Posted in retro on Sep 3rd, 2024
Around 1995 I had a Zoom VFX V.32bis 14.4k modem as my main workhorse. It was a white plastic shell with a smoky brown translucent front face. I decided to buy one recently for old times sake: I also came into possession of a Telebit Netblazer PN (which I need to finish working on and […]
Posted in retro on May 28th, 2024
I wound up buying a completed FreHD kit for the TRS-80 model 4, along with the self-booting EEPROM. FreHD is a TRS-80 hard drive emulator that plugs into the I/O connector on the bottom of the system. Normally the TRS-80 hard drives required a DOS to be loaded off of a floppy disk first, then […]
Posted in retro on May 28th, 2024
This is mainly a reminder for myself so I don’t forget what I did. When using Qodem in iTerm2 on my Mac along with a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard, the “Alt” key wasn’t working inside Qodem. It was impossible to “Alt-Z” to bring up the help, the dialer screen, or anything. I didn’t have […]
Posted in retro, Uncategorized on May 25th, 2024
[photos: flickr – 1995 Tape backup pulls] Data has been recovered from my 1995 backup tapes! After badly mangling one of my three QIC-80 backup tapes trying to repair it to make it readable, I gave up before I screwed them up even more. Finally a couple of weeks ago I contacted Dmitry Brant, who […]
Posted in retro on May 14th, 2024
TL;DR I hex edit a binary to make it work with my “newer” Courier modems TL;DR 2: Less than 12 hours later posting I find an updated version of USRSTAT2.EXE from 1997 that fixed my bug and makes my hacking irrelevant Way back on the US Robotics BBS (USR BBS) they had a door program […]
Posted in retro on May 13th, 2024
Good news! A new video RAM chip fixed the lingering video artifacts I had. I looked up the IC model that was in it “HM6116LP-2” and found some on eBay. I had to wait a couple of weeks for them to arrive from China, but popped the first one in and it worked like a […]
Posted in retro on May 7th, 2024
I finally got around to working on the TRS-80 model 4 again, specifically troubleshooting the floppy drives. Last time I tried to boot it, the drive light would come on and it didn’t sound like it was doing anything. I suspected the belt on the bottom had deteriorated/and or lost tension and wasn’t spinning the […]
