphics and sound. We ignore the fact that Apple ][s were pretty often running VisiCalc on monochrome monitors, because we’d much rather talk about Ultima V in that glorious artifact color. And that’s something that’s hurt the reputation of Tandy/Radio Shack– the TRS-80 Model I was amazing for its time, but lacking colors or even graphics modes, was never going to lead in gaming. But that would change with the Tandy 1000… and wouldn’t you know, I have one of those right here!
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Fun and 'Fun' With the Atari XE
Holy crap I forgot about this blog! Well, actually, I’ve just been busy– changing jobs, and moving to a new location will do that to you. (The change of seasons to depressing, snowy winter doesn’t help either) But we’re back! And this time we’re taking another look at the Atari 130XE I mentioned before… and going to look at some problems.
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Designing an Adventure Game API
Recently, I started work on a client-server adventure game API, written in node.js on the server side and Vuejs on the client side. And more recently, my interest in the project waned. Here, I’m going to discuss some of what I learned, and what my conclusions are.
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Nicole Buys Stuff: The Apple ][ plus!
For some reason, I felt like I should explain a little bit about what the Atari 8-bits were, but I don’t feel like I need to explain this machine. The Apple II series (calling it the ‘Apple 2’ just seems wrong), though feels like it needs no introduction. This particular machine is an Apple ][ plus, the 1979 update. This makes it about as old as the original Atari 8-bit; while the 130XE was a product of the latter half of the 80’s, this thing is a true throwback.
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Nicole Buys Stuff: The Atari 130XE!
In 1977, Atari released the 2600. (Well, okay, they released the Video Computer System, catalog number 2600) So that makes it make a little more sense that when they released the successors, which unlike the 2600 were designed to be useful as computers too, they gave them the numbers 400 and 800. And then they summed those together to get the successor, 1200XL, with the XL to denote it was smaller than the previous, heavy systems. And then… okay, Atari’s 8-bit branding doesn’t make much sense. But they’re cool machines. And I have one now!
