exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Finished the QIMSI case.


The rear is a tight fit but still needs the help of a couple of dabs of hot glue to hold it in place when pushing the module into the ROM port.

I forgot to add a hole so that the access light can be seen but that's easy to add to the design and I'm not bothered about it for myself anyway so I'll not print another case. However, I will change the design before distributing the STL files.

In case anyone wants to print one for themselves I've attached the STL files.

Oh, some signs of life from my original 1976 vintage "Boots" digital watch! (OK, not *much* life, but more than when I put the batteries in.)

stephen_usher wrote: 29 Dec 2023 21:42 Oh, some signs of life from my original 1976 vintage "Boots" digital watch! (OK, not *much* life, but more than when I put the batteries in.)


IMG_3523.jpeg

OOOh, that is soooo 70's :)

Managed to prise the plastic facia off the front of the "movement"... and an SMD cap and a tiny gold wire fell out. There's quite a bit of corrosion in there so I think it's dead.

Found a mouse which works with the QIMSI so loaded a virtual hard drive onto the SD card which has "Pointer Environment" installed upon it.

My goodness, PE is weird. It makes the RICOS UI seem normal. (@rubber_jonnie will know what that means.)

I *think* that right click runs things, sometimes, maybe. I think the middle button brings up the system launcher menu, maybe...

Let's say that you have to forget everything you know about a WIMP environment and start from scratch, other than scroll bars. Scroll bars work as you expect.

stephen_usher wrote: 30 Dec 2023 12:18 Found a mouse which works with the QIMSI so loaded a virtual hard drive onto the SD card which has "Pointer Environment" installed upon it.

My goodness, PE is weird. It makes the RICOS UI seem normal. (@rubber_jonnie will know what that means.)

I *think* that right click runs things, sometimes, maybe. I think the middle button brings up the system launcher menu, maybe...

Let's say that you have to forget everything you know about a WIMP environment and start from scratch, other than scroll bars. Scroll bars work as you expect.

Oh yeah, I certainly do. I have the Mice system for my QL and that is weird enough in itself, but whilst RISCOS certainly has some weirdness, it is for the most part relatively normal. PE sounds really rather strange, I must try it :)

As you can see the watch is a bit corroded inside.


This morning I resoldered the cap where I think it came from. It didn't make much difference though. The right minute LED showed 8 in the segments to begin with but the bottom three then faded out. The buttons didn't do anything. Maybe it was the LR43 batteries running low, I don't know. They were down to 1.2 and 1.3 volts from the 1.5V when new. Anyway, I've given up.

Instead I turned to the boxes of stuff from my Dad's house and decided to clean my old Dinky USS Enterprise.

Other than slight yellowing of the saucer section it's not bad for a 47 year old, well played with toy.


Interestingly, the orange from the plastic shuttle craft has transferred onto the paint inside the shuttle bay. Similarly around the deflector dish.


It's almost as if the plastic has sublimed. I've never seen that before.

Shame about the watch, but it does look like some badly corroded tracks in there, so it is perhaps best to lay it to rest. Before you do, have a look at StezStix Fix on YouTube, he managed to revive a similar watch a little while back.

As for the Enterprise, I had exactly the same toy growing up, IIRC it was able to fire yellow/orange discs (Photon torpedoes?) by turning the metal command deck on top of the main disk. Very cool toy, no idea what happened to mine.

Thanks for the pointer about the watch. The traces are so thick that even after the corrosion there's still probably about 0.4mm of trace thickness! :-)

As for the Enterprise, yeah, I still have two of the orange disks (photon torpedoes) in the saucer. I got this in '76, so it's the same age as the watch. Apparently you can tell it's one made in the first year as the stickers on the nacelles are plastic rather than paper.

P.S. Looked at the vid. That was one of the expensive "Trafalgar" watches. This is a cheap "Boots" Hong Kong special with exposed gold wires an blobs on the silicon rather than a nice package.