grimmware @grimmware@cybre.space

I’m starting to get this nervous tick where any time I see the term “NFT” I punch myself in the face.

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