Category Archives: Retro Computers
Articles about retro computers
Valiant Turtle
The Valiant Turtle is a floor roving robot made by Valiant Technologies and was a popular education robot for teaching geometry and programming during the 1980s and 1990s. The robot was first sold in 1983 and was often used with the LOGO programming language. I started writing this article in 2009 when I obtained my […]
4-Bit Computer
If you’ve ever wondered how electronic devices like computers can count, this article gives a simple introduction to binary and logic and shows how they are tied together with electronics to make both simple and complex computers. Please note: There are a couple of mistakes on the slides in the youtube video which are shown […]
C64 VICE Front-End
The aim of this project was to create a front-end for Commodore 64 emulation using VICE. One of the primary problems with emulators (especially for machines from the ’80s) is that there was no standard keyboard arrangement. In this project I took a broken Commodore 64 computer and replaced the motherboard with a PIC microcontroller […]
Atari Joystick USB Adaptor
This project implements a composite USB device supporting two USB 2.0 full-speed gameport HID interfaces. The physical joystick ports are wired in accordance to the ‘Atari standard’ allowing connection of most Commodore 64 and Amiga joysticks as well as older Atari 2600 compatible joysticks. It’s purpose is to allow game play on Linux and Windows […]
Restoring an Acorn A3000 computer
Released in 1989, the Acorn BBC A3000 computer was the last of the BBC branded machines Acorn produced and as a ‘cheaper’ all-in-one unit and was the machine most Acorn loving Brits had for games, programming and a whole host of other applications in the early 1990s. At the time of writing (March 2009) there […]