sparcie

  • Hercules Graphics

    Late last year I got a comment on one of my videos suggesting I could add Hercules graphics to my game project. It sounded like an interesting idea so I started considering how I would go about it. Hercules graphics isn’t that hard to program for, the main issue with adding support for it is…

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  • Random Update

    It has been quite a long time since I’ve posted anything at all here, more than a year in fact! I hadn’t intended for my blog to go into hiatus, but into hiatus it went. There’s quite a few different reasons for this, many new things taking up alot of my time such as a…

  • My Computing History : Part 3

    In the last part of this series we were still using our old Twinhead Superset 590 for playing MS-DOS games. It was roughly 1996 when Dad went about replacing the now quite old 386sx with a new machine. The machine we got was a Cyrix 6×86 166PR with 16Mb of RAM and Windows 95b. Even…

  • My Computing History: Part 2

    In part one of my computing history my family got our first computer, a Twinhead Superset 590. We used it for DOS gaming, and I learned to program on it with GWBasic. In this part I get a bit older, go to high school and continue learning more about computing and programming. We were still…

  • My Computing History: Part 1

    Recently I’ve had the pleasure of reading the computing journey of Retrotech Chris in his book of Nostaligia, which you can find on his site here. It was an interesting read about how he became interested in computing and his journey through to now as a retro computer collector and youtuber. I’ve been documenting parts…

  • Motherboard: MSI MS-5156 Socket 7

    It’s been a little while since my last post, partly because I’ve been quite busy, but also partly because I’ve been putting much of my energy into making youtube videos. I’ve been meaning to write something for the blog, but have been procrastinating because I’m having difficulty with the floppy drive repair I’m attempting. I…

  • Bob’s Fury Update: Bug Squished!

    For quite some time I’ve had a very nasty bug in my game, where basically it would lock up whenever a sound was played through any sound device on my microbyte 386sx machine. What made this bug tricky to fix is that it worked perfectly fine on other hardware I had available and on the…

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  • Attempting to Fix a 3.5″ Floppy Drive and a New 5.25″ Drive

    The start of the year is a time when I am usually visiting family, but is also a time for cleaning out old junk and rubbish at work. This year I did a little cleaning out whilst visiting family and found an old 3.25″ floppy drive from our original old PC. Upon returning to work…

  • Neut Tower for DOS

    Today’s game was made by SpindleyQ starting in 2018 releasing a shareware episode in early 2020. It is an EGA puzzle game that would have fit right into the shareware gaming scene in the late 80’s and early 90’s. The author took on an unique challenge, doing all the development on a 286 machine without…

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  • New Microphone setup

    It’s no secret that my old microphone was less than ideal. Basically it wasn’t sensitive enough, wasn’t easily adjustable, and sounded different every time I set myself up for recording. It’s a cheap lapel mic, which explains much of the quality issues I experienced, it was however better than nothing and allowed me to get…

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Recent Comments

  1. That looks like a good source of information, I’ll have to get mine out sometime to have another go at…

  2. Hello everybody, I finally got a service manual for ALT-386, mine also doesn’t work, I will tray recapping. https://ia904502.us.archive.org/8/items/manual_ALT286_SM_AMSTRAD_EN/ALT286_SM_AMSTRAD_EN.pdf

  3. Glad to see you’re getting your mojo back. I look forward to your renewal of more frequent posts.

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