Clones or remakes of historical computer designs offer ways to hack the old hardware without the risk of destroying an original machine. Here I detail the remake of a small single-board Z80 computer, the Micro-Professor 1B. [Read More]

I recently got an interesting Z80 computer/trainer Single Board Computer: the Multitech Micro-Professor MPF-1B. It is an attractive little board that comes with a case that looks like a book. Here I document some of my first experiences with the little board, which, unfortunately, isn’t too happy. [Read More]

The 8-bitters of the mid-‘70s came with a bunch of general and specialized support chips. The KIM-1 used the 6530 RRIOT. In this post I’m describing my first steps in programming the PAL-1 6532 RIOT I/O and timer functions. [Read More]

Owning and maintaining ’70s architecture minicomputers has many challenges. Of course, emulation of these old machines has many advantages, but there’s just no substitute for the real deal. This post details a few steps creating a minimalistic, but working!, PDP-11 from vintage hardware. [Read More]

Making a Python script to convert audio tape to binary code for my PAL-1 seemed somewhat useful, but especially instructive as since I wanted to learn more on how that worked. Showing off a working prototype at the PAL-1 forum I got asked: but can it do hypertape. Oops… no.... [Read More]