GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

In my retrocomputing adventures, I have sought things not purely based on style alone, but based on combinations of processor, wide 3rd-party adoption and support, and "interesting" factor.  Having picked up at least one system from each common type of processor (8088, x86, Zilog Z80, 6502, 68xx, 68xxx) and the schemes popular in the USA (IBM & compatibles, Apple, Commodore, Amiga, Atari, Tandy), I thought it was time to try for something from overseas.  Plenty of computers were made for the UK market, such as the Amstrad, Acorn, and BBC Micro, and Japan had many interesting varieties of computers offered by NEC alone, not to mention their other manufacturers such as Sharp and Fujitsu. However, really not much is known (in English) about computers from behind the Iron Curtain. A Brief History of Why This Is a Thing One thing that is for sure: in the 1970s, the Soviet Union, in an effort to keep up with rapidly-evolving Western technology, decided to put an end to ...

The"maker bone" has bit me pretty hard since 2011 when I began working on LEDgoes/BriteBlox and won 3rd place the Apps for Metro Chicago hackathon with Owtsee/headonout.  And while I've worked on a mixture of side projects for profit and fun since, I can't help but note the urge to do more ridiculous things for myself just to say I did them -- not necessarily to make any sort of profit (in fact, most of my projects sink an enormous amount of time spent over several years before true completion), but for the notoriety. The Actual Beginning Of This Post There... Now that the part Google Plus will post as the headline is out of the way, it seems to me that my coworkers generally love me, and I love them too.  I am seen as quite the maker type inside my area, and have been invited to participate in events even in various groups I don't necessarily belong to because they like to "claim" me.  Often, these are external recruiting events, and I love exuding...

A great deal of my time was spent from Memorial Day weekend up through now trying to produce this gigantic piece of functional furniture, and now I am pleased to present an Instructable on how to make one for yourself!   Here is a link to the Instructable . Hint: It is helpful to have a Makerspace handy. I actually started this project back in January in an effort to get certified on the CNC table router at Dallas Makerspace and start cutting pinball playfields.  I made a post previously about my experiences and learnings from that particular endeavor, but as you can tell by the edits, I didn't quite get it right the first time.  It took a bit of time before my schedule could clear up in order to try 3D parts again, and lest I forget the procedures involved with using the table router, I thought it'd be prudent to try building an even bigger NES controller than what I did to get certified.  My proficiency test involved making a 16x-sized controller, but here I w...

Recently, I’ve acquired a bunch of vintage computer hardware from various sources, whether donated to me personally or stumbled upon during scavenger hunts through crazy places that used to be companies whose owners have pretty much turned into hoarders.  It’s been quite a tedious process getting some of these things working, but surprisingly, there have been very few instances lately where my skills with a soldering iron or my cache of loose parts has actually come in handy to fix something.  In fact, most things have come back to life surprisingly by simply plugging them in and giving them some time. Cases 1 & 2: Some Commodore 64 Computers Last week, a kind fellow who was moving granted me three Commodore 64 computers belonging to him and his brothers.  They grew up with these machines, and had a large collection of games and utilities on floppy disk.  There were also accessories such as floppy disk drives, joysticks, plenty of power supplies ...

I marched in the band for all four years of high school, and anyone who does this obtains the right to compose a "Senior Will" that is supposed to call out special memories shared with friends, admit to any kind of silly activity or wrongdoing whose time is so far gone that the band directors would have a hard time punishing you, or to leave advice to the underclassmen of your section and the band in general. Looking back over my four years in marching band, I spent a great deal of time with many people -- especially those on the drumline.  We traveled together even more than the band did for contests, and always placed very well at them.  However, in reading several senior wills that told of interesting stories that happened among cliques or circles of friends outside our official time together, I realized... gee, I'm really such a freaking square!  I had a small number of very close friends in the band, and would say I had a great deal of notoriety and esteem among ev...

A while back, I used some kind of "cp -r" command in Linux to copy files from an old IDE hard drive to a newer SATA drive.  The IDE drive is 10 years old, and thus many of the files on there are of that vintage.  Unfortunately, I was not aware that cp does not properly transfer file attributes between Windows files (as these are NTFS partitions).  I could have simply used Windows to copy the files, but I didn't want this to happen: Hence why the choice to use Linux.  Nevertheless, being somewhat of an archivist at heart, I was interested in retaining some of these original file properties, namely Created, Modified, and Accessed times.  I didn't want all my files looking like they came from 12/2/2013 when some of them are as old as 2002.  So, I went back into Windows to solve my problem. The idea for this was derived from one of many related StackOverflow posts on the topic, plus some additional information was acquired in order to walk the directory...

Those of you who have followed Win Ben Stein's Money at all may recall that time back on July 1, 1998 when a contestant finally managed to defeat Ben Stein and get a perfect 10 score on the bonus round, thus prompting Ben & Jimmy to drop their trousers .  However, you may not have heard about another instance over 20 years prior when the pants-dropping bug bit Pat Sajak on Wheel of Fortune ! While I've been meaning to post this clip for a very long time (and it appears someone did in fact beat me to the punch with a very brief 7-second clip of it), a Facebook thread prompted me to finally take action, dust off the ol' DVD collection, and spin this one up to rekindle its glory and a piece of the Internet's ever-wandering attention. The year was 1987, Black Monday was about to hit the stock market, Microsoft released Windows 2.0, and to start its fifth season in syndication, the producers of Wheel decided to lose the shopping round format and have the players s...