Archive for the ‘retro’ Category
Grace Hopper
It’s wonderful that this lecture by Grace Hopper at the NSA in 1982 has made its way out into the world. It’s SO prescient on a variety of topics like distributed computing, language standards, service ownership and the leadership vacuum. She could see it all – 42 years ago. If you work in IT today, […]
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Tags: COBOL, distributed, Grace Hopper, history, leadership, SOA
March 2022
Pupdate Although it’s looking ready to snow outside as I type, we’ve had some glorious summery weather in March, which means plenty of time outside running around for the boys. But the picture that grabbed most attention was this one: People thought we’d got another sausage dog, but it was just the boys hanging out […]
Filed under: MAME, monthly_update, RC2014, retro, TMS9995, travel | Leave a Comment
Tags: eSIM, IoT, MAME, MWC, RC2014, TMS9995, travel
My original attempt at an RC2014 Mini driver started out as pretty much a copy of the gsz80 driver, with a find/replace of ‘gsz80’ with ‘rc2014mini’. But as the MAME team reviewed my pull request, they surfaced a bunch of problems. Firstly I didn’t have the correct memory map. The RC2014 Mini only has 32K […]
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Tags: C++, MAME, RC2014
Decoding the MAME Rosetta Stone
I mentioned in my previous post Grant Searle Simple Z-80 Machine on MAME that the gsz80.cpp driver was like finding a Rosetta Stone for MAME. In this post I’m going to go through it block by block to explain how I parsed it, and how it enabled me to figure out how to write a […]
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Tags: C++, MAME, RC2014, Z80
In my RC2014 Mini on MAME post this was one of the things I was planning to try next, and once again there was an existing driver that had most of the pieces in place – evmbug.cpp implementing the TMS 9995 Evaluation Module (aka TMAM 6095). My first job was getting the existing driver working, […]
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Tags: EVMBUG, MAME, RC2014, TMS9995
RC2014 Mini on MAME
TL;DR Getting an RC2014 Mini working based on the Grant Searle Simple Z-80 Machine driver was pretty trivial, but it’s been enough to get me going with MAME development and persuade me to try some other things. Background I know there are already emulators out there already for the RC2014, I’ve used EtchedPixels/RC2014 a bit […]
Filed under: MAME, RC2014, retro | 1 Comment
Tags: build, MAME, mini, RC2014, rc2014mini, ROM, tools
TL;DR I’ve been wanting to try emulating some RC2014 stuff using MAME for some time, and I think I’ve found my way into it with the MAME driver for Grant Searle’s Simple Z-80 Machine. Background Back when I was making my TMS9995 on RC2014 system part of my adventure into the lands of TI-99/4A fans […]
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Tags: bin, Grant Searle, gsz80, hex, MAME, RC2014, retro, ROM, Z80
My first published programs
Background This post has been a long time in the making. But a couple of things happened in the past week that prodded me to finally write it. Firstly there’s this epic thread from Shahid Kamal Ahmad about becoming a games developer in the early 80s. And then there was the awful news of the […]
Filed under: retro | 1 Comment
Tags: 1541, BASIC, C16, C64, CCI, Commodore, PCW, Plus/4, publishing, Simon, utilities
May 2020
Inspired by Ken Corless’s #kfcblog I’m trying out monthly roundup posts for stuff that didn’t deserve a whole post of their own Retro I wanted to try out RomWBW, but didn’t fancy going down the route of making more RC2014 modules, so I got myself an SC131 kit from Stephen Cousins. It’s wonderfully cute and […]
Filed under: monthly_update, Raspberry Pi, RC2014, retro | 1 Comment
Tags: fitness, food, Mathematica, Raspberry Pi, retro
It turned out that my TMS9995 system had no modules in common with my CP/M system, as it’s using the ROM and RAM modules left over from the CP/M upgrade. All I needed was another backplane to be able to run both at once. SC116 3 slot backplane As the TMS9995 uses three modules: CPU, […]
Filed under: Raspberry Pi, RC2014, retro, TMS9995 | Leave a Comment
Tags: CP/M, FT232, FTDI, minicom, PL2303, RC2014, screen, terminal, TMS9995
Chris Swan's Weblog 