I've owned a Pimoroni Pico VGA demo base since the very early days of the Raspberry Pico. I bought it after seeing a couple of videos showing its capabilities, with a vague idea that it might be fun to try to implement an emulator for an 8 bit computer of…
The Zilog Z80 has now had its final production run, but I'm sure there will be plenty of them still working away for the next few decades(*). For nostalgia purposes (and as spares for the various Z80 computers I have), I ordered some of the last production run in April.
Sometime in the mid-1970s, my grandmother gave me a book of Arthur C. Clarke's short stories. The first story in the book, The Nine Billion Names of God, was written in 1953. It's about a computer manufacturer who is commissioned by Tibetan monks to run a program to produce all…
It's 42 years since Computing Today first published The Valley. It set a new standard for magazine type-in games as the code is designed to be portable, well structured and comprehensively documented. Perhaps most importantly it is very playable, with lots of scope for writing extensions to the core game.
Another note to self rather than anything else - a PuTTY version 0.78 configuration that works well for an RC2014 running CP/M from the Micro SD card and SIO/2 module (Somehow this selection of modules seems fussier than the Compact Flash module paired with the MC68B50 - but this configuration…
A week ago I noticed that I had a problem with my CBASIC prime number generator running on an RC2040. My first thought was that I'd messed up the algorithm (not unheard of) as it told me there were 1,231 primes between 1 and 10,000 (there are 1,229). Eventually I…
Update: 06/01/2026 Something seems to have changed in the way the Raspberry Pi sets up serial ports by default between the time I wrote this article and later versions of Raspberry Pi OS (bookworm) through to the current release (trixie). After a lot of experimentation, the following method now appears…
After my post on Turbo Pascal et al, someone suggested that I try using the Digital Research CBASIC compiler - so I have done! The CBASIC dialect seems like a mashup of ideas from other BASICs, FORTRAN and Pascal. For example, line numbers are only required if they're going to…