Author: Dave Farquhar

Atari SDrive Max

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Atari SDrive Max

I got an SDrive Max for my Atari 800 and I really like it. It took a little doing to get it working for me. Hopefully you won’t have the same troubles I did. If you are, hopefully what helped me will help you. Let’s take a look at the Atari SDrive Max and what it does for you.

SDrive Max is a modern storage solution for vintage Atari 8-bit computers that uses SD cards. By storing images on the card, the Atari can boot off the image as if it were a floppy drive.

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How to not drill too deep

Dave Farquhar DIY
How to not drill too deep

Sometimes when you’re working on a project, you have to drill a hole to a certain depth, and you don’t want to go completely through your workpiece. How do you not drill too deep? Here’s how.

To not drill too deep, you need to stop the drill from going any further than you want. You can use something called a drill stop to do this, or you can improvise your own with stuff you probably have in your shop.

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How to cut foam insulation board cleanly

Dave Farquhar DIY
How to cut foam insulation board cleanly

Foam insulation board claims to be easy to cut. It says right on the board, usually. But when someone saw me cutting thick foam boards in the Home Depot parking lot, he said, “You’re a braver soul than me!” In this blog post, I’ll show how to cut foam insulation board with simple and very inexpensive hand tools, and minimal mess. The best way to cut foam board even allows you to cut it right in the parking lot, so the foam will fit in a small SUV.

Thin foam board will cut with just a utility knife, but you can easily cut the thick 2-inch boards, even with just simple hand tools.

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Amiga 1080 monitor

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Amiga 1080 monitor

The Amiga 1080 monitor was the original monitor Commodore supplied with the Amiga 1000 in 1985. It’s one of only two monitors that featured the Amiga branding with the Amiga checkmark logo. Its picture quality is very good, but the monitor sometimes behaves oddly. You can fix the odd behavior. I’ll tell you how, and I also tracked down the elusive pinout for this monitor.

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u200b: What it is, and why it messes up your code or data

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting
u200b: What it is, and why it messes up your code or data

I was pushing some old data through an API at work when I received a weird error message. The API coughed up a hairball. It responded that I had u200b at position 154, and if I needed that character, I’d have to encode it. But I looked at position 154 and it was a number. Nothing weird. Some APIs render this problem character as u+200b. So what’s u200b, why does a problematic invisible character exist, and how do you clean it up?

U200b is a Unicode non-printing space character. It’s meant to assist typographers in creating page layouts, and it’s extremely useful in certain languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet. But many of us who use the Roman alphabet may go a lifetime without needing it.

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Atarisoft: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Atarisoft: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em

Atarisoft was a short-lived publishing venture from Atari, makers of the iconic 2600 game console and 800/XE/XL line of 8-bit computers. As consumer interest shifted from game consoles to computers, Atari sought to bolster its fortunes by publishing software for those computers. The results were mixed.

Atarisoft allowed Atari to make some short-term profits, but in the long run it may have hurt sales of their own computers. The titles Atarisoft published had been exclusive to Atari systems, so publishing them for other systems robbed Atari of system exclusives.

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Are old Tandy computers worth anything?

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Are old Tandy computers worth anything?

These kinds of blog posts have a way of coming back and biting me, but I’ll write it anyway. Are old Tandy computers worth anything? The answer, of course, is they are. But how much they are worth depends on what the computer is, whether it works, and how complete it is.

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Are Westinghouse TVs good?

Dave Farquhar Hardware
Are Westinghouse TVs good?

Westinghouse is an old, respected brand in the United States, and you can find Westinghouse TVs everywhere. But are Westinghouse TVs good? If they aren’t, it’s because Westinghouse TVs aren’t what they seem. Let’s start with who makes Westinghouse TVs.

Westinghouse TVs are made by Tsinghua Tongfang, a Chinese state-owned electronics company. Other brands made by Tsinghua Tongfang include Seiki and Element.

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Timex Sinclair 1500: The ZX81 in Spectrum clothing

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Timex Sinclair 1500: The ZX81 in Spectrum clothing

The Timex Sinclair 1500 was Timex’s ill-fated attempt to fix what went wrong with the Timex Sinclair 1000. It was completely compatible with the 1000 and the Sinclair ZX81, but sported 16K of RAM and a better keyboard. These were welcome improvements, but they weren’t enough in the hyper competitive 1983 U.S. computer market.

The Timex Sinclair 1500 was essentially a Sinclair ZX81 with more memory in a Sinclair Spectrum case. Released in July 1983 at a price of $80, it wasn’t successful and Timex withdrew from the market in February 1984.

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Trash-80: What it meant and why it stuck

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Trash-80: What it meant and why it stuck

One of the first computers I ever used was a Radio Shack Color Computer. Or should we say, a TRS-80 Color Computer. But everyone I knew called them Trash-80s. Why?

Trash-80 was a pejorative for Radio Shack’s TRS-80 line of computers. Tandy executives didn’t like the nickname, but most of its competitors had one too.

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