24 Jul
2005
24 Jul
'05
6:39 a.m.
Hi
I'm Arron, 15, from New Zealand.
Yesterday I just finished piecing together two dead spectrums into one
working unit. I had a few problems with screen quality so I replaced
the modulator with a little composite circuit. Better quality, though
flicker still remains.Might add a power switch also. This has been my
first foray into Sinclair machines.
Are there any other New Zealanders here? I met Ethan Dicks a while ago
on his way through the country.
-Arron
24 Jul
24 Jul
11:30 p.m.
On 7/24/05, Arron McLaughlin <arron.owns at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi
I'm Arron, 15, from New Zealand.
Hi, Aaron... good to see you on here.
...This has been my first foray into Sinclair
machines.
Can't help much with Sinclairs, but I'm sure other people here can.
-ethan
25 Jul
25 Jul
2:05 a.m.
On 7/24/05, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On 7/24/05, Arron McLaughlin <arron.owns at
gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks. Hows things? I got your email on the TIL311 displays on ebay,
unfortunately I didn't have anything in paypal. I've still been
meaning to put the Elf 2k board together, might see if i can
reconfigure the GAL on it and get it working with a character LCD
instead (through a small PIC perhaps?).
Hi
I'm Arron, 15, from New Zealand.
Hi, Aaron... good to see you on here.
...This has been my first foray into Sinclair
machines.
Can't help much with Sinclairs, but I'm sure other people here can.
-ethan Oops... terribly sorry to have misspelled your name,
Arron.
No worries :)
25 Jul
25 Jul
6:19 a.m.
On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 03:39 -0700, Arron McLaughlin wrote:
Hi
I'm Arron, 15, from New Zealand.
Hiya and welcome.
Whereabouts in NZ? I used to find there were some nice pickings around
the north island when I was there - still lots to find in junk shops and
scrapyards (unlike here in the UK!). Plus of course garage sales were a
lot more common in NZ and local tips tended to be much more geared
toward recycling, so old machines would be picked out and put up for
sale for a couple of bucks...
Yesterday I just finished piecing together two dead
spectrums into one
working unit. I had a few problems with screen quality so I replaced
the modulator with a little composite circuit. Better quality, though
flicker still remains.Might add a power switch also. This has been my
first foray into Sinclair machines.
The speccy was what got me started in computing. Amazing little machines
for the price really - the C64 was probably better (at least graphics-
wise) but more expensive, and the BBC B was a real killer, but probably
twice the price of a speccy.
I got rid of my Sinclair collection last year to concentrate on some of
my other machines, but I kept one 48K machines (and all my games from
way back when) for sentimental reasons...
Are there any other New Zealanders here? I met Ethan
Dicks a while ago
on his way through the country.
It doesn't seem to be as much of a hobby there as it is in the UK, US
etc. - which probably means there's scope for you to build up a really
nice collection if you so wanted.
cheers
Jules
7:45 a.m.
On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 03:39 -0700, Arron McLaughlin
wrote:
The speccy was what got me started in computing.
Amazing little machines
for the price really - the C64 was probably better (at least graphics-
wise) but more expensive, and the BBC B was a real killer, but probably
twice the price of a speccy.
More than twice the price - IIRC the BBC Model B was ?399 and the ZX
Spectrum 48K was ?175.
I was listening to a thing on the radio a month or two back, where one of
the people they were interviewing said that the ZX Spectrum was the whole
reason for the massive computer games industry in Dundee. Why? Because
that's where the Timex factory where they made them was. So Spectrums
were very cheap, under the pub table. So everyone had one, and anyone
with a bit of ability got the chance to write on a good, well-supported
machine...
Gordon.
2:29 p.m.
On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 03:39 -0700, Arron McLaughlin wrote:
Are there any other New Zealanders here? I met Ethan
Dicks a while ago
on his way through the country.
Well, I'm here, but not there (ex Auckland). I
don't recall any other
NZers here, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong.
Have fun with the Spectrum. You should be able to find some fellow
enthusiasts - a friend of mine had quite a collection of Spectrum stuff
until recently (microfloppies etc.)
--
Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence at ljw.me.uk
The IBM 360/30 page http://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360
29 Jul
29 Jul
12:35 a.m.
This reminds me of a pet peeve of mine. Is it just me or does it really xxxx
you off when somebody gives you a Tandy model 100 and then they say
something like "I had a Cray-1 in the garage until last week but I took it
to the junk dealer"? It seems to happen to me quite often. Maybe they feel
so bad about parting with the little piece of junk that they hung on to the
they need to say something to make them feel better? I am always tempted to
say "Are you just trying to make me angry or what? Why would I want to know
about the really valuable thing you didn't give me?"
Gil
-----Original Message-----
From: cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Lawrence Wilkinson
...
Have fun with the Spectrum. You should be able to
find some
fellow enthusiasts - a friend of mine had quite a collection
of Spectrum stuff until recently (microfloppies etc.)
25 Jul
25 Jul
3:17 p.m.
On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 03:39 -0700, Arron McLaughlin wrote:
Are there any other New Zealanders here? I met Ethan
Dicks a while ago
on his way through the country.
Well, I'm here, but not there (ex Auckland). I
don't recall any other
NZers here, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong.
Have fun with the Spectrum. You should be able to find some fellow
enthusiasts - a friend of mine had quite a collection of Spectrum stuff
until recently (microfloppies etc.)
--
Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence at ljw.me.uk
The IBM 360/30 page http://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360
28 Jul
28 Jul
3:26 p.m.
On 7/24/05, Arron McLaughlin <arron.owns at gmail.com> wrote:
Yesterday I just finished piecing together two dead
spectrums into one
working unit. I had a few problems with screen quality so I replaced
the modulator with a little composite circuit. Better quality, though
flicker still remains.Might add a power switch also. This has been my
first foray into Sinclair machines.
There's a lot going on in the Sinclair world still. Google for
Sinclair Spectrum and be amazed!
There's a project to build an updated-model Speccy, the Spectrum SE,
which brings together the best features of the 48, the 128 and the
Timex Sinclair 2068.
There are new ROMs, some to fix bugs, some to add new features.
There's new software & hardware development. I particularly like the
internal CompactFlash interface - one on a 48K with a cheap 128MB card
can hold every Speccy game ever written.
It's a fun environment still!
Check out World of Spectrum, Planet Sinclair and ZXF Magazine for
starters, and Usenet news:comp.sys.sinclair -- there's an active
community.
--
Liam Proven
Home: http://welcome.to/liamsweb * Blog: http://lproven.livejournal.com
AOL, Yahoo UK: liamproven * ICQ: 73187508 * MSN: lproven at hotmail.com
5:16 p.m.
On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 20:26 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
On 7/24/05, Arron McLaughlin <arron.owns at
gmail.com> wrote:
I remember looking at usenet about a year ago (comp.sys.sinclair
probably) and was amazed at how active the group still seemed to be.
Lots of the old 8-bitters here still seem to have a dedicated following
coming up with new projects; the Acorn BBC micro, Sinclair and C64 are
still popular machines. Apple systems seem to take a back seat as they
never were quite so popular, same with CBM's PET systems.
Lots of discussion over on the BBC micro mailing list at present about
building a gateway between Acorn's Econet network and modern Ethernet,
which could allow some pretty cool things to be done from a beeb...
Nice to see people still doing cool stuff on these machines :-)
cheers
Jules
Yesterday I just finished piecing together two
dead spectrums into one
working unit. I had a few problems with screen quality so I replaced
the modulator with a little composite circuit. Better quality, though
flicker still remains.Might add a power switch also. This has been my
first foray into Sinclair machines.
There's a lot going on in the Sinclair world still. Google for
Sinclair Spectrum and be amazed!
29 Jul
29 Jul
2:25 p.m.
On 7/28/05, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Nice to see people still doing cool stuff on these
machines :-)
It certainly is. I'd like to get more involved but I lack the relevant
skills and try to focus my new skills acquisition on more
commercially-relevant ones, such as Linux. But I take my hat off to
those who are doing such things!
For my money, one of the most impressive projects is Adam Dunkels'
multitasking OS for 8-bitters, Contiki. Amazing stuff; includes TCP/IP
and even Ethernet support on some hardware.
--
Liam Proven
Home: http://welcome.to/liamsweb * Blog: http://lproven.livejournal.com
AOL, Yahoo UK: liamproven * ICQ: 73187508 * MSN: lproven at hotmail.com
30 Jul
30 Jul
5:10 a.m.
For my money, one of the most impressive projects is
Adam Dunkels'
multitasking OS for 8-bitters, Contiki. Amazing stuff; includes TCP/IP
and even Ethernet support on some hardware.
I'm actually working with an 8052 microcontroller port of his tcp/ip
stack for the embedded network device I've been designing. I'm using
it with an ISA nic and an 89C51RD2 chip from Atmel, should be finished
for the end of the month for an electronics competition called Bright
Sparks. Similar to picnic.sf.net.
The port of it to the Magic-1 Homebrew CPU was really brilliant.
also, I got out a little book from the library on programming the z80
in assembler :)
-Arron
6929
days inactive
6934
days old
14 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
-
arron.owns＠gmail.com -
csmuseum＠cse.uta.edu -
ethan.dicks＠gmail.com -
gordonjcp＠gjcp.net -
gtn＠mind-to-mind.com -
julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk -
ljw-356＠ljw.me.uk -
ljw-cctech＠ljw.me.uk -
lproven＠gmail.com