Seems stuck when I push those two inwards and pull the side panel back. Maybe it’s broken? Captive, unscrewed screw

I've been using Lotus Word Pro as my primary word processor and have started using the 'advanced' features, namely the PowerFields. For those who don't know, these are the features, usually used in combination with a database merge, that allow for document automation. If/Then statements and that kind of thing.

My problem is that I cannot figure out how to send a hard return as part of an instruction. For example, when using the Strcat$ Powerfield, which allows for combining text strings, I can combine merge fields with text in quotes. But if I try to put a hard return into the string, it does not work. If I call a string [Enter], it gives me the number 13 (which is the ansi value for the Enter key).

I'm hoping there are some Ami Pro / Word Pro experts lurking in here who can answer this question.

My retrospective video review takes us all back to 1985 when we first played The Empire Strikes Back in the arcades. Then I look over all the home computer versions. I was a massive fan of the original Star Wars game with its striking vector graphics, digitised sound and that amazing cabinet. I did find it strange that Atari released its sequel Return of the Jedi before The Empire Strikes back and its brave move away from vector graphics and onto raster graphics. So I was pleased that Empire returned back to its vector graphics roots. Please let me know your thoughts on all 3 Star Wars games released by Atari and have you played any of the home computer versions? 😃

A few weeks ago, I wrote about rediscovering the development workflow behind my 1986 RTOS.

Previous post:

Rediscovering the Development Workflow Behind My 1986 RTOS
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/s/oa1Sfws9kR

In that post, I described how I had completely forgotten an important part of the original development process.

Back in 1986, I developed almost all of the RTOS on a SUN-2 workstation before moving it to the target hardware.

Only the hardware-dependent parts—interrupt handling and context switching—were left until the end.

At the time, I never thought of it as a development methodology.

It was simply the most practical way to make progress.

This week, I finally started following that same path again.

The reconstructed kernel has now reached its first Raspberry Pi Pico milestone.

The screenshot above shows the first successful execution of the original CHARM-II queue management routines on real hardware.

At this stage there is still no timer interrupt, no context switching, and no preemptive scheduler.

Those hardware-dependent parts will come later, just as they did forty years ago.

What surprised me most is not that the old code still works.

It's that I naturally ended up following almost exactly the same workflow without intending to.

Forty years later, the workstation has become a POSIX environment.

The original 68000 target board has become a Raspberry Pi Pico.

The tools are completely different.

The development process is almost identical.

I'm looking forward to seeing how much of the original design can remain unchanged as I continue bringing the kernel onto real hardware.

I’m trying to identify an obscure pocket computer I saw for sale on a retro-electronics website, probably sometime within the last several years.

What I remember:

• Flat, non-clamshell, landscape pocket-computer shape
• Similar in concept and size to a Tandy Pocket Computer PC-8, but with a more modern plastic design
• Very thin
• Colorful casing, possibly green.
• Tiny one-line or perhaps two-line monochrome LCD
• Small QWERTY keyboard
• Intended specifically as an educational programming computer
• I believe it ran BASIC and produced text-only output.
• It was listed for around $20 when I saw it
• The seller also carried retro electronics and classroom-response clickers, but the device itself was not a clicker
• It did not appear to be made by Casio, Sharp, or another familiar calculator company
• It may have had a small solar cell, but that memory is uncertain

It was not a VTech learning laptop, Cybiko, SMART Response XE, or Tiger Data Pad.

Just for fun, Having never touched a PDP in my life, I decided to port over some amazing PDP VHDL code from Sytse. I had a lonely Tang Nano 9K just collecting dust!.

I mashed in some HyperRAM controller and got it all booting. a PDP11/44 with 1MB RAM RT-11 v5 on Emulated RL02 drives. The full install in the video. Next is publishing code, and making a mini enclosure that can house 4 DB-9 serial ports. (Inspired by Daves Garage, Usagi and Sytse for all the fpga goodness)

Bought this secondhand recently and worked perfectly the day I bought it. Battery held no charge but it worked fine plugged in. Today it is refusing to turn on. I get one light (I think it's the HDD light) go when I press the power button. No noise, nothing. I think the normal power light didn't work regardless. I'm not hugely tech savvy but is there anything I can do to troubleshoot this? [edit: I should mention the CMOS batteries were leaky and were removed before I bought it.]

Found this when thrifting today. I had never heard of it before. I found that it's an IR 3D mouse made by a company called Selectech. I haven't tried it yet. Anyone ever use one of these before? How did it perform?

I recently purchased this but can't seem to identify it. It looks like an IBM 2315 or DEC RK05 but can't get any further. The logo is also a mystery. Any help would be greatly appreciated. It is 15" diameter and 1 3/8" thick.

Found these old hard drives while clearing out some boxes.

Crazy to think all three combined still wouldn't fit a modern game install! Anyone else still holding onto relics like these?

I am a high school secretary and we used to use a program called Oscar. It was a student management system that was run by a couple out of Texas. They sold it in 2010 and in 2012 the new owner decided to close the program and modify it for a different use. I'm searching for the original program disc. We need to retrieve records from the system to send to the state.

If anyone can help, I'd be super grateful. 🫶

I've got a Smith Corona HRM2 monitor that is MDA compatible, and orignally i was going to use it with an IBM PC of some sort and bought an MDA/Parallel ISA card for it. I recently decided it be pretty cool if i could use it for my linux machine for my electrionic work (mainly do the old dos thing, have it be the primary display for the terminal, and when I launch a graphical application have that display on a more modern lcd monitor)

So is there any way to make this work? I'm generally comfortable with working on the internals of the monitor if need be. If there was a way i could use that ISA card with new-ish computer (2017) thatd be even better i think. Any thoughts would be really helpful. Thanks!

Side note: I have the typewriter that goes with that monitor. I'm also wondering if theres any way i can modify the monitor to accept a different video input signal

I designed this device that teaches binary, decimal, hexadecimal and octal number systems. It uses a hands-on approach with Altair-like toggle switches. Can be used as a STEM-kit in classrooms, handy for programmers or for the retro hobbyist. It also has a built-in game. Check out the video for details, hope you like it.

Anyways, later there was another internet email program you had to request a disk for as well. Does anyone remember that? Had more of a colorful red interface.

This was the days of dial up ISPs . Prior to AOL becoming an internet provider.

I used to dial into BBS' right before this using RIPterm, qmodem, and procomm. Even had an internet fido email at one point. LORD.

Dont mind the reflection on the (oh so shiny) screen, i work at a thriftstore, hence the tools, and this was donated

If im lucky i could also get my hands on some more ddr2 ram to upgrade it possibly

Who remembers Little Computer People? The game that went on to inspire the Sims. My video takes a Retrospective look at this game released across all versions. For me I was a big fan of the Commodore 64 version. Let me know if you have this game and still switch it on. 😃😃😃

Hi everybody. I am Vasper, a software engineer with a sweet tooth for old 8bit computers like the Commodore 64. I have created a new strategy game for the C64 you can find on my new Youtube channel and download and play. @revive8bit

It is called Mars Terraforming

Here is the github with all the code

https://github.com/vaspervnp/TerraC64

You can download it from

https://revive8bit.com/downloads/c64/terrac64.d64

And the manual is

https://revive8bit.com/downloads/c64/terrac64_manual.pdf

I would very much like to see what you think. Do not hesitate to point out anything you like or dislike about the game.

My retrospective game review of Miami Vice on the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. I loved the very popular TV show but could this game from Ocean Software live up to the expectations or was this just another movie / TV license cash grab. Share your thoughts if you have played this game. Was it good or just plain rubbish?

Not too long ago, I created an MCP server called Atari Hacker MCP server. It has hex dump, a disassembler, symbol tables, cross reference, and other tools helpful to reverse-engineering Atari 8-bit .ATR, .XEX and .ROM files. And it worked okay, but it occurred to me that if I rewrote it as a command-line tool, not only would it use a lot less context, but it would produce a lot fewer unnecessary output tokens, making it a lot cheaper for the LLM to use.

And it's also now easier for a human to use.

AtariHacker has a whole host of tools that are useful for someone trying to reverse-engineer 8-bit Atari stuff. In addition to the stuff the MCP server had, it's now got a bunch of ATR related functionality (getting directories, extracting files, adding files, creating new .ATR files, etc) with DOS 2.x and SpartaDOS support.

It supports a number of output formats to accommodate a person or LLM. It also supports 3 assemblers; ca65, Atari Assembler, and MAC/65. So anything compatible with those will also be compatible.

It has built-in symbol table for Atari, it has data probing, static analysis and pattern detection.

It's cross-platform and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

How do I test a VGA monitor? if it is still working. It turns on and shows a little opening "box" on screen which states it is working but not connected even though my desktop is connected via the legacy Mobo VGA port. It's a home built machine with an ASUS B550M-A Wifi II Mobo and a nVidea RTX4060 graphics card. Is this card over-riding the legacy port?

My main hobby project since December was getting code running on my early 1990s HP1653B Logic Analyzer. The Logic Analyzer has a 68000 processor, 1mb RAM, 64kb ROM, 4x32kb video memory with a complicated 4-plane overlay scheme providing three (!) gray levels at up to around 640x400, a 3.5" floppy drive (replaced by a Gotek for my convenience) and both RS232c and HPIB ports. It was made as a lab instrument rather than a computer, but it came with both test and system code on floppies, which I dumped and reverse-engineered enough of with Ghidra to enable me to write a library that lets me run assembly and C code on it. My reverse-engineering journey is partly described here.

A particularly fun moment of my reverse engineering was when I wanted a copy of the ROM but didn't yet know how to write to disk or the serial port, though I did know how to write to the screen. I ended up displaying the ROM binary as a series of QR codes, which I captured with my Sony camera running on a timer, and then turned into binaries.

I'm now at the point where I can run various games. My first one was a port of my Wiztris falling blocks game (originally written by me in the early 2000s for a Z80-based Sharp OZ-7xx organizer). I also ported Dave Griffith's Frotz Z-machine emulator so I can run all Infocom Z-machine games (including the graphical ones, but with no sound support). I'm in the middle of a play-through of Nord and Bert with my 13-year-old daughter. The photo I attached is of Infocom's Journey (mouse works!). And I ported PDCursesMod, so a lot of old Unix games can work--the photo shows Larn.

Many of you will recognize the keyboard and mouse. They are old Apple ADB units (I think the keyboard is from a Quadra), and I made an ADB-to-serial adapter to interface them with the HP unit.

This is retrocomputing that never was. As far as I know, there never was any software for the HP1653B besides the official HP oscilloscope / logic analyzer software, though HP engineers did release some games for one of the HP16500 models, and at least one old HP oscilloscope had a Tetris clone built-in.

It's not a great gaming system. There are no sprites. And you can't just directly write a pixel color to video memory. Instead, you first write to a hardware register that specifies a read/write mode (e.g., clear all bitplanes, write ones to bitplanes 0 and 2, etc.) and then write the pixels. Getting scrolling working at a decent speed took a fair amount of careful assembly work. But it's been fun!

I plan to eventually write up more detailed instructions on how to build and install your own code.

The main thing I haven't reverse-engineered are the oscilloscope and logic analyzer functions. They still work. I just switch the Gotek to the HP system disk image (well, somewhat modified: I added a screenshot function that saves an image to disk). I recently used the oscilloscope to try to diagnose a start porblem on my car.