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Posts tagged with "ancient"

Emulating a Sinclair ZX80 home computer

While I was skimming through some Linux news sites today, I came across the article Emulate the Sinclair ZX81 home computer with Linux which briefly mentioned the ZEsarUX open source emulator for Sinclair home computers. When I noticed that ZEsarUX is also capable of emulating a Sinclair ZX80, which was my first “real” computer, I thought I’d give it a shot and get a quick dose of nostalgia…

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Unpacking !PackDir archives on Linux

!PackDir Icon While wading through the heaps of data that I had recovered from my old Acorn computer machines, I found some interesting coding projects I did in the mid 1990s. I wanted to have a closer look at them and maybe even reuse some of the code. However, there was a little obstacle: I had stored almost all of my source code in non-standard archive files...

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Decoding Acorn BBC Basic Files

Acorn Computers Logo During my archeologic expedition into ancient computer stuff, I encountered a bunch of old BBC BASIC programs I'd written on my Acorn Archimedes A5000 computer in the early 1990s. For the sake of reminiscence, I wanted to have a look at them, but was thwarted by the fact that they are stored in a tokenized format that is not directly readable. So I did some research on the format and created a converter...

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Emulating an Acorn Archimedes A5000 computer

Acorn Computers Logo Back in 1992 I bought my first Acorn Archimedes computer, an Acorn A5000 running the RISC OS 3.11 operating system. I still have this machine around, but unfortunately it is not in working condition. Luckily you can emulate all sorts of older computer systems these days, and the same holds true for the Archimedes. So if you are fond of some nostalgic feelings, let's go...

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RISC PC Battery replacement

Acorn Computers Logo As you may have seen from my previous posts, I am currently tinkering with my old Acorn RISC PC. Yesterday I was in for an unpleasant surprise when I disassembled the whole machine in order to clean it from the dust...

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Transferring Data from the Risc PC

Acorn Computers Logo During the holiday season I was retrieving numerous files from my old Acorn Risc PC in order to convert and use them on my Linux notebook. Part of this effort has been to move the files between systems, partly detouring them through my Raspberry Pi which I am running the most recent version of RISC OS on. As it turned out, the easiest way to access the data on the Risc PC's hard disc is to use an IDE-USB adapter attached to the Raspberry Pi running RISC OS...

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Do not trust your old diskettes

During the holiday season I found some time to dig through my old computer equipment, mainly because I was looking for some old data that was stored on my Acorn RISC PC. I was lucky and found what I was looking for, but transfering the data to my current computer was a bit more challenging...

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Emulating the Philips G7000 Videopac console in Linux

The Philips G7000 Videopac game console from 1978, also know as the Magnavox Odyssey 2, was my first video game console. Let's see if we can bring some of the memories back to life...

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MS-DOS 6.22 in QEMU

MS DOS Icon In a previous post, I had installed MS-DOS 3.30 in the QEMU emulation system, what turned out to be quite simple. Doing the same with Version 6.22 of MS-DOS is even easier. In this post I will show you how to install MS-DOS 6.22 in QEMU under Linux and add CDROM support.

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Installing MS-DOS in QEMU

MS DOS Icon Recently I was sorting through a bunch of old stuff in the attic when I stumbled across a box with some old diskettes. Most of these diskettes where from my early days with PC computers and amongst them I found the installation disks for the MS-DOS operating system. I wondered if could get it to run on the QEMU emulation and as it turned out, it's actually quite easy...

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