Yo dudes
Posted: 07 Jul 2020 10:40
Hi,
My name is Alex and I am a hardware retroholic. (And a stealth member of the board for years)
Ok now that is over, my first computer was an Acorn electron in 1982, I was very disappointed at first because I wanted a Sinclair Spectrum 48k. Over the years my main computer chronology was : Spectrum+3, Amiga 500, Amiga 1500, Amiga 3000, x86 PC.
I stayed an Amiga fan long past the death date but in 1997, I worked for Argonaut and shared a house with James "SainT" Boulton and he turned me to the Dark side that was Atari ST and I started collecting and using ST's (I've probably got one of every model now)
Working At Argonaut was awesome. Some of the biggest names were there at the time, Jez San obviously (ST StarGlider), but also Dave "Spaz" Moss of The Lost Boys (ST Demo crew), Jon Ritman (Head over Heels Spectrum), Matt Godbolt Acorn. While I was there I wasn't a games programmer, (although I am a coder). I was a microchip designer, working in what had been the SuperFX team. Writing GPUs in VHDL.
I went on to design the GPUs used in several Set-Top-Box SoCs, these were uber basic, 2D GPUs. Lots of my inspiration came from very very old Arcade machines, Amiga, Atari Jaguar. I now work for an SSD company as part of a team designing the SoC's for PCIe NVMe drives, writing in SystemVerilog for FPGA and ASIC.
Over the years I've done many "home projects". Way Way before the TF3xx series I built a CD32->A1200 adapter, it was little more than a PCB of wires, but I found someone with the tooling to make cheap CD32 MCA edge connectors which years later paved the way for Kippers backplane and then the TF3xx. I had just bought a WSi CD32 floppy drive and I was determined to make a RAM card for it to replace the RTC board it came with.
I used to help run the BBoAH (Big Book of Amiga Hardware) and lots of pictures are of my collection. I researched the Agnus probably for the first time working out the numbering scheme and all the variants and their pinouts.
I helped research the different 060 variants, I had lots of different ones, noticed some overclocked better than others in CT60 and Apollo 4060, I researched the mask sets and geometries and probably aided the Chinese in what to put on the top of the chips to make them look like Rev6 E41J variants :-(
I've probably got a collection of hardware to rival most museums, one of pretty much everything (home computer, console, handheld) sold in the UK in a mainstream shop between 1982 and 2010.
Long time member of Atari Forum, EAB, Amiga.org a1k.org etc. same alias, same avatar.
My name is Alex and I am a hardware retroholic. (And a stealth member of the board for years)
Ok now that is over, my first computer was an Acorn electron in 1982, I was very disappointed at first because I wanted a Sinclair Spectrum 48k. Over the years my main computer chronology was : Spectrum+3, Amiga 500, Amiga 1500, Amiga 3000, x86 PC.
I stayed an Amiga fan long past the death date but in 1997, I worked for Argonaut and shared a house with James "SainT" Boulton and he turned me to the Dark side that was Atari ST and I started collecting and using ST's (I've probably got one of every model now)
Working At Argonaut was awesome. Some of the biggest names were there at the time, Jez San obviously (ST StarGlider), but also Dave "Spaz" Moss of The Lost Boys (ST Demo crew), Jon Ritman (Head over Heels Spectrum), Matt Godbolt Acorn. While I was there I wasn't a games programmer, (although I am a coder). I was a microchip designer, working in what had been the SuperFX team. Writing GPUs in VHDL.
I went on to design the GPUs used in several Set-Top-Box SoCs, these were uber basic, 2D GPUs. Lots of my inspiration came from very very old Arcade machines, Amiga, Atari Jaguar. I now work for an SSD company as part of a team designing the SoC's for PCIe NVMe drives, writing in SystemVerilog for FPGA and ASIC.
Over the years I've done many "home projects". Way Way before the TF3xx series I built a CD32->A1200 adapter, it was little more than a PCB of wires, but I found someone with the tooling to make cheap CD32 MCA edge connectors which years later paved the way for Kippers backplane and then the TF3xx. I had just bought a WSi CD32 floppy drive and I was determined to make a RAM card for it to replace the RTC board it came with.
I used to help run the BBoAH (Big Book of Amiga Hardware) and lots of pictures are of my collection. I researched the Agnus probably for the first time working out the numbering scheme and all the variants and their pinouts.
I helped research the different 060 variants, I had lots of different ones, noticed some overclocked better than others in CT60 and Apollo 4060, I researched the mask sets and geometries and probably aided the Chinese in what to put on the top of the chips to make them look like Rev6 E41J variants :-(
I've probably got a collection of hardware to rival most museums, one of pretty much everything (home computer, console, handheld) sold in the UK in a mainstream shop between 1982 and 2010.
Long time member of Atari Forum, EAB, Amiga.org a1k.org etc. same alias, same avatar.