Vintage computers

In my previous blog, I have written a bit about the remake of the PCB board for Atari 800XL computer. Now I will describe the process of acquiring all the parts needed to build it. 

There are a few simple assembly steps required to dress up your DE10-Nano board and transform it to a fully functional retro machine.

When you need to connect more then one USB device to your DE10-Nano FPGA board then you need to use a powered USB hub. It is possible to use normal hub, but it is way cooler to connect the one that is custom designed for the MiSTer project.

Getting FPGA cores of your favourite retro systems onto the DE10-Nano is very easy. You can run them in matter of minutes.

Acorn RISC OS requires a mouse and it is very limited in use without it. This post describes in detail how to create a PS/2 Arduino adapter that connects to the 9-pin Mini DIN mouse port.

I was very fortunate to get this vintage computer from my friend Eric. This Acorn Archimedes A3010 was produced in 1992 by Acorn Computers and was based upon an ARM250 RISC microprocessor. Right away I proceeded to connect the computer to see if it still was in a working condition.

Playing games on emulators is usually bound to using arrow keys on the computer keyboard or an analog PC joypad. This ruins all the fun. The right way to do this is of course using a real arcade joystick

After I have bought this Amiga 500 computer, the cover was in very bad shape. The previous owner tried to retr0bright it, but it didn't work out as planned and there were a lot of spots.

Two old computer mice turned yellow over the years and needed some brighting up. To achieve this we are going to use the retr0bright method.

This vintage Canon parallel scanner needed some restoration and for that purpose it needed to be taken apart. It is a bit tricky as some of the parts are glued with adhesive tape and need to be detached very carefully. This small tutorial shows a step by step disassembly instructions of the scanner.