Tony is a Geek

It's been a little busy with the Amstrad updates. First of all, the UsifacII device has been great - it dawned on me that I could convert .DSK images into real 3" disc images and vice-versa.  This was a minor break through for me.  why? well, it allowed me to write out to real 3" discs software apps like CP/M, Arnor-C and Hisoft-C, you may notice a theme there!  It also allowed me to convert an entire 3" disc to a .DSK image and save it onto the USB drive for later retrieval.  again, why? well, the 3" discs themselves are getting rare and the non-Amsoft banded ones do tend to fail - easy test is to do a format and if all sectors are okay, all will be good, else mark the side of the disc as BAD and if both sides are bad, you have a new coffee cup coaster. I visited archive.org and got hold of a nice .pdf version of the Hisoft-C manual I did the obligatory "hello world" following the instructions: and there we have it.  it worked. The manual has CP/M an...

I missed out on the CP/M hey-day, however, just recently, thanks to the RC2014 Z80 device and my re-ignited usage of the Amstrad CPC, I have learnt to use CP/M and respect just how genius it is/was. My first personal computer was an Amstrad CPC 464, that just booted up into Locomotive BASIC, which was fine for the 4-5years of usage, at school I used a BBC B that ran BBC BASIC, I learnt early on about porting from one BASIC to another and how it was more about getting the design/architecture right and then applying whatever syntax was needed to make it happen.  I then acquired an Atari ST 512 ( funny enough from a friend called Gary ) and I was amazed at using the GEM TOS user environment... I then upgraded to a PC-clone, it was a 286 PC that came with DR.DOS 6, on 2 3.5" disks.  I actually still have those 2 disks.  My first introduction to PCs was using DR.DOS, it did annoy me that when I went to college I had to use MS-DOS 5 that just didn't have the same things that I ...

A little while back, ( gosh! was it that far back, wow! those months really do start to fly by, don't they ), I added a 3.5mm phono-jack to one of the Amstrad CPC 464 machines...and well, kinda knackered the second machine as explained in the middle of THIS ARTICLE . I  managed to acquire another Amstrad CPC 464 machine that has a faulty motherboard ( one for me to send over to Rob for him to diagnose, fix & keep/sell/whatever ), but the tape-deck "looked" okay.  I did a direct swap as it's simple enough...however, the tape deck was not playing ball either. sigh.  So I left the two machines under a desk & got on and did some other things.  Well... I decided to give these two a look again and see if I can Frankenstein monster something useful out of them. I had actually just watched a YTube video about connecting a Bluetooth adapter, so that was my initial thinking, if I cannot get it to work as-is, I'll just bluetooth it, I have enough old skool BLE adapto...

After owning a couple of K9 toy robot dogs for about 10 years.... and never really getting anywhere with them - okay, that's a little unfair, I did previously fit a Pi W with a MotoZero 4xDC motor controller board into one of them, but didn't progress much further.  One of them moved around onto different shelves, whereas the "more complete" and original one stayed as a shelf-ornament. That is until this week... this was the week when the stars aligned and the universe was at the point where it needed to be.  I received, in the post, the Cytron.io ROBO PICO.  I say, I received, like it was just randomly sent to me - no, it wasn't I bought & paid for it, with my own money, from ThePiHut.com The board is quite nifty & pretty much what I've been wanting for a Raspberry Pi based board since the days when I used to use Arduino boards from DFRobot.com - now, we ARE going back 8years or more and that robot still exists, currently a bit dusty, but sitting on...