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8-Bit Battle! The Tandy Color Computer 2 vs. the Sega SC-3000
I recently got two new computers. And usually, I might consider doing a “Nicole Buys Stuff”. But those are, well, a bit boring. It’s kind of why I’ve stopped doing them. So how do we make this a little more interesting? Let’s pit two random unrelated computers with completely different architectures against each other!
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Making a Fake Floppy Click
The whole world has moved to solid-state media; my laptop, a 2017 Apple MacBook, has an SSD, no fan, and runs perfectly silent in nearly all cases. With floppy drive emulators, the benefits of solid state and modern media types can be brought to older machines as well; but sometimes that silence can be a bit unnerving. So what can we do about that?
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Porting a Project from Concat to Webpack!
Last year, I started work on Aspect Star 4. I used this as an opportunity to switch from my older “engine” (which I tend to affectionately call “master.js” because most of the non-game-specific stuff lives there) to a newer system using TypeScript and the PIXI.js engine– and after making a basic, “jump around a level and change aspects”, I stopped for awhile. Now I’m picking it up again, but it’s structured a bit ugly– how can we make this a little easier to code for?
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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.
