CygnusAlpha

These flash floppy emulators from Gotek are great. But they are even better when they have the FlashFloppy firmware loaded. The SFRC922D model I have seems to have some extra holes under the serial/boot jumpers. I chose to use the USB/DFU programming method for which you will need a USB A-A cable. Here's how I put the Gotek into boot mode for DFU: Jumpers for boot/DFU mode. Wirelinks above the white connector. Once in boot mode you can program the device using the dfu-util: I'm using OSX, and used homebrew to install the dfu-util. brew install dfu-util dfu-util --list dfu-util 0.9 Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc. Copyright 2010-2016 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY Please report bugs to http://sourceforge.net/p/dfu-util/tickets/ Deducing device DFU version from functional descriptor length Found Runtime: [05ac:8206] ver=1965, devnum=2, cfg=1, intf=2, ...

Acorn A5000 Dirty, very dirty. And Rusty. After cleaning with acetic acid & IPA Disk drive flashes with a fault code:    00010059    CMOS unreadable PC-style IO world detected ARM 3 fitted/ARM ID read and not ARM2 Long memory test performed Self-test due to power-on So some work needed around the CMOS. UPDATE: 2018-09-23 Fixed the corroded CMOS tracks It Lives! Sorted the rust & painted (Needs lettering) Almost the right grey, but shows up the disk drive :-o

Poor old RiscPC suffered the common battery leak from the PCB mounted NiCd. Sadly it caused some damage to tracks around the CMOS clock and memory. The charging circuit for the NiCd was also damaged. Things I know that work now: * Charging - Replaced the failed 180R resistor with a through-hole type as I needed to also get power from the diode and the track had disintegrated. Not pretty. * CMOS I2C - I watched the waveforms on the logic analyser. * Sound & Video from VIDC Battery replacement. NiMh hidden well away from the PCB  Life! for the first time since 2009! Little bit better! Some more cleaning of SIMs & VRAM Passable, but I think the VRAM needs replacing now. Well, that's the most life I've had out of this recently, so I'm a bit happier with it. Still some way to go. Next steps.  Some new RAM and VRAM.

Hacking the Sureflap Dual Scan Cat Flap To get the RFID codes for the 134.2 KHz Cat chip ID's  Aha! A PIC. And an ICD port next to it. PICKit3 at the ready. I'd quite like to get the firmware off this if possible.

Atari ST A good friend found these in the loft and thought I might find some use for them.  There was some interesting software came with them. Transputers! Occam!  And levels of brownness not seen since the 1970's.  This one cleaned up ok though.

Acorn A300 Bit of a Frankensteins Monster. Bits from A300 / A410 and many upgrades. Unfortunately this one suffered a little from poor storage at some point. Luckily most of the damage is just the back panel. Everything else just needs a bit of a clean.  There's some great bits of wire linking and factory mods on this board.  And a few of my own mods for memory and ARM 3  Bit of rust.. Clean up and repaint..

Had a great time at the Newbury Radio Rally and an amazing bit of luck finding this Tatung Einstein from 1984 in pretty good condition.  In another bit of amazing luck one of my friends had a bundle of Manuals, magazines and some disks.