General Stuff(tm)

[rubber_jonnie]

Yeah. Amazing that the battery goo made it up hill at least 5mm, after obviously passing through a small hole in the plastic and then moving about 1 cm sideways before jumping up and over the edge of the PCB. Seeing as the remote has always been laying flat and upright this would have been against gravity.

That's crazy, but I guess we've all seen enough battery damage over the years to just shrug and accept the weirdness.

Battery goo that defies the laws of physics...

[stephen_usher]

Car replaced: The MG ZS EV has gone and I now have a one year old Skoda Superb iV plug-in hybrid.

No more range worries for me as in hybrid mode it can run for ~400 miles and in electric mode about 80 miles. So, that's half way up Great Britain without a refill. Not quite as good as the old BMW 330d, which was around 600 miles, but it's good enough.

It also has a nice, large and very flat boot as it's an estate. Ideal for retro stuff.

[stephen_usher]

This morning I was up early as the SAAB 93 is going off to the car hospital up in Leicestershire to hopefully have a full renovation.

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I've been putting this off and putting it off, hoping that I'd stabilised the car enough to be able to wait until my pensions start to kick in before getting the expensive renovation under way but it can wait no longer now that it's failed its MOT due to rust in an inaccessible (with the engine in) place.

From the money I gained from the sale of my Dad's house I've put aside £30K for the job, but I'll have to see what the renovation company says once they've seen the car.

More retro stuff, but just not computers.

[rubber_jonnie]

This morning I was up early as the SAAB 93 is going off to the car hospital up in Leicestershire to hopefully have a full renovation.


IMG_4671.jpeg


I've been putting this off and putting it off, hoping that I'd stabilised the car enough to be able to wait until my pensions start to kick in before getting the expensive renovation under way but it can wait no longer now that it's failed its MOT due to rust in an inaccessible (with the engine in) place.

From the money I gained from the sale of my Dad's house I've put aside £30K for the job, but I'll have to see what the renovation company says once they've seen the car.

More retro stuff, but just not computers.

Good luck with the restoration, it's a shame you have rust in an inaccessible location, but having done a lot of car work over the years I very much understand how things can go that way.

How is the rest of the shell, the bodywork does look in quite good order overall?

[stephen_usher]

[How is the rest of the shell, the bodywork does look in quite good order overall?

Other than on the near-side rear door, just below the window (which I've treated and it's not got through the paint on the outside), it's pretty clean. It's had a few small areas patched up with welding but very little for a 25 year old car. There are a number of supermarket car park dents though.

[stephen_usher]

Back to Atari and retro stuff.

Given that I'm displaying retro-Spectrum emulators at RetroFest in Cambridge (last resort for a "gaming" theme) I wondered about other z80 emulators.

I came across Yaze-ag (https://agl.yaze-ag.de/) and wondered if I could get it running under MiNT and see what speed this would run at, seeing that the GFA BASIC compiled "specci.prg" was running at probably 3/4 the speed of a ZX Spectrum on the TT.

After installing the GCC cross compiler it wasn't too difficult to compile other than spending time finding the right defines to enable some of the POSIX functionality and then replacing mmap with a fudge involving copying the file into RAM and then copying it back if it's not read-only when unmapped.

This morning I've been running the tests and benchmark, which are supposed to take about 4 hours on a 4MHz Z80. It's been running about 5 hours now, which means I somewhat doubt that this speed benchmark is correct...

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[stephen_usher]

Bother!

Looks like my TT has developed a fault. I'm not sure exactly what the diagnostic ROM is trying to tell me though.

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Thoughts?

[exxos]

Like U601 has a checksum of C0A1 etc ?

Maybe just take them all out clean and with IPA put them back in and rerun the test ?

[stephen_usher]

I can try.

Just leaving the system on the diagnostic ROM for a while seemed to "fix" it. :-/

[stephen_usher]

I wonder if running a CPU heavy task for many hours caused it to overheat.... Never had that before.

Apparently that diag ROM error about the MCU is "normal" for all but the last revision of the TT motherboard, but I can't remember seeing it before.