Worth bringing an NTSC Apple IIe from the States to a PAL Country?

As a collector of vintage computers and video games I had been looking a long time for an Apple IIe. In my home country (Germany) they have been pretty expensive. Same here in Australia where I am living now and they are relatively rare these days. Chances are probably better in Australia to catch one ...

SD2IEC on ATMEGA32 – easier data exchange with my C128 5

Recently I discovered that my Time Pilot arcade PCB is broken. It works partly, its the graphics that is messed up. The cause is an eprom, where all of its legs on one side, just rusted off the socket. Some of these old PCBs are in rough shape. Not always treated well – especially after ...

“Amount to Words” and a Revival for a twenty year old book

Other than in my home country Germany, Cheques still play a big role here in Malaysia. Its been a pain to fill them out and frequently there’s an error and trouble with the bank. An idea was born, I need to write a software doing that job for us.  Well I am more into PHP ...

Glimpse into the world of Cycle Exact programming

The retro fever caught me again. I am these days quite busy with my RC models like helicopters and multicopters, but I felt it was time again to explore some topics around the Commodore 64 hardware. I stumbled upon the website of Michael Steil. He was the author of the 15 Second Disk Copy program ...

A harddrive gives me a hard time

The last two evenings I was fighting with the Megafile 30 harddrive of the Atari ST. The wiring is perfect and “something” happens between the ST and the Megafile but I don’t have any access yet. Pretty fast it became clear, that I might need some drivers and tools to further investigate. I am a ...

My Latest Catch

Since I have moved from Germany to Malaysia, my collection of old games and systems grows a lot slower. However, I managed to get an ATARI 520 STfm for RM 125 (~ 30 Euro). It came with SC1224 color screen and Megafile 30 harddrive. Unfortunately the harddrive cable and the mouse was missing. An original ...

Publikationen in der AMIGA Spezial

Emulatoren sind wohl die Programme, die eine Vielzahl von neuen Möglickeiten zu eröffnen scheinen, aber eher eine Vielzahl von neuen Enttäuschungen hervorrufen. Über Sinn und Zweck von Emulatoren wurde auch schon viel Diskutiert, der der Programmieraufwand und somit der Preis ist kein geringer. Hier soll nun, nach erscheinden des “C64 Emulators” und des “Transformer” , ...

A story to tell your children…

Once upon a time, in the Valley of Silicon, the two headed Wizard of Apples went for a walk. The two heads, both of which were named Steve, looked around, and spied a beautiful PARC.“This is truly a beautiful PARC~ Steve exclaimed.Yes, it is’ agreed Steve. “It is very graphic. And do you see how ...

Retro Pearls on Android

It has been a while, since I wrote my last posting and I have to apologize. Right now I am sitting in a hotel in Beijing and enjoying a day off. So no work to do and no family, I have to pay attention to, taking the opportunity writing something I kept in mind already ...

Who was Gary Kildall?

Recenty I stumpled multipe times upon a certain name. It was Gary Kildall. Gary was the one, who founded Digital Research. The company who was well known for its operating  system CP/M, designed for smaller computers. In a time where mainframes were more common, than a personal computer. Some people might rember DR DOS, which ...