retro

Agon and Agon Last month I visited the RMC Cave where we got a sneak peek at the Agon Console8 from Heber. The Agon Console8 is a consolised version of the more general-purpose Agon8 Computer. They come in a natty retro case, and features twin 9-pin joystick ports. I’d not heard about the Agon line of Open Source devices before, but they tickled something in me. I’m somewhat fascinated by computers that boot directly into BASIC. [Read More]

I’ve just returned from an excellent day visting The Cave and the Arcade Archive with friends. I’ve visited the cave before, and wrote up my experience in Visiting The Cave last year. I decided since (nearly) a year had passed, it was time to visit again. When I mentioned online to some friends, that I was planning on going, they all booked tickets for the same day. We arrived just before 11am, met the greeters who checked our tickets, showed us up the stairs, and introduced the venue. [Read More]

About a year ago, I left a comment on a Nostalgia Nerd video about Viruses. It’s a good video, worth a watch, like most of their content. Here’s my silly comment. At 1.7K 👍, it’s my most upvoted comment on YouTube, ever. I do enjoy free Internet points. Some of the replies to me on YouTube were quite 🌟fun🌟. “Any chance you made a back up? I’d love to look at the source code” [Read More]

Rainbow love I’ve previously written about how the Sinclair line of computers kickstarted a life-long love of computing. I still sometimes go back and play classic Spectrum games on my Nintendo DS. I’ve also bought brand-new games for the platform in recent times. I love that people still code for these ancient devices. Modern vintage classic In April 2017, I backed the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter campaign, which was ultimately successful. [Read More]

If you only want to know about my visit to The Cave and not the nonsense about my aracde boards, feel free to scroll down to “Three Wise Men” Note: I’ve embedded some posts from Twitter (where there’s engagement with other Tweeps) and other posts from Mastodon, because, y’know. Yesterday I had cause to visit Bristol in the west of England. I live in Farnborough, in the South East of England, so it’s a two-hour journey each way. [Read More]

This post, previously titled “Thirty Years On” appeared on another incarnation of my blog 10 years ago. I am being lazy nostalgic and re-posting it today as it’s the 40th birthday of my first computer, the diminutive Sinclair ZX81. On Christmas day 1981 I awoke with the usual excitement of any 9 year old boy. I clearly remember going downstairs and being told not to go into the lounge because my Dad was busy setting up my main Christmas present. [Read More]

10 REM TL;DR My Raspberry Pi 400 boots from this: To this. BBC BASIC! This blog post is what parts I smashed together to make this work and why. 20 PRINT “HELLO” 40 years ago this Christmas, I got my first “personal computer”. It was a Sinclair ZX81 with 1KiB of RAM and a tape deck for storage. Every time I powered it on, like all ‘81 owners, I was greeted with this. [Read More]