After Sydney-native Peter Vogel graduated from high school in 1975, his classmate Kim Ryrie approached him with the idea of a creating a computer microprocessor-driven electronic musical synthesiser. Ryrie was frustrated with his attempts at [more…]
THE ARCADE games of the 1970s used dedicated circuits for sound – even the sound chip in the Atari 2600 only had a set of pre-defined sound effects and an oddly-tuned tone generator. Realising that [more…]
The latest release of microM8 includes a few new features. First, GEOS is now usable inside microM8. Quoting Wikipedia: “GEOS (Graphic Environment Operating System) is a discontinued operating system from Berkeley Softworks (later GeoWorks). Originally [more…]
In the 1960s, the BBC experimented with the idea of broadcasting a newspaper to hard-copy printers in homes during the early hours of the morning. It worked by rasterising (converting into lines) text, sending it [more…]
RPGs, no, it’s probably not what your thinking of – rocket propelled grenades. Although those kind of RPG’s sure are cool and a very useful weapon in today’s current gaming environment. What RPG stands for [more…]
In the early 1970s, computers were expensive! Like, really expensive, man! So if you were a young Nolan Bushnell entranced by Spacewar and you wanted to bring it to the masses, how could you do [more…]
Call it the ‘butterfly debugger’. People at KansasFest 2018 were excited by the development possibilities of microM8’s ‘rewind’ feature – the one that lets you cheat at games by going back before you made a [more…]
Released in 1977, the Apple II was one of the first personal computers marketed towards households rather than businesses. It was a complete computer – it had a keyboard for data entry and the ability [more…]
Richard Altwasser is a British engineer responsible for the hardware design of the ZX Spectrum. After graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge with an engineering degree in 1978, he was hired by Sinclair Research in 1980. [more…]
April 1982 saw the launch of Sinclair Research’s most successful micro-computer, the ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum was not the first Sinclair computer to make it big, it was however the the first to go massive. In [more…]
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