Retro & Vintage Computers, old consoles and classic gaming.
Posts tagged retro computers
Donating computers to the collection.
08 months ago
If you would like to donate a machine to me or to the computer museum in Cambridge, do feel free to contact me. You can contact me either on Twitter or via my email address. What ever you do, don’t take them to the tip or your local recycling centre – they will just crush them up and use the metal! (And that would be a shame!!!)
MJ Hibbett – Hey Hey 16k LIVE
08 months ago
by Andy
in Andys Retro Computers
MJ Hibbett – Hey Hey 16k LIVE at Spectrum 30
New twitter account – @Retro_Computers
01 year ago
by Andy
in Andys Retro Computers
I have decided to split my personal twitter account into two. I will still be using @andytuk for personal tweets, but will be putting the majority of my retro computing tweets into a new account @retro_computers.
This will be a staggered migration to give my followers time to follow my new account.
The main reason for doing this is to stop flooding my timeline with retro related tweets where a majority of my followers are not interested.
So, please follow @retro_computers.
Sega Dreamcast – Crazy Taxi video
01 year ago
Short HD video of the demo mode and some actual (bad!) gameplay by me. Dreamcast was hooked up to my LCD monitor via a VGA box. The Sega Dreamcast was a console released in late 1998. It replaced the Sega Saturn. The Dreamcast was discontinued in March 2001. This was the last console ever produced by Sega – they purely publish games now.
Micro Men repeated on 24/02/11 at 21:00 on BBC Four
22 years ago
by Andy
in Uncategorized
Micro Men will be repeated on the 24/02/11 at 21:00 on BBC Four. All computer hardware and most props were supplied by The Centre for Computing History who are a computer museum based near Cambridge. Jason Fitzpatrick, the curator of the museum played a small part in the film as David Johnson David. See if you can see him dancing in the background!
The BBC website says the following about the show…
Affectionately comic drama about the British home computer boom of the early 1980s.
Legendary inventor Clive Sinclair battles it out with ex-employee Chris Curry, founder of Acorn Computers, for dominance in the fledgling market.
The rivalry comes to a head when the BBC announce their Computer Literacy Project, with the stated aim of putting a micro in every school in Britain. When Acorn wins the contract, Sinclair is furious, and determines to outsell the BBC Micro with his ZX Spectrum computer.
Home computing arrives in Britain in a big way, but is the country big enough for both men?
If you missed the program, you can catch it on the BBC iPlayer. There is also a review in this post : Micro Men – A Review.
Addition – Amstrad PC1512 DD
43 years ago
Another machine for the collection – a Amstrad PC1512 DD. It has a 8Mhz Intel 8086 CPU, 512k RAM and 2 360k 5 1/4 disk drives. It did come with a collection of floppy disks, including the Red, Yellow, Green and blue Amstrad disks. If these disks we missing, you download disk images from the Retro Computing Archive Site here. Here is some information taken from Wikipedia
The Amstrad PC1512 was Amstrad’s mostly IBM PC-compatible home computer system, first manufactured in 1986. It was later succeeded by the PC1640.
It launched for £499 and sold very well, as it was one of the first cheap PCs in Europe. It significantly helped open up the European PC market to consumers as well as businesses, and Amstrad’s advertising of the PC1512 was aimed at homes rather than offices. The 1512′s influence was such that the UK PC magazine PC Plus originally targeted itself at the “Amstrad PC 1512 and compatibles”, since home ownership of other PCs at the time was rare.
The PC1512 shipped with 512K of RAM; it could be upgraded to 640K of RAM with an expansion pack. Video output was compatible with the CGA standard, with an extension allowing all 16 colours to be used in the 640×200 graphics mode. The CPU of both the PC1512 and the later PC1640 was an 8 MHz Intel 8086, which was sufficient for playing The Secret of Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion and Prince of Persia. The power supply was located in the monitor, which made upgrading difficult.
