Amiga 500: Booting From External Floppy

After the 1084S monitor, my Amiga 500 gets an external Gotek USB Floppy Drive emulator. To be able to boot from it, we install a DF0 switcher. Many demos and games on the Amiga can only be booted from the first floppy drive, DF0. The external drive is called DF1. With the switcher we can toggle the external drive to be either DF0 or DF1.

Sound Cards On The Printer Port? TNDYLPT and LPTsnd

Today I got a package from fellow retro nerd Matze79, aka Retroianer. He sent me two PCB kits for parallel port sound cards: The TNDLPT and the LPTsnd. The former is Tandy compatible sound device by Serdaco, who sells quite a bit of retro kits, and the latter is a DAC for the printer port by Matze79 himself. The two boards let you add either 3 voice synthesized music or 8 bit PCM playback capability to retro DOS machines. A lot of very old games don’t support SoundBlaster or Adlib cards so these are options for getting better sound with your gaming experience. Also many old laptops of the 386 and 486 era don’t come with builtin sound cards, which is why these devices here are useful as well.

The Best Joystick for the Atari 2600?

I am not very content with the original CX40 joysticks that came with my Atari 2600. While they are iconic pieces of hardware, actually playing with them gives me hand cramps and their innards are prone to breaking. Instead I am using a custom arcade controller right now. For two player games a second one was in order. So I picked an arcade joystick kit by Monster Joysticks. It recently arrived, so what else to do than assemble it and take it for a spin! No soldering required…