It's time to retrobright

"New Blog - New Amiga 500"

Last week I was looking for an Amiga 500 on eBay and YEAKES if price have skyrocket!

But I was lucky and snagged one for 130€

It's this one below:

YELLOW

YELLOW

YELLOW

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But you know me, It's Retrobright's time!

I just use 40% Vol. Hydrogen Peroxide and wrapped the case:

The result of the case was very good, take a look:

As you can see the keyboard needed some work too, so the next day i did the same on the keys:

And here the finished work compared to the original:

NOT BAD!

BTW you know....

THOSE KEYS NEED A PART 2

I will post an update as soon as I finish to retrobright the keys.

Thx for reading!

A new beginning!!

WELCOME BACK!!!!!

Many years ago I had a blog, called Claude'sTech, a sad day I was upset and decided to delete it... I regret that decision many times, tought everything was lost...

That made me lose interest on Blogging, but this blog recovery and restart has been possible thanks to the awesome waybackmachine website - service!

I posted back the old post with a (From Backup (Date)) feel free to go back in time and check what I was into some years ago!

As a new beginning I will start posting back my electronics adventures as I was doing before!

HAVE FUN!

A little (10") companion screen with a retina flavour! (From Backup 17-June-2015)

The Retina Display

A funny suffix Apple use for Hi-Res panels which should not have "visible" pixels. 

The display used in this project is the one from the iPad 3 and 4...

Due to the high demand of replacement parts for iPads, it's easy to get one of this gorgeous panels for less than 60$, really cheap!

but what should we do with an iPad panel?

We gonna make it a little companion screen, with mini-displayport!

JUICY!

How to? 

thankfully these panels uses a new connection technology called eDP so it was some-how easy for the guys from Rozsnyo to produce a board to interface these screen with every Mac or PC with Displayport!

It cost 99$ but comes with both miniDP and fullsize DP the led drivers and button to control.

So its just a plug&play project for around 160$, but having a small screen with a stunning resolution of 2048x1536,

It's priceless.

Pictures and more info on the next post!

A little "preview":

Testing MacOsX 10.11 El Capitan Developer Preview on the SurfacePro 1°gen (From Backup date missing)

MacOsX 10.11 El Capitan Developer Preview:

Touch-Base's multitouch driver not working yet, works only after the installation, doesn't work after reboot.

To create a bootable drive you can use the same process done for Yosemite: createinstallmedia.

example with a fresh formatted drive named Install and the OS X installer app on the desktop:

sudo /Users/USERNAME/Desktop/Install\ OS\ X\ 10.11\ Developer\ Beta.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Install/ --applicationpath /Users/USERNAME/Desktop/Install\ OS\ X\ 10.11\ Developer\ Beta.app

edits to boot the installer:

Mount your efi partition, edit the config.plist to add "rootless=0" as a new boot argument, create a folder named 10.11 inside kexts, 

and copy fakesmc acpibacklight and acpibatterymanager

boot with kext injection

after installation:

boot with kext injection

Delete AppleHDA from /System/Library/Extensions first.

Then install the one inside Yosemite folder from the package with KextDrop.

reboot and have fun.

Remember that this is an early developer preview, seems pretty stable, but it's not good for daily usage.

USING ROOTLESS=0 BOOTFLAG DISABLES SYSTEM INTEGRITY PROTECTION AND IT'S REALLY DANGEROUS AND NOT SUGGESTED.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

An update to the files package would probably be released when the Final version is out.

Accellerating an Amiga 500 (From Backup 20-November-2014)

The Amiga 500 was one of the most popular Amiga...

Powered by a 68000 processor running at 7mhz and 512k of ram.

It was enough for most gaming needs of that time, 

but there were lot of expansions around too,

the most common one was the 512k ram trap door expansion, to get a full mb of memory.

 Then there were those expansive solution, the CPU accelerators.

The HardItal BigBang is a 68030 CPU + 68882 MMU accellerator with 68000 mode and memory expansion capability up to 8mb.

The price of this board in 1991 was 990$, not so affordable, but ensured a faster experience thank even to its faster clock speed, 25mhz.

I was too young back then, but two days ago, 23 years after its release, 

I had the luck to get one,

and this is what i did to my Amiga before installing the accelerator.

One of todays goodies of using an Amiga its WhdLoad, this software enables the installation of most amiga games, btw it requires at least 1mb of chip memory and some games needs a new "super denise" chip too.

So I did a "Full-ECS" mod, swapping the old denise with the new one and "tricking" the amiga to use trapdoor slow ram as extra chip mem.

(this can be done only on rev. 6a since it got a 8372a Agnus 1mb capable)

Then, after fixing some broken pins in the accelerator, i plugged it...

It simply works!

the left switch is to enable the 2mb of board ram

the right switch is to enable the 68030 mode.

This is what i understood about the pin on top of the board:

_ _  <- must be placed to enable the board.

_ _ <- enables the 60830 

_ _ <- ?!?!?!

_ _ <- enables the onboard extra memory

_ _ <- ?!?!?! (found the right pin connected to the left one of the connectors above) 

And this is what i understoon about the ram dipswitches:

(on stands for pressed on the left side)

2mb zip rams:

9 on

8 off

7 off

6 off

5 on

4 on

3 off

2 on

1 on

4mb zip rams:

9 on

8 off

7 off

6 on

5 off

4 off

3 on

2 off

1 off

Hope this could be helpful to someone else :D

 

Still messing with the Amiga2000! (From Backup 10-November-2014)

There are a lot of different revisions of the Amiga 2000 Mobo,

But these are the three most common configurations:

Oldest with just 512k of ChipRam (Old Fat Agnus) (old Denise [graphics])

then there are versions with 512k ChipRam + 512k Fast (PLCC Fat Agnus) (old Denise)

Then there are new revisions that offers: 1mb Chip (new denise) (1mb capable Fat Agnus)

My Amiga2000 is a rev4.3

Originally with a PLCC chip with 512k chip 512k fast.

This version it's easily convertable to what is called "Full-ECS"

To do it we need to replace the old Denise Rom 8362R8 with the new one 8373R3.

  FatAgnus have to be upgraded too... 

from 8371 (capable of addressing only 512k of Chipram)

to a "smarter" 8372A (capable of addressing 1mb of Chip)

(there is no way to add 2mb of chip if not with an additional MegaChip Card)

Then we need to super carefully cut with a cutter, the connection pads: J500 and J200

and then, the last step, to move the J101 jumper to the left.

Thats it, now the machine use whole it's onboard memory as ChipMem (1mb)

instead of its usual 512kChip + 512kFast

Repairing an old Amiga 2000 (From Backup 9-November-2014)

 

Hi there fellows,

I have been messing a couple of days to fix my Amiga2000 Rev4.3.

I had a kickswitch installed (ks102w) that autoboots 2.04, clicking the left mouse button boots 1.3.

Btw only 2.04 was actually working, trying to boot 1.3 even using relokick 1.4

 gets to a stuck white screen...

The first thing I did was to swap the rom of the kickswitch with a working one I took from an amiga 500, the white screen was always there.

Then I've tried removing the whole kickswitch and tried with only a 1.3 rom, same white screen.

The only working rom was a 2.04 took from a dead 500+

Then I removed and reseated every chip but still without any luck at all.

Then I had a fantastic idea, since the kickswitch was connected to pin 8 of the ODD CIA, I replaced both CIAs chips and, 

BANG! Relokick worked, 

so i reconnected the kickswitch to find everything working as it should!

[Guide] Surface Pro 1st gen Yosemite clean installation (From Backup 23-October-2014)

 

Clean installing OsX 10.10 on the SP1

(this is an extract from my guide on InsanelyMac, click here for the original)

Part 1 Video Guide

Part 1: 

creating the Usb Installer

Devices:

8gb Pen Drive

A Vm a Mac or another Hack 

Files:

latest GenericUSBXHCI from here

latest Clover from here

SurfacePro V0.5.1 files Pack

Yosemite Installer (placed in the Application folder)

Things are really getting easier, this time we just need a couple of steps to create a bootable pen drive.

We need something with OS X already running on it to create the Usb installer, even a VM is ok.

Then after formatting the Pen drive with Disk utility and naming it "install" with the Yosemite installer inside the Application folder just open the terminal and paste this:

Quote

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Install --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app --nointeraction

when done, install the latest clover to the pen, choosing efi installation.

The Efi partition will automatically mount,

copy dsdt & ssdt files to efi:clover:acpi:patched

config.plist to efi:clover

and fakesmc and genericxhci to efi:clover:kexts:10.10

That's it for the first part. 

Part 2: 

Install Yosemite

disconnect every device or screen

Even this is really simple,

with the Usb device we created on step1 inserted, 

press and keep pressing volume down while pressing power, this will force the tablet to boot from usb

At the clover welcome screen go to options and add -x as boot argument then with the usb highlighted in Clover press space and choose kext injection.

When the installer boots use disk utility to plain format the whole drive using guid (under options) and mac os extended journalized.

Proceed the Installation like a real Mac.

Part 3: 

First Run

SafeBoot with injection.

Again with the Pen inserted,

press and keep pressing volume down while pressing power, this will force the tablet to boot from usb

At the clover welcome screen go to options and add -x as boot argument then with the local drive highlighted in Clover press space and choose kext injection.

when booted, after the welcome screens, install clover to the local drive drive always choosing efi mode, then copy config.plist, dsdt and ssdt to local efi.

Use KextDrop to install all the kexts.

Install touchbase demo driver, or if you bought it install your copy.

Good to go...

Various personal opinions about the Rift DK2 (From Backup 20-October-2014)

 

The Oculus Rift Dk2,

Belive it or not, but i "strongly" suggest to wait for a consumer version of this ingegnious piece of tech, and do not buy any Dk.

Heres why:

The product itself is surely well made, even easily servicable, but it's a continuos messing with the straps or the cables itself, hardly getting the desidered "comfort".

I sadly noticed that the distance between the lenses is a bit too short for me, and that means that its impossibly hard to find the right position to view both images on focus... :/

I have to say, even if you probably may already know, that the screen resolution is simply not enough, surely good for a monitor on your desk, but not for a screen on top of your face, the "pixel reticle" is too much and there are even some chromatic problems related to the lenses...

The Screen it's an Oled Panel, actually a complete full Panel from the Note III, overclocked to support 75hz

 Another important aspect that we must keep in mind, is that to get that "sense of presence" the demos or games should run at 1080p (or higher in the future) with constants 75 frames per second in stereo mode, and believe me when i say that even a GTX 780 is good for demos but it is simply not powerful enough for a full VR experience, latest retina MacBookPro with Iris integrated GPU is not even good for simple demos, not powerful enough.

This means, that if you really want to get a really good experience, you need a really badass PC rig, maybe even with a SLI configuration (even the new 980's are not yet perfect for VR)

Oculus already showed his new prototype Crescent Bay, pixels, are surely disapearing, but will them do something to make this Vr experience the comfortable and "universal" experience everyone is expecting to be?