SanguineBrah

joined 2 years ago
[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Ragebutt's advice is good RE: maintenance. I would take the back off, make sure it's discharged then clean around the anode cap and in general make sure there is not excessive dust/soot that could form a path for electrical discharge. Clean the anode with alcohol, apply a little dialectric grease to the cup and put everything back together. There is a decent chance that will help, just make sure not to wipe off the black paint on the tube - this is called "aquadag" and it is important to the operation of the monitor.

[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

This monitor has no OSD or button to trigger a degauss. The coil will be wired directly to AC via a posistor, so it's entirely passive and will only trigger again when the monitor cools down.

The distortion is caused by the high voltage arcing over, which droops and interrupts beam deflection for a moment. I wouldn't want to run it this way for very long, because it can damage the flyback transformer over time (although the flyback could itself be arcing anyway).

[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 week ago

If you are looking for a retrocomputing meetup near you, check out retro.directory (created by our very own Rob Smith)

 

Today was our bimonthly meeting of the Robin Hood Amiga Group in Nottingham, UK.

Today's presentation was delivered by team behind the DeMoN project, which is a reverse-engineered and upgraded Action Replay 3 cart with tons of cool new features. Here is their demo unit plugged into a stock A500.

There was a diverse range of wonderful machines on show, including a CD32, Vampire standalone, A1200 PiStorm setup, a retro console table and a gorgeous A1000 setup.

We also had a visit from the Who Dares Wins Amiga BBS team, which is an oldskool 90s BBS that has been brought back to life by the original operators.

One of our members was showing off his progress on a ZX Spectrum clone project using the Tang Nano FPGA board.

A couple of cool homebuilt Amiga CD32 joysticks were on show.

Also, two of us were there showing off our work-in-progress Denise ITX Amiga builds.

[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago

I had multiple fan failures which brought down my system, so instead I picked up one of these heatsink cases and it's been running mostly uninterrupted for years.

[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I disagree with this. New old stock floppies that have been stored properly are becoming increasingly difficult to find, especially 5.25" media. There are a lot of hobbyists out there that would love to get a hold of them for use with their retro systems. You should sell them on, not throw them away.

[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Network effects mean you can't switch without losing all those communities.

When I left Reddit, I left behind the only active mental health community on the internet supporting those with my specific condition. I had the choice to leave, sure, but what did it cost me?

[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"Which paint is better: eggshell white or oyster white?"

[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Here in the UK, builders & farmers use flatbeds and movers use box trucks - exclusively working vehicles. Pickups are not practical for most jobs.

[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 4 months ago

It's a GPO 706, which is a classic British bakelite phone from the '60s. I have it hooked up to a SIP trunk through an OBi 100. Right now it can receive calls but not make them because I haven't gotten around to sorting out a pulse-to-tone dialing converter yet.

[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 19 points 4 months ago (4 children)
[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I've run a TR-004 for the last 5 years haven't had any reliability issues so far. In hardware raid modes, drives are hot swappable but you can't grow the array without wiping it. I'm JBOD mode you need to power off before swapping drives. The main problem I've had is their chipset is only partially supported by smartmontools due to proprietary crap so there is some strange behaviour there.

 

I'm fitting a Marpet 4MB upgrade to my STFM today. What a hassle! PLCC socket hot glued on top of the surface mount MMU, interposer board inside the metal can and further mods needed to disable the onboard RAM.

 

My latest project is an XT-class build in a modern looking case (Sergey's Xi 8088) complete with LED fans, window in the side panel, etc.

Normally, I would try to source real floppy drives for a project like this. However, in this case, to make it more modern-looking, I'm going GOTEK+FlashFloppy.

My question is: let's say I want to be able to use most kinds of DOS floppy images, including 5.25", 3.5", double density and high density. If I configure the GOTEK in the BIOS as a 1.44mb drive, would it also accept 720k images? Would it also take 360k or 1.2mb images or would I need a second GOTEK configured as a virtual 5.25" drive to cover all the bases?

 

Does anybody have any experience of trying to fit internal storage into their ST? I'd prefer to have everything all in one unit drawing from the internal PSU if possible. I'm using a 1040 STFM.

I've seen references to a product called Lightning ST which has a wiki page but no indication of whether or where it is for sale.

I've also found this project: https://github.com/agranlund/STBlitter_RevA but no reviews or information from people who have built it.

If you have tried it, what kind of clearance issues did you have? Did you run without shielding? Did you cut parts of the shielding away? How does it fit with other expansions e.g. 4mb RAM?

 

Spooky late night text adventures on my BBC Micro model B, courtesy of [https://zornslemma.github.io/ozmoo.html](Ozmoo for Acorn).

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