Some Assembly Required
The VIISAN VF3240 is a 2400 dpi A3 flatbed scanner, sold under several names for a few hundred euros. Above 600 dpi, every scan has three defects, coming from the LEDs, from the motor, and from the sensor. vf3240 is an open source driver that talks to the scanner directly over USB and removes them. This article is about the three defects and how they are corrected.
The Deutsches Museum in Munich (Germany) has a new art installation as part of the reopened Electronics exhibition: The “Schrott-Tornado”, a tornado-shaped sculpture made from scrap electronics. There is (at least) one item in it that is most definitely not trash.
The user port of the Commodore 64 exposes a TTL-level RS-232 serial port that supports up to 1200 baud1. In 1997, Daniel Dallmann came up with a very sophisticated trick that allowed sending and receiving at 9600 baud2, using slightly different wiring and a dedicated driver. This “UP9600” wiring has become the de-facto standard for all modern accessories, like C64 WiFi modems. Let’s see how UP9600 works.
This article explains how to convert a “Competition Pro Extra USB” (which you can still buy new) to work with a C64, Amiga or Atari. For the conversion, you need a joystick extension cable like this:
I updated the instructions to a USB Competition Pro to DB9, so you can use it with a C64, Amiga etc. They now include the new “V3” and “V04T” pinouts and were updated with the use of a joystick extension cable.
Update 2022: Web MiniDisc Pro can access NetMD devices through the browser and can also download protected files!
I have previously shown an unassembled Sinclair ZX81 Kit that could be bought in the early 80s. Today, it is possible to buy a clone of the ZX80 from Tynemouth Software. Here are some pictures.
The 1551 is the weird outlier in the family of Commodore disk drives: It is the only drive using the “TCBM” bus instead of Serial or IEEE-488. And what’s even weirder? 1541 and 1570 drives converted into 1551s!
Here are hi-res photos of an unassembled Sinclair ZX81 kit, with German assembly instructions.
Speedlink makes several versions of the Competition Pro joystick that have all the physical properties and the excellent switches of the original Competition Pro, but come with a USB interface:
The power switch of the Commodore 1084S tends to break easily. To replace it, you will need a standard “Preh TV3″ switch (which can be found online), a screwdriver, a soldering iron, desoldering braid, and some basic soldering skills.
