Re: [tlug] Call for presenters Apr 19th

["Curt J. Sampson" <cjs@example.com>]

On 2025-04-01 15:08 +0900 (Tue), Bernie Innocenti wrote:

> I considered buying a MEGA65, a modern successor of the Commodore 64 which
> is entirely FPGA defined and open source: https://mega65.org/
>
> It's not cheap though.

You can get a real C64 for considerably less, even here in Japan where they
are relatively rare. If you're just into vintage computers in general,
there are a lot of much nicer Japanese machines out there (the Fujitsu FM-7
comes to mind) that are easily and cheaply available.


On 2025-04-01 15:15 +0900 (Tue), Bernie Innocenti wrote:

> Also, in case someone is interested in vintage-computing, I recently
> started restoring Amigas and other Commodore machines as an excuse to
> gain experience with electronics and PCB rework. I won't have time to
> prepare a proper slide deck, but I have detailed photos of all the boards
> I repaired.

You should drop in to the Tokyo Retrocomputing Telegram channel[1] where we
have several dozen members doing similar things, and perhaps coming by a
meetup.[2] We have plenty of people doing Amgia stuff (I don't know why;
surely machines with 16-bit processors and literally _hundreds_ of
kilobytes of memory are not retro), amongst other things. (I'd say it's a
weird Italian thing, but it's not just Edoardo in our group who does this.)

[1]: https://t.me/+Ti62CEO9yl2giOeS
[2]: https://www.hachibitto.com/trcu/?setlanguage=en

On 2025-04-01 08:13 +0000 (Tue), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Ah, you youngsters and your digital sims!  I learned how computers
> work tracing logic gates on a piece of paper with my father, once with
> a 64x64 plane of core memory sitting next to it on the kitchen table.
> Building half- and full-adders on paper.  Then diving into the physics
> of NPN and PNP and hysteresis in flip-flops, all on paper.  Wouldn't
> touch a user-programmable electronic device for another 6 years!

Yeah, well, that's how we kids are these days: using microprocessors
instead of just building our own CPUs from SSI. Heck, even my PDP-11 uses a
DEC J-11.[3] (And no, I don't count it as "real" 16-bit because it has only
a 64K address space.)

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_J-11

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
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