Recent content by hackerb9

It would be great to have an actual Wikipedia page which covered the VT640 (and clones), but it feels like there are a lot of unanswered questions. Since it was sold both as its own terminal (as with the Synclavier) and as an add-on board with specific graphics capabilities, the VT640 entry...

Hi Roland, I had collected some links for a stub Wikipedia article for the VT640, but never created it as it seemed nobody had reliable sources of information about them at the time. It's great that there are now people who will be able to experiment...

So, my IBM 5155's screen started pulsating at me (larger, smaller, larger, smaller) and I'm pretty sure I recognize the syndrome from my MacPlus: the flyback transformer is about to blow. I seem to recall hearing "life hack" tips like, "Stick epoxy on the outside" to keep a flyback transformer...

Thanks for the link! It looks like Unicomp's Mini M isn't reprogrammable, unlike their Model F keyboards. Fortunately, the swap should be easy in the Arduino. The styling isn't as pretty as Drop, but I think it would match the VT340 better. Especially since I'll probably end up repainting the...

Hiya! Does anyone have or know where I can find an LK421-AA? Alternately, can anyone point me to a USB or PS/2 keyboard that is laid out in a similar fashion? I can make an adapter using an Arduino so it'll work in my VT340. Unfortunately, it's been hard for me to find any keyboard that is...

So, one of my Atari 2600 joysticks went bad (no fire button) and I found that the wire had broken right at the plug, so I couldn't just solder it back together. I tried a standard 9-pin D-sub serial port connector, but was disappointed to find the metal housing makes it not fit in my...

I'm curious what other people think of retrofitting retro-computers in ways that are permanent. Or, perhaps more accurately, where on the spectrum of permanent mods do people feel comfortable? I remember when “macquariums” were cool that some people felt strongly that it was a waste of a...

I'm creating an automatic Unicode conversion module for UNIX and I'm supposed to put in both the colloquial and the official names of the character set. The manuals I have label it "Extended ASCII", so I had first called it "Tandy Extended ASCII". But that's obviously wrong since there are...

Of course! Please do. As you can see, I've got it so the builtin TELCOM program works with ncurses applications for inverse, box drawing characters, and a few of the "extended ASCII" characters like £. I'm working on automatic unicode support, but that will have to be a separate gconv module...

I was reading about the Synclavier II system and the Wikipedia page mentioned that the Signal File Manager used a VT640 graphics terminal, which I'd never heard of. Frustratingly, the link to VT640 went to "No such Wikipedia article". It was very hard to find any information about it, but once...

Hello! I created an improved terminfo so that I could use my Tandy 200 as a proper serial console to my UNIX boxes. I thought I'd share what I've got and ask a few questions. https://github.com/hackerb9/Tandy-Terminfo Here are some of the unanswered questions I've come upon that I'd appreciate...

Whoa! Careful with that squib! Whoa! Careful with that squib! Um... If you haven't actually tried the Taitsu yet, I'm going to gently suggest that you wait until you contact them as their datasheet says to do and ask them if it can handle 22.25kHz. For comparison, Panasonic's ECW-F2395JB's...

Hi All! I've been using Michael Brutman's excellent 2020 release of mTCP on my IBM luggable (using the nifty 3C509B driver made available by yet another VCFed forum member, Nestor). I am impressed with mTCP'S TELNET.EXE — it's quite a bit more than just telnet as it handles terminal emulation...

I was trying to disassemble a program (3C5X9CFG.EXE) that turned out to be compressed with PKlite. I couldn't find any generic program for such decompression, but I did find a project that had routines that worked for a couple program (Keen Dreams and The Elder Scrolls Arena). So, I wrote up a...

It looks like Crynwr.com, which had the source code to a lot of the old PC network packet drivers went down a couple months ago. Is there a replacement site? I know that archive.org has a backup, but it doesn't appear to be indexed by the web search engines.