Earth Day
We had an Earth Day collection in Colonie, New York today. It was amazing to see so many computers in one place. I saw plenty of Commodore 64's (my favorite 8-bit machine) and I even saw an I-opener. I shot lots of photos with my CVS red. In particular, there is one shot from early morning in which the person setting up the cones has a "lens flare halo" around him from the reflection off the cone itself. Gallery is here: http://www.palmatier.org/earthday

Earth day
Any other 8-bit equipment to be seen? I cut my teeth on an Atari 400, and have always had a soft spot for old gear.

I saw an Atari 2600. :) I really didn't see any Atari computers that I can remember. I still want to get hold of a Commodore 1581 disk drive or an SX-64. Both very difficult items to find. I would try interfacing the 1581 to the new Commodore 64 DTVs from KayBee toys. Years ago I worked for Performance Peripherals (no longer exists) but they made all kinds of devices for the Commodores including the RAMDrive and BBGRam. I left around the time we were working on developing a high speed serial interface cartridge with a copy of Novaterm by Nick Rossi in cartridge ROM (had to page that one). I sure wish I had that prototype. The product was never finished.

Retro computing
The 2600 counts, from a nostalgia standpoint anyway! :P Funny factoid, it's one of the more resource intensive 8-bit systems to emulate, because it didn't have any bitmap memory - instead 2600 programs had to manually change the color of the TV scanline as it zipped along! This generally took more than 50% of the 6502's time. Do you have one of the commodore kaybee thingees? It sounds like a pretty sweet toy - much better than the 2600 emulator joysticks because they run modified/converted roms to lessen the cpu requirements.

Around Christmas time, Kaybee was selling them for $10 each (Now they're $15). I purchased a few of them and played around a little. I dremeled a DB9 on the back of the joystick and wired a PS2 keyboard to also use a DB9. I can hook it up to the TV and program it in BASIC (as well as access some of the easteregg programs). You can wire up a 1541 drive too and load all of your own programs (although I haven't done that yet). Here are a few photos (although these pictures were not taken with a CVS cam, they were taken with my SONY (it's easier to get clear closeups)). http://www.demanufacturing.com/pv2/miscphotos/dtv1.jpg http://www.demanufacturing.com/pv2/miscphotos/dtv2.jpg

C64 emulator joystick
Nice mod! To many others, a DB-9 is a serial port. To me, they'll always be joystick plugs. :P They turned up in the Atari 2600, Atari 8-bit computers, C-64/Vic20, Colecovision, and IIRC the Sega MasterSystem used one too, though it had a multi-button pad. Was the nostalgia factor your reasoning for the DB-9 choice? If so, nice touch! I've always thought that someone should market USB enabled one-button joysticks for the retro/emulator crowd. My choice would be the 2600 type since I have a soft-spot for them. One of my first "electronics" projects as a young lad would be taking two broken joystics and making a working one out of them. My older brother was suitably impressed.

The DB9 was just a part that was handy at the time. I used it because it was the easiest thing to mount with screws/nuts. I do remember the old Commodore joysticks with the DB9 connector. One of my earliest projects was a crystal radio set. I tuned in to the strongest station (810 WGY) and replaced the earpiece with an LED. Believe it or not, there was enough power being transmitted (it's a 50,000 watt AM station) that the LED actually lit. And that was from "free energy" pulled out of the air! I wonder if you could design a crystal radio battery charger? :D As memory serves me correctly, the antenna was a 100 ft piece of speaker wire.

This probably belongs in the "Annoying" category, but it seemed to fit the way this thread was going and I wanted to share it. Anyone who remembers when 8-bit was mainstream will enjoy this one. Hey hey 16k: http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

OMG!!! I used to obsess over Elite and Lords of Midnight! Ahhh the days when you could write a small loop in basic and amaze your friends.

I guess I'm still obsessed with my old machines. Still actively poke ing on the TRS-80s & just picked up an upgraded Coco3 just recently. C64 doesn't see as much action, but he's still fun. I've been wanting to try the same thing binaryweaver did with his C64 handheld, but never found one locally. IIRC, QVC had the exclusive rights to it around last Xmas. Nice hack binaryweaver!!!!!!!!