Category: Vintage
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Pickering vs Grado: Chapter two — Penny Lane
This time we're looking at a Beatles classic for our cartridge comparison. Penny Lane from the Canadian pressing of 1967 - 1970. Which will sound better?
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Pickering vs Grado: Chapter one — introduction, review, and listening to an old favourite
Two cartridges. One vintage, the other new. Which sounds 'better'? What is better? I get to play with charts and audio stuff, and play cool tunes to YouTube! What's not to like. And maybe we find out a bit more about these two cartridges.
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Akai AP-Q41 won’t quite fit the Pickering XV-15 625E cartridge with brush
Five minutes with a wire and some creative bending...
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The Frankenstein Cartridge is Alive!
Just a quick post to capture the first playback of the Frankenstein Cartridge.
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Making progress
Updating my slowly-evolving analog audio project wherein I undertake to rebuild/recover my enjoyment of observing the phenomonon created when a tiny diamond rides merrily through a vinyl groove, delightedly vibrating, producing a minuscule electrical current that eventually (through amplification magic) becomes the sweet sound that we call analog music. The project makes progress and it's…
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TS1000 upgrade – log entry 4 — Oh the memories we’ll make with 16k!
Part four already? Memory -- that thing where the more you've got, the better things are for your computer? Yeah, that stuff. We'll be upgrading this vintage computer using a bit more modern tech to get it up to a whopping 16K. Oh, and there's a bit of gold in this story too...
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TS1000 upgrade – log entry 3 — On The Big Screen!
If you’ve been following along, you may recollect that this journey to modernizing my vintage Timex Sinclair began when I watched this four-part video series by The Byte Attic, and decided ‘yeah, that looks like something I could do’. If you’re jumping in at this point, well, I’ve done things and have more things to…
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TS1000 upgrade – log entry 2 — More Power!
As I'd mentioned in my previous post in this series, I've been poking around my TS1000 a bit and doing some online digging. I found this series about refurbishing and upgrading a Sinclair ZX81. And since I wrapped up my last post testing the that unit is still alive and kicking (I think. Video is…
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TS1000 upgrade – log entry 1
#retrocomputing has been taking up more of my attention recently. Specifically, I found this series about refurbishing and upgrading a Sinclair ZX81. Since the Timex Sinclair 1000 is essentially a ZX81 that jumped the pond (and doubled it’s native RAM in the process), I’ve got one. And it’s been sitting in a box for 20ish…
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A Virtual Parallel Printer for a Vintage Computer
One of the neat things about using vintage computing equipment is figuring out modern ways to work with the older technology. Why virtual printing? Recently, I wanted to explore printed output from my NEC PC-8201a. For one thing, working ‘on the hardware’ in this case has a display limit of eight lines of forty characters…
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How long will a NiMH battery pack last in a NEC PC-8201 or PC-8201a?
As I was converting NEC battery packs to be recharegable, I wondered just what the run-time of a battery pack would be. So I came up with is a simple BASIC program to run the computer battery down, and record the time that it dies and calculate the run-time. This is the story...
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Vintage Computing: Saving data to an audio device
Back when the early days of personal computing, you did your work on your computer and either printed out the finished work, or stored it to work on later. Early on, cassette tapes were the storage medium of choice as they cassette tape recorders were commonly available, and reasonably affordable. Some computer system did have…