Category: Computers/Tech/Games

23 Tiny Screws

Today I am repairing a Commodore 64 keyboard. Not just any keyboard, but the one I grew up using back in the 1980s. The original Commodore 64 came with brown keys. For a brief period of time, Commodore made a similar computer, the Commodore 16, which came in a black case with grey keys. A few years after the C16 was discontinued, Commodore’s stock of replacement keyboards flooded Radio Shack. Although the two keyboards were not electronically compatible, the keys themselves were. I bought one of those keyboards back in the late 1980s, plucked the gray keys off of it,… (read more)

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Visiting Friends and Barcades

Earlier this week my buddy Robb and his wife Mel flew in from Colorado to celebrate his birthday. The two flew into Arkansas, drove over to Oklahoma to visit me, and eventually returned to Arkansas to visit the Arkadia Retrocade in Fayetteville before returning home. While they were here we ate onion burgers, had Mexican food at Ted’s, and had breakfast at Hatch. We also did some shopping, sight-seeing, and even stopped by Bob Funk’s stable to check out the Clydesdales. I had a great time visiting with Robb and his wife, and I hope they had a good time… (read more)

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Buying Time

Saturday morning, the power supply in my home file server died. According to Amazon, the power supply was three-and-a-half years old and already out of warranty. The 486 computer I bought in 1996 still has its original power supply. It seems to me they don’t build things like they used to. Or maybe I’m just old. My server has all my movies, all my music, and all of my data. I have backups (my backups have backups), but accessing them involves physically moving drives around and isn’t as easy as one might imagine. Because my server also handles services like… (read more)

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Review: Old Skool USB HDMI Capture Device

I’ve been streaming games on Twitch (twitch.tv/RobOHara) for a few months now, and I am constantly adding software and hardware to my little bag of tricks. One limitation I’ve had is that I haven’t been able to pipe video from real consoles and computers directly into my computer. For a lot of streams emulation is fine, but to show off things like the MiSTer, THEC64, or any of my newer devices that output HDMI, I needed a capture device. Most of the devices I’ve seen for sale cost around $200, which is more than I was willing to spend. Recently… (read more)

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A New Toy Enters the Ring: The MiSTer

After waiting almost a year, I finally decided to buy a MiSTer FPGA computer. If talk of cutting edge FPGA computers doesn’t interest you, I’ll spare you — it’s okay to skip this entry. FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) computers are fascinating little devices. Most computers contain CPUs with their code permanently etched into them. An FPGA has no code of its own; instead, “cores” are flashed into the chip. Imagine a magical car that could instantly change from a van to an SUV to a sports car with the press of a button — and that every day, people… (read more)

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Vacation Project: Movies to Google Sheets

For the past five years, I’ve been tracking every movie I watch, every television show I watch, and every book I read. I set a few parameters for myself when I started — I only track movies I watch from start to finish, entire seasons of television shows, and books I finish. I don’t track sporting events like basketball and football games or individual episodes of television shows I catch while couch surfing. I’ve been keeping the list on a standard webpage and I’ve been doing the HTML code by hand. Not only has the page become a long unmanageable… (read more)

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Can You Go Back? A Look at the THEC64 Maxi

Late last week my newest computer, THEC64, arrived. I’m not in the business of buying things for myself this close to Christmas, but this was a computer I pre-ordered back in August. After multiple production and shipping delays, the machine finally found its way to me the first week of December. Most people know I’ve been a fan of Commodore computers, and specifically the Commodore 64, since the mid-1980s. I’m still a fan of the computer today; I’ve written two books about my experiences with the computer (Commodork and Commodorkier), and record a podcast called Sprite Castle where I play,… (read more)

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Ultimate 64 Assembled

Ultimate 64 with clear case, clear monitor, Commodore

After an extroidinarily long period of procrastination, I got my Ultimate 64 up and running over the weekend. The Ultimate 64 is a drop-in motherboard replacement for the original Commodore 64. Not only does it retain most of the original’s ports (joystick, cartridge, video, and serial) but it adds USB, ethernet, and HDMI output to a nearly 40-year-old computer. The USB ports allow modern joysticks to be used and games to be loaded directly from a USB stick, eliminating the need for a physical disk drive. The ethernet port can be used to connect to BBSes hosted on the internet,… (read more)

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Pushing Projects Forward

I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not — I can’t remember anything, anymore — but my 3D printer wasn’t working properly for a while. It was working okay, but not great. Everything I printed was coming out with a weird, rough finish. For the longest time I thought there was something wrong with my printer, but after doing a bunch of online research I narrowed the issue down to a single software setting. Literally, checking a single box in the software fixed the issue. I bought an Ultimate 64 over a year ago. The Ultimate 64 is a… (read more)

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Home Office Coming Together

Slowly, one piece at a time, my home office is coming together. When I first moved into my new office, I lined the walls with white plastic indoor/outdoor tables. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it’s what I had on hand at the time. Susan suggested I buy some white table tops and matching legs from Ikea, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make my own tables out of plywood… and then didn’t do it. Two months later, Susan wanted to make a trip to Ikea for her own office needs, and while we were there… (read more)

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