grimmware @grimmware@cybre.space

My TL is so sparse because keep typing out sassy shit and then deleting it because I don’t see it causing positive discourse so it’s nice to see my sense of altruism is actively preventing me from being open and honest about who I am.

Can someone just pay me to do weird shit instead of my actual job?

I'm seeing cryptoart float around as a topic a lot and quite frankly RIP humanity for trying to make digital art scarce because capitalism says that anything which is easily available is essentially worthless.

Anyone with ZX81 experience who wants to help me get the zeddy booting again, I've posted my diagnostics thus far on https://www.sinclairzxworld.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4074

All I want to do is futz around with the zeddy to figure out why it's not booting correctly and I have taken a solid set of scope readings to share on some forums to ask for help but I a) have to work and b) am too tired from work.

But in my mind I'm getting really ahead of myself in modding BIOS ROMs on more than just the ZX81

Does anyone else archive a particular kind of technical information? I archive stuff where I'm like "I will probably never find this again if I don't take a copy".

Web search is terrible.

Okay so the good news is that the ROM is an intact copy of the revision 1 (with the SQRT bug) as expected from a 550.

The bad news is I don't know what's wrong with the board now.

The good news is I'm really looking forward to using my scope and the (frankly amazing) ZX81 community to find out!

Yesterday I surprised myself by managing to dump half the ZX81 ROM by wiring it up to the Tl866ii as a 2732 instead of a 2364 (which the TL claims ignorance of and I can’t hack it in because the firmware is encrypted).

I say half because I should have been targeting the 2764 but got confused because the 32 is pin compatible (a DIP24 instead of DIP28) but I honestly wasn’t expecting my method to work so it’s a huge success and I know what I need to do to get the rest.

I was surprised when I didn’t get a dump of 0xffffs and even more surprised when the data wasn’t garbage and actually disassembled to Z80 assembler!

Starting to look like the ROM isn’t the reason it won’t boot which is kinda exciting!

#zx81 #retrocomputing

Welp in removing and re-inserting the ROM chip on the ZX81 I appear to have fucked it up somehow. This has prompted me to get on and purchase a 2364 ROM adapter though, and coincided with my new oscilloscope turning up so at least I was able to determine that the Z80 wasn't running code from the ROM through the total lack of activity on the HALT pin.

#zx81 #z80

Or I suppose to put it in a more positive way, I don't feel like I contribute meaningfully to any instance-specific discourse and therefore I don't think I'm contributing to a community in the way that I could be.

I like cybre.space but I am beginning to wonder if it's really the best instance for me to discover people with dovetailing interests.

Aww yiss #zx81

My TL is so sparse because keep typing out sassy shit and then deleting it because I don’t see it causing positive discourse so it’s nice to see my sense of altruism is actively preventing me from being open and honest about who I am.

Instagram has finally figured it out to advertise me shoes and I’m like “dude I’ve been on her for probably half a decade and you’re only just figured out that I’m partial to a boot or high top?”

FUCKING BRAVO FOR MACHINE LEARNING ALREADY

I had to redraft this internets memo because I am drunk and spelt a bunch of shizz incorrebly.

This is the current status quo for the #grimmclair #ZX87 - got some cheapo keycaps on it and it works like a charm! Got the kit ready to crimp some more sturdy dupont cables with a bit more length on them and replace the angled headers with straight ones and a ROM chip flashing setup on the way so I can start screwing around with the "OS".

I've additionally been using it with the 16K RAM pack with no problem so the 32K RAM upgrade can go on the backburner for a bit seeing as I've got some headroom to play with!

Also had a go at loading from a line-out cable but I think I need to do some experimentation with levels to get that working.

Having read very little LaVey I’m starting to generate a hypothesis of how he works: be a bit of an edgelord, be wrong a bunch of the time, anyone who sticks round long enough to find the bits where he’s RIGHT will dissect them thoroughly in order to disprove them, then be suitably impressed with their own fruitless labour.

And suitably I don’t know whether to be disgusted or impressed which probably means I’m begrudgingly impressed?

Today I asked the ZX81 to tell me about itself.

Strictly speaking what I said was:

10 PRINT CHR$ (RND*255);
20 GOTO 10

This is how it felt about the subject.

Being able to talk to it after all these years is strangely cathartic.