Might as well pop my channel in here (as it features a lot of older games); currently it focuses on Every PC F1 Game and Every PC Rally Game (including unreleased ones!): https://www.youtube.com/user/VirtuaIceMan

I have bigger plans though, as I've recently got a Matrox M3D and NV1 I'll be looking at Sega arcade games vs every PC port of them. But need to finish up F1 list first!

Visiting the Helmond Home Computer Museum

The city of Helmond, close to Eindhoven in the Netherlands, is a little more than an hour’s drive from my home city. So we decided to go there and visit the fantastic Home Computer Museum! It’s a giant, interactive collection of home and personal computers from the 70s to the early 2000s. Spanning more than 30 years of technological progress it is really worth more than one visit. So much to see and do here…

https://youtu.be/ggDILNVtq0U

The Akihabara of Paris: Boulevard Voltaire

We went to Paris to visit some retro game, Manga and Comic shops. All along the Boulevard Voltaire there are tons of shops, which reminded me of the Akihabara quarters in Tokyo. Come with us on a trip through nerd heaven!

https://youtu.be/syw24e74l7I

Let's Code x86 Assembly: 0x05 Primes and Variables

In this episode we learn how to declare variables in assembly language. Also we learn how to access data from pointers stored in registers. We learn a couple of jump instructions and how to loop. We use this knowledge to compute all prime numbers below 1000 and print them to the screen. As usual this is based on the book “Programming Boot Sector Games” by Oscar Toledo.

https://youtu.be/18e5jWyG6uE

The Commodore 1541 Frankenstein

I have a couple of broken 1541 floppy drives for the C64 and similar machines. Some have broken mechanisms, of Mitsumi variety, where the read coils are fried, but also one drive that has supposedly some PCB issues. Let’s see if we can assemble a Frankenstein 1541 drive by taking bits and pieces from each drive!

https://youtu.be/ZrJoRgIYwNw

Let’s Code x86 Assembly: 0x06 Tic Tac Toe JMP and CALL

In this episode we learn how to program a little tic-tac-toe game for two human players. No AI, just the input and output and the winning condition! We learn different methods to compare registers and memory locations, different conditional jumps and how to save a few bytes by replacing CALL instructions with JMP.

https://youtu.be/k4LebWryXhA

Recording MIDI Music onto Floppies

I was asked by a viewer if the Roland SoundBrush that I showed in an earlier episode can also be used to record MIDI music from a PC. And yes of course, it can. With some caveats though! I connected the SoundBrush to my 486 PC and tried a few games. Lucasfilm games were running into buffer problems on the SoundBrush, but Sierra games were playing nicely. Let’s have a look and a listen how you can wire up the SoundBrush, format some floppies and record some MIDI files!

https://youtu.be/sVK_5ZzqWVc

The M396F 386SX Homebrew Mainboard

Marco Roth reverse engineered a broken M396F mainboard, powered by a 386SX CPU. This tiny Baby AT sized mainboard comes with six 16 bit ISA slots, four 30 pin SIMM sockets, a 40 MHz AMD branded 80386SX CPU and is a fancy purple color! Does it work? Let’s throw some soundcards and games at it and see how it behaves! Marco didn’t have a lot of cards to test with, so I offered to do it for him. Let’s see how it turned out!

https://youtu.be/C4Dn0XjM-SI

Just watched it. I was expecting a video about how it was reverse engineereed and produced, and what new discoveries were made about the platform and hardware etc but this was also a fine watch on my way to work 😀

appiah4 wrote on 2022-07-06, 05:24:

Just watched it. I was expecting a video about how it was reverse engineereed and produced, and what new discoveries were made about the platform and hardware etc but this was also a fine watch on my way to work 😀

Yeah, no. Marco announced this after the fact, so I have no insight into the process. I guess he just copied manually all the tracks from his broken board into a new design. Plain simple as that. As it's a two layer board this is actually no magic -- even though beyond my capabilities, as I have no clue on how to use layouting software. 😀

I did a video on the PS/1 I recently picked up https://youtu.be/m-6zoH4Vb0k

Repairing a Dead Roland MT-32

A user from the DOSReloaded forum sent me his dead Roland MT-32, arguably one of the most sought after and iconic synthesizers for playing vintage DOS games. This item is said to be totally dead, no LCD display and no sound. So let’s have a look at what’s wrong and if we can fix it!

https://youtu.be/SRQ6rxSJZaQ

root42 wrote on 2022-07-22, 04:39:

Repairing a Dead Roland MT-32

Nice work! I especially like how you managed to fix the LCD display by swapping out those worn out flat cables with DuPont connectors.

Those things are super useful for any kind of retro work. I sometimes use the longer ones to get digital audio from a CD-ROM drive and connect it to the CD_SPDIF header of a SBLive.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-07-22, 05:58:

root42 wrote on 2022-07-22, 04:39:

Repairing a Dead Roland MT-32

Nice work! I especially like how you managed to fix the LCD display by swapping out those worn out flat cables with DuPont connectors.

Those things are super useful for any kind of retro work. I sometimes use the longer ones to get digital audio from a CD-ROM drive and connect it to the CD_SPDIF header of a SBLive.

Thanks, and yes, these cables/connectors are pretty neat. Also as they fit very well on the regular 1/10" or 2.54mm pitch pin headers. They are the swiss army knife of cables.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-07-22, 05:58:

root42 wrote on 2022-07-22, 04:39:

Repairing a Dead Roland MT-32

Nice work! I especially like how you managed to fix the LCD display by swapping out those worn out flat cables with DuPont connectors.

Those things are super useful for any kind of retro work. I sometimes use the longer ones to get digital audio from a CD-ROM drive and connect it to the CD_SPDIF header of a SBLive.

They would catch a lot of interference without proper shielding though!

appiah4 wrote on 2022-07-23, 08:56:

They would catch a lot of interference without proper shielding though!

SPDIF is fully digital, so interference is not a huge issue there. It will either work or not. If it works, noise levels are nonexistent, unlike with analog CD audio.

I also have a factory-made CD SPDIF cable, which came with my Audigy1, and there's no perceptible audio quality difference between it and the DuPont cables.

Sorry I thought you meant regular cd audio cables.

Quick video trying out a Matrox DualHead2Go VGA splitter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0D3N3QQpWs

The HDD Clicker

Remember the clicking sounds of spinning hard disks? One “problem” with retro computing is that we replace those disks with Compact Flash, SD Cards or even SSDs. Those do not make any noises that you can hear under usual circumstances. Which is partly nice, because the computer becomes quieter, but also irritating because sometimes you can’t tell if the computer has crashed or is still working. This little device fixes that issue! It’s called the HDD clicker and it’s a very unique and funny little gadget!

https://youtu.be/zxTtG9wmAFM

Fixing an old Apple Mac LC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LS9z9bHSDk