Tony is a Geek

well, it's not all doom & gloom. lol, well, it is, but it isn't. I was clearing out a couple of rooms in the house, I've basically sold off all my old ATARI ST machines and accessories (2x1040STs, 1x520ST & 1x520ST with 4MB upgrade), including a genuine colour monitor, an Megafile 30, an SH204 and other harddrives, loads & loads of other things Atari related that took me years to acquire. I also sold off the Sinclair Spectrum machines, books, tapes, etc... and the Atari 800XL machines (3 or maybe 4 of them?), along with cartridge games and a side3 cartridge and a FujiNet device, again, with a load of software, disc drives, tape drives, etc... all working.  I also threw in the Toshiba MSX machines (2x!) and tape drives and software. As I was in the mood, I threw in an Amiga A500 with a 2Mb plug in with 2xhard-drives, LOADS of floppy discs, software and a genuine monitor too.  yeah, that hurt, a lot. especially seeing as it was for £650. I know, I know, I know. I ...

I short while ago, I teased that I was going to do some time-travelling back to the 1970/80s.... I did actually purchase a Z80 MBC3 device , getting around the Brexit problem of not being able to purchase items from The Netherlands because of the massive VAt charge for importing the goods into the UK - yeah, great, thanks populace dim-witted knuckle-scraping thug heads for that decision - anyway, way arond it was for the seller to pay a small fortune themselves in fee's / costs and also for me and to get the item via eBay too.... yep, of course there is a loop-hole.  don't expect it to stay open for too long though. More info at github  and a new WEBSITE to purchase the kits from I received the board and all the parts and was ready to do a soldering session and then a really odd thing happened in the UK - the sun came out...for more than 1 day.  This meant I had to switch from doing things "in the house" and go and do all those "other things" that involve ...

Whilst looking at setting up come C programming for the old Atari 800 XL (as you do!), I stumbled over this website that looked awesome and contains a nice snapshot of information. https://retrogamecoders.com/ Setup by a gentleman, bit like myself, who was doing some spring-cleaning during the covid-19 pandemic and re-kindled some of that old computer magic days from the 80/90s, back before it got boring, serious & out-sourced :-D Oh looksie - Atari ST Coding (looks familiar) What am I looking at on there?  Well....just using Altirra emulator and looking at using some C coding, although I might dip my toe into using CC65 and cross-compiling, so I can code on the PC machine and produce output to then deploy onto/into the Atari 800 XL..... let's see! https://retrogamecoders.com/learn-code-c-programming/ Coding, done properly (none of that Python stuff). Will probably end up documenting my journey of setting stuff up, how to get the environment working etc... who to write some si...

Following on from my previous post about PICO, VGA and using the PICO DEMO board .... I had concluded that I was able to use the pico demo board to get a VGA output - awesome! I had concluded that I was able to build the MCUME emulator code and that it was failing to read the SDCard.....with a "Card not ready yet" error message (3). As I'm a stubborn old-git, I refused to let something like a simple error message prevent me from proceeding. I tried a few more things, even use a bit of MicroPython in an attempt to read the card - that failed too. However, I then noticed on the website for the product that it states: Please note that VGA Demo Base only currently works with the C/C++ Pico SDK! At which point I did a Homer Simpson and face-palmed my forehead. Okay, time to get blowing off the C code cobwebs properly then.... I then tried a few variants of other people C code and found that didn't work either. I kept coming back to the PIN diagram: and the reference from...