This is the EPROM programmer I use the most these days. This has programmed all the EPROMs for all the Minstrel and Mini PET kits, PET ROM RAM boards and pretty much everything else I have touched. Although that is an old photo, taken when I got it years ago. I still...

   This was posted on Patreon a while ago, but has been held back, waiting for the official announcement and accompanying video see end of post , the actual updated hardware and software started shipping several months ago. The VIC Penultimate Cartridge was launched last year and has been doing...

   Until I ran out, I have been shipping Minstrel V . boards. I am now shipping V . boards. What happened inbetween Here is the story, from a series of Patreon posts.Whenever I get new batches of boards, even if they are just a repeat order, I like to build one up, just to be sure everything is...

   It all started a couple of weeks ago. A couple of long weeks ago. TFW b found the last of the Mini PET PCBs and decided to put those up for sale again. There were enough for units, with a couple of extra mainboard PCBs without keyboard overlays. yes, I know there are in the photo...

   Hopefully, when you build your Minstrel or Mini PET kit, it will work first time. Most of them do based on the feedback I get. Occasionally, there can be problems, so I present a bit of a guide to the process of troubleshooting if it doesn’t work first time. This can also serve...

   This question has come up again, so I thought I would finish off a blog post I started quite a while ago. The humble bridge rectifier. Four diodes arranged to take an AC signal and convert it to DC. A simpler circuit with only a single diode gives half wave rectification. The...

   Welcome to the unexpected part of this Commodore PET Repair. In the previous posts, the board had been fixed and had reached the stage where I could load things from an SD PET disk drive to test it properly.All appeared to be OK until I tried out D Monster Maze. Those spikes...

   In the previous post, I got the PET to the stage it was running, and could load from cassette. However, the IEEE port was not working, the usual Device not present error . As part of some of the other testing, I had already swapped out the easy to replace socketed chips,...

   Here we have a PET board in for repair. This one has been in use for a year or so with a PET ROM RAM board, and all the system ROM chips removed, and I am told it had been running fine. Then one day it stopped working, the symptom being nothing on the screen, no raster with...

   How about a mini monitor for a Mini PET I am occasionally asked about HDMI converters for things like the Minstrel and Mini PET kits. I have not tried many of those, but in general they don’t like monochrome composite video. The lack of the colour burst signal confuses them, and so...

   In one of my Patreon update posts, I mentioned that there was a th game in this last round of conversions, but I was not going to write it up. Ever since, I have been bombarded by constant demands by literally nobody, so I have finally relented and written it up. The th game to be revisited was...

   Another VIC Cartridge Conversion from the Patreon archive. Operation Ganymed was another early request. It’s a better Jupiter Lander than Jupiter Lander, but it is in many parts, with trick filenames etc. and was marked down as too much work . The first part has a filename which...

   Another VIC Cartridge Conversion from the Patreon archive.Outback is a quirky little shooting game where the player can only move up and down and fire, with a bit of a hint of Lemmings, and a stronger hint of Pooyan. Outback was another of the challenging ones. First off was...

   Another VIC Cartridge Conversion from the Patreon archive. Rock Man is quiet a nice Boulderdash Repton type game. This one is available as a tape and also a disk version with slightly different code. I think I hit a problem when looking at the tap version last time, so let’s...

   I have converted a lot of cassette games to cartridge format for inclusion on the Penultimate Cartridge. Some well known, some more obscure and not easily available, so it is hopefully bringing these games to a new audience. When doing these, I have found a few where it has just not worked, or has...

   On the top shelf of my workshop for probably the last years has been a little black box with a couple of valves on the top. You might think it is the original valve based version of The Internet, but it isn’t. You might think this is one of many old projects gathering dust....

   One from the Patreon archive, this from the development of the Penultimate Cartridge file browser.I am sure any Commodore user is very familiar with typing LOAD , and then LIST but what exactly is going on when you do that I wanted to add a file browser to the Penultimate ...

   I have been working on porting ZX BASIC to the Minstrel D. Hardware that was designed to run the Jupiter Ace, without making any hardware changes. The next target for things to get working were two excellent flicker free ZX games from Paul Farrow. Following on from the post...

   Continuing the series of posts from Patreon in November, working on getting ZX BASIC running on the Minstrel D. This one reworked from several posts. I have since updated this to also include a section about the updates to the LOAD routines. In the previous post I got ZX BASIC running on the...

   Continuing the series of posts from Patreon in early November, working on getting ZX BASIC running on the Minstrel D. Yesterday I gave up on trying to make the old ZX tape load routine work. I do not know what exactly is wrong, I have tried all the combinations I can think, and is just isn’t...

   Yes, you read that right, ZX K Integer BASIC running on a Minstrel D. This is the first part in a series of posts where I will be starting with building a modified version of ZX BASIC and later moving on to a version of ZX BASIC that will run on the Minstrel D hardware. The...

   I am shipping to the USA and to Europe from my SellMyRetro store, but this is currently taking weeks, and my have additional customs fees to pay. https: www.sellmyretro.com store tynemouth software This is likely to take longer as things get busier into December, so if you want to order...

   I am in the process of writing a post about how the video system on the Jupiter Ace works, and that is coming together nicely, but it would be useful if I had a Jupiter Ace I could wire up to a logic analyser to get some traces. I do have lots of Minstrel th’s and Minstrel D’s, but those have...

   I don’t normally write up most of the Commodore PET repairs I do, because they generally follow the same patterns of RAM faults, ROM faults, and occasionally a bad CRTC. Sometimes all three. As you might have guessed, this is not one of those. I think I need a disclaimer. These...

   Mini PET B is the version of the Mini PET designed to act as a drop in upgrade replacement board for a Commodore PET or CBM. It provides K of RAM, and selectable ROM sets. x monochrome video, compatible with most software other than a few demos which require a CRTC. Modern WDC...