Radio Controlled Tyranosaurus Rex Toy

I was recently browsing through some Christmas photos of the family and I found this little gem of a toy my nephew got. My how times have changed. We didn't have little radio controlled Tyranosaurus Rex toys when I was his age!

Better than a Chia pet though, that's for sure!

Back From Blogging Vacation

Well, I've been taking a vacation from blogging for the month of December. Now I'm baaaaaaaaaccckkkkkk.

I decided to try not blogging for a month, and it was nice. However, time to get back into it. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to evaluate all my internet/on-line shtuff and see what can be done to improve things.

Also on the Resolutions list: play music every day, and lift weights every day, unless too sore from the day before.

Happy New Year to all and may 2010 be better than ever!

Old Computer Motherboards

Today is Friday the 13th, and this is my 113th post.

What a coincidence. I'm feeling lucky. Strange how this blog always puts a time stamp on my posts that is west coast time, but I'm on the east coast and my PC is set to the correct time & time zone.







I have a couple old computer motherboards that have some cool chips on them. They seem to be Intel 286-based boards and they each have a 287 math co-processor on them

They do not have the main 286 CPUs, apparently they were stripped, along with the ROM chips on one board.



















The 287-3 co-processor has a nice bit of information at http://www.cpu-museum.com/ and I've even seen this and similar chips on e-bay.















Here's how RAM looked in the old days. These 2 boards have what they called 'piggy-backed' chips, since there was one chip soldered right on top of another.

It amazes me how much information you can find on the internet about old computer technology that hardly anyone has anymore.

Geek Project: Microprocessor Trainer

Here's a hobby electronics/computers education kit that I bought a couple years ago at a yard sale for $1.

It's a Science Fair kit that you wire up according to the instructions. It teaches how to understand and use commands for a little microprocessor that has some pre-programmed ROM in it. It has a small amount of RAM memory for coding in your own shtuff.

Allegedly, this microprocessor is a close relative of the ones that powered Speak-N-Spell children's toys.

This picture came out

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It's a list of the commands that the microprocessor 'knows' you could say. It's quite complicated even to do simple things like adding numbers together.

Here are a couple pages from the text.

Daunting.

So far I understand how to take some data and add it to a register, and also how to display the contents.

This is a video of the program for a countdown timer. On the left you can see how many minutes are left in the countdown with the 3 left-most LEDs, in binary numbers, and then the next 4 show the tens column for the remaining seconds, in binary, and the digit on the right shows the ones column for remaining seconds.

Now give yourself 1,000 Geek Points if you can read binary coded numbers!

Wordless Thursday

Today is a Wordless Thursday.

Enjoy.

Vintage Computer Sites Of Interest

Here are some sites that I visit whenever I feel like reading about old vintage computers. Not that I have much time to devote to the subject, but I just love reading about how computers were back "in the day".

http://www.old-computers.com/

http://www.1000bit.net or also http://www.1000bit.it - NOTE: 1000 is the binary number 8. In other words, if I have 1000 in base 2 numbers, it equals 8. Pretty clever huh? So it's really 8bit.com. Many of the computers on this site are also later 16-bit models, but hey, who's counting?

http://www.digibarn.com/

http://www.cpu-museum.com/

http://www.computercloset.org/

Good stuff. Oh, and follow your dreams.

BASIC Program

This is my 80th post. YEAH! To celebrate, I decided to post about a recent endeavor, trying to type BASIC programs into my old Atari 800 computer. I realize this is very geeky. Oh well.

This is a little test program. It is a looping program that prints a number, starting with 1, then that number to the 2nd power, then that number to the 3rd power, then the number to the 4th power. To calculate these exponential numbers, the little microprocessor of the Atari 800 is really maxing itself out, at least with the 4th power.

Here we go:

10 FOR INDEX = 1 TO 10000
20 PRINT "=================="
30 PRINT INDEX
40 PRINT INDEX^2
50 PRINT INDEX^3
60 PRINT INDEX^4
70 PRINT
80 PRINT CHR$(128), CHR$(164), CHR$(123)
90 NEXT INDEX
100 END


Now give yourself 1,000 Geek Points if you can actually understand this code. HINT: it's known as BASIC. Personally, I have never encountered anything basic about writing a computer program. It's all hard to figure out.

Pictures From A Past Refurbishing Project

Here are some pictures I stumbled upon while doing some recent spring cleaning (even though it's officially summer in like 1 day from now).

This is my Digi-Tech guitar effects unit. It's one of those all-in-one units, with guitar effects like distortion & overdrive, EQ, all kinds of different reverb and echo sounds, and it has 40 prepared sounds in it's memory, and it allows 40 user-defined sounds, all saved in flash memory. It's really a simple computer tailor-made for manipulating audio from guitars. Ok, so when I say "simple computer" it's really a contradiction of terms.

Anyway, the pedals are intended to be operated by your foot, so you can change your sound without having to stop playing guitar, since the guitar takes up both hands to play.

Well, eventually the pedal switches started to become less and less responsive until some of them no longer worked at all. I decided to take it apart and investigate.

I just love staring at electronic stuff. I don't know why. I'd rather just stare at a hot female, but if there's none around, electronics are ok. Or hot cars.

I found that the plasic part that touches the switches was flattening out a bit from wear. I cut out and taped a thin piece of cardbord to fill in the gap.

I put it back together and the switches were then working great, almost like new.

Of course, my cat Lexus just had to investigate my guitar gear. As soon as I go to play something though, she hauls ass to get away from the sound. She does not like guitars or basses that are making music. Or, maybe she just hates my music.

Hello, and welcome to my blog post about a new toy I just got.

It's a combination of 2 things I am really into - little electronic handheld gadgets, and NASCAR!!!

It's a little handheld car racing game.

It has sound, which can be turned off in case you are playing it somewhere where you're not supposed to play games.

It's made to look like an arcade game, in miniature form.

It even has the official NASCAR laser-sticker thingee.

It's fun for awhile. It's not the greatest actual racing game, but I like the fact that the game allows my car to be the fastest car on the track, if I can only keep it on the track. You can keep racing until you screw up too many times.

I should really get a real handheld game. I heard Nintendo has a new handheld out. I may just be buying it soon...

Vintage Computer Games From Nintendo - N64

Time for some more vintage computer games!
Here's my old Nintendo N64 64-bit console. It still works, along with almost all the cartidges.

Here are some of the many cartidges I still have. I have a lot of racing stuff. The NASCAR game rocks.

Star Fox rocks.

Here's a controller.

Here's the cat, checking the controller for quality and responsiveness.

I decided to remove it from the TV it was on due to the way it's little cable thingee causes the signal from my antenna to be weaker. Since I got the new digital converter box for my old-fashined analog TV, the Nintendo cable hookup caused the signal to be just a tad too weak. I'll be hooking the N64 beast up to another TV as a new project.

Atari 2600 Vanguard Game

Oh how I love old video games. Here's a blast from the past - The Atari 2600 Vanguard Game

Ahh, does this ever bring back the 80's or what?

An Old Toy, New To The Net!

Here's my latest gadget toy - the Rolodex NAME CARD - from 1991 apparently. It is an old toy that needs a new battery.



It can be programmed to remind me of important events.

Like doing something that is scheduled.

I need a 2032 button-type battery - oh, look, I have one here.


I can schedule a beeper to ring when I want it to. COOL!








Here is my battery package.






Here's my battery removal screwdriver - how cool is that???







It goes to it's little "Hello World" date of 1-1-1991 - WOW IS THAT OLD???????

I can still get it to remind me of cool things on my schedule, like watching a truck race. Fantastic!

What a cool little obsolete device. I love obsolete devices in case your have not noticed.

Finally Recording Original Music

Yesterday I finally got back into recording SOME OF MY ORIGINAL MUSIC ! ! ! !

So please excuse all the excitement.

One of my friends got hooked up with a digital recording interface so we can record music into the computer using some really cool RECORDING STUDIO SOFTWARE!!!!!!

First, he's got this interface from Presonus. You can record like EIGHT CHANNELS OF AUDIO AT ONCE !!!!!!

Wow.

Here's a mixing board. We used this to control the music signals coming from guitar, bass, and a vocal microphone.

On the computer - CUBASE RECORDING STUDIO SOFTWARE !!!!!!

Pronounced Q-base.

I'm trying not to get too excited while typing, but it's not working.

I started off by copying some drum & guitar loops into the audio tracks. Then we added some guitar solos, to boost our guitar-hero egos, of course.

Then I worked on a totally new tune I just pulled out of thin air (or as we put it, out of my ass). Normally you would never want to make up a song while you're in a recording studio, since you would probably be paying at least $40 bones an hour. However, when you have your own gear, you can just throw down whatever you want!!! If it sucks, you just start over, and you haven't wasted oodles of cash, just a little time. And you're not really wasting time, since when you write your own material, you have to write 5 or 10 things before something good really shows up.

The tunes we did yesterday were pretty rough, but when we work on them more and they sound better, I'll try to post some sound clips RIGHT HERE BABY!!!!! Can you sense any excitement from me?

Vintage Computer Games From Atari

Oh how I love old computer games. Years ago Atari ruled the world.
Here's an old Atari 2600 game console.





Here's a video of Defender from an Atari 800 computer. WOW!!! This is the video I tried to upload a few weeks ago but it didn't work, then I was full of piss & vinegar about it. Today I could upload it.

Finally!

Today Atari is not a gaming company, at least not at the top of the industry.

Vintage Computing - Atari 800

My, how time flies. It seems like just yesteryear that I played with Atari computers like it was the best thing since the integrated circuit chip. Since then I've used many other computers. There will still always be a special place in my heart for old supposedly obsolete computers however. Some may call this computer "not Scottish" (i.e. like the saying "If it's not Scottish, it's CRAP!") but I think it's just a beautiful machine full of innovation for it's time. AND IT STILL WORKS !!! It must be close to 30 years old.





I can boot it up.

It runs a BASIC programming language cartidge.

It plays, Defender, PacMan, and Centipede!!!















Here's how they installed memory in the good ol' days. They stuffed a bunch of chips into what looks like an Atari cartridge (for good reason - it's an Atari cartidge) then they plugged it into an Atari cartidge socket. What a great idea!!





I seem to have what they call a later Atari 800 computer. It has 48 kilobytes of RAM memory (yes, I said KILO bytes, not mega or giga, like any real computer today) plus I've never had this so-called 'heating issue' with it. That is, it's never overheated since I've owned it, no matter how long I leave it on, doing something productive. Like calculating long math equations with no end, even though I don't need to know the answer, like they teach in traditional math classes in school. There was some kind of overheating issue with the first Atari 800 computers. They fixed it by the time they pumped out 48 KByte machines.

I have a cartidge of the Defender game. This was one of my favorites when I was a young lad. It still plays on this old, but VINTAGE computer.

I tried to upload a video of this game running, but as usual, I'm having trouble uploading video to blogspot.com even though I can upload to anyone else with no trouble.

The Garmin Nuvi

As I mentioned in a previous post, I got a Garmin Nuvi for Christmas. It's a GPS device. At first I thought - "I don't need a GPS device, I never get lost." Then I used it for awhile and found it has some cool features.

Even if you don't get lost ever, like myself, you can still use this device for tracking mileage, average speed, it leaves little blue lines on road you've driven on, and more. I even downloaded a cool blue monster truck icon, to represent my powerful persona, of course, from the Garmin website. Totally unnecessary, but cool.

I also found out this device can be used to find places, like restaurants, gas stations, places for entertainment, amusement places, and other useful places. It can find phone numbers and give directions. It searches for places within your current location.

Plus it has the ability to be used while your ride a bicycle, or if you just walk around. It can see how fast you are going, what direction, puts you on a map, finds average speeds, how much time you are moving, how much time you're stopped, and a bunch of things I'm still discovering. It has a built-in battery that charges from a USB connection to a computer, or you can use a cable that goes into the lighter socket in your vehicle.

It even has a voice that tells you when to turn right or left, when you program in a destination. Plus, if you decide you don't want to turn when it tells you to, it doesn't get mad at you, like a human direction-giver would do. It just recalculates your next turn, and keeps it's mouth shut. Way too cool.

New Year's Resolutions

Well, here we are at another New Year's Eve. Time to celebrate the beginning of a new year. I always wondered, if we're celebrating a new year, does that mean the old year sucked totally? Think about it. If this year is great, we would not celebrate the end of it. On the other hand, if the old year sucked, then we'd celebrate a new year since we can't wait to get rid of the old one. Substitute 'car' for 'year'. You would celebrate a new car if your old one was such a piece of crap that you had to get rid of it. If you have a new car but your old one is still pretty cool, then you get a new car that sucks, who celebrates that? But nooooooo, we just celebrate the new year without any idea of whether the new one will really be better. Oh well.


Here are my New Year's Resolutions:

1) Clean out the garage so I can actually park my truck in it.

2) Barbeque more. Much more. You may see many more food and BBQ posts on my blog soon.

3) Work on more electronics and computer projects. I have not put any posts up yet about my interests in electronics and computers. This will probably change.

4) Work on recording some of my original music I have written. This is something I've done in the past but never really finished.

5) Limit my resolutions to 4, then stop.



Whew, that sounds like a lot of work. Good thing I have one year to do it.