I have had some success refilling vintage plotter pens for the Casio, Sharp, and Radio Shack printer plotters. After quite a few trials and errors, I might have finally solved the refill challenge.
Category: Vintage Computing
I adapted the PB-770 maze program for the PB-1000 and created three types of printouts for the randomly generated mazes.
The Casio PB-770 was quite an impressive model given the release date. With a multi-line display and memory expansion options, this model was certainly a competitor to the Sharp offerings of the time.
I found a Casio PB-1000 and an MD-100 on an auction site. I have spent a few months with this pocket computer and it has become one of my favourites.
I recently needed to read old 3.5″ floppy disks for a project and was able to quite easily repair an old 3.5″ floppy drive in an old laptop.
The RS-232 interface for the Radio Shack PC-2 along with the CE-158 for the Sharp PC-1500 are difficult to find these days. These added possibilities to connect to printers, modems, save load programs faster and more. Luckily the CE-158X has been released.
I was curious how difficult it would be to program a simple game for the PC-6. I picked a rather simple concept to start with, a “matching” game.
Although this is my least favourite of the Radio Shack line of pocket computers, it is the most nostalgic for me, as it is the only one I actually owned back when these were sold.
With a bit of organization, you can avoid the frustrations of loading saved programs (wav files) into pocket computers or other vintage computers.
I recently acquired the PC-4 printer and cassette modules and wrote a version of my banner program for this model pocket computer. With only 544 bytes available, it was the most challenging version to code.