The demoscene has been part of Amiga (and PC) culture for at least 30 years. Of course there are still great demos and intros released for all kinds of platforms. I love when the Amiga OCS machines (A500, A1000, A2000) get some kind of love, but getting a brand new demo ONLY on floppy disk, and not for download, is something special. This is Hologon by TEK (The Electronic Knights) — let’s watch it!
Category: Retro Computing
Let’s Code MS DOS 0x19: Fireworks in PowerBasic
As 2020 comes to a close it’s time for another PowerBasic video. Last year we did a little snow simulation in PowerBasic around Christmas. This year we are going to do a fireworks simulation instead. And with a little sprinkle of x86 assembly language even!
C64 Repair: Bad Color RAM
We already had a C64G on the channel, which was working fine, but was missing some keys and came „only“ with a SwinSID. This time we get a regular brown breadbin C64 with a fault: It’s showing flickery colors. This might be due to two things: Either the 1K color SRAM or the PLA might be broken. One way to find out: open up and replace some chips!
The Queen of Soundcards: Roland LAPC I
The Roland MT-32 and its brethren CM-32 and CM64 were external MIDI synthesizers that were very much a gold standard for MS DOS gaming. There was one more obscure device though, which was compatible for the most part, namely the LAPC-I. It was a CM-32 and a MPU-401 rolled into one. It’s a big whopping 8-bit ISA card. Today we will have a close look and listen to some samples.
The Greaseweazle: Inexpensive Rescue of Old Floppies
There are many solutions to image old floppies on a very low, flux based level: Kryoflux, Catweasel, Fluxengine or Supercard Pro, to name a few. The Greaseweazle is a low cost, open source variant that can be had for less than 10 EUR. It is suitable to generate disk images of a wide variety of formats, including but not limited to IBM PC, Atari ST, C64 and Amiga. In this video you can see me test the device and create a pipeline for more or less easy creation of different disk images. In theory you can even salvage data off of damaged disks. This heavily depends on how much of the disk is still readable though, and you should weigh your options carefully if the data in question is really valuable, of course.