Book 8088 PSU

I bought one of these interesting devices: Book 8088 v2.0.

I hope to have more detailed posts, but for the moment: the charger that came with it looks a little unsafe and definitely doesn’t have a UK plug. I asked for the specs for the PSU to find my own, which doesn’t seem to be published anywhere. They got back to me with this information:

100-240V50-60Hz
Output: 12VDC1.5A (rated 1.5A, peak 2.0 A)
Plug: default 5.5*2.1 with circlip

I’ve ordered a matching one which has a UK plug and hopefully might even conform to some safety standards, but hopefully this is useful information for someone.

Simple DOS fun

I’ve been meaning to post more about the ESP32-SBC-FabGL board from olimex for a while now.

I’ve now got the board itself, via thepihut in the UK, and the case via tindie and agon australia.

Combining it all with some instructions I found from github, I’ve achieved my current goal, built the PC Emulator, and have a board that semi-directly runs MS-DOS. Ok I recognise there’s technically a layer of emulation happening, but for practical purposes it boots pretty directly to a DOS prompt. Sound is terrible but I’m pretty sure I remember the original having awful sound as well so that’s accurate emulation.

Anyway, simple dos fun. I’d quite like a board from monotech pcs for the fully real experience, but this is so much smaller and cheaper, even if it’s technically not “real”.

get rid of the backpack

Mark Pilgrim had a blog post that was then reblogged by someone else (Mark no longer has a blog): The Pursuit of Happiness

  1. Stop buying stuff you don’t need
  2. Pay off all your credit cards
  3. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in your house/apartment (storage lockers, etc.)
  4. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit on the first floor of your house (attic, garage, etc.)
  5. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in one room of your house
  6. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a suitcase
  7. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a backpack
  8. Get rid of the backpack

Like the person I linked to, I think about this post a lot.

(I can’t remember if I’ve blogged this before, but I think about this so much I feel it deserves blogging multiple times)

cdkans

cdkans looks like a really interesting project, “cdkans is a framework for defining Ansible playbooks in a CDK-esq way, following concepts that power other CDK frameworks such as AWS CDK, CDKTF, and CDK8s”.

Mandelbrot in BASIC

A bit more nostalgia, this time BBCSDL and a slightly dodgy Mandelbrot generator:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34

MODE 0
ITERATIONS = 50
LIMIT = 50
DEF FN_mag(a,b) = SQR((a * a) + (b * b))
DEF FN_add_a(a,c) = a + c
DEF FN_add_b(b,d) = b +d
DEF FN_mult_a(a,b,c,d) = (a*c) - (b*d)
DEF FN_mult_b(a,b,c,d) = (a * d) + (b * c)

FOR a = -2 TO 2 STEP 0.01
FOR b = -2 TO 2 STEP 0.01
z_a = 0
z_b = 0
FOR iter = 0 TO ITERATIONS
orig_a = z_a
z_a = FN_mult_a(z_a, z_b, z_a, z_b)
z_b = FN_mult_b(orig_a, z_b, orig_a, z_b)
z_a = FN_add_a(z_a, a)
z_b = FN_add_b(z_b, b)
IF FN_mag(z_a, z_b)>LIMIT THEN EXIT FOR
NEXT
point_x = (a * 320) + 640
point_y = (b * 256) + 512
MOVE point_x, point_y
IF FN_mag(z_a,z_b)>LIMIT THEN
GCOL 0
ELSE
GCOL 1
ENDIF
DRAW point_x, point_y
NEXT
NEXT

And the output:

slightly grainy mandelbrot

simple 8-bit fun

Having simple 8-bit fun with the Agon Light

I got the Agon Light 2 from the pi hut.

It’s a little hard to find the right keyboard, you need one that supports PS/2 over a USB connection, after some experiment I found this one from amazon works: JUSTOP Extra Value Wired Desktop PC Computer Keyboard Slim UK Layout USB / PS2 Connectors.

So far I’ve run the classic BASIC program we all used to type in shops back in the 80s:

1
2
3
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

And flashed the firmware using the instructions at https://github.com/breakintoprogram/agon-docs/wiki/Updating-Firmware.

For me it did work on a m1 mac, but I needed the note here:

If you are using an Apple Mac with an M chipset and are having difficulties uploading to the Agon, try changing the upload speed from 921600 to 115200 - some users have reported that works.

It’s all good simple retro fun.