News

30/09/2010: Modding the Mag-Stik

Guide on how to adjust the resistance on Ultimarc's top line of arcade joysticks.

29/09/2010: JAMMA SuperGun Project

Want to play real arcade games but don't have space for a huge cabinet? How about building your own JAMMA SuperGun?

15/02/2009: New Commodore Pages

Having collected a couple more Commodore machines lately, I've decided to give them their own section. Still got some Amiga stuff to add, too.

03/11/2008: Pandora Section Added

The thing itself may not have been released yet, but I've already been busy preparing some software for this groovy little machine. See the whole new section for more info.

22/07/2008: DEC PDP-11/35

The DEC collection continues to expand, this time with a DEC PDP-11/35. Three 19" racks' worth of 70's computing power, including a TE16 reel-to-reel tape drive and several RK05 removable disk drives, promise to provide an interesting project. You'll be able to follow the progress via the above link.

16/03/2008: DEC PDP-11/23+ Joins the Fleet

The retrocomputing collection has been expanded (rather significantly in terms of physical volume!) by the addition of a complete DEC PDP-11/23+ system in a 19" cabinet with two RL02 drives. A couple of extra pages detailing the 19" cabinet, the main system box have been added. I'll also be documenting my progress as I work getting the machine operational again.

Pages related to the collection have therefore been split into two separate sections for Sinclair and Digital equipment. (URLs to the old /computers/retro location will be automagically redirected to /computers/sinclair.)

29/02/2008: Z80 System Gets Blinkenlights Front Panel

The Z80 system has finally developed into a stand-alone system - maybe not with the most user-freindly interface ever devised, but a flashy blinkenlights front panel. It's now possible to monitor and even program the system using nothing more than a bunch of switches and LEDs.

07/01/2008: Source Code Respository Online

In order to facilitate the sharing of source code, I've put my Subversion repository online. The repository itself is accessible via WebDAV at http://sources.cosam.org/svn/ but thanks to the ViewVC project, you can also browse through it over the web. Curious readers should check out my short guide to using the source code repository.

01/01/2008: Visitor Stats 2007

2007 saw a major redesign of the site after reparing the web server so I could migrate the everything back from my ISP's webspace. Since mid Novermber I've therefore been able to record statistics based on the server's access logs.

In that month-and-a-half or so the site's had more than 600 unique visitors who've together requested over 2,000 pages. Just under 30% of those visitors stuck around for more than half a minute, and about 80 of them returned later for another look. Most visitors apparently came directly to the site via bookmarks or by typing in the URL although, after Google's index of the content was updated, almost as many found their way here via search engines.

The most popular page was that of the Z80 project with almost 250 hits, making up one eighth of the total traffic. About a third of those visitors also downloaded the schematics . A similar number also took the trouble to check out my Focus operating system although only 10 downloaded the source code. First runner up was my page on customising the MikroTik Routerboard 500 with over 200 hits, mainly due to being linked to by several popular forums. The home made dew heater for telescopes and the Amiga A1200 Tower project were also pretty popular with approximately 80 and 60 visits respectively.

Although most visitors, around 80%, were using Windows at the time, a healthy 11% were browsing from a Linux system. Almost half of the site's hits were from Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, although Mozilla Firefox came a close second with almost 40%.

12/12/2007: Z80 System's Construction Updated

I've replaced the outdated page on the construction of the Z80 system with a new one featuring a few new photos. There are also two separate pages on the serial and ATA/IDE interfaces.

08/12/2007: New Look

The site has undergone a pretty intensive makeover to tidy things up both visually and technically. The content side of things hasn't changed too much and the site maintains the same basic structure as before. Hopefully the new menus and navigational aids will help make the site easier to browse through. All pages should also now be XHTML 1.0 Strict-compliant and a lot more of the formatting is done using CSS than before. I've even managed to weed out the tiny bits of JavaScript lurking in most pages, except for a couple of handy things like scrolling back to the top of the page.

Thankfully, the entire site is built up from a set of XML documents from which the actual pages are generated using an XSL stylesheet. Apart from all the CSS stuff, which is pretty much all new, all of the structural HTML changes only needed to be done in one place.

I hope you enjoy the new layout. It should look good in the latest versions of Firefox and acceptable in Internet Exploiter. If there are any glaring problems in other browsers, feel free to drop me a line.

12/11/2007: Z80 Schematics Online

Now that the Z80 system is actually working, I've reworked the schematics. Recent additions like the IDE interface are now in there and the whole lot is available as a PDF document instead of a zipped bunch of images.