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A simple jailbar fix for the Neo Geo AES
The Neo Geo AES. Back in the 90’s, everyone saw the Neo Geo machines in the arcades (known as the MVS, for Multi-Video-System; yes, even the ones that only had one game), but nobody I knew had the home version. Now, I have the home version. Unfortunately, it’s got a problem with the video signal… if I was smart, I would’ve just bought an MVS board, but I’m not smart, so let’s fix this. No soldering required!
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The Canon Cat!
The computer world is filled with all sorts of machines that are opretty obscure, and even there the Canon Cat is obscure; they say it’s the creation of Jef Raskin, who started the Macintosh program before Steve Jobs jumped in and took it over. Instead, it’s all about text. But I seem to have been potentially shipped the wrong machine… So, on this April 1st, let’s dig in, shall we?
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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?
