EasyFlash is a cartridge for the C64 expansion port. In contrast to traditional cartridges, this one can be programmed directly from the C64

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You can easily create various classic computer game cartridges, program collections or even a diagnostic cartridge to track down issues with your hardware with it. All what you need to do this is a C64, an EasyFlash, the software available here and an image of the cartridge (*.crt). As these CRT files may be quite large, a large disk drive like the FD-2000 or an sd2iec may be useful. For smaller drives EasySplit can be used to compress and split large cartridge images.

EasyFlash is not a freezer cartridge like the Final Cartridge III or the Retro Replay. And it’s no replacement for a 1541 disk drive like the sd2iec.

In the package, you receive the following parts.

As you can see, the PCB is professionally made.

45 minutes later, the board was fully assembled.

Once the board was made, I plugged it into my C64 and it worked! Once I had a quick play, I thought it would be wise to put the EasyFlash into a case. In my box’o'junk, I had a dead Simon’s Basic cartridge. I took out the faulty PCB, marked where I needed to cut out holes for the cartridge enable switch, reset button and activity LED and got hacking away.

Here is the finished result.

I have uploaded some high resolution photos to Flickr : EasyFlash 1.5 Photos

Come back soon to see this cartridge in action!

The North’s Premier RISC OS Show is now in its 17th year.

When : 28th April 2010. 10:30 until 16:30
Where : The Cedar Court Hotel, Denby Dale Road, Calder Grove, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, WF4 3QZ

More information on the official website here.

Raspberry Pis started being made a couple of days ago, but I was forbidden to tell you about it until signed contracts and receipts for payment had arrived – it’s been killing me, especially since I’ve had tens of you asking me when manufacturing would start every day for the last few weeks. I am not good at keeping secrets.

This means that the first units from the first batch will be rolling off the line at the end of January. This first batch will consist only of Model Bs, although you will be able to buy Model As later on. Details about whether we’ll wait for all 10k to come off the line before starting sales, and about what date we’ll be starting on, will come later; so that gives you something else for you to shift around nervously on your chairs about for at least another week or so. (Please stop emailing me about it. Please.)

Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to manage manufacture in quite the way we’d hoped. As you will know if you’ve been reading the forums and the articles on this website, the Raspberry Pi Foundation had intended to get all its manufacture done in the UK; after all, we’re a UK charity, we want to help bootstrap the UK electronics industry, and doing our manufacturing in the UK seemed another way to help reach our goals.

We investigated a number of possible UK manufacturers, but encountered a few problems, some of which made matters impossible. Firstly, the schedule for manufacture for every UK business we approached was between 12 and 14 weeks (compared to a 3-4 week turnaround in the Far East). That would have meant you’d be waiting three months rather than three weeks to buy your Raspberry Pi, and we didn’t think that was acceptable.

Secondly, we found that pricing in the UK varied enormously with factories’ capacity. If a factory had sufficient capacity to do the work for us, they were typically quoting very high prices; we’d expected a delta between manufacture pricing between the UK and the Far East, but these build prices not only wiped out all our margin, but actually pushed us into the red. Some factories were able to offer us prices which were marginally profitable, but they were only able to produce at most a few hundred units a month; and even then, we were doing better by more than five dollars per unit if we moved that manufacture to the Far East. When you’re talking about tens of thousands of units per batch, losing that sum of money for the charity – a sum that we can spend on more manufacture, more outreach work and more research and development – just to be able to say we’d kept all the work in one country, starts to look irresponsible.

I’d like to draw attention to one cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and it’s an issue we’ve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

So we have had to make the pragmatic decision and look to Taiwan and China for our manufacturing, at least for this first batch. We are still working hard on investigating UK possibilities; at the moment, we’re investigating an option which would mean that all the Model As (whose demand we expect to be much lower than that of the Model Bs) will be built in the UK, and at the moment that’s looking quite do-able, although it’s not as efficient economically as doing it in Asia. I’ll fill you in on how that goes later on.

10 of the eagerly awaited $25 computers were listed on Ebay for auction and enthusiastic bidders around the world bid frantically for the rare opportunity to own one of these first production boards. The auction for board #7 ended on 8th January at a final bid of £989 which obviously included free delivery!

Jason Fitzpatrick, Director of the museum, said “We are really pleased and quite taken aback at this generous donation. We are extremely supportive of the Raspberry Pi project and feel that it could usher in a new era for computing, allowing potential programmers to ‘get to the bits’ and who knows, maybe create the next big thing!

We will be purchasing a number of the (somewhat cheaper) Raspberry Pi’s to take out for school visits and help promote the programming in schools initiative – something we very strongly believe in.”

The Raspberry Pi is a $25 ARM GNU/Linux box that has a myriad of uses but is generally aimed at the educational market to help bring programming back into the syllabus.

You can read the rest of the article at : One of the First Raspberry Pi Computers Donated to Museum

It would be great to hear your memories of this brilliant 8 bit computer. Please leave a comment below, and I will compile them all together at the end of this week. If you wish, you can also email me at andy@retrocomputers.eu

I look forward to hearing your stories!

Commodore took the wraps off the Commodore 64, one of two immediate follow-ups to its popular Vic-20 home computer, 30 years ago this week.

The 64 made its public debut at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), though it wouldn’t go into production until later in the year before going on sale in the US market in August. It didn’t make it across the Atlantic until late Autumn.

The original 'breadbox' Commodore 64 design Source: Wikimedia

You can read the rest of the article at The Register : The Commodore 64 is 30

Made in 1969 at the Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill, this eight minute film attempts to predict what the future of communications may be like.

I’ve been a computer guy for a long time now, but I’ve been enjoying Christmas even longer.

I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning, 1982. I was 10 years old, and from that Christmas on, it was games and hardware I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Christmas spirit and enjoying the holidays was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time (and every platform out there had a few of them).

Enjoying these demos is a personal tradition that I had, sadly, long left behind until last Christmas when I was inspired to seek out one of the demos I remember best, Audio Light’s 1985 musical slideshow for the Atari ST. With the help of an emulator, I captured it to share online with readers.

Here, a year later, I recently brought it up and watched it run through it’s pixellated images and 3-voice musical holiday greeting. As I watched, it occurred to me that it might be nice to gather a few of the other demos I remember from those good ole’ days and present them here, in order to perhaps share some of the holiday cheer that they used to inspire within me.

The following list of demos ranges across a number of platforms of olde. I’ll start with the Atari ST demo I presented last year. Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy the shows!

Read the full artice at Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer!

Photograph left to right: Director - Jason Fitzpatrick, Trustee – Dr Lisa McGerty, Patron - Dr Hermann Hauser, Trustee - Peter Robson.

In the late 1980s Acorn went on to develop the ARM processor forerunner of the processors still manufactured by ARM Holdings and found in 95% of today’s mobile phones. Since then Hermann has been responsible for setting-up numerous technology companies and in 1997 co-founded Amadeus Capital Partners Ltd, a venture capital company. During his career he developed strong links with Cambridge, and has played a big part in the city’s enterprise culture.

Read the full story here : Hermann Hauser Announced as Patron of New Cambridge Computer Museum

Cook Building was home to several Royal Navy training suites where personnel underwent tactical warfare training on type 22 and type 23 frigates and type 42 destroyers.

Some of the computers used to feed emulated data to the training suite were designed in the late 60′s and were fully operational right up until the closure in July 2011.

Phil Heathcote from BAE Systems contacted three museums with a view to preserving these historically important computers. It was finally agreed that the three museums could purchase the equipment from a government disposals agency and the pressure was on for each museum to raise their 1/3rd of the £1800 purchase price as well as additional funds to cover the logistics costs.

To read the rest of this article, please visit Military Computers Preserved