Leaded Solder
Posts
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Mouse in the Artdink House (Travelling to Tokio, Part 3)
With the NEC PC-9801RA2, I’ve fought bad power supplies, battery corrosion, case rust, weird NEC design decisions, and flaky floppy drives. The only thing that’s keeping me from enjoying my quirky Japanese space-simulation game, Artdink’s Tokio, is the lack of a mouse. How can “just go buy a mouse” turn into an entire article? You’re about to find out.
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Breaking out of the Snail Maze
Snail Maze. Either you know what it is, or your video game system didn’t come with a free video game hidden deep within its logic board. Or you bought a later Sega Master System, which didn’t have it. But what if we could bring Snail Maze to those later Master Systems? What if, indeed?
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Mattel's Little Friend
As I’ve gotten deeper into the world of 8-bit computers, one mass-market, North American computer has resisted my attempts to obtain it. That computer is the Mattel Aquarius, and it is at last within my grasp. Or at least it would be, if it would act a little nicer.
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It's All Above Single-Board
When you get a gift, the best thing to do is to put it on your pile of projects for several months, and then slowly assemble it over the course of a year. That gift, of course, is an Office Tetsu MC6809E-based single board computer. It was given to me by blog superfriend CDP, who had ordered a set of them and surely wasn’t going to build five.
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Why, you three-bit machine...
My NEC PC-6601SR “Mr.PC” has been a nearly permanent resident of my desk ever since it was repaired. This beautiful red computer works okay with a regular old VGA LCD monitor. So why did I pay a fortune to import a CRT monitor from Japan? There are two reasons. For one, it is the NEC PC-TV151 monitor that’s supposed to go with this computer. Also, it’s broken.
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Pippin in My Orchard
One of my white whales finally came up for a price that I could justify. Let’s see just how wounded it is, and then welcome it home with a little bit of help from some smart friends.
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Mastering the BASICs
Hitachi made a bunch of computers, none of which seemed to have that much penetration in the Western market. Perhaps their most popular series was the Basic Master. This very late model of BASIC Master has floated into my life.
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How Test Suite It Is
You can always tell when it’s the holidays. The days are getting shorter, I’m always going out to shovel snow off the sidewalk, and I have a hankering to build a Famicom cartridge. Or, more specifically, a blog friend asked me to put one together, so I’m using my Tengen Tetris piracy skills… for good?
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Becoming Mr.PC's Type
Like the Sharp X1turbo, the Mr.PC is also not very usable without a keyboard. It’s yet another way in which NEC copied Sharp.
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You Might Have To Tomy Twice
I always wanted to try out a Tomy Tutor, and so I assumed that the Pyuuta was an identical computer. After all, it looks the same! This was one of those machines that I bought without knowing the details. All I knew is that Mandarake wanted an absolute fortune for any boxed Pyuuta games they had on the shelf, and that a good number of the retro-y Japanese Twitter folks seemed to have fond memories of the purple wedge. Let’s find out why.
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Columns Me Maybe
I love Columns. I love its creepy music, I love its chunky gameplay, and I love the way that it invariably hands me my own ass within a few minutes of playing. I also love using it to test suspicious Genesis consoles. Is it possible that one could acquire the power of Columns in a more inconvenient format?
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The Soggy-1000 turns a page
For version 3 of the Soggy-1000 SG-1000 clone, I wanted to make it more useful as a general-purpose computer. Building a new keyboard is going to cost a fortune in parts, so it’s fiscally prudent to find more reasons to use said keyboard. There are only so many SG-1000 games out there, the SC-3000 software library is kind of small, and I was using only 2k of the 32k of RAM that I had on the board. These are all problems that can be solved with a suitably large application of hubris.
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The Floppy Flops (Travelling to Tokio, Part 2)
In the previous part of my adventure with the 386-based NEC PC-9801RA2, we covered the existence of Artdink’s game Tokio, talked briefly about clone PC-98s, bought two computers, and built a replacement power supply PCB for one of them. That was a lot of work! So now we finally get to play the game, right? Right?!
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Amped Up For Artdink (Travelling to Tokio, Part 1)
Despite not being able to understand more than preschool-level written Japanese, I decided to get in on the “importing games from Japan” craze. Of course, I jumped in at the deep end and decided to pick up an Artdink-made city simulator with lots of cultural and regional in-jokes. Also, the city is in space. Did I mention that my PC-9821Ap2 can’t run it?
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I don't know you from Adam
No self-respecting Coleco owner’s collection is complete without the machine that was their ultimate undoing: the Coleco Adam. Adam’s a game console. Adam’s a computer. Adam’s a bizarre hash of over-engineering and under-manufacturing. It’s all of those things, and more, which would make it perfect for this blog even if I wasn’t knee-deep in ColecoVision construction.
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