General Stuff(tm)

[stephen_usher]

Apparently record pre-booked tickets for the Retro-Computer Festival today, so it's going to be busy!

[Icky]

Good luck with the festival @stephen_usher - I hadn't realised there was one on otherwise I would have come along. Was there any announcement on the forum about it.

[stephen_usher]

@Icky Only on this blog in terms of the preparation.

Well, the first day went well. Back at the hotel now. I'll get some food here before heading to the pub later. Quite tiring.

Still the twins behaved themselves and lots of fun was had.

About a third hadn't heard of the Memotech, some having a bulb go on when talking about ZX81 RAM packes, a third saying that they'd seen them in magazines and craved them back in the day but never seen one in the flesh and a third knew what they were and some had them. They all wanted to stroke the brushed aluminium cases.

P.S. At one point they were having to turn people away as the venue had hit its people limit.

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[rubber_jonnie]

@Icky Only on this blog in terms of the preparation.

Well, the first day went well. Back at the hotel now. I'll get some food here before heading to the pub later. Quite tiring.

Still the twins behaved themselves and lots of fun was had.

About a third hadn't heard of the Memotech, some having a bulb go on when talking about ZX81 RAM packes, a third saying that they'd seen them in magazines and craved them back in the day but never seen one in the flesh and a third knew what they were and some had them. They all wanted to stroke the brushed aluminium cases.

P.S. At one point they were having to turn people away as the venue had hit its people limit.


IMG_3419.jpeg

Looks like a good little get together

[stephen_usher]

Phew! Back home and stuff dumped in the living room.

Yeah, it was a fun but exhausting weekend. At least I've taken tomorrow off work to recover and do the stuff I usually do at the weekend.

Swapped my unrequired CFX + RAM Memotech expansion for a strange Epson stocktaking device which should be able to run CP/M, if it works and if I can find any documentation.

[stephen_usher]

This is the unit. an Epson EHT-10, for which there are only two mentions on the Internet, one referring to the other.

Essentially a hand-held data access machine which has a CP/M kernel but no shell etc. and designed to be a slave to another machine over an RS232 interface or via burning ROMs and sticking them in:

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The bit on the top is an addition. Taking it off shows "ACS" then an old 061 phone number and a serial number. The installed ROM has "ACS Data Ltd. Access v1.0" and the same phone number.


The rechargable battery contacts have some corrosion...

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More worryingly the web site mentions a second, smaller, backup NiCd inside.

The battery pack helpfully has the polarity written upon it and I was therefore able to determine the power socket is centre negative 6V.

I may find time tomorrow to take it apart and see if I can find that second battery.

[stephen_usher]

I tried the unit this morning using my bench power supply and...

It works!!!

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The unit on the top is a battery backed up RAM unit which had a 3.5V lithium cell soldered in. Thankfully it hadn't really leaked and caused damage.

I've managed to get a little charge into the NiCd battery, so the system will run for about a minute off the battery.

Anyway, some more pictures.

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More playing this afternoon.

[rubber_jonnie]

What an odd little machine

Cool though.

[stephen_usher]

Put a CR2032 socket on the RAM disk expansion module and that works. A whole 512K of RAM disk. Only problem is that there seems to be little way of copying the data as the main system doesn't seem to see the drive and I don't have a memory card to copy data from anyway.

[stephen_usher]

Looked at the RS232 connection. Although it's using the same connector as Apple & Sun for the serial port it seems as if they've magiced up a different pin-out to everyone else. Typical! Probably so as to force you to by their cable.

If I get a serial connection going I should be able to upload PX-4 BASIC programs and run them in the runtime environment.