… must be flooding through my house. I have so many dead Amigas with broken diskdrives, it’s untrue. Every single Amiga I own (all four of them) has a dodgy diskdrive. And I’ve just been given another one to repair, and I’m failing!

Had to resort to buying an entire new A600 off a local friend in exchange for an XBox 360 game.

Bloody retro tech, it sucks sometimes. I’m going to buy a floppy disk cleaner out of desparation.

Of 39…

It’s going well so far. I managed to keep a class of year 9s quiet whilst I spoke to them for ten minutes, which is a big improvement on last year when I was fighting the buggers to keep their mouthes shut. Tomorrow I will have looped around all my classes once, so I’m watching now for any of the quiet timid ones to start poking their heads up.

And when they do, I’ll soon make them hide again.

This year’s motto of “take none of their crap” is proceeding well.

While sorting out my diary’s categories I made that strange realisation of just how old this site is. I’ve been pushing words into this since October 2000 - LiveJournal users, this is where you follow the link back onto my real site . The database is growing quite large now, and there’s some fun posts hidden in here. I think I’ll have some self-indulgence and post up a selection of my favourite entries. It can be the blogging equivalent of those “Top 100 ways to watch paint dry” programs that TV is full of.

At the weekend we’re supposedly off to rescue some ZX Spectrums from being thrown in the tip. I have no idea what I’d do with more of them, but the books and assorted addons interests me. I’m a sucker for weird hardware

A while ago I won a box of Sinclair User magazines on eBay and have started reading through them. If anyone’s got any old Spectrum or Atari ST magazines that they don’t want, I’ll have them.

I’ve not done this in ages Sat, in pieces, in my office is a Compaq 486 all-in-one PC that Amy has given to me. It came preloaded with Windows 3.11 and contains a network card. My aim was simple - get it on the network, then see if it would go on the Internet.

Getting it on the network was easy, all I had to do was install the Windows 3.11 TCP/IP update and configure it. The machine popped up on my network and managed to install Netscape 4.0 off my Linux server. It had no idea what to make of the long filenames, but coped very well.

I ran out of disk space, the tiny 100meg HDD only having 7 meg free. So out it went and in its place went a 256MB CF card in a CF-to-IDE converter. Some farting around with fdisk and xcopy gave me a neat clone of the original HDD that booted.

Netscape didn’t run too well on the weedy 486SX/25 CPU and with only 4 meg of ram it was constantly swapping to the disk. Fortunately I had 8 meg of ram in another old PC so in that went, bringing the machine up to 20 meg of ram and instantly the disk swapping stopped. But it was still quite slow overall, so out of the old 486 came its DX2/66 CPU.

And here’s the current state of things. The CPU is designed for a ZIF socket because DX2/66s need heatsinks and fans to keep them cool. Originally I got around this issue by supergluing the heatsink and fan to the top of the CPU. This worked, but the superglue has gone brittle and the heatsink fell off. My next plan is to somehow attach a Pentium MMX class CPU cooler and heatsink to the processor, probably using cable ties and luck.

It’s fun though, and it’s been ages since I sat up for half the night fiddling with a PC.

It’s not quite finished, but I present my updated website. Rather than seeing my blog on the front page, it’s been moved back behind the main site. I’ll be using my main site to write about my hardware and software projects and other technology related things. This blog will become my place to write about everything else, along with some cross-posting of new things on my main site.

This blog will continue to be cross-posted to LiveJournal, but the main site won’t; there’s no Drupal plugin to do that, and it’d clog my LJ up.

So if you like tech, soldering irons, code and watching someone with no formal training in electronics taking stuff apart you can do worse than visit my main website.

Eventually, when I’ve taken the photos, there will be a section for my increasingly large Retro Computing Collection. I have a lot of retro games consoles and computers, so many that I can’t actually remember what I own so a catalogue is next on my list of things to make.

I am attempting to upgrade the system software on my Macintosh Classic. Currently it runs System 7.0 and I want it to run System 7.5. I have the System 7.5 images from Apple, and a Macbook with an external USB floppy drive. I also have a set of high density floppy disks.

Not that getting data from one to the other is easy. I’m lost in a world of sea.bin files and not a lot of idea what to do with them. I didn’t own a Mac when this stuff was current, and it appears nobody ever thought “aha in 18 years time people will be downloading System 7 images from the Internet onto their new Macs and then want to install them on their old Macs”

I’ve been at this too long, I’m giving up for the night.

My god, what a haul of goodies we managed today! It was like someone knew we were going and got out the goodies ready for us. I’ve always thought it’d be cool to have a second XBox running XBMC in my bedroom, but never thought it worth the £40-odd for a second hand XBox.

Well… how does £10 grab you? No? Well after taking advantage of our technical knowledge and bamboozling the seller we got it for £8. People’s brains fuse if you start prodding their stuff and saying “ahh the labels are intact, it’s not been opened. This one would be ideal”. It also helps if you have a female counterpart

The XBox even works. I’ve had to order a video cable from eBay, and a Modchip is now in the post too. Looks like I’ll be spending a fun hour with my soldering iron again soon. I get to go cross-eyed soldering SMD components again.

I also bought a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for 20 quid, including two controllers and a light gun. The light gun won’t work on my TV, but this is OK since the NES itself doesn’t seem to work either. It flashes the power light at me. Yes, this means the cart isn’t connecting properly and I need to repair the contacts. I’ve added that to my list. I’ll swap the cartridge slot from a working NES just to make sure the main circuit board isn’t faulty though.

I then bought a couple of books (a Red Dwarf book and a William Gibson), a cheeseburger and managed to block the toilets. Amy bought several of those TV games units that contain an FPGA emulation of an old console and its ROMs. She’s got a Sega Megadrive one that has Sonic the Hedgehog, Columns and other games, and a bizarre Tetris game.

We very nearly bought an Amstrad PCW1512 word processor, but having no money and no desire to carry it across the field stopped us. We also successfully resisted buying another Sega Megadrive, but David did buy a Sega Saturn. There were also many Gameboys for sale and those amusingly illegal “52-in-1″ games carts.

We will return another day looking for games and junk. I think I’ll have to start looking for a bigger house too

As is usual for some weekends, I’m at Amy’s again. I also took Dave, another Llamasoftie, along too as he had some retro hardware to give Amy. She’s now got a colour monitor for her Amstrad and while cooking tea had a fun bit of gaming in the kitchen with the Amstrad set up next to the cooker.

Tea was made to the squealing tune of Manic Miner scraping its way off tape, Commando and KickStart 2. All amusing games that after spending five minutes loading, we were going to get our money’s worth. If a game takes [i]x[/i] minutes to load, you have to play it for at least that much time - a hard task when some of these old games are just utter rubbish. We found some space shooter that was truly awful, both technically and as a shooter game. They really did peddle some gash back then.

We’re off to the giant Hemswell car boot again, but earlier in the hope of scoring some bargains.

This is a little present I cooked up (literally) for Amy’s birthday. It’s a passable rendition of a Nintendo Entertainment System done in the medium of sponge cake and icing.

The cake mix is a fairly standard combination of eggs, flour, sugar and butter/margarine. Google is full of cake recipes, go wild. Bake it at 200c until cooked and then leave to cool on a rack. Since I only had round cake tins I had to chop the cakes to shape resulting in a slightly square looking Nintendo. I was tempted to turn it into a Game Cube cake but didn’t have enough cake to do a cube.

The cake consists of two layers of sponge with a layer of buttercream in the middle (combine butter and sugar together, resist eating it). The outsides being coated in buttercream to help the icing stick.

The icing is the premade ready-to-roll variety, a favourite of lazy and busy cooks all over. Deciding to throw past Christmas cake icing experience out the window I opted to ice each side separately rather than draping one large piece of icing over the whole cake and smoothing it down. You can’t see the joins because I used a wet knife to smooth the whole thing.

The distinctive NES patterns and detail were first marked using a sharp knife and then coloured using food colouring and a clean paintbrush; the knife marks helping to prevent the colouring from bleeding into surrounding cake. I was skeptical how well painting icing would work out, but the results ended up much better than I thought. The stripes on the top were done using black decorative ‘writing’ icing in a tube, as were the Nintendo logo on the front and the power LED. The buttons are two pieces of icing.

Early games consoles such as the NES are good candidates for geeky cakes. They’re just squares or rectangles without too many complicated details. If you can bake and have limited art skills this kind of thing is easily accomplished in an afternoon.

I wasn’t aiming to create an accurate rendition of a Nintendo Entertainment System, just something that looked like one. All the non-geeks at the party asked what the weird stripy cake was all about, while everyone else thought it quite amusing.

Tips

• Use plenty of icing sugar to prevent the icing from sticking to your hands, rolling pin and chopping board
• Clean, sharp knives cut icing with clean, sharp lines
• Icing becomes surprisingly pliable when slightly warm and smoothing out bumps and weird parts is easy if the area is given a light but fast rub until the surface feels smooth
• If you get food colouring splats on the wrong parts of the cake, pick them off with a knife and smooth over the resulting hole
• Do not eat too much of the icing, you will feel ill after approximately a golf-ball’s worth and positively awful (but very hyperactive) after a fist-sized glob
• It’s a cake, don’t expect sharp corners or fine detail
• Do not tell the recipient about the little mistakes you’ve noticed because you’ve been staring at the cake for three hours, they won’t notice nor will they care. If it looks OK and tastes good the operation is a success
• Cookery is like hacking or programming, approach it in the same way

Yeah Me and Amy have just been to Lincoln to meet another Llamasoftie, and once again to collect yet another piece of junk retro hardware. This time it was an Atari 1040STFM. I’ve also had a Philips 14″ monitor and several hundred Amiga floppies from Amy too. It’s like I’ve just been handed the whole of 1990 in the boot of my car

Today was also a tactical way to allow Amy’s highly irritating housemate to leave quietly without causing hassle. She told him to get out by Saturday night, so we went off to Lincoln and had an excellent day, and came home to an empty room which we can now turn back into a front room.

We win all round