Tony is a Geek

As you do on a Saturday, I found an old Maplin (who remembers them, before they stopped trading!?) robot arm with a USB connector. I was looking around online to purchase a new one and of course I got carried away and moved from £50, to £250 to £400 devices - I even got carried away and looked at the £7000 versions, but alas - I am being money conscious nowadays and thought, well, if I have this old one, SURELY I can make it work. I had a quick google and indeed the robot arm was from Maplin.  I unscrewed the casing and found the 4 x D batteries inside that had an "expiry date of Mar 2019".  That tells you more than enough.  This unit had gotten quite dusty knocking around in the garage.  I "probably" did something with it back in 2016-2018 ish timeframe, I cannot recall. As I've mentioned, I kind of got distracted by the Corporate world around then and lost my focus - fret not, it is returning! I noticed that it has the USB connected and adapter on the back - ...

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...