One ubiquitous demo effect that can be seen on a wide variety of demos and intros is the twister or the twister bar. There are numerous examples in productions for the Amiga, Atari ST and 2600 that I know of (and even at least one on the Sega Master System). And probably a lot more that I don’t know. However I have never seen this effect in any of the old PC demos, except maybe in Future Crew’s PANIC, where something very similar was used for the vertical scrolling greetings. But it was not quite the same still. So today we will code a variant of the twister using Turbo C for MS DOS!
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Retro Burner: Refurbishing and Retrobriting the Galep III
I got an old Galep-III universal EPROM programmer from a friend. He couldn’t get the device to work under Windows 10, since it is quite old and uses the parallel port. This device is perfect for my 486! And since I just finished assembling an XT CF Lite card, I needed something to write its EEPROM with.
The device looks a bit aged, due to dirt and severe yellowing, so we will clean it and retrobrite it, to make it look like new. This is only my second attempt (after an experiment with my serial mouse), so let’s hope for the best!
Let’s Code ESP8266: The SI7021 Temperature and Humidity Sensor
The SiliconLabs SI7021 is a very popular sensor for measuring temperature and humidity. It uses the I2C bus and is easily accessed from the ESP9266 or ESP32. Some breakout boards use different variants of the chip, namely the measurement Specialties HTU21D or even the Sensirion SHT21. These chips are more or less compatible to one another, but some don’t implement all the commands. However temperature and humidity can be used on all those chips. Today I’ll walk you through a tutorial of accessing the SI7021 via the Arduino Wire library.
Upgrading The VGA RAMDAC
The VGA cards for historic PCs have an analog video output that is being driven by a so called RAMDAC. This is an IC that converts the digital framebuffer information into analog VGA signals. Modern PCs don’t need this anymore since they use digital output (like HDMI and DisplayPort) and digital displays. But our old retro machines use this to drive either an LCD or a traditional CRT. There are good RAMDACs out there and bad ones. One problem some RAMDACs have is noise when the VGA palette registers are written. This happens in games and demos for example when the screen is fading in or out. I found a supplier of new old stock INMOS RAMDACs, and I hope that replacing the cheap ADV RAMDAC on my Tseng ET4000 will remove the noise that I am seeing.
Let’s Code MS DOS 0x16: Fire Exclamation Mark!
It’s summer and it’s hot. And what better to code than another classic demo scene effect: the ubiquitous fire. But we will do it with a twist. The naive implementation is slow, very slow. Especially on older 286-486 computers. We will optimize the actual algorithm a bit and utilize a hidden VGA function that gives us scaling in the X-direction by a factor of 4 for free.
So you want a Gravis Ultrasound?
The holy grail of PC soundcards include a few special devices. But one of them is surely the Gravis Ultrasound. It allowed mixing of 32 independent channels with (near) CD quality. This could be used for sound effects or music, and was particularly popular in the demo scene. But also game classics such as Jazz Jackrabbit, One Must Fall, Epic Pinball and Pinball Fantasies used the card to great effect. However today an original Ultrasound costs anywhere between 200-400 EUR, which is a bit too expensive in my opinion. So we try out a cheap homebrew clone! Meet the GUSar lite!
The ATX2AT PC Saver
In 2019 Sam Demeulemeester (he’s actually Belgian, although I say French in the video) did a Kickstarter for the ATX2AT smart adapter. It allows you to safely attach a modern ATX PSU to a retro mainboard with AT connectors. That is your precious 286, 386 or higher will now be safe from overcurrents due to wrongly inserted CPUs, broken expansion cards, failing tantalum capacitors or rogue power supplies. It might not save the world, but it will probably save your valuable retro PC. I already lost two precious mainboards and am glad to have finally received the ATX2AT smart adapter!
How To Learn SMD Soldering
There are two kinds of soldering PCBs: through hole and SMD. Through hole uses components with leads, which are threaded through holes (hence the name) in the PCB and then fixed to the PCB with solder. SMD uses Surface Mounted components. That is, very miniaturized components that are soldered onto the surface of the PCB, without using leads.
Due to the small size of the components it is at first much harder to solder than for classic through hole parts. To save you from the misfortunes of failed projects, there are practice kits available. We will assemble one such example today and I will try to teach you the basics of SMD soldering as well as some more advanced tricks.
What is the best C64 SID Chip – For MS DOS?
The Innovation SSI-2001 was a very early PC sound card which appeared roughly during the release period of the Adlib. It was supported only by a handful of games and disappeared very quickly from the market. What makes it notable is the fact that it used the MOS6581 also known as the SID as its core. This chip was better known as the chip that drove the Commodore 64’s sound. Hence this card is particularly interesting. Early this year I hand soldered a replica of this card, known as the Renovation SSI-2001. Today we want to test drive a couple of games and compare different SID implementations: An original MOS6581, a SwinSID nano and the ArmSID. Can the much cheaper emulated SIDs hold a candle to the expensive and ever rarer original in this setting? We also take a short stab at getting the SID to produce a tone using MS DOS QBasic!
Retro Game Review: The Curse of Rabenstein
I am a big fan of interactive fiction, better known as text adventures. I am also a big fan of MS DOS games. And retro games in general. And when there is a new release of a retro game, a text adventure, which supports MS DOS and other platforms, I am all ears. Enter: The Curse of Rabenstein. A brand new release with a nice physical big box with lots of goodies. But is the game also a goodie? Let’s see…